In early August, prompted by leaked audition tapes for new season 3 characters, an ‘insider’ appeared on a popular lesbian forum with a thread dedicated to The 100, and began to interact with the fans. They identified themselves as “Your Friendly Neighborhood Lurker” and as someone who works on the show. They also identified as straight, despite the forum being a safe space for lesbian individuals to engage with one another.
“Your Friendly Neighborhood Lurker” announced that they were there for rumor control and to answer questions about canon. They also stated that they had a fondness for Clexa. They enjoyed engaging with the community on the lesbian forum and took pleasure in reading what the fans had to say about everything. While interacting with fans, they even tried to come up with ‘non-spoilery’ ways of responding to questions about the plotline.
Aug 4 2015, 02:37 AM
Sorry, just catching up (busy day at the office…)
Full disclosure: What we speculated last season when episode 209 aired has evolved slightly in the discussions for this season. It’s more like 2-3 years.
–YFNL
Aug 4 2015, 02:49 AM
I’m not Jason (yes, I know, no way to prove that.) He’s far too busy now that production has started to read forums. That’s why his tweeting has dropped off (though his asst sometimes retweets articles on his behalf).
– YFNL (Your Friendly Neighborhood Lurker) :spy:
P.S. I’m here because I enjoy reading what you all have to say. Obviously, you don’t have to censor any criticism on my account (and yes, most of you will look at me askance as a fake because…well, I would.)
Aug 4 2015, 02:51 AM
She was in L.A. today.
She looks lovely in glasses, btw.
– YFNL :spy:
Aug 4 2015, 02:55 AM
Hmmm… :hmmm:
Let me get back to you. Gotta figure out the most non-spoiler way to answer this and yet satisfy.
– YFNL :spy:
Aug 4 2015, 03:05 AM
Total oversight. No one thought to take a photo until she was gone!
(I said it was a busy day.)
Last post today. Don’t want anyone here asking questions… and it’s cool if you are skeptical. You should be. Always.
– YFNL :spy:
Aug 4 2015, 03:08 AM
(okay really, last one)
I only jumped in around page 220 of this thread. Tracking down leaks. Stayed because y’all are funny.
As far as I know, I’m the only one currently checking in here…but, if someone else does and sees my posts… let’s just say, I’m dipping in a toe and not a whole foot so as to keep my cover. Also, I in no way intend to spoil anything for anyone. I’m here for rumor control and questions about canon.
Keep on, keepin’ on, ladies…
– YFNL :spy:
One of the major points “YFNL” made, was to reassure people about something that had been posted on social media.
Alycia Debnam-Carey had stopped by The 100 office and signed a poster to Jason with the following:
“Thank you for this opportunity. Jus Drein Jus Daun.”
Many fans took this as a goodbye note to Jason, suggesting that Lexa would be dying this season.
YFNL, in their capacity as “Rumor Control,” discredited that theory, stating that there was no goodbye implied and that Alycia was simply thanking Jason.
Of course, by the time Shawna Benson stopped by the board to reassure fans and “help them sleep better at night,” she was already aware of Lexa’s death. In fact, even media members were aware of Lexa’s death at that point. Eric Goldman, of IGN, joked that Kim Shumway had accidentally spoiled Lexa’s death for him at Comic-Con, weeks before Shawna visited the thread.
Aug 4 2015, 02:43 PM
Not an official poster. I believe Jason bought it on Etsy. ADC signed it for him because he asked. No “goodbye” implied by thanking the show creator for casting her in a great role.
– YFNL
Aug 4 2015, 03:28 PM
I already said to keep an eye on TCAs.
Maybe we’ll finally get an episode total announced…
But yes, that too could be guessed by anyone. It’s logical to announce that kind of thing at the TCAs.
The problems with “verifying” who I am are two-fold:
1. If I tell you something that would clearly identify me as being part of the show, I’d blow my cover with my coworkers. 2. You will continue to consider me a fake anyway.
So, I’ll live with #2 rather than run the risk of #1. I’ll pop in from time to time when I see things are going south and you need a little sanity. Maybe I’m legit, maybe I’m not. Either way, I intend to make you sleep better at night as you wait for the show to come back. Now I’m going away for awhile, because clearly I’ve posted too much in the last 48 hours.
– YFNL
P.S. Like pretty much everyone else, I am ship-agnostic. But I have a fondness for Clexa that cannot be denied. And I’m straight, since someone asked my orientation. I’m here because you guys amuse me. And this is completely unsanctioned, hence why I can’t prove anything.
Fans felt more reassured after YFNL’s posts and presence in the forum; the confidence in Lexa’s survival rose even more when “YFNL” revealed herself to be Shawna Benson, a staff writer on The 100. She confirmed this on her twitter account.
Aug 4 2015, 07:38 PM
You guys have clearly had too many issues with this in the past, so I’ll just let it go.
Although Shawna stated that she would not be back following the August posts, a Merry Christmas message to the same lesbian forum showed differently. Shawna referenced a series of inside jokes and names from the thread, demonstrating that she had been hanging around the forum and reading posts, even possibly engaging with the community on an anonymous basis. According to the forum, for Shawna to understand the inside jokes she was making on her twitter account, she would have had to be on the thread often.
Dec 25 2015, 06:29 AM
Thank you for a great year. Love you all and sorry about all the drama.
Merry Christmas!
Regards, YFNL :spy:
(Yes, its really me. Check Twitter for validation)
This situation as a whole raises a number of questions about proper social media engagement between fans and creators. Was it wrong for fans to feel comforted when a writer on the show specifically seeks out their fan