10 years since Lexa was killed off, a small retrospective
I had to write this today. Clexa and Lexa were such a big part of my life ten years ago and for some time afterwards that, yeah....this post was always inevitable. Today is March 3rd, 2026, and it's officially been 10 years since Lexa was killed off in The 100.
The state of things in 2016
Younger sapphics don't understand how groundbreaking Clexa felt. We had no mainstream rep aside from like, Sense8 and Orange is the New Black, plus side characters in shows like Glee. Carmilla was a big fucking deal and, listen, I fucking love Carmilla and will forever treasure it, but it was a youtube series sponsored by Kotex that started with no budget whatsoever. This was the wlw media landscape at the time. Then came The 100.
The first season of The 100 was frankly meh and had very little hints of gay, but then came season 2. Not only was season 2 actually good, and not just CW good but like actually one of the best seasons of television that year good, but it introduced Lexa, the badass lesbian Commander of a whole civilization. We already loved her, but then, then, and this is where everybody collectively went ''HOLY FUCK'' - Lexa kisses and officially becomes a love interest for the protagonist of the show, Clarke.
Nobody had seriously been expecting that.
So, Clarke was now the bisexual protagonist of a network show, one that was receiving wide acclaim for its second season at that, and in a same sex romance. What's more, unlike the case with Korra, this romance would actually be explored on screen and not just hinted at at the end of the series. The only other show doing that at the time with a protagonist was Orange is the New Black, but Piper and Alex's relationship was presented as toxic and messy from the outset. Expectations for season three of The 100 were sky high, Clarke and Lexa felt like a chance for a central wlw ship on a big mainstream show to have a grand romance and be endgame against all odds.
Didn't happen, obviously.
I remember vividly how that night went down for me. I paused the episode right after Clarke and Lexa finally had sex together and ran to the nearby grocery store before it closed, incredibly giddy and smiling the entire time. My body was vibrating from the sheer euphoria as I made my way down the street. I made sure not to check any social media because I didn't want to be spoiled what would happen the rest of the episode. That was clearly the best decision, because for that short trip to the grocery store, I truly believed that Clarke and Lexa were going to make it. That they were going to be the first big wlw ship that go to be endgame in a mainstream show and have their romance play out completely on screen.
I came back home, clicked play on the rest of the episode, and then my world came crashing down. It felt that way online too. Heart break, confusion, betrayal, frustration, rage - that's what the show and ship tags on Tumblr were full of. People couldn't believe it. We had been foolish enough to think that Jason Rothenberg and co were sincere in their courtship of wlw fans, that they weren't leading us on for ratings and clout. Not only did it turn out to be the case that Lexa and Clexa were being used to generate more hype for the show, but she was killed off in frankly one of the most bullshit and insulting ways possible, being shot by her father figure literally only a few minutes after the Clexa sex scene (For what it's worth, the actual writer of the episode has apologized for it several times and even went to Clexacon. Javi is a cool guy).
I felt numb. Lexa being killed off legitimately contributed to my depression that year. The way people talked about her was as if we had lost a loved one, and it fucking felt that way man. So many of us related to her, saw ourselves in her. We felt like society was finally paying attention to and valuing our stories, our humanity. I had never, ever seen that amount of heart break in a fandom and thankfully I haven't seen anything like that again since. Other characters that were important representation to marginalized groups had been killed before, obviously, that same year also saw the brutal death of Glenn on The Walking Dead and The 100 itself managed to piss off even more people with the way it killed off Lincoln only a few episodes later, but Lexa's death truly felt like a tragedy in wlw fandoms.
It's incredibly important to note that Lexa was, at that point, just the latest in a long, long history of wlw characters that had been killed off. It used to be mandatory by government censorship to kill off queer characters, but even after those laws were lifted, homophobia made it so that queer characters kept getting killed off and ''Bury Your Gays'' continued well into the 21st century. That year alone, in 2016, a good number of other wlw characters were killed off as well, and wlw viewers had had it. We were fucking done with that bullshit.
The outcry was so big that companies learned not to queer bait to that scale again. I legitimately don't remember how many times some variation of ''LGBTFansDeserveBetter'' trended on social media, and these campaigns lasted for months. This shit was written about on many big mainstream media outlets, entire billboards were taken out in places like New York and LA, it inspired an endless amount of academic papers and even a documentary. Hell, an entire convention dedicated to wlw rep was formed and ran for a few years until COVID.
There was so much going on in the activism side. People from all walks of life - younger and older, from every corner of the world - came together to make it known they had had it with the queerbaiting and being used for ratings boosts without meaningful representation. On the smaller fandom side, people also channeled their defiance into creative outlets, making so many fanfics and fan art and edits that Clexa would go on to hold the record for most written about wlw ship on ao3 in a given year until CaitVi came along and broke it nine years later.
It really was a movement y'all.
It's 2026 now and a lot of people seem to have forgotten about or don't even know who Lexa and Clexa are, to which I say....good, honestly.
I'm glad that the media landscape is now one where wlw fans don't have to resort to a show where the lesbian was killed off for their rep. I'm glad that young people don't have to go digging through media from decades ago for scraps, that there is newer stuff for them that doesn't end in heart break and actually centers our stories. I'm glad that we're at a point where there's wlw rep in multiple different genres, in tv shows as big as Arcane, The Last of Us, Hazbin Hotel, Pluribus, and Bridgerton.
I'm glad that we have ships like CaitVi, where not only is one of the protagonists a wlw, but it's a series where almost everybody dies by the end except the wlw and the literal last scene is of them snuggling by a fire together. I like to think that our advocacy in the Clexa fandom contributed to that happy ending for CaitVi. The show was already in production in 2016, so the creators and Riot definitely saw what went down. In a way, CaitVi turned out to be what many of us in the Clexa fandom were hoping Clexa would be. I legitimately felt a sense of ''Wow, this is really happening, after all these years'' when Arcane ended and our wlw got a happy ending together.
The downside is that now it feels like there's much less....unity, to be honest, in wlw fandoms. There's obviously the fact that wlw are more splintered now in different fandoms, which is obviously a good thing. I think this is also partly because Tumblr is no longer the home of fandoms and the other big apps just promote endless discourse/watching video edits, but either way, the absence of this wider wlw community is sorely felt. I don't know if that kind of thing will ever happen again because that environment was created in part through sheer trauma and people bonding over what little sliver of representation we did have, but I still miss it. I really miss the heyday of wlw fandoms on Tumblr.
From a personal standpoint, I met people I still talk to every day that I never would have come in contact with otherwise. I will forever be grateful to the Clexa fandom for that alone.
Reshop, Heda. You helped pave the way for many after you.
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