The media has tried to send us a message over and over, most recently with the death of Lexa in episode 3×07 of The 100. That message is: gays can never be happy, queer sex is punishable by death, and lead characters can never be in same-sex relationships. In other words, more of the same that we’ve been getting since the Hays Code in old Hollywood stipulated that homosexuals can only be portrayed as unhappy and must be punished. This is a pattern. It is a trope – whether employed consciously or not. It can be nothing other than a trope if you can name more dead TV lesbian and bisexual women than living ones.
And we are tired of it.
Fans were devastated by Lexa’s death, as was I, and any look at The 100 fandom on social media over the following days revealed an unprecedented amount of grief over this loss. This was not only the death of a beloved character, but far greater, death of the best chance of positive media representation that the LGBT community has ever seen on mainstream TV. That anticipation, so carefully built up by the show’s writers and executive producer, deceived millions of viewers and hit a vulnerable community hard. LGBT kids in particular. You can read my last post if you want the sad details.
The Thursday night the episode aired was all shock and utter disbelief. Friday was despair. Saturday, the fandom collectively decided to migrate its allegiance to AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead, which features Lexa actress Alycia Debnam-Carey as a member of the main cast. By Sunday, young fans were fully sold on FTWD and embraced Debnam-Carey’s character Alicia Clark.
You might note that the name “Alicia Clark” is a struggle for your average recovering The 100 fan to type because of Alycia Debnam-Carey, the actress who played Lexa, and the character Clarke Griffin, Lexa’s now grieving girlfriend on The 100.
Using the confusion of actress and character names already present on FTWD, the fans took this idea one step further and began imagining: What if Clarke actress Eliza Taylor were to play a character on the other show? Naturally, her name would be Elyza Lex, comprised of an alternate spelling of her own first name and the name of her character’s love interest on The 100.
Within 48 hours, Elyza Lex was born. Naturally, she could be Alicia’s love interest in the FTWD universe, since Alicia has not been confirmed as canon-heterosexual in the series. Clarke Griffin had a boyfriend in Season 1 of The 100, and she fell for Lexa in Season 2, so we should never just assume any character is straight. Since Elyza Lex is a fan creation, she could be anything they chose for her to be. Pretty soon, the two characters had an amalgamated relationship (aka ‘ship) name: Lexark. Not long after that, social media users brainstormed to agree on what Elyza would be like.
This process resembled the fandom’s collective construction of Lexa’s previous love interest Costia – mentioned, but never shown on The 100 because she was brutally killed by the Ice Nation due to her relationship with Lexa. In other words, an offscreen Lesbian Death Trope. Through a kind of alchemical social media consensus, it was determined that Costia was a person of color. Fans further decided that, if she were to appear onscreen as a flashback, she would surely be played by Nathalie Emmanuel, who currently plays Missandei, Daenerys Targaryen’s advisor and handmaiden on Game of Thrones. There was some debate about her personality, family background (Indra’s daughter?), and role in the 100 universe, but it was generally decided that Costia and Lexa knew each other in childhood and developed into love interests as teenagers. Stories were written. Art was created. And Costia became a fan-created character every bit a part of the story as any you might see on screen.
In a similar fashion, Elyza Lex emerged fully formed after a weekend of discussion and online brainstorming, mostly taking place on Tumblr. The construction of Elyza seems to have begun on the Saturday night after Lexa’s death in The 100 3×07 the previous Thursday. By Sunday, Elyza had a name and a series of possible “headcanon” ideas of how she could be inserted into the story on Fear the Walking Dead. By Monday, there were more elaborate story ideas and prompts popping up on tumblr. By Tuesday, a few fan fiction stories featuring Lexark had been written. By Wednesday, full-blown fan art, character description sheets, and by one count 21 fanfic stories had already been published on ao3. I think there are over 100 now. Typing “Ely…” into the google search field now autocompletes to “Elyza Lex.” And “Elyza Lex” trended on social media sites.
I found this response utterly delightful and remarkable. To be sure, the fandom still mourns the loss of Lexa and especially the Lexa / Clarke relationship, which had been so painstakingly built by the show and adored by millions of fans across the globe. And no one has forgotten the awful manipulation that was perpetuated by the deception that led up to Lexa being offed so callously and uncreatively. Far from it. The fandom is angry and has instigated (at the time of this writing) 12 consecutive days of worldwide Twitter trends related to The 100, LGBT representation in the media, the demand for an apology from showrunner Jason Rothenberg, and finally, the demand for the CW to replace him at the helm of 100.
