Thank you for taking the time to reply. This is a very emotional topic for a lot of people (myself included), so I understand that you’re coming with strong feelings and I hope my reply can clear up some of your questions.

There are two main ideas I wanted to communicate in my original post:

1. The historical treatment of queer female relationships has caused a lot of internalized anxiety within myself and the “Clexa” fandom.
2. Killing off Lexa for the purpose of creating a romantic relationship between Clarke and Bellamy would be a giant step backwards.

When it comes down to it, the decision to kill off characters is the prerogative of the writers and the show. If their goal is to get viewers invested in a relationship and use the breaking of that relationship as a tool for evoking passion and emotion, that is something entirely justified. They’ve made it abundantly clear that no character is safe:

I can see a multitude of situations in which Clarke and Lexa’s relationship comes to an end that does not fall back onto the bury your gays trope — including situations in which Lexa does ultimately die. Though I would find Lexa’s death personally very upsetting, I think it can be used a storytelling tool that furthers Clarke’s development as a character and the overall plot of the show. (For example, the parallels between the Ice Queen killing Lexa, Clarke’s love, and the Ice Queen killing Costia, Lexa’s former love, could be really interesting to explore.)

I also believe that if Clarke and Lexa’s relationship does come to an end, there are ways to introduce a new romantic partner for Clarke (of any gender) that does not fall back on tropes and could even work towards subverting them in other interesting ways. At the end of the day, it’s less about who Clarke ends up with, but how she does.

One of the reasons pairing Clarke and Bellamy together feels like a step backwards to me is less about their specific characters and more about how main character archetypes have traditionally been represented in media. Bellamy is like every rash, impulsive former bad-boy hero that needs a woman like Clarke to come along so that he has someone to protect. Pairing him with Clarke feeds into the trope that a bad-boy just needs a good woman to come along and “save” him from himself. It doesn’t allow him to work through his immaturities and bad behavior on his own and grow from internal reflection and experience, but instead puts the burden of his emotional growth on his female partner. Pairing Bellamy with a female partner that serves those needs only elevates his character, not hers. These archetypes encapsulate so many heterosexual relationships in popular media and it’s just become so, so tiring to me. This wouldn’t necessarily be the case if Clarke ended up with a different male character archetype.

Where my biggest argument comes in, then, is if Lexa is killed not to further the development of Clarke as a character, and to further the development of the world, but instead is used as a means of hooking up Clarke and Bellamy. In my opinion, while that wouldn’t necessarily diminish the work the show has done to build a diverse and inclusive cast of characters, including queer characters aside from Clarke and Lexa, but it would definitely diminish the work they’ve put into showing that two women can have a relationship on TV without one of those women needing to die so an opposite-gender relationship can be formed.

That’s also where this topic becomes difficult. Clarke is, and will always be, a bisexual character. Pairing Clarke up with a cisgender male character would not subvert her identity as a bisexual woman, but it would eliminate a queer relationship that has been incredibly important to viewers. Clarke and Lexa’s queer relationship is the best I’ve ever seen on TV (some great thoughts on that here). The loss of that relationship would be a blow for many people, for whom Clarke and Lexa’s relationship has done a lot to help them accept their own sexualities as “okay.” It also helps to normalize queer relationships to heterosexual viewers, including the parents of queer teenagers and adolescents also watching the show.

I think both of our anxieties are coming from similar place: queer characters, both bisexual or homosexual, have been historically ill-treated in media. The fewer well-written queer characters we have in media, the more we want to hold those characters to the highest standards. I hope that as more shows start following The 100’s lead, the less of an issue this will become.