What makes you ship Becho and not Bellarke? Just curious.
I think the relationship between Echo and Bellamy is extremely interesting, and they both benefit from it a lot. Echo is someone who has spent her life been stripped from her humanity, and never really had the chance to belong somewhere or have people to love. She was just a soldier among many, a weapon to dispose of anything that might be considered a problem. She was nothing but a tool. Bellamy came into her life and taught her (along the rest of Spacekru) what was life beyond what was taught to her as a tool. He gave her somewhere to belong, someone to be vulnerable to, made her feel true love and true reasons to live and so on. He allowed her to be human. On the other hand, Bellamy also benefits from being in this relationship with Echo. His relationship with her is so balanced and equal in the sense that she is as devoted to her, as he is to her. She always is on her side, even when she disagrees with him. She is extremely dedicated in making sure that he is safe, and puts a certain importance in having him preserve the relationship he has with the other prominent people in his life. They communicate, listen to each other, make compromises and plans with each other, and he as a person and what he wants are always priorities to her. While they were enemies before, and a lot of blood was shed at that point (which is completely understandable since they were people who barely knew each other in two complete opposite sides of a war), as soon as they truly became allies, and eventually fell in love, their relationship has been completely healthy. They are my two favorite characters from this series, and watching them mold as individuals, but also become this extremely dynamic unit, has been so wonderful to watch.
On the other hand, I don’t know a dynamic in fiction that I despise more than I do the one between Bellamy and Clarke, or a character I like less than Clarke. For starters, their relationship has been toxic every step of the way. They were supposedly close friends, yet time and again, one or the other disregarded the other, with most of the time, it being Clarke. Of course, initially they were begrudging allies at best, so them not prioritizing each other and what the other wanted wasn’t that noteworthy of a thing, yet the problem is that this tendency continued for the span of the show. Despite being Bellamy’s close friend, Clarke has kidnapped him, she shot at him, she chained him, she drugged him, she tazed him, she brutalized him, she considered killing him, she manipulated him over and over again, and left him to die. She did all of that despite supposedly being his close friend. Not only that but she put the people that he cares about in danger on numerous occasions because they were obstacles to whatever she was trying to do. Whether it be Octavia in Mount DC, or when she left her out of the bunker to die. There’s also Raven whom she sent off to be tortured once again. It doesn’t help that her actions led to the war continuing which resulted to Murphy getting shot, and her actions led to McCreary having the chance to destroy the world, which then gave Murphy and Harper no choice but to sacrifice themselves to save everyone. Whenever someone she supposedly cares about is in the way of her goal, she has no qualms in pushing them and what they care aside, and hurting these things in order to achieve whatever she wants. Look at how horribly she treated Raven (she’s practically just a tool for Clarke) overall. Look at how she abandoned Murphy in S3 (which led to his rape), chained him up and threatened to have the person he cared about most be put in the radiation chamber (she even insinuated that if Emori couldn’t produce the desire results, he would be next). Look at how she electrocuted her own child. Look at how she left Bellamy to die.
Not only that but there’s a clear power imbalance in their relationship, that Clarke has repeatedly taken advantage of to manipulate Bellamy. She doesn’t truly care about the problems in his life (especially with his sister) except when she wants him to do something in particular, and will pretend to care about whatever is going with him, and use that thing in order to push him into doing what she wants him to do. This relationship has the same problem as Bellamy’s relationship with Octavia. It being that it’s swarmed by toxicity. In order to preserve a relationship with either of them, he is forced to be loyal to them to the point of having him willing to die for either of them, despite them constantly treating him poorly. They don’t truly listen to Bellamy and instead only pay attention to the parts that are convenient to them. However, this dynamic between them, which relegates to Clarke being this ‘‘princess’‘, and Bellamy being her ‘‘knight’‘ which has been reinforced by the writers and romanticized by the fans is not healthy. Bellamy isn’t just there to follow everything Clarke says. He isn’t just there to validate every one of her actions even when her actions are putting the lives of the people he cares about in danger. He isn’t there to lay down his life for her despite how poorly she treats him. I do think Clarke cares about him to some extent, but it’s horrible seeing Bellamy dedicating so much to helping Clarke, and then Clarke time and again push him and the people he cares about aside to do whatever she thinks matters the most at the moment. It doesn’t help that the shippers often fetishize the idea of Bellamy being ‘’the brown knight’’. Not only do they only love Bellamy when he is relocated by the narrative as just that, but as i mentioned, they fetishize him and the trope, and many of them self-insert into the ‘’white princess’’ in order to live out their gross fetishistic (and abusive) fantasies. They love the idea of Bellamy instantly forgiving Clarke for every abusive thing she’s done (Becho is better in that respect because Bellamy was given the agency to hold Echo accountable for her actions and distrust her for years until eventually finding it in his heart to forgive and love her) in a way that undermines Bellamy and his perspective. Clarke has been abusing and manipulating Bellamy since early on, and again and again, I had to watch that abuse being swept to the side by both the story and the shippers, who cared more about fantasizing about this racialized abuse to really pay attention to how grossly abusive this relationship is. I honestly find this relationship absolutely disgusting, and there’s nothing the show could do at this point to make me remotely like it.
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