#lxa

You know what? That question is too hard. Because there have been some great villains, and then sometimes those villains don’t STAY a villain, and what makes them great might have been what makes them great non-villains. So in order to answer that appropriately, I’m gonna have to go by season. 

Season 1-- Bellamy Blake. He most definitely WAS a villain. He was the main villain on the ground for the first half of the season. And the same qualities that made him the best villain made it so Clarke could bring him to her side. Setting up the essential dynamic of learning to understand your enemy as your own shadow, making peace with them, and in so doing, becoming a whole and healthy individual. He’s not the enemy anymore, but that yin yang push and pull gave season 1 it’s energy.

Season 2--Lxa. Wow I never thought I’d say that. But I am. For much the same reasons as Bellamy. The enemy shadow within yourself thing. She might not have stayed a villain (although I maintained she was Clarke’s love interest/antagonist through s3 because she was an obstacle to her getting the peace and unity that she wanted,) but she started one. She’s the reason the grounders attacked the delinquents. She was ready to annihilate them at any moment. Revealing that the water girl was the heda was SUPER bad ass and great female empowerment. I don’t personally like Lxa as a character, but as the villain/antagonist of s2, that’s some good stuff. And tbh, the alliances she made with Clarke, the FRIENDSHIP, the ROMANCE are part of what made her a good villain. Because we thought something good could come of it and then. OMG THE WORST BETRAYAL OF THE WHOLE DAMN SHOW AND THE TRAUMATIC EVENT THAT SET CLARKE UP FOR NEAR DESTRUCTION. Maybe I can say this now because she came back in season 5 and apologized, admitted she was wrong and said that love wasn’t an enemy, thereby allowing Clarke to process and heal from that trauma. hmm. 

Oh wow. Wait a minute. There’s a correlation between Clarke’s shadow being Bellamy in season 1 and her shadow being Lxa in season 2 and 3. [symbolism and deep analysis coming up you may want to look away until s3 villain also yes, it subordinates CL in the story to BC, tough noogies. CL is subordinate in the story to BC.] Okay. The same dynamic is set up with BC and with CL with Clarke attempting to win L to her side with the same techniques as she did B. It didn’t work. L refused to partner or give up her power or honor her agreements, leading to that terrible trauma of betrayal, genocide and horror, which she ran away from and was dragged back kicking and screaming to face. I think they used the Clarke’s shadow story of CL to actually deepen the connection between Clarke and Bellamy. They couldn’t have had him betray her that badly and have it come back to be something like a healthy true love relationship. But I think they needed Clarke to sink to the dark side while letting Bellamy rise from his dark side, in order to create the symbolic balance that has them spinning around each other... like binary stars, right? She needed the pain from love but he couldn’t be the one to give it to her. Therefore they brought in another love story to punch Clarke in the heart. Very cruel. Very hard. Intensifies everything. Wow I don’t know if I could do that to my characters. But it was effective. In the long run. Even bringing her back for that resolution after 6 years of healing. (all of this is really about a way to tell a story and make it deeper and more difficult without harming the essential romance irredeemably. Use a mirror of the relationship that plays out some of the possibly harmful elements. Make that relate subconsciously, but not really. you guys can all ignore it. it’s not really about villains. although i like it because you get the enemies to lovers thing but the harmful parts are shifted into the secondary relationship.)

Season 3-- PIKE. I LOVE PIKE. LOVE. I get Pike. Pike is a teacher and he will do ANYTHING to protect his kids. And he was a really good leader and managed to keep Farm Station alive despite being hunted across the mid atlantic. Hey. This also follows the shadow villain theory, because Pike is BELLAMY’S shadow. He is who Bellamy could have become without the balancing element of Clarke. He is a good man at heart who has demonized “the other” in order to protect his own. (This is also what Lxa did, btw. Although she did make alliances when it was in her benefit.) He would not have become as violent as he did if he hadn’t been attacked, but in reaction he became a xenophobe. I mean, I can’t say this isn’t a reaction to the trauma that he experienced. Being hunted by Azgeda. I do think that he could have changed if he’d lived. He was already cooperating with Indra, and while he’s biased and bigoted against grounders, he was not blind. He recognized, I think, that he was wrong and there was room for him to learn. Alas, Octavia took care of that. Also, other than Bellamy and Clarke, he’s tops on my own “hot” list. I know he’s too old for all y’all, but not for me. :)

Season 4-- The real villain is Praimfaya, so I’m gonna pick Roan as my favorite villain. Is he a villain? Is he an ally? No one ever knows. One minute he’s working with them, the next minute he’s capturing someone. One minute he’s making deals with them, the next minute he’s putting roadblocks down in front of them. One minute he’s refusing to be allies, the next minute he’s allying. MAKE UP YOUR DAMN MIND. If he weren’t raised in Azgeda under Nia, with all that politicking and power plays he might have been a good guy, but he can’t help wanting to replicate the domination of his mother. Too bad because he’s funny and insightful and sarcastic and I think he really LIKES Clarke and Bellamy.

Season 5-- TOUGH TO DECIDE. Is my favorite the awful truly awful Octavia who mucks everything up because she’s gone to the darkside. Or is my favorite the awesome Diyoza who is no longer a villain by the end of the season, but was formidable and quite the opponent, and really another shadow of Clarke, who Clarke could have been if she had been pre-apocalypse. I think I’m going with Diyoza, because she’s funny, and reasonable, and she likes everyone and Octavia is just so damned grim and vindictive. It might make a more evil villain but as for who I like better? I think it’s Diyoza. Both were fun, but Diyoza is fun as in I liked her character, and Octavia was fun as in, OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE SHE DID THAT. Octavia also has that storyline of being the symbolic representation of the toxic state of humanity, caught in the cycle of violence and perpetuating it. She’s definitely more important in the storyline but I like Diyoza better.