Make no mistake. This is a big deal. The matter won’t be dropped. This is the line in the sand for queerbaiting, for the Bury Your Gays / Dead Lesbian Trope. Audiences won’t accept it any longer, neither LGBT audiences nor their allies. We are done. I have never seen a more widespread or more coordinated fandom response to any event, and I’ve been a fan and observer of the media since the 1990s.
But beyond the anger and the Twitter trends, the creative response of an entirely new character emerging out of collective fan imaginings over the course of a couple of days? To the point that it becomes a worldwide trend and its own Google autocomplete? This is a new form of collective coping that I never imagined possible. Yes, I have seen and been a part of whole fandoms that crop up around original, non- or semi-canonical characters (Mara Jade in the Star Wars EU books comes to mind), but I’ve never seen a fandom fully create a character that was adopted so quickly or so universally. This group of fans utilized the tools that have long been at fans’ disposal, basically since the inception of fandom: fiction, art, fan-to-fan communication, and collective imagining. The mobile, social web has only hyper-facilitated a process that’s happened at least since the spread of Star Trek fandom in the 1970s and 1980s.
I suspect that Elyza Lex is now a permanent part of the 100 / FTWD crossover fandom. Tumblrites and folks on Twitter had to quickly come up with a hashtag or two that didn’t confuse existing FTWD fans. There was a brief period where FTWD fans were coming onto the Clexa tag and politely asking where all this was coming from. The Clexbian consensus machine decided the new tag would be #qtwd (for Queer the Walking Dead: in other words, genius.)
Basically, it amounted to a mass queer migration from one series to another, and even if they couldn’t bring their other favorite character and actress from The 100 with them, they would create their own alternate canon. They devised their own crossover world where they could still have a version of Clarke / Lexa, only in some sense better because they can make the relationship whatever they want now, and even keep, eliminate, or add aspects of the relationship and the Elyza character as they wish.
Remarkably, the creation of Elyza solves several problems that the death of Lexa created.
- What happens to the Clexa fandom without additional Clexa to speculate about, discuss, make new gifs and art, etc.? This, I would say, was as much a source of many fans’ grief as anything else about the situation. Fandoms die out sometimes when series are over and characters are killed. And fandoms are tribes, families in some ways. Especially queer fandoms, often consisting of people whose own families lack understanding.
- How does the fandom deal with its grief, not only from the loss of a beloved character in Lexa, but the very real loss of hope for positive queer representation from a media property that had painstakingly convinced us that’s what we’d be getting, finally, for once?
- Although nothing can ever replace Clexa, because their relationship was unique, unprecedented, and utterly unlike any other we have seen onscreen – what alternatives are there? None that are satisfying. So the fandom took the tools at its disposal and appropriated media in ways that fans have always done, only now those tools are available via social media, which makes the process infinitely faster and more efficient.
- We have been so completely disillusioned by the queerbaiting and calculated misrepresentation connected to this instance on The 100, on top of all the times it has happened before – where do we find some kind of inspiration, and a character who definitely won’t die on us?
- Where can fans put all the creativity, humor, and fun that had infused the Clexa fandom? Because the hilarity that went into all the memes of “Lexa’s Gay-Ass Candles” has to go somewhere.
So this fandom – and I would guess that it consists mostly of young women, many queer – decided to take the media into its own hands and reappropriate a brand (or two) not only to assuage grief, but perhaps more importantly, to thumb its nose at corporate media that perpetuates the disproportionate number of deaths to characters of an underrepresented group.
Readers of a certain age will remember another such movement of young women who attempted to take back their power from corporate media and create their own culture and icons: the riot grrrls of the 1990s. For those who don’t know, riot grrrl was a do-it-yourself punk movement that began around 1991 surrounding the punk group Bikini Kill and its lead singer Kathleen Hanna. The Olympia, Washington-based band created a ‘zine (like on paper, y’all!) also called Bikini Kill, and in its second issue they published The Riot Grrrl Manifesto.
