#halemaliia

By happenstance I’ve had several conversations this week in fandom about Lexa’s betrayal at the foot of Mount Weather in 2x15, and what that means in terms of characters being responsible for their actions. So I just decided to slap all my feels onto a big meta post.  What you’re about to read is like an unnecessarily long post about Commander Lexa, all the other characters, war strategy, Mount Weather, the Trigedakru, ethics, and how the series handles culpability for character’s actions.  I’m putting it under a cut.

The point of war ethics as presented in two seasons of The 100 isn’t to narrow bad things down to simply “I had no choice” vs. “I’m guilty”, its to show that:

there is always a choice

life is so unfair that usually it’s two terrible options to choose from

you can’t avoid choosing

once you choose, you’re responsible for the weight of it. your fault, your burden, your choice.

First, let’s talk about the strategy behind the betrayal. Was Lexa’s choice to save a hundred or so hostages and her initial wave of soldiers really the choice made from the head and not the heart?

This whole question is where the writer’s justification for Lexa’s ruthless’ tactics falls apart. The goal of the Trikru war effort was to conquer and destroy MW. PERIOD. END STOP. They didn’t even know about the blood prisoners until Clarke made the alliance 3 weeks before. Lexa’s massive regional alliance was built on the promise of conquest, not peace. Even after Clarke told them about the hostages, rescue was secondary concern to military victory: “Blood must have blood.” Clarke promised them to help defeat the mountain and rescue both groups, but the primary military goal of the 12 clans was always to eliminate the threat.

If Lexa was genuinely ruthless enough to made “the hard choice”, she would have let the blood prisoners die like she let her allies and civilians die in tonDC. What’s 100 prisoners when she already lost 300+ a week before, and tens of thousands over the last 50 years? Taking MW by force was the primary goal from the Trikru perspective. Instead Lexa suddenly goes soft for a comparatively small number of hostages & the initial people who might die in the siege? That doesn’t hold up with her hard-ass rationale. If she decided based on wanting to save the hostages, that’s using her heart to make choices. So then her relationship rational with Clarke falls apart–obviously Clarke isn’t as high in her heart as her people. Which is fine and for the best, but it doesn’t follow then that we should believe Lexa was completely in love with Clarke to the degree that fandom makes it out to be. Is her heart with a few survivors or is it with Clarke or is it with herself?  I get frustrated whenever I try to think about the conflict between how we’re “supposed” to read that scene (per writers on twitter) and how that scene actually fits in with her other behavior.

By choosing the deal, Lexa failed the ultimate goal of the campaign (i.e. MW was not conquered), she allowed a rival force to be empowered, and to do so she sacrificed proven allies. This is great for Lexa if she wants to live in a world where she leads her people alone and unrivaled, with MW as a predictable opponent she can use to keep her power established.  If personal power was her goal, then she did well with her betrayal.  HOWEVER, the writers have said that they wanted it to seem like it was a strategy choice driven by a desire to save the hostages and avoid war, not about her personal gain. We’re supposed to see her betrayal as a sacrifice: by sacrificing the alliance and her feelings for Clarke, she saved the Trikru.  But that makes no sense because by letting MW roam free on the surface Lexa has grossly endangered every clan in a three hundred mile radius. She woke the dragon and opened the front gate wide.  She failed to achieve the goal of the 12 clan alliance, and she allowed her enemies to grow stronger, not weaker.  The fact that the writers of the show can go on twitter and say that they actually think Lexa’s people are safer now and that she made the wisest choice possible by allying with MW just demonstrates that even tv writers can make ludicrous gaps of logic sometimes.

As fandom has discussed multiple times, Lexa’s actions don’t make sense from a cold-hearted POV or from a soft-hearted POV. Her choices are inconsistent either way, which is why fandom is still confused about this and arguing it out– it was weak writing that leaves Lexa either looking like an incompetent war commander or a very power-grabbing individual. Apparently neither of those were the intention of the writers room…. which honestly sucks for all the viewers.

As far as Lexa’s choices go, she’s responsible for the consequences of her actions REGARDLESS of her intent.  Time and again The 100 show has made it 100% clear that people may make difficult decisions because they feel trapped by circumstances, but at the end they are still responsible. They still have to pay the piper.

Kane and Jaha and Abby felt trapped by duty–but they are still responsible for corruption, executions, torture, and ‘culling’ on the Ark.

Bellamy felt trapped by survival and duty to his sister– but he’s still responsible for shooting Jaha, for beating kids, for torturing Atom and Lincoln, for hanging Murphy, and for trying to cut off communication to the Ark.

Clarke felt trapped by duty–but she’s still responsible for lighting the rockets that burned a Trikru village, for killing the Trikru army, for abandoning tonDC, and for killing the Mountain Men.

Finn felt trapped by devotion and survival–but he’s still responsible for massacring 18 innocent villagers.

Dante felt trapped by duty to his people and to survival–but he’s still responsible for bombing cities, enslaving fellow human beings, and turning people into cannibals and vampires.

Lexa feels trapped by duty toward her people, but she is still responsible for initially making war with the Sky People, for torturing Raven, for executing Finn, for executing Gustus, for trying to kill Octavia, for abandoning tonDC, and for betraying her alliance to side with her people’s lifelong enemy.

All of these things have complex reasons and context and rationales and motivations. All of these characters believed that they were, in their own view, justified.  But over and over again, the show tells us that intent DOES NOT trump responsibility. You have to accept responsibility for your actions. Going too far eventually ends one of four ways:

- loss of power (Jaha, Bellamy, Abby) - abdication of power (Kane, Clarke) - death of spirit or loss of reason (Jaha, Clarke, Finn) - horrible death (Dante, Cage, Finn)

You always lose something. You always pay. We done know how Lexa’s fate will result bc in canon time, the betrayal was just two episodes ago. We don’t know what the fallout will be for her yet. Maybe more war, maybe internal clan strife, maybe just Clarke’s enmity and the sacrifice of their romantic possibility.   But she is responsible, and there will be negative consequences for her.  There always are on this show.

The thing about Lexa… I’m not dissatisfied with them making her a darker and more ethically corrupt character. Nearly everyone on screen is at this point. Even Monty is tainted now with the death of MW. But fandom hiding behind her saying “I had no choice” is a delusion, the lie that all these characters have told them selves before eventual narrative judgement slams down on top of them with a big “THIS IS YOUR FAULT” gavel.

Lexa had a choice: hold the alliance or break it. She chose to break it. She had her reasons, and to her mind they were justifiable reasons. That will have both good and bad results for her in season 3, I’m sure. But let’s not pretend that Lexa is innocent just because she felt justified. Let’s not pretend that her seeming ‘lack’ of choice absolves her of the weight of her betrayal. She did those things, and she has to live with it.  While Clarke may or may not grant her forgiveness, Lexa is not entitled to be absolved, forgiven, or accepted back into the good graces of Clarke or the Sky People. Her feeling bad or feeling that she was justified doesn’t make it not her responsibility.

She is a dark and complicated character and just like everyone else on The 100, she has to live with the choices that she made, and the cost that eventually follows. If some fans dislike Lexa for the choices she made, then that’s no different than disliking  Murphy, Jaha,  Abby, Kane, Bellamy, Clarke, or Finn. When characters make bad choices, fans get upset with that character. That’s life on the internet.

HAHAHA IT’S ALWAYS MY FAULT HAHAHA

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