I'm really proud of me for the coloring!  x33 

ART  © Me

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Thanks for the info! It makes sense, and I feel like I might have known that already? I think it came up the last time I spiraled down this path lol. But it also means that the clans each had their own leadership systems. Even alliances are just that, associations formed between groups for mutual benefit, each with their own leaders. So when and how did all of the clans suddenly decided the flame dictated their one true ruler above even their clan rulers? Canon says Lxa. She was the first to bring all of the clans together. One leader ruling by the Mandate of Heaven. Authority through religion. But that’s what keeps tripping me up, and prompted my post. Because if the flame system is that new across the clans for selecting their leader, then there’s no way it’s consistent between them and the coalition is far more unstable than even seasons 2 and 3 showed.

Even if one coalition always had that system, and more clans were integrated into that system as they joined, all of them were never under that system until Lxa. Who was just over 20 years old, and became commander as a teen. So we’re looking at maybe a decade at most, depending on how long it took her to get all of the clans together. Which she was able to do because of war.

It was a wartime coalition. Lxa was able to bring the clans together because of the Mountain Men. The threat of the Mountain Men was enough that she was able to bring the clans together with herself as warlord, and even then didn’t have the full backing of the ambassadors and their clans. Lxa needed the Mountain Men to the extent that she manipulated Clarke into allowing hundreds of her own people to die at TonDC, and betrayed her allies and her people’s honor and culture of blood must have blood at the battle of Mount Weather. All of which makes sense to me for a character who believed herself to have a Mandate from Heaven to rule. Her power was just. But that’s also when it get’s confusing, when the flame is added. And it’s a significant part of the story right now with Roan and Gaia, and Roan is all that’s keeping the grounders from finally wiping out the Sky People so I need to know these things.

If it was season 1 I would shrug and accept it as flawed worldbuilding. But the writers have been much much more careful in their crafting of the world of The 100 since then. So I could be wrong, but I think all of this will be relevant this season. The history of the coalition and the clans that is.

I think L learned AFTER her death.

She may have been starting to learn it, she did let Clarke go, finally, so I think that was her trying to release control over the person she loved, even if having the ability to force her to stay or allow her to leave is still power games.

I don’t think she could really learn it until AFTER she died, because she had to be released from the ego that was always about gaining more power. 

However Sheidheda didn’t lose that. So perhaps not being heda is what allowed her to consider her life and her actions and change. Maybe she’s the only one not repeating Sheidheda’s love is a weakness thing because Clarke helped her grow. 

I think C realized that love is not a weakness during that Clecho scene where her heart is turned inside out and then Lxa finally admits, through Madi, that she was wrong, love is not a weakness, and betraying her was the worst thing she’d done.

I say it censored to keep my posts out of the fan tags and searches. Also CL. Never write that out. Because the shipwars were terrible and I was harassed very badly by that fandom, so I’d prefer to avoid them if possible. 

I also think Lxa was overrated. She’s not the worst character by far, but the pedestal that she’s put on is not reflected to me in the character.

I personally don’t think she was a good leader. She might have been before the show started, but by the time the delinquents showed up she wasn’t. She is the one who caused the war, treating 100 shipwrecked, defenseless kids like they were an invading army. They had spies. They knew they weren’t an army. 

I think Lxa’s guiding principle was to gain and keep power. And when she met Clarke, that set her back on her heels because she fell in love and she basically lost control of herself and her judgment. 

I think that her last good leadership decision was letting Clarke go free after mercy killing Finn. I think “love is a weakness” is a terrible leadership philosophy and is part of what started Clarke’s breakdown. I think the bombing of TonDC was the point of no return for Lxa, because what she did was bomb that city so she could get rid of her political rivals who were all there, except for Nia. (who did end up trying to destroy her next season.) Yes, she said it was to protect the mission but not really. They could have started a fire and evacuated the city like Clarke suggested, but that’s not what she wanted. She wanted to clean out the coalition.

I think that betraying Clarke and the delinquents in front of the mountain was the worst decision of her life, not because she betrayed the girl she loved, but because none of her allies would ever trust her again and she was betraying what her people stood for. BUT she did it to keep power. Because without the enemies of MW, she would not have a coalition to fight them, and as long as skaikru were around, there would always be a people who were powerful enough to take down the mountain when she was never able to. She kept getting BEATEN by Clarke and the delinquents. This was her chance to get rid of them. 

And in the narrative, the betrayal of MW set Lxa up to be taken down. Her coalition turned on her. She wasn’t a fair leader, she was a tyrant. She set up a system where she COULD be removed democratically, and then she killed the people who tried to enact that system. That is a tyranny. She kidnapped Clarke and held Arkadia’s safety over her the whole time, so while Clarke was trying to make her an ally, Lxa was giving her the carrot or the stick, luxuries and safety or everyone you love is dead. And when Clarke got her to say “blood must not have blood,” she did it by appealing to her vanity, not sense of right and wrong, but leaving a legacy of being a visionary. Her FAME.

I also think Lxa caused her own death.  I think she was a tragic hero, who stared out visionary, with all the power, and through her own tragic flaws, brought about the downfall of everything she worked for and loved.