Although this ‘zine, like all ‘zines, had a very low print run, the manifesto was copied and reprinted thousands of times and ended up with a cross-country distribution. This manifesto was a call to arms that fueled a movement. That movement meant to create space for women in music and culture in general – and in some cases BK meant this literally. They always cleared out space in front of the stage at their shows so that women could see them and dance without getting pummeled by guys in the mosh pit. One of their mottos was “Girls to the front!” Their ethos can best be summed up in the song Rebel Girl from the album Pussy Whipped (1993).
Although not an expressly queer movement, queer women were included and heavily involved in Riot Grrrl. Several RG / queercore punk bands such as Bratmobile (considered an original RG band), The Need, Team Dresch, and The Third Sex emerged out of this scene.
The media became so intrigued with RG that major music and culture magazines (e.g. Rolling Stone) started to do stories on them, and their feminist message was undermined by a male-dominant focus on superficial factors such as fashion, how “cute” they were, and sadly but unsurprisingly, critiques of them as inferior musicians – you know, as if The Ramones and The Sex Pistols were musical geniuses. Several major bands, with Bikini Kill at their helm, responded with a media blackout and refused to give further interviews in mainstream media outlets. You can see more about RG in the documentary The Punk Singer, which is both a bio of Hanna and of RG as a movement. If you consider yourself any kind of feminist at all, I encourage you to watch it.
By the mid-1990s, RG had affected the overarching culture enough that the term “grrrl power,” redubbed with the more harmless spelling “girl power” for the mainstream media, had lost its original meaning as an underground feminist rallying cry. Indeed, by the late 1990s it had become a branding device to sell clothes, corporatized music (the Spice Girls), and media (the Powerpuff Girls).
Nevertheless, the original spirit of riot grrrl lives on, and I see that spirit in the Clexa fandom. Where RG failed, we can succeed because we have access to tools RG didn’t.
The original intent of RG was to reappropriate dominant narratives about women and girls, including and especially queer women and girls, to create space in the culture for non-harmful, non-damaging, healthy portrayals and opportunities for self-expression in media. RG used the media available at the time to do this: namely ‘zines and flyers, music, and personal stories, traded person-to-person at local and regional self-organized Riot Grrrl conventions. They often used brands or iconography from dominant media and twisted them to fit their needs and get out their feminist message.
Riot Grrrls didn’t have social media or the web in any kind of form like we know it today, at least not until the movement as such had waned. I didn’t even know what e-mail was until I was in college, circa my sophomore year, 1992ish. It took a few more years for the graphic, searchable web to be accessible to the majority of people. Fans certainly had no access to the creators of media like they do now, much less the opportunity to interact with them in any meaningful way. But if we had, I think we would have done the same things the Clexa fandom is doing now, my young friends. We would have utilized Twitter trends, hashtags, and all the other resources available today.
Twitter @anthocles
As I write this, episode 3×07 of The 100 aired 12 days ago. You all have engineered a revolution in fandom – a Queervolution, as one of my Tumblerite friends terms it – the likes of which no one has ever seen. We have coordinated trends on Twitter every day since, most notably “LGBT FANS DESERVE BETTER” during the airtime of The 100 3×08 last Thursday. You have orchestrated the decrease Jason Rothenberg’s Twitter following by thousands. Episode 3×08 was the lowest-rated episode of the entire series. Through our efforts, the mainstream media has picked up our cause, from the BBC to Variety and many important points in between. The Variety article even blockquoted my previous blog entry on this very site. I’d like to mention here that Variety is the Hollywood trade publication. It is required reading by everyone in the entertainment industry. Trust me when I tell you we have been heard and noticed, and it has been acknowledged that we are a force to be reckoned with. Things have changed.
As Lexa told us, “No one will fight for me.” We have to do this ourselves. And we are doing it. It is happening. It is working. And we cannot stop.
The 100 3×07 and the ensuing response is a watershed moment in media, and this is our time to riot. This is the Stonewall for queer representation. We must not let it pass.
Do not give up, my Clexa fans. This is it.
