Because I like theorizing about potential ships and you seem like the best person to go to for this, which do you find more intriguing? Bellamy/Echo or Bellamy/Luna? Personally, I'm really looking forward to seeing B&E interact/develop more as the season goes on. But then, I'm also curious about the potential between *peacefulLuna* and B struggling with trusting Grounders - to put it simply lol but I'd love to hear your thoughts on these 2 ships + potential!
You’re right nonny, I AM someone to come to with this because yesss let’s talk about pretty people mushing their faces together. I’m gonna take this in two parts: what I think is most interesting, and what I think is the direction the show is most likely to go.
For me personally, as firehot as I think Bellamy/Echo could be, I think Bellamy/Luna is more interesting. For one thing, the show has already done the “a grounder betrays a sky person, that sky person learns to forgive and love them anyway” twice now (cl.exa and memori), so I’d be up for something a little different this time around. For another thing, Echo is responsible for the death of Gina, something the show didn’t handle very well the first time around (as Gina was clearly created just to be fridged and I thought you were better than that, show) and so I’d rather see the show handle that head on rather than just be like “idk, it’s war” because that’s lazy. I also think “Bellamy learns to forgive Echo despite her being responsible for one of his major traumas” feels unnecessarily harsh on Bellamy, because everyone else on this show gets to make horrible mistakes and move on with lessons learned, but for some reason Bellamy has to pay for his mistakes first. And that sort of storyline with Echo would feel like more of the same and again, I want something different.
Bellamy/Luna, however, presents far more intriguing options to me. Luna has deliberately chosen non-violence despite the world she lives in, and I see Bellamy struggling with following that same path this season. He wants to “deserve to survive” as it were, and I think exploring a relationship with Luna would give him the opportunity to figure out how to do that without it seeming like punishment/self-flagellation. It would get across the same narrative of “Bellamy learns to trust grounders” that we’d get with Bellamy/Echo, but without the grossness of the show getting a boner for punishing Bellamy and not knowing what to do about Gina. Nadia is also incredibly pretty, and I for one am a slut for “pretty people making out” and thus it checks that box for me too.
However, for almost the exact same reasons as I listed above, I do think the show is more likely to go with Bellamy/Echo. I’m not entirely convinced that all the parallels we see are actually parallels so much as lazy writing, but “sky person forgives and loves a grounder despite betrayal” is definitely a story beat they seem to enjoy. They’ve also clearly set up Bellamy and Echo as foils for one another, and their story is definitely being portrayed as “unfinished” for now, because “Do you think we’ll ever be able to trust each other/I doubt it” is what we call Very Unsubtle Foreshadowing, my friends. In contrast, Bellamy barely seemed to interact with Luna in 314. In fact, I’m not sure they even had a conversation that didn’t include other people. That sort of complete narrative indifference to a character dynamic indicates to me that it’s not a relationship they’re really interested in exploring (and before anyone mentions the set visit video from Seat42F, I took Bob’s answer about Luna to be more of a “uh, I didn’t plan on answering a question about her because we have almost no scenes together so I’m just gonna say something vague and non-committal” dodge than anything else.)
All of that being said, however: I’d still be surprised if Bellamy/Echo went explicitly romantic. I would not rule out (and definitely wouldn’t be opposed to seeing) a scenario where Bellamy hits rock bottom and like, has grief/hatesex with Echo as a way of attempting to process the absolute mountain of feelings he’s dealing with right now, but the farthest I see his Echo feelings going this season is “downgraded from Hate Always to Grudgingly Trust.” If we take 401 as the place setting episode for s4, wherein they lay out where each character is emotionally at the start of the season and what each character is going to have to overcome, here’s what we have for Bellamy:
Does Not Trust Echo Even The Slightest Bit
Worried He Doesn’t Deserve To Survive
What He Needs To Achieve This Season:
Learn To Let Octavia Make Her Own Mistakes
Learn to Believe He Is A Good Person
Learn To Trust Echo/Not Hold a Grudge
If you notice, everything but Clarke from the “current emotional state” list was addressed explicitly (and verbally) by 401. Clarke called out his worry about Octavia, Kane called out his worry about his soul, and Echo called out his distrust of her. Given the clusterfuck of s3 and ships, I’m not at all surprised that they left Concerned About Clarke as the only element uncommented upon, because if a character calls that out then the Build Up To Canon Bellarke has officially begun. And narratively, Le.xa died for the second time like, two hours ago, so I get why they felt it was too soon. (Because it was!) But the fact remains that the show repeatedly and bluntly emphasized “Bellamy is very worried about Clarke, even more so than he is worried about his sister, the one person he has consistently been shown to love above all others” throughout 401. I highly suspect the show is laying the ground work for something involving Bellarke and they just didn’t want to get accused of erasing L.exa right out of the gates. (And again: good. Let Clarke grieve one love interest for a bit instead of immediately introducing a new one. I disliked it in s2 and I’d dislike it now). So I suspect that if Becho is introduced at all, it’s going to be introduced as a complicating factor on the way to canon Bellarke rather than True And Everlasting Love.
Okay, one last thing I want to say about speculation before I wrap this up: I have absolutely no idea if any of the above is true. I could be totally wrong, because I don’t actually write the damn show. So if you read this and got upset that I think Becho might happen in some form, take heart in the fact that I am not an actual authority on the s4 plot and therefore this spec carries absolutely zero weight in real terms.
But the same also goes for my “I think they are building to bellarke” theory as well. I could be totally wrong. As my dear friend once said about show speculation: it doesn’t count if you promise it to yourself. I can look at the clues and say “I think this is what is going to happen,” but that’s all it means, okay?
