#ask mj

"... Shit...*

1. I absolutely loved your work! Beautiful, I cried, I laughed, I cheered, and I can't stop thinking about it. Thank you for making that masterpiece almost ten years ago😭😭

2. I wanted to print and bind your fanfic to have it on my bookshelf, if that's ok with you?? I won't sell it or anything like that, I'll make it for me!

3. Lastly,,, your dice!!!!!??? GORGEOUS, love them, would buy if I wasn't absolutely BROKE even if I don't play DnD so much. They're so so nice, keep up with the good work!

Anyway, hope this wasn't a bother, and have a good day!!!

You are INCREDIBLY sweet. Honestly I doubt many people still associate my current blog with being a fic writer/artist. I still read every comment that I get on Ao3 though! I'm a very different person than I was when I wrote AEJ, but I still have a very squishy spot in my heart for it and the fandom.

I’ve seen a lot of posts lately, lamenting having seen something triggering on their dash. I too have been witness to this. What’s frustrating is that I utilize my filter function — both for tags and content — but here we are bc some content creators don’t tag or warn for triggery content.

(Yes, people use tags to find content, but they also use them to filter content.)

Regardless, here are a few tips from someone who’s existed in online fandom spaces since the early 90s and using tumblr for more than a decade.

Well this is the question isn’t it?? I think everyone in the Bellarke fandom is probably asking themselves this right now.

So, I’ve been team “I don’t think they’re going to address the 2199 calls” since the beginning of the season. That’s for a couple of reasons: 1) I’m trying to lower my own expectations lol but mostly 2) Clarke does NOT say Bellamy’s name in 5x01, Eden. She says his name in the call at the end of 4x13, but the writers do not have Clarke SAY BELLAMY’s NAME in 5x01. Now, it’s extremely clear from context that he’s who she’s talking to (”I’m proud of you” + “this would be so much easier if I knew you were alive” + calling her other friends by name). 

So it’s not that I don’t think we’re meant to think Clarke was talking to Bellamy the whole time; it’s that after an 11 month hiatus, if “Clarke radioing Bellamy” was about to become a Big Romantic Catalyst for bellarke, I would expect the writers to really flag it in 5x01 by having Clarke say his name, thus kind of putting a pin in that for the general audience. So, going in to 505, I was very pessimistic about the chances of Clarke’s The Notebook calls to Bellamy ever being relevant again.

BUT THEN

When I was watching this scene, when Bellamy asked, “how did you do it?” I literally froze because - are they really going to go there??? are they really going to have her TELL him that she spoke to him every day?? that the memory of him, his love, his partnership, was what got her through?? Because honestly, between the pause and Eliza’s acting, and the awkward way the scene ended - with the conversation LITERALLY UNFINISHED - that’s how it FEELS. It feels like she was about to tell him that he helped keep her alive, but then she chickened out at the last minute.

Like, idk what the stage directions were, but Eliza’s acting here makes Clarke’s hesitation in response to this question very clear. And if the answer is only and always just “Madi,” what awkwardness is there to be had??? In any sort of just world, this “omission” on Clarke’s part is a set up for her to reveal, down the road, probably when her and Bellamy are embroiled in some sort of angsty conflict, that it was in fact HIM that helped her survive 6 years without a peer on the ground.

Now, I’m also not going to pretend that this show always does what is just lol. They drop threads all the time, and as Bellarke has been building for seasons now, there are several scenes that were seemingly set-ups for later reveals that were pretty much forgotten (2x09 “Love is weakness”/”I was being weak” and 4x06 “Clarke, if we don’t see each other again-” come to mind). However, there are a couple of reasons that I feel like s5 might be the season where these kinds of ~romantic bellarke~ threads actually come home to roost.

One of the reasons I think that is something that a lot of fandom, included myself, has picked up on, which is the relatively muted nature of Bellamy’s reaction to finding out Clarke is alive. Like, the cast and writers have told us until they’re blue in the face that Bellamy is less “heart” than he used to be, less fiery, but there’s a difference between finding balance and like, not having a visible/visceral/conflicted emotional reaction to finding out that, contrary to what you believed, you weren’t responsible for killing your best friend/partner/woman you’re lowkey in love with by proxy. 

Like Bellamy is clearly happy to have Clarke back, but he hasn’t verbalized really ANYTHING about how it feels to have this huge bomb dropped on him after he lived his life for six years in honor of her. After he mourned her and missed her and memorialized her and moved on from her. This omission of a nuanced reaction on Bellamy’s part makes me think either 1) the writers really fucked up and don’t care bout Bellamy/bellarke or 2) They’re saving big relationship-defining angst feelings about the Separation and Reunion for midseason Bellarke angst. Needless to say I’m hoping it’s door #2.

What does that have to do with the truncated fireside chat scene? Well, in my deepest darkest Bellarke wet dream fantasies, they have some blow up fights or angsty as shit moments later this season where all of these omissions and half truths and old wounds get put on the table, subsequently setting fire to the tentative automatic partnership bellarke have fallen back into. Something else that makes me hope we’re in for some knock-down, drag-out emotionally raw air-clearing angst is, of course, the last shot of 505. 

So I don’t know if the show is really going to go full love triangle, and honestly I don’t much care, because THIS SHOT is intentional. Arguably, the shot of Clarke’s reaction to becho kissing is the first objectively nonplatonic framing of bellarke in the show. This shot tells me the show is ready to acknowledge in some way that Bellamy and Clarke’s feelings for each other go beyond platonic partnership. And to me, THAT means the door is open for all their baggage to come home to roost later this season. Because we as a fandom know that if the writers ever had Clarke and Bellamy really fully put all their feelings on the table, there would be no backpedaling into platonic territory. But if they’re willing to frame shots like the one above, I think they might finally be ready to stop just dropping hints and actually follow their own trail of bread crumbs to some MAJOR developments on the bellarke front.

Which brings me back around (finally) to your questions: will Clarke ever tell Bellamy that she called him every day for six years? The short answer is i don’t know!! If we do indeed get some relationship-changing moments between Bellarke, I would say it is highly possible, even likely, because this fact would be such an emotional bombshell for them - for Clarke, because she would essentially be admitting out loud that she loves Bellamy, and for Bellamy because he wouldn’t be able to escape the implications of Clarke staying so intimately connected to him for 6 years while he thought she was DEAD.

And THAT’S why I think Clarke hesitated. Because Clarke had six years to come to terms with the fact that she loves Bellamy, a fact that she was able to work out for herself by “confiding” in him every day. But when Bellamy comes back down, she realizes that she was in love with the Bellamy that LEFT, the Bellamy that has remained static, a ghost at the other end of her radio for six years. But this Bellamy is solid and real and DIFFERENT and, as she finds out at the end of 505, this new Bellamy is someone else’s. This Bellamy has moved on from her in a way that she never did from him.