What are you thoughts on Bellamy Blake being an alpha male character who subverts alpha male tropes?
Oh man, Bellamy being the anti-alpha male is like, so fucking important to me. I’m not entirely sure the writers did all of this was done on purpose, but it does highlight one area where they excel: Women In Charge And The Men Who Respect Them.
Let’s rewind back to the pilot, but do yourself a favor and imagine that Bellamy’s hair is the beautiful unruly curls that it became later on instead of that gross flat-ironed-and-slicked-back bullshit. Now that we’ve got that taken care of, if you think about Bellamy’s characterization, he’s a pretty typical Gross Alpha Male. He acts like Octavia’s vagina is his to protect (whether or not he would have good reasons for worrying about Octavia’s ability to socialize aside– because those reasons exist, but his methods are Not Okay by any stretch of the imagination), has himself a harem of women (girls, really, although I doubt the show was intending for that to be squicky and was just a case of “this is the CW we must show teenagers boning any way possible”), and attempts to run the camp as a dictatorship-with-a-dash-of-anarchy. He’s large, in charge, and a total fucking disaster.
But the one thing Early Season One Bellamy doesn’t do is underestimate Clarke because of her gender. He clashes with her and calls her princess, yeah, but his resentment of Clarke is because of her privilege and naïveté and he has roughly the same dynamic with Wells. (Let’s take a moment of silence to mourn the Bellamy/Wells BroTP that never was). At that point in the series, Bellamy had surrounded himself entirely with men, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Bellamy is at his worst when he’s under the thrall of aggressive masculinity. I have a theory that Bellamy actually prefers the company of women to the company of men, and his alpha male posturing at the start of season one is a desperate act put on by a man who has decided he is a monster. He takes on the persona of the men he loathed on the Ark (Shumway and that guard his mother had to trade sexual favors with to keep her family safe) because a) he hates himself so why not become what he’s decided is the worst thing in the universe as punishment and b) those men had considerable power over his life on the Ark and he’s trying to maintain control on the ground, so he uses that persona in an attempt to recreate the hierarchy of the Ark with himself in charge so he can protect Octavia. (Note: I highly doubt all of this was planned by the writers. But it works, so fuck it, I’m running with this theory.)
When Clarke offers Bellamy a position of co-leadership in 1x04, he accepts and we start to see a different side of Bellamy, a side that sort of emerged when he befriended Charlotte. For all my Bellamy-is-the-Mom-Friend jokes, I think it’s important that we first saw his nurturing side emerge with a young girl. He eventually comes around to being a Big Brother figure to Jasper, but Bellamy’s first hints of softness that aren’t tied to Octavia appear with Charlotte, and then Clarke continues to draw that out of him. Bellamy doesn’t lose his edge– he’s practically married to his gun– and the show doesn’t portray his acceptance of Clarke’s leadership as a weakness or submission on his part, just one leader recognizing the strengths of another.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when Bellamy is closest to Clarke (second half of season one, all of season two) he is at his best and most emotionally healthy. Even at the start of season three, Clarke is gone but he’s found Replacement!Clarkes in the form of Kane (another Alpha Male Who Really Likes Strong Ladies) and Gina (a woman who sees the good in him.) Bellamy’s decision making takes a huge turn for the worse when he loses Gina and rejects Kane, turning to Pike for guidance instead.
In defense of Pike, I don’t think he’s a misogynist. He’s probably just as feminist as Kane, but his aggressive and warlike reactions to things are classic Toxic Masculinity. Bellamy joins Pike because he’s afraid that Kane and Clarke’s philosophy (work for peace; there has to be a better way) has opened them up to attacks by the Grounders, and Bellamy is willing to be the bad guy if it means protecting his people. This is a noble impulse on his part (and he’s basically “bearing it so they don’t have to” with regards to being willing to carry out awful acts if it means keeping them safe) but it’s misguided and the show depicts it as such. Bellamy is no longer the Mother Hen surrounded by women (Clarke, Raven, Octavia, Gina, sometimes Abby) and men who take on traits typically associated with women (Diplomatic!Kane, for one, Lincoln the Peacekeeper for another) but an Aggressive Dick surrounded by other dicks (male and female, because Momma Green is definitely an Aggressive Dick too.)
Now, I’m not saying that the thesis of this show is feminism/women= good masculinity/men= bad. The show has plenty of aggressive women who think violence is the answer to their problems (Indra, Octavia, L.exa pre-Clarke) and plenty of men who want peace (Kane, Wells, season one Finn). But when you think broadly about tropes and stereotypes, men and war are closely associated just the way that women and peace are, and I think Bellamy’s struggle is based on him deciding between the two. I also think it’s important that Bellamy started to choose the side of peace before Clarke returned, because if he is going to be a leader (and he already is, but he’s working on earning that title back) he needs to make those decisions on his own.
If Clarke is “the head” of the show, then Bellamy is “the heart.” Thanks to the fucking Enlightenment (you really don’t want to get me started), we generally associate men with reason and logic and women with impulse and emotion. But Clarke is first and foremost driven by logic: she thinks about the long game, the end goals, the big picture, and tries to keep her heart out of her decisions. That’s not to say she’s heartless– on the contrary, her soft heart is what we love about her– but between Clarke and Bellamy, Clarke is the one more likely to reject an emotional appeal if sacrificing someone will help them attain their long-term goal. That sacrifice will cost her emotionally and she will grieve it, but she’ll make it if she has to. Bellamy, on the other hand, is all emotion. What comes across sometimes as short-sightedness is really driven by love and a desire to protect those he loves in that moment. His love will blind him to reason, and where Clarke might make a calculation and say “losing this is worth it in the long run,” to Bellamy, driven by emotion, that sacrifice is rarely worth it. These are both problematic qualities, and that’s why Bellamy and Clarke working together are such a formidable pair– they balance each other out. She reins in his more impulsive decisions, and he helps remind her of the emotional cost.
And that is what’s so great about Bellamy Blake: Alpha Male. Because he walks around with guns and strikes action-hero type poses, but really what he wants to do is wrap everyone in blankets and make them a nice cup of cocoa. He fulfills the Alpha Male trope of Aggressive Masculinity while also undercutting it by being the Mom Friend, driven by love and a desire to see his children safe. He will murder people and blow shit up, but he’ll do it all in service to other people. He takes orders from women if they’re qualified and doesn’t question them, and when ALIE!Raven accuses him of being a follower his fear is not that he’s being led by a woman, it’s that he’s listened to the wrong people and now the woman he loves no longer values him. Bellamy and Clarke demolish the Queen and Her Knight Trope not by inverting the dynamic and placing Bellamy in charge (you know, where the man is *supposed* to be) but by placing each other on equal footing. Clarke recognizes the softness in Bellamy and loves him for it, just as he loves her for her steely commitment to logic. What’s more is that neither of them fully embody the emotion/logic archetypes: Clarke can be susceptible to emotionally driven impulses and Bellamy can be cold and calculating, but together, they work like a well oiled machine. Reason and emotion, logic and love, light and dark, male and female. They’re all of those things at once, and they help balance each other’s scales when they’re dipping too far in one direction.
Just as Clarke has taken the Helpless Princess in the Tower trope and smashed it to pieces at her Action Hero feet, Bellamy has taken the Aggressive Alpha Male trope and tenderly set it aside so as to not hurt its feelings.
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