everytime i think about the grounders i get so fucking angry, i feel like its very unfair how the sky people were treated in s3A. like they took down the grounders's worst enemy on their own after the grounders broke the alliance and abandon them, if u noticed sky people basically did everything, grounders did nothing. after that u learn that they've been keeping them from going to MT weather to get supplies (UNFAIR) and starving in arkadia (WTF?!?) wish i could understand them but i got nothing
You know what? I don’t feel that way about grounders. That isn’t the grounders doing that to them. It’s the leader of the grounders. She’s the one who makes the rules and they are her subjects and demands that they do what she says.
And not all grounders thought how they treated the sky people was okay. In fact, we’ve got a list of them who said it was wrong. Lincoln, Niylah, Nyko, Echo, even Indra, who was part of the leadership. Even freaking Nia was willing to to give them respect (as far as we can tell) until Clarke chose her side and stood with L. We still don’t really know where their enmity came from. Why Azgeda hated L or was it The Heda or was it Trikru?
Not saying there wasn’t still xenophobia directed at the sky people, because there was. But it’s not like the grounders decided on this path and went forward. Their HEDA was the one who put these limitations on them and the sky people agreed for a treaty, so they wouldn’t be killed out right.
I get pissed when people say the sky people were colonizers, because it’s not true. They’re more closely refugees. Their ship and home destroyed. Coming back to the land they came from. The earth is just as much the skypeople’s as it is the grounders. And they are refugees that are being contained by a huge power who doesn’t want them to be self sustaining
Or at least it’s not true that every sky person is a colonizer. Pike was no doubt a xenophobe who was intent on taking land from the grounders, but we forget that Farm Station was also massacred and chased all over the east coast. They had to become “grounder killers” or be killed. This decisions to treat Farm Station as automatic enemies, made them automatic enemies and caused them to react to threat of constant death, and lead to the xenophobia that caused them to be unable to differentiate between Azgeda and Trikru.
It just isn’t this simple story of a huge might coming in from nowhere to take land and lives of the innocents just going about their business on their own lands. Those “innocents” have been killing sky crew ever since they landed. It was actually the Tri Kru warriors who started killing the kids at the dropship, so even though they were innocent of Mount Weather, they weren’t actually “innocents.” Talk about gray morality.
The first act of war leads to the next, and the next, and then next and next and next and it doesn’t stop until total mutual destruction. Happened at the dropship, happened at Mount Weather. Happened with Arkadia/Polis. HAPPENS IN THE FANDOM. It’s all about destroying and taking down the enemy. Like. I’m not your enemy. Just because we come from different places and have different ideas doesn’t mean we can’t understand each other.
This whole story is much more about escalation, tribalism, xenophobia and warmongering. It’s not “the sky people are good and the grounders are bad.” Nor is it “the grounders are bad and the sky people are good.”
At many points, if people just step back from feeling the need to destroy “The Other” in order to protect “Their People,” then we could actually get everybody to work together.
But Us vs Them mentality seems to be very hard to stop.
