I haven’t watched an episode in years out of annoyance, out of laziness, out of many things. But I always always ALWAYS thought I would watch it again someday. I followed along on tumblr and AO3 because of Bellarke. Like the anon, @ponyregrets‘s writing always pulled me back even when I wasn’t watching.
I think some part of me was holding out hope that JRoth would get his shit together and allow the best part of the show actually be the best part of the show, ie Bellamy and Clarke. That’s why I continued to read fanfic and follow the plot from afar.
I’m mad and I’m sad, and I know for sure now that I will not ever watch the rest of this show. That being said. I also want to say that Bellarke will always have a place in my heart. The fandom has written such wonderful, beautiful stories about them and the rest of the delinquents that I have hope that there will be better stories and better shows written by people who give a damn about their characters someday. And I look forward to that time and that content.
I... am sort of in shock maybe? I just. I can't believe it. They actually killed off Bellamy Blake. What kind of writing?? I'm sorry, I know you don't watch the show anymore. It's just that my love and appreciation for Bellarke and the fandom grew in part thanks to your wonderful stories and I just don't know who else to talk about this. They really killed off another POC. A fellow Filipino one at that, which is honestly already so rare in mainstream. I didn't think it would hurt this much.
I’m so, so sorry, anon.
It just sucks, right? It’s a shitty, shitty thing that the show did, presumably because the showrunner at some point decided that hurting his audience was the way to make “meaningful” TV, and because he seems to be made up of roughly 90% spite, but not in the fun way.
There are things fans can do in these situations, writing fix-it fics or deciding that the show ended for them at another point or passionately declaring that canon isn’t canon, and those are all good and I endorse them as coping mechanisms, but none of them are a replacement for what we really want, which is for the shitty thing not to have happened in the first place. We don’t want to have to come up with a way to deal with shit we wouldn’t even be experiencing if Jason wasn’t a fucking hack who was apparently the only person in the world to see the last season of Game of Thrones and think, yeah, that’s the way to do it.
The best bright side I have for you is that the show is long past its days of critical acclaim. Whatever Jason is trying to do with the last season has not won him back the love and adoration of the mainstream media, which seems to be the fanbase he actually wants, instead of the one he has, which he hates. Bellamy’s story is over, and the ending was terrible (as were many parts before the ending), but now fandom can continue to write better stories for him, while Jason will never write a better story because, and I cannot stress this enough, he’s a fucking hack. And with the show over, everyone on the cast is free of him and all of us can get back to our lives where we never think about him again. Whether or not this is a comfort, I don’t know. I’m only about 75% spite, so it helps me some, but probably not as much as it could.
I’m so sorry for your hurting, anon, and I hope that you can take away something better from your experience in fandom than what the show gave you. You deserve that <3