Pedro Zamora
Representation matters. It matters a lot. Representation can change a culture. If you don’t believe it, read about the case of Pedro Zamora on Mtv’s The Real World in the early 1990s. His appearance as an openly gay man and a person with AIDS put a human face on that struggle and changed the way the media portrayed gay men and HIV/AIDS for the better, forever after. The larger culture came to see these folks as human and deserving of compassion, whereas before depictions had been largely “those gays with their gross disease.” Representation matters. Fan reactions matter. Now more than ever. And we can see this through.
In case you haven’t read the Riot Grrrl manifesto I linked above, let me share a pertinent part of it that relates to why our struggle for representation matters:
BECAUSE we know that life is much more than physical survival and are patently aware that the punk rock “you can do anything” idea is crucial to the coming angry grrrl […] revolution which seeks to save the psychic and cultural lives of girls and women everywhere, according to their own terms.
And not just girls and women (and any definition thereof), but rather all LGBT people, their allies, and the culture at large need our representation. This culture needs saving, and we can help do it. It’s not only for us, it’s about building a more compassionate world for everyone.
wanheda.tumblr.com
Heda Lexa knew that. The pillars of being Heda are wisdom, strength, and yes, compassion. That’s what we want for our world, just like she wanted it for hers.
She finally came to know that life is about more than just surviving. Lexa was a riot grrrl. She changed her culture. We can too. We mourn her death, but this is her legacy to us. No one fights for us. We can and will do this ourselves.
I wanted to give up, but you all have inspired me to keep fighting. And I love you for that. Each and every one of you.
Life is about more than just surviving. Don’t we deserve better than that?
Yes, we do.
For those who would like to help us, please connect with “LGBT Fans Deserve Better” on the web or on tumblr.
If any art on here is uncredited or mis-credited, please comment and let me know so I can give credit where credit is due. It is sometimes hard to trace the provenence of images that get tweeted / retweeted, or blogged / reblogged. If anyone from Tumblr would like to be linked or credited for anything I mention here, by all means let me know.
I love this article SO SO much. It’s beyond inspiring. Thank you for every word, ESPECIALLY “*Heda Lexa knew that.* The pillars of being Heda are wisdom, strength, and yes, compassion. That’s what we want for our world, just like she wanted it for hers.” – it reminded me so much of “Wanheda knows that…” from 3×06.
I often embed lines from the show as easter eggs for other fans. Good catch 🙂
I agree with the ‘wait and see’ policy towards the Xena reboot, putting all your hopes on one particular show i have realised is not a good idea. I really appreciate this article other gay media has been letting us down with the coverage of this issue.
Thanks for reading. I have been really surprised all the attention my posts are getting.
Thank you for this article. I am going to check out the documentary, Punk Singer, soon. Something about this particular article touched me. I haven’t shed a tear since this all happened 12 days ago. I’ve gotten teary but I didn’t want to cry. The last part of this piece, where you tied it back to Heda Lexa, and all she was/is and all she stood for…just made me start crying. I needed to cry, I know now. I feel a bit better. We are Leksa Kom Trikru’s legacy. We have the spirit of Heda Lexa and I am so very proud of all of us. Thank you for highlighting the link between what is going on now to what was going on in the 90s with Riot Grrls and Pedro Zamora, linking our past with our now and our future. I was a teenager in the 90s and these things shaped who I am as a human being and member of the lgbtq community.
To the people participating in this media revolution: Let’s keep it going.
<3
I’m glad I could be helpful. I definitely want to inspire everyone to keep going. Especially us 90s babes!
You have. With your thoughtful writing. I’ve seen this particular one shared a lot on Tumblr already 🙂
Yay! Tumblr has a special place in my heart. So much humor and warmth there. I would’ve loved something like that when I was younger.
“As Lexa told us, “No one will fight for me.” We have to do this ourselves. And we are doing it. It is happening. It is working. And we cannot stop.” We won’t give up! Thanks for your words.
Thank *you* for reading and for all you and your peers are doing. I’ll keep at it too.
This is beautiful. Thank you for a well written article that encompasses the real reason of pain and anger amongst the LGBT+ community. I have seen responses to posts over and over again that essentially amount to “it’s just a character, get over it.” Lexa was loved, and her death was painful, but we are in greater collective mourning of our representation. Brilliant read. #queerevolution
Thank you. If this were “just a character” major news outlets wouldn’t be doing stories on it.
