A major death on ‘The 100’ sparks massive backlash from queer fans

The 'dead lesbian' trope refuses to die.

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Season 3 of The 100. Last Thursday, a major character death sent shock waves throughout the fandom for the popular CW sci-fi dystopia The 100. But while The 100 has long been known for its brutal, no-one-is-safe approach to killing off main cast members, this character’s death hit especially hard—not just for members of the fandom but members of queer communities across the Internet. Over the weekend, what began as a groundswell of outrage among an already-troubled fandom quickly spread into a major ongoing conversation in fandom communities about the “dead lesbian” trope—a relic of the celluloid closet that has managed to stay alive much longer than the many queer characters who’ve been killed off in service to it. One Hundred Billion Story Ideas That Don't Involve You Killing a Queer Woman is a book I'm going to write and give away for free. — Heather Hogan (@theheatherhogan) March 4, 2016 The 100 is a unique show in many ways. Although it’s a CW show, it’s not just another teen drama. Its political themes, gripping plot, complex female characters, and deep study of a post-apocalyptic survivalist future have earned it major critical acclaim and an intense fan following. Last season, fans were thrilled when the main character, Clarke, began to develop feelings for another young woman named Lexa. [Placeholder for http://scmeh.tumblr.com/post/140627908455/shhhh-the-episode-ended-here embed]

Clarke is one of the first canonically bisexual main characters on network television. She follows recent complicated queer leads like House of Card’s Frank Underwood and The Good Wife‘s Kalinda. But The 100 is a geeky genre series, arriving at a time when science fiction and fantasy narratives are being deeply interrogated by fans and challenged to provide greater, more meaningful and diverse representation. For queer fans who are vastly underserved by Hollywood’s current dearth of diverse GLBTQ characters, Clarke and Lexa’s relationship was a hugely positive thing.

But this season that came to an end. In an episode of The 100 podcast The Dropship, the episode’s writer, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, explained that the creative team had to write the character of Lexa out of the show because her actor, Alycia Debnam-Carey, had become a lead on Fear the Walking Dead:

“We considered a lot of different options, including the possibility that killing her would make a political statement that we were not comfortable with. But ultimately when you’re talking about this world and the stakes we’re dealing with, we genuinely came to the perspective in the writers’ room that this death would be the best way for us to, not only write the character out of the show, but protect ourselves against the possibility that we might never see the actor again ….

And honestly I think that in terms of the epic quality of the show … we honestly look at the story as an epic tale of shocking fate and destiny. And, you know, kings tend to not retire from being kings.”

Fans acknowledged that Lexa’s character might have to go, but heavily criticized the choice to off her the way she went on Thursday’s episode: killed by a random stray bullet, leaving Clarke and the fandom heartbroken.

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Grillo-Marxuach acknowledged that fans would be “very unhappy” with Lexa’s death, but argued that the show’s narrative is “the struggle for love and humanity in an atavistic world that only understands conflict” and thus dictated the mode of the actor’s departure.

“I can’t control or dictate how people are going to react to a character death on the show, and obviously there’s a huge spectrum of, outside the narrative bubble of the show in terms of the LGBT representation and all that, that has to be addressed,” Grillo-Marxuach said. “The hope that these characters are going to find happiness and joy halfway through the series is a very poignant one, but is in no way borne out by any of the events of the show.”

But fans questioned the point of killing Lexa off in a manner that seemed to be so random and haphazard: