First, I wouldn't categorize the Grounders as someone just defending their homes. Maybe initially that was the case, but at some point they became an attacking force and it was clearly a kill or be killed situation for The 100.
Well, that's what people do when defending their home against invaders, isn't it? They fight back. The point is that neither side was evil here, and they should've found some better option than just immolating the whole lot of them. Taking the leads to that point without really giving any thematic reason for it seems gratuitous. I grew up with shows about protagonists who were defined by their determination to find better alternatives to violence when it was possible, stories where the nuclear option was there as a last resort but usually as something the characters stepped away from when they realized it would be too great a moral compromise. Now it seems the fashion is to tell stories about protagonists with no moral compass and make them cross every conceivable moral line for the sake of being edgy and shocking. And I have to wonder what characters like that stand for, why we should sympathize with or root for them.
Granted, stories about antiheroes or even villains can have dramatic merit if their acts of violence reveal something dramatically meaningful about them. I never watched
Breaking Bad, but I gather that the main character's descent into worse and worse evil was a cautionary tale, meant not to glorify his acts but to highlight their immorality and how they destroyed him and the people around him. But I don't see what the 100's actions are revealing about them or teaching them. I don't see the dramatic purpose to all the violence, so I don't feel it's justified. I'm not talking about whether the
characters were justified in taking actions to defend themselves. I'm talking about the justification behind the
writers' decision to include all this violence in the story. What purpose does it serve dramatically, thematically, philosophically? What is the message of the story? What are the characters learning?
I think a less daring show doesn't go as dark as this one does with showing what the consequences of really poor decisions can lead to.
I hear that so much these days, about how "daring" it is to go dark. That would've been true a decade ago, maybe. But these days, it's the default to go dark. Plenty of shows do it. It's not daring anymore, it's just copying
Breaking Bad and
Game of Thrones. Going along with the current fashion is the exact opposite of being daring.
I'm curious as to who you are referring to regarding the show's track record for non-white characters? Anyone other than the Jaha's son, and asian guy who also played a bad guy in Continuum?
You haven't noticed? Every speaking black character among the 100 has been systematically killed off -- first Wells (who was one of the main characters in the book!) in episode 3, then
John Mbege in episode 6, then
Connor in episode 10. Up top, Kelly Hu disappeared after the first episode, then most of the multiethnic council (including poor Hiro Kanagawa, who I don't think was ever given more than one line) was killed in the explosion. Then Terry Chen was shoved aside as the bad guy in favor of the very blond Kate Vernon.
So by late in the season, we reached a point where, aside from Raven and Monty, all the speaking characters among the 100 were white -- and Monty was frequently absent altogether. And who plays the primitive, savage Grounders? Mostly nonwhite actors like Ricky Whittle and Dichen Lachman. The protagonists are coded as white and the savage, exotic enemy is coded as dark.
And yes, a lot of white characters have died too, but that's because there are so many white characters overall. The key is that there are still plenty of white characters left alive, while among the nonwhite characters, the mortality rate is more than half.
