How to Write The 100 Fanfiction ✓

27 | clarke griffin

for this tip on writing clarke, i urge you to remove your bias goggles for a minute and hear me out.

i'm not asking you to like clarke. i'm not trying to force you to fall in love with her. however, i do want to show you that she isn't the cold-hearted bitch that half the fandom believes or makes her out to be.

first: consider the narrative. clarke is seventeen years old at the start of the show. that may be younger than some of you, or it might only be slightly older. let me tell you that being seventeen is not much different from any other age in your lower or mid-teens. you still feel like a child.

this seventeen year old girl watches her father die, finds out it's her mother's fault, is sent to earth to die, watches jasper get speared, is kidnapped by grounders, falls in love for the first time but finds out she's actually a side-chick, makes the decision to close the dropship door and locks the two people she cares about the most outside (bellamy and finn), believing them to be dead and that it's her fault. and more.

a big scene that people get mad at clarke for is her decision to blame murphy for wells' death in front of everyone. while it was absolutely wrong, it's important to think about her feelings when considering why she did this. clarke's best friend of nearly eighteen years was found dead outside of camp just hours after she reconciled with him. days later, jasper finds two of wells' fingers outside of the wall and brings them in with octavia. clarke is obviously not thinking straight. she's grieving, bewildered, confused, distraught, and angry. she acted impulsively because of these things, which was not the right thing to do, but it doesn't make her an evil person or a "dumb bitch", it makes her human.

i don't want to anger anybody with season 2, but i'd like to remind you that this is strictly in terms of the narrative, not my personal opinions.

clarke has to deal with the fact that finn massacred a grounder village because of her. because of this, lexa orders her to turn him in for a gruesome death of a thousand cuts. he turns himself in. she mercy kills him. raven, unable to understand, hits her across the face and screams at her. afterward, at finn's funeral, clarke is manipulated by lexa to believe that love is weakness. (the conversation basically goes like: "this wouldn't have happened if you had just shut down your feelings.") clarke, again, a seventeen year old girl who is speaking to a twenty-something year old leader of the grounders, is like "huh. maybe you're right. this pain inside of me is pretty great, so maybe i should try that out." so she does. believing its best for her people, she sends bellamy into mount weather ("i was being weak" shows that this is a direct result of lexa's conversation with her). you can actually see the pain in her eyes even though her face is blank because eliza is that good of an actress.

splitting this into two paragraphs because OOOHH man i don't want it to hurt anyone's eyes from being too long. many people blame only clarke for the missile hitting ton dc. what people conveniently forget is that lexa convinced her to let it hit the city. she was like "hey if you alert the people, they'll know bellamy's in there and you don't want him to die, so you?" thus making clarke decide she's right, and ultimately making octavia hate her. if you notice, you can see how wrecked clarke is about this decision in the shots of just her and lexa, but when she's talking to people like octavia or raven, she's cold and unfeeling. again, this is the "love is weakness" mask that she donned because of lexa's beliefs. for some reason, she is solely blamed for the mount weather genocide when it was the work of her, monty, and bellamy. additionally, she is influenced by dante's "i bear it so they don't have to" speech, which ultimately causes her to leave in the finale. she believes that she can and should shoulder the entire weight of the genocide onto her shoulders, that she doesn't deserve to come back to arkadia.

clarke is eighteen in season three. in 3x03, lexa uses a technique called gaslighting that directs all of clarke's anger toward herself while refusing to admit what she did wrong by abandoning her at mount weather. (when clarke is like "you abandoned me", lexa is like "would you really have done any differently?" when she knows that clarke would have). clarke chooses to stay in polis because she believes it to be the only way to protect her people, a choice she regrets as shown in season six.

another reason people seem to hate her is because of the list in season four. i recently had to rewatch it because of my fanfiction, and honestly, it made me really angry. clarke was forced by raven to make it. she kept trying to put it off because she didn't want to decide who lived and who died, but raven kept urging her to do it. clarke didn't even write her own name down— bellamy did, and i don't understand how people didn't recognize the different handwriting when they were upset that she was on there. clarke didn't think that she deserved to live. she put everyone else before her, waiting until the very last line, and she couldn't do it even then.

people's brains aren't fully developed until about age twenty-five. clarke is twenty-four in seasons five and six. that means that she's had to make all of these decisions (and more, since i didn't include season five) with an underdeveloped brain.

let me tell you that i could not imagine being in charge of most of the remaining human race at the incredibly young age of eighteen. the characters constantly blame her for things they forced her to do (*cough* raven and the list) or things that were a last resort (mount weather).

i'm not saying that everything clarke has done is morally correct (ie leaving bellamy to die in the fighting pits, which, again, she deeply apologized for in season six) but people paint her out to be this absolute monster, when it's like? what would you have done? clarke is young. she is under immense pressure all the time to save everyone when her options are limited, or a solution that's good for everyone does not exist (ie choosing to keep her people safe in the bunker and then them deciding to use her list to choose the survivors of the sky people, which miller blames her for in season five because his father gave up his spot for him).

the point is, there isn't a single character in the show who has done everything right. nobody is on any moral high ground— they have all done incredibly bad things. so why does clarke get all of the blame? why do people paint her out to be a terrible person when the other characters aren't any "better?"

it's literally like

any character: do this
clarke: *does it*
any character: WHY DID YOU DO THAT YOU'RE SO EVIL PEOPLE DIE WHEN YOU'RE IN CHARGE—

that's today's tea. do with it what you will.