Fantastic Read. I believe articles have been written about how President Palmer on ’24’ was able to pave way for the acceptance of President Obama. Media representation matters. Let no one stipulate otherwise. Lexa remains a great loss but if it can lead to something positive, then it’s a battle to be lost for the war to be won.
Victory stands on the back of sacrifice. – Heda Lexa
This was a lovely read! As an adult fan who’s been into/burned by many fandoms I am constantly amazed by what this community has accomplished by working together. This will be a huge part of our history and will hopefully shed light on how much we need informed representation. The 100 was probably my favorite show of all time, and I’m deeply saddened that I won’t be able to enjoy it anymore. I guess we all know how Clarke felt at MT Weather now. Thankfully the wonderful sense of humor remains in the fandom.
Yes I’ve been really heartened by the response. Thanks for reading.
I really liked this article and agree with most of it. However, I do have two things I disagree with. For one, I think comparing this movement to the Stonewall riots is disingenuous, although I do like that it’s still ongoing. Also, while I personally love the Elyza Lex character that’s been created, I’ve seen a ton of ticked off fans of FTWD, as some Clexa fans have been trying to insert the character into the Wikia. In general, I believe that Lexa pretty much had to die, as the ADC would’ve only been available for 7 episodes each season, but my main issue is how she died and how Rothenberg has interacted with the fans. He has this obsession with shocking deaths, which he has able to get away with when killing off Wells and Anya, but I suppose he didn’t realize how large the Clexa fanbase was. Lastly, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the Xena reboot, but the showrunner is the person that wrote 3×07. He’s already had some fantastic quotes about fixing what he did wrong with Xena, and that the two main characters would immediately be in a Lesbian relationship, which I find fantastic!
The wikia thing has already stopped, from what I understand. It was silliness, but it took things too far. I saw a number of posts from Clexa fandom telling people to stop it. I’m sorry you don’t like my comparison to Stonewall. That was obviously a much larger historical watershed, but what I meant by it is that this is the point at which there is no going back to the way things were. I truly believe that. And in terms of acceptance, I do think that media play a huge role, just like Stonewall did in terms of what it did for the larger LGBT rights movement. I have heard of the Xena reboot, have read some of Javi’s posts, but I’ll believe the good representation when I see it. I’ve been burned so many times.
I hadn’t seen much on the wikia thing for the past couple of days, but I’m glad to hear that it’s already stopped. In regards to the Stonewall comment, I definitely agree with you that there’s no going back to the way things were, which is fantastic. There’s been such a backlash to the decision to kill Lexa off with a stray bullet that I don’t see that ever happening again. I loved the way Lexa was written throughout 99 percent of her storyline, which is why it’s so disappointing that they couldn’t kill her off in battle or some other noble way. I also agree with your comment about believing the good representation when you see it. I’m not LGBT, so I personally haven’t felt what it’s like to be burned, but I can understand your hesitation. I also can’t quite tell if Javi is 100 percent committed to good representation or if he’s just taking this opportunity to get LGBT fans on board before Xena airs. It’s also important to remember that Rothenberg was saying and doing all the right things with LGBT representation until he killed Lexa off the way he did, so it’s really difficult to be certain of great representation until a storyline or TV show has concluded. Thanks for the response!
Which is why I’ll wait to see if Javi puts his money where his mouth is. I no longer trust anything show runners say. The thing is, yes The 100 was batting 1000 before 3×07 and to manage to screw over your base fandom and mislead people and f**k up such a wonderful characterization and not only undo but utterly reverse all good representation in one fell swoop? I’m still somewhat dumbfounded at how boneheaded they could possibly be to pull that off so completely.
Thankyou so, so much for writing this. It made me feel a lot better and inspired.
That’s what I hoped to accomplish. Glad it worked!
As someone who came of age in the ’90s, stumbled into my first fandom (Xena) in a pre-Tumblr/Twitter/Facebook world, and have only stumbled back into it because of Clexa and The 100 – it has been ridiculously wonderful to see the younger LGBTQ generation absolutely kicking ass on this (and us older gens joining in/letting them lead). Thank you for this beautiful article that so eloquently ties it all together.
Xena was so crucial to my coming out process. It sounds funny to say but it really was. And they are kicking ass and will continue to. I’m so inspired by these kids it’s incredible.
