#r j

Pour one out for our baby Romeo Lexa, girl only thought with her heart and her pussy ✊😔💕

Anyway, Clarke was 17-18 in the story so just a little younger than Lexa (not 14, I'm lookin at you Bill 😒). I always saw her as not particularly having much of a dating history. A few boys tried to court her, but nothing ever really stuck. They were fun, and she enjoyed their kisses, but they were too tiresome in how they wanted her to be a weakling for them. Docile. It wasn't in Clarke's nature.

Clarke's first girl crush was actually on Octavia, tho that also didn't last long. It was nothing more than a childhood thing, Clarke's little 8 year old heart fluttering like mad during a game of make-believe when Octavia, pretending to be a dashing prince coming to sweep her off her feet, offered Clarke a few freshly picked dandelions as she he declared her his undying love 🥺. It made her realize that maybe she really wouldn't be all that bothered if it did just so happened to be a princess rather than a prince who came to her on bended knee 👀.

At the very least she thought Octavia smelled better than when it was Bellamy's turn to play the prince 😬

Then the Blake parents died of a lingering illness later that same winter and Clarke's parents took Octavia and Bellamy in. So that crush was pretty much squashed within the same year because she started seeing them both as nothing more than siblings. But she never could quite forget that feeling and how pretty she thought Octavia was. And she would see women here and there who made her cheeks flush a bit and her stomach squirm, but she didn't really know what it all meant.

How did you take one of the most renowned, beloved and reworked stories in history and make it fresh?

It was an incredibly daunting prospect. Shakespeare is often a sacred cow, so we knew there would be people who didn’t like what we had done. But we just followed a path we believed in. We used to joke that the critics would call us “the Butchers of The Bard” – so we figured we would just own that idea.

We even had caps made with that embroidered on it, which we’d wear while we were writing! One of the first things we did was read the play aloud to each other in American accents, because that immediately smashed through the perceived, slightly pretentious, elevated language.