(Spoiler alert for those who haven’t watch season 2)
The CW’s breakout show “The 100” takes place a hundred years from now in a post-apocalyptic world. With lives that only rely on surviving, there isn’t much time to worry about the sexual orientation of others. This was proved on episode fourteen of season two, when the main protagonist Clarke Griffin shared a kiss with the commander of the enemy tribe, Lexa. In the beginning on the show, Clarke had showed an interest in men. Even if she hadn’t been with a male before, viewers would most likely have assumed that she was straight anyway, since we currently live in a heteronormative society.
Unlike the average television show with queer representation, Clarke nor Lexa ever “announced” or “came out” about their sexuality. After the kiss, Clarke never said “I’m not gay” or “I’m straight.” The only reason behind why she denied a potential relationship with Lexa because the man she loved recently died. In the TV industry, it’s important to know who likes who and how someone identifies, everything and everyone is labeled. That episode received a mix of positive and negative reviews, and the show’s producer and main writer, Jason Rothenberg, was immediately slammed with questions about Clarke’s sexuality. “Is she gay, straight, bisexual, etc.?” This is what Rothenberg had to say about all of the assumptions in a recent Q&A. “We don’t self-identify her that way. She’s definitely bi. But people don’t look at themselves—it’s a different kind of world.
In our world, I understand how important that is. In the world of the show, it’s more—it’s not about what your sexual orientation is, or what your gender is, if you’re disabled or not—it’s just are you strong or not. Are you going to help me survive today or not? Nobody gives a fuck who are you having sex with or who you love or what color you are. It’s just not part of that world view based on a hundred years of really, like—if you take away all of the things we took for granted like where our next meal is going to come from and the fact that we’re going to survive until the end of the day, the fact we have a place to sleep, oxygen on The Ark, water on The Ark—these things were not a given. That becomes what you worry about. You’re not going to live or die based on what color you are, but you are going to live or die based on whether you can fight your way out of a situation. So with that sort of bigger world view in the show, it became obvious to us that sexuality, that someone’s sexual orientation would be the same; that it’d be looked at the same way we looked at race or looked at the other things.” It’s obvious by now that Clarke’s sexual preference doesn’t matter, but Rothenberg also mentioned that race doesn’t either. With the (few) POC characters on the show, their race has never been mentioned or even treated as a minority. In the three groups of the show, The Ark, The Grounders, and The 100, they all had one main leader. Two of them were women and the other was a black man, without any complaint of any of the characters. All of them had at least one person that disliked them, but not because of their gender of race. Although the series takes place years in the future and is mainly based on survival, we can only hope society will develop similarly.
