TW: death in CW’s The 100

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I haven’t even watched the episode yet but I am disgusted.

@cwthe100 has proven OVER and OVER again that the emotions of its fans are irrelevant, that we do not matter, that the actors we love and admire do not matter. Lexa mattered. Lexa matters. Lincoln mattered. Lincoln matters. 

So many of us started watching the show before the second season because people were raving about the exceptional diversity, the LGBTQ+ representation, the women who were dynamic leaders with a wide range of emotion. 

One POC was killed in the second episode. That should have been the first sign that something was wrong here. When the writers wanted to send the message that “anyone could be killed” / “no one is safe”, they didn’t just pick anyone, they picked a main cast POC. POC were tortured, are being tortured – Raven was smiling a little more, but was still being emotionally manipulated into helping the main antagonist (and her black assistant, once a fairly competent leader of the community). Anya, a POC leader of a largely-POC people, was killed off and subsequently replaced by a white woman, while each new Grounder introduced was played by a non-POC.

And then we fell in love with the white woman, because not only was she a young woman in a position of power, but she was a representative of the LGBTQ+ community, specifically the lesbian community, which sees very limited representation in media. She was important, and still is to many people. She was also killed in a ridiculously offhanded, divisive manner – not even assigned enough importance to be killed on purpose.

THE VERY NEXT EPISODE featured, apparently, many deaths, including the death of a MAIN CAST POC who was not only important in his own right, but also important to a MAIN RELATIONSHIP on the show, and who has been LOCKED AWAY for the majority of this season in order to explicitly prevent that character from having interactions with his fellow MAIN CAST members. Fans were forced to watch this death in its entirety, in its brutal entirety. 

It’s not only awful treatment of characters, it’s also careless treatment of fans. We loved these characters, we identified with them, and they weren’t even significant enough, in the minds of the writers, to be afforded proper deaths and proper writing this season.