Watch in HD also SPOILERS like hot damn spoilers if you aren’t caught up on The 100 feel free to keep watching this vid so you won’t be blindsided by the utter BULLSHIT that happened on the show last week like I and everyone else was. I could beat a dead horse all day about how much I disagree with the writers’ decision to kill Lexa and playing into the whole ‘bury your gays’ trope business. Instead I’m gonna talk about Lexa herself for a second and why this character meant so much to me, and why I’ve never had a reaction to a character death the way I reacted to Lexa’s death. I grew up in just about the most conservative Christian environment humanly possible, so the whole ‘agonizing over my bisexuality and being terrified what people will think if/when they find out’ is no strange concept of my past and in some ways, my present. Because of that, fiction was a really big crutch and stepping stone for me in terms of accepting who I was. Characters like Santana from Glee resonated with me deeply back when I was trying to come to terms with my sexuality and then later when I was ready to ask my family and close friends to accept me as well. The problem is, in terms of LGBT representation in media, it stops there. Our stories are almost exclusively centered around how hard it is to be gay/bi/trans/etc., and the subsequent triumph (and sadly sometimes just plain tragedy a la Brokeback) of finally being able to overcome fear and accept ourselves. But the bottom line is in real life? After that, we’re also just people, with the same struggles as any other person trying to make their way in the world. We just happen to, you know, not be straight. And yet the vast majority of the stories about people like us focus on time periods that frankly only make up a small part of most of our lives. The coming-out phase. Honestly, I’m over it, and I’ve been over it for a while. I think of those characters and stories I connected with years ago very fondly, but I’m ready to move on to new stories. I don’t have any desire to relive the story of that struggle over and over and over again because it's just not, like, fun. You know? But there just hasn’t been anything else out there in media. Until Commander Lexa. Like, wow. The 100 has never shied away from placing complex female characters with agency in powerful and influential positions within the narrative and the world itself, and not even making a deal of it. That’s a whole other thing I (still) love about the show and its storytelling choices. The decision to make the Commander, this ruler of what in The 100's world is literally every known group of people that exist on a post-apocalypse Earth, not only a young woman, but a woman who just happens to be gay? And not only that, but have her be, like, a really great leader, and a badass warrior? I had never seen anything like it in fiction. Ever. And to take it two steps beyond that, have this character be really interesting, multi-faceted, and give her an incredibly compelling and complex same-sex relationship dynamic - both romantic and political - with the lead character of the entire show? AND have that dynamic almost always be well-written, well-developed, and well-acted? AND not have ANY kind of narrative focus on the “struggle” of being gay as part of their/her storyline and struggle with their feelings for one another? This was groundbreaking. And Lexa was nothing short of a damn superhero to us. And that’s why it was frankly kind of devastating for me and I know many others to have been given this beautifully realized character and relationship that resonated so deeply and was so inspiring, only to have it ripped away violently literally minutes later…for shock value. Like, I’m worried I’ll never see a character/relationship like this on TV again, or at least for a while, and that sucks. (not to mention her and clarke reminded me like hella of my girlfriend and i so i kinda wanted them to get a happy ending, damn it.) tl;dr, im v salty about lexa’s death and probs will be for a while also fun trivia kids: the title of the project while i was editing it was "haha i love suffering :))))" oh also be gentle i havent edited anything in like a year

• published: 12 Mar 2016
• views: 6