Honestly - it’s 2.11 - Coup de Grace. Her first one - Show me a woman who spits on her enemy from inside a cage after being bled/used as a human filter for bad blood for weeks, and I’m totally cheering her on.
Then - she actually listened to Bellamy. Even if she didn’t totally believe him (and why should she have?) she still took the risk/chance that he was worth helping and she told him to keep his head down/be quiet. Or maybe it was just her human sympathy reasserting itself.
And when the MW techs came for her, he distracted them. It saved her - and got him out of the cage. She could appreciate both, I think. Once she saw he really was an inside man sent to get them out, she returned the favor and helped him murder a man.
She’s smart, she evaluates new evidence, she thinks on her feet (or from inside a cage), even when she’s weak and tired, doesn’t wait for orders to evaluate new conditions or make new friends, and has no squemish hesitation to do what’s necessary ... (or later take very firm control of that room of desperate grounders. And she didn’t forget to say ‘Thank you’ either. Though that is a later episode.)
How do you get from We May Have to Throw Someone Overboard to What Are We Going to Be Now
I have so many time jump headcanons, I wouldn’t even know where to start. My favorite tag when I reblog is spacekru the series, we were robbed. Because we were. We got 2 eps of the bunker! Yeah, Octagon was crazy, we get it. Kane couldn’t control her, maybe Bellamy would have been able to help but he was in a Hippie Commune in Space!
Anyway, Echo said in 5.01 that it took three years for Bellamy to forgive her. And in 5.06 he tells Octavia “Not a lot to do in space for 6 years, you pick up a few things.” So, he may not have forgiven her yet, but they were training together.
At some point, he had to have been down on himself, pissed off at everyone because he left O behind, because Clarke was dead and it was his fault, that no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t save everybody. He’s brooding, he’s sulking, he’s yelling at people. It all comes to a head the day he snaps at Harper, sweet, unsuspecting Harper. He storms away, and Murphy tells Echo that since Bellamy already doesn’t like her, it won’t matter how he treats her, so now it’s her job to keep him in line. “He’s your responsibility now.” So she starts going extra hard at him during fighting sessions, trying to work the agression out of him.
It takes a while, but he is finally able to beat her and in the process she is able to get him to calm down a little. “Why are you being so hard on me?” he asks he one day. “We need you up here, and you are one outburst away from Monty throwing you out the airlock. So calm down and stop taking it out on us.”
So, he calms down, and one day he finally beats her, gets her on the floor and then well one thing leads to another....
It is obvious in the way she is able to calm him down when they get back to the ground that this is the dynamic they had in space. He was trying to keep everyone together, but no one was trying to keep him together, and then she stepped in to that role. She didn’t know him as “Mr. Whatever the Hell we Want” like Harper, Monty and Murphy. Or “Mr. I should have killed you when I had the chance” like Raven. She didn’t see him change from that cocky ass-hole facade he put up those first few weeks on the ground to the person he became on the ground. The person she met in a cage wasn’t that guy.
There he is, lowkey, freaking out and she is calming him down. Telling him, I am going to be fine.
When she was three Echo’s mother left her with her father who promptly denied that she was his child. However, she was at the right age to pick up languages quickly and living at a trading post helped immensely.
That’s right, Niylah and Echo are half-sisters, maybe. Because The 100 is the land of unlikely coincidences and shenanigans but also never gives clear answers about anything.
Anyhow, little unwanted Echo became a polyglot, and when Azgeda showed up for their tax payment / protection money the tiny translator was sold. Her language skills are why she’s called Echo. That’s why she has a big, old-looking, swirly tattoo on her leg (slave mark from childhood) but her Azgeda tattoo is crisp (it’s newer and she had to earn it). That’s why getting labeled non-kru was such a major blow. Her worst fears are rejection and abandonment.
If anyone made playlists for echo week that didn’t get a spotify link added to them please lmk! i’ve been making the playlists on spotify and tried to catch everyone but i may have missed some people! i have two on the queue for tomorrow but just lmk!
Echo Week: Day 3: Favorite Relationship. Becho. Not just my favorite relationship for Echo, but my favorite of the show. Mutual respect. Love that’s actually love instead of a control freak taking punitive action. Yes, it developed off-screen and that’s a bummer, but for where they are now it’s just amazing. They listen to each other. They make plans together. They recognize each other’s strengths, weaknesses, and needs and work within those parameters.
This graphic: Missing Ring moment: Loving Bellamy Blake meant celebrating a new set of holidays. Valentine’s Day was a foreign concept to Echo. A day set aside to declare the identities of people who made you weak, the people you might feel more loyalty to than the royal family, would have been the cause of executions and assassinations in Azgeda. On the Ring it’s a day to get cheesy or honest or romantic or sexy or sisterly depending on the relationship. Inspired by Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning (a complex woman disowned by her family who then ran off with a man they didn’t understand), she and Bellamy have written books of poetry for each other.
Unwritten books, 7/? Echo week. AU day. Matchmaker/Modern fake dating AU.
Emori opened the email, laughed, and called across the office, “Are you out of your mind?”
“Maybe,” Echo called back from her office. “But if you don’t want your next paycheck to bounce we need to bring in some money. Selling a few books about the dating misadventures of these three impossible to match men might be the answer.”
“All we need to do is find the right women for them and everything will be fine.”
Echo sighed and came to the doorway of her office as she considered her three problem bachelors. Bellamy burnt through women like a hot knife through butter. Monty was sweet but shy and couldn’t hold up his end of a conversation according to the women who’d been out with him. John was… well, John was John. “Sexy felons make great stories, but the reality is a little hard to live with. We can use the books as a pre-screening tool. And income.”
Harper stopped in between the two of them and took a slow sip from her coffee cup.
“Just say it,” Echo ordered. Aware of the sharpness of her tone she added, “Please.”
“I’d go out with Monty.”
“Good. Do it.”
Emori stood up. “Really? We’re allowed to date clients now?”
“Regular, matchable clients, no. If it’s one of these three rolling disasters, yes.”
“Dibs on John.”
“He’s yours.”
Emori grinned at her. “That means you get Bellamy.”
“No.”
“Yes,” Emori and Harper exclaimed in unison.
Maybe it was worth a shot. After four dates it was considered a successful pairing and the men each owed the agency a thousand dollars. All she had to do was figure out if it was great sex or no sex that would keep Bellamy on the hook.
My favorite Echo fight scene is all of them, so precanon thoughts it is.
We are all pretty free to construct whatever we like about Echo’s backstory from the very few fixed points in canon that we have.
Echo is a spy. And a talented warrior. And eventually a direct advsior to the king.
She told Bellamy that he wasn’t the only one to lose someone he loved to war.
She and Roan had never met, though they had heard of each other.
She wants to save her people.
And that.... is it. So far. (Maybe we will learn more in s6?)
From those two things, plus her general extreme comptence, and her later assurance that she speaks with the monarch’s voice, and her pretty blunt attitude in speaking to her monarch, added to general info from all the seasons, what follows is my latest Echo backstory headcanon...
Azgeda and the coaltion had been at war for some time before the Commander forged ther peace, and the villages along the frontier bore the brunt of the fighting, as fronteir villages always do.
In that war, then, Echo’s home village was attacked when she was a child, and she was orphaned then.
Or perhaps her village was in the southern portion of Azgeda, and one of the early reaper raids destroyed her village. That raid may even have been the event that prompted renewed hositlities between Azgeda and Trikru/Polis as Nia blamed the coaltion and the commander for those losses. And for all those that followed. Until the day she sent the Commander the head of her lover in a box, a clear (if possibly misunderstood) message to stop the killing.
Either way, Echo lost her family, lost the people she loved to war.
As an orphan she was taken in by the queen’s service. Azgeda was larger than all the rest combined. One reason? They didn’t leave their children to starve alone.
Burning with a desire to strike back at the Trikru/Coalition who killed her village/parents - directly or by Reaper proxy - Echo excelled at all her training in the Queen’s city, drawing the attention of her teachers and mentors. Directed to the Queen’s service, her intellect and abilties, her quiet watchfullness, her desire for revenge, led her to be selected for training as a spy. So she never recived her scars when she came of age. She recieved Trikru tatoos instead. And in time she was sent to discover what she could of their enemies.
She lived for years among them, learning of MW and their attacks, open and covert. Learned of the Reapers and the reaping. Learned of the tensions among the clans. Learned how little they trusted each other. How much they disliked the tributes the Commander demanded to support the war against Azgeda, even as the toll of the reaping from Mount Weather grew. Learned how much they hated the natblida hunters.
Echo heard the rumors of the natblida who fled to create a hidden sanctuary out on the sea. She found their landing on the shore, watched as pilgrims lit the green flames, as her acolytes slipped ashore and back to sea again. She never dared make the journey herself. It was one thing to hide among regular folk. Another entirely to hide from one called to ascend who refused.
When the peace came, Echo stayed on among the people of the coalition. Still reporting, now on the fractious and angry clans as they recoiled still further from ever bolder and more numerous reapers, the more devasting harvest of the reapings, the lands closest to MW empty now as the villages that had once grown into the shadow of the mountains lay empty and the land fallow.
She rose in high in the servce of Queen Nia in those years, her reports finding favor with the queen’s advisors and then the queen herself as the intelligence proved useful again and again as Nia quietly made new alliances and new friends.
Echo was making her way west again, toward the mountian, to investigate the rumors of new people from the sky, burning the villages of the Trikru and slaying whole armies sent in retaliation, when the reapers found her.