This is amazing, thank you for writing this and sharing what you know. Something curious: Last year I started a project to make people read more superheroines, and we chose the name “super girl power”. When we did that, I tried to find where “girl power” came from and now reading this everything makes sense. I think we have a history and we should learn more about it, and you just gave it to us. So, thank you.
But what I really wanted to say is that sometimes I can’t believe what is happening right now with The 100 is real, even if I’m here doing everything I can to make this go forward. Sometimes I feel stupid and fear.. because, we can do this. We really can if we keep doing this and making it bigger, but I fear people will just forget and go away. I don’t want to forget. I want more warrior/leader young queer girls, I want more good representation, I want to make something about this. And I know if we keep doing this together we can. What you just wrote inspired me to keep fighting too. So… thank you again.
That’s why I wrote it. For y’all and for the jaded older peeps like myself. We can keep this alive. I think we should work on bringing in other fandoms. There are so many for whom this is an issue. I have to think there’s a lot of overlap too, but I think outreach should be the next step. I’ll keep at it here and on the Twerters.
Hey just FYI, the Lexa with a rainbow cape painting is credited incorrectly; the artist is wanheda.tumblr.com.
Anyways — amazing article. It’s been fascinating watching the clexa fandom function for the past week and a half.
When people reblog and reupload, it is very hard to trace the provenence. Thanks for telling me. Fixing now.
Fixed.
You killed me with your closing lines. Heart strings pulled!! This was a brilliant read – seeing the community response to such a monumental character loss has been the greatest healer! So excited to see this happening in my lifetime! Thank you for this article.
I’m just so impressed with the whole community. Thank you for reading.
I agree with you on every point. I have watched this revolution unfold these past 12 days and I am utterly amazed; 1. the lack of acknowledgement from J. Roth, to be sure, someone somewhere along the line had to say, “Do you really think this is a good idea?” and if they didn’t. Why Not!? 2. The fandom is just freaking awesome with their creativity and drive. You are right this is the line in the sand and we need to stand together and steadfast in our beliefs. A few days after the airing of S3x07 I came out to all my friends(family) at work and I to everything holy that we all had the acceptance I had from them, not that they were all that surprised, but something very deep in me said I needed to be true to myself and stop standing in the shadows and letting people guess who I really am. I would like to think that I was able to channel Lexa’s strength, courage and wisdom to see the light and finally step onto it.
I’ve heard this from several fans. I’m starting to think that, although painful, maybe this is what we needed to start a revolution in media. I really believe this is it. Congrats on coming out. My friends were all immediately accepting, and a few we were like “we were taking bets.” lol. It’s almost never as bad as we think it’s going to be.
So, spreading out love and encouraging messages is cool, but using my art without even asking me or crediting me is really, REALLY uncool. I appreciate that you liked it enough to use it to illustrate your article, but it’s not free for you to use as you wish. I’d like you to remove it, or at least, credit me.
Which art is yours? I will credit immediately. I wanted to credit everyone, and I put out an ask on Tumblr attached to this article and was hoping it would reach the right people. Apparently it didn’t. My apologies. I will rectify as soon as I get a response from you. It is often hard to trace the provenence of these things once they get reblogged. Sometimes people upload clean copies and it’s impossible to trace it.
The first one you used, actually. This one: http://morelikecreamhuff.tumblr.com/post/140831434694/fear-the-walking-dead-elyza-lex-alicia-clark#post-notes
You credited elyzalexnews.tumblr.com instead, who only reblogged it from me.
I get that things can get hard to keep track of, so that’s why I always careful put a link to the source in my posts. There’s also always the option to use google image search to track an image. Fanarts and art pieces are stolen constantly, and it’s really disheartening.
Thank you for your response, though, and to be willing to fix it. I really appreciate it.
Done. Thank you. I’m certainly not wishing to claim I did these. I don’t have the skills. I’m a writer not an artist. Thanks for contacting me about it. I actually put a note at the end for folks to contact me if I failed to credit or mis-credited. Google searches don’t always lead to the right place either, unfortunately.
Yes, unfortunately true… Thank you for fixing it. Now, I can be very cool about the fact that my fanart is being used in an interesting article.
Sorry for screwing it up before.
Mistakes happen and it’s fixed now, so no hard feelings, really. I liked learning about the Riot grrrl movement, and reading the point of view of someone outside the fandom(s) was hella interesting. So all in all, it came to a positive outcome. 🙂
(Just in case you haven’t noticed, though, the previous “elyzalexnews.tumblr.com” is still visible in the text part of your article and is messing with your layout)
crap I’ll see what I can do. Jesus. For the record, I’m not “outside the fandom.” You might call me a participant-observer.
That was an easy fix. Not sure how that happened. :-/ Thanks for the help.
No problem 🙂 Hahaha, participant-observer it is, then. I must admit, now I’m curious to know if the show caught your interest before there was a queer character on it, or once the LGBTQ+ community became enamored with Lexa.
Yes, I started watching as soon as S1 dropped on Netflix. I love a good survival scenario and have been a sci-fi fan all my life. I watched S2 week to week and noticed the sparks between Clarke & Lexa (at the latest) by 2×10. I was standing up in my living room cheering when they kissed going “finally!” I liked the show before Lexa, but my interest increased a lot once the C/L tension started up. And then I got marginally involved with the fandom and was super-psyched for S3 like everyone else. I just happen to also have a background in media studies.
This is a lovely article! We’re currently collating all articles such as this on the official tumblr 🙂 lgbtfansdeservebetter.com! If perhaps, you could link to the tumblr if any fan or ally would like to know what other campaigns we have regarding the movement!
Will do!
Done! Thank you!
Elisabeth,
thank you (again) for putting your thoughts out in such an eloquent way.
I agree with what you said. This is the time and place we have to stand our ground.
Kom war!
Yep, this is it! Los!
This is an amazing piece. Thank you for sharing with us. As you know, I have been mourning Clexa so hard since that Thursday. It seems silly, I am a grown woman! But several nights since, I couldn’t sleep. All I could think about was Lexa and how her death was so unnecessary. How she deserved better. How we all did. I too am amazed at the immediate worldwide response!
I wouldn’t even consider myself a huge The 100 fan. I watch(ed) mainly for Clexa, which is why even I am surprised at my response to her death. I guess Lexa (and Clexa) mean more to me than I realized. 🙁 I haven’t felt this bad about a character death since Dana on The L Word. (and I am a HUGE Orphan Black fan! I guess I don’t think Delphine is really dead, which is why I am okay with the way things ended last season)
I am so proud of the younger generation standing up to this and fighting back. I love the creation of Elyza Lex. Wouldn’t it be great if the writers of FTWD actually take it seriously? 🙂
Thanks for the kind words. I don’t think it’s silly at all. We were hyped and deceived, and this wasn’t just any pairing. It was going to be unique, in that it would’ve meant representation on a mainstream, network series as the *lead couple*. It would’ve been a really important step, but they blew it. That’s a lot to be upset about.
Excellent article. All in what needed to be said. Even educational. 😉
You are so right: we still need humour in our lives, despite all the negativity happening/surrounding us. Thank you for your voice!
Glad you learned stuff. That’s my day job. Thanks for reading.
I love your articles. I’m 48 and I remember Riot Grrrl Movement, Bikini Kill, Team Dresch and so on. I think Lexa’s character is more heartwarming, heartfelt, it’s somehow “molecular”. Because the Spirit of the Commander is something that I recognise inspired my actions everyday, since Riot Grrrl Movement years. So, I hope we’ll really get better. Thank you again, and sorry for my bad English language.
Your English is fine. Riot grrrl gave me a lot of strength, and I did find a lot of love in that movement, but I know what you mean. I have to believe things will get better.
Yet again an excellent piece of writing, very informative and especially inspiring. Thank you!
Thanks for reading. I appreciate it more than you know.
Thank you. Your writing in piece is not only informative and insightful but beautiful, inspiring and moving. By the end of it I had not other options but give into all these feelings and started to tear up.
I’m old enough to “know” that the world is not a nice place for LGBT people like me yet I cannot help but feel inspired as I see all these young kids put so much passion into changing this world… Dare I even say hopeful?
Go ahead and say it. I’m hopeful. They’ve really inspired me a lot. They’re a creative, fun bunch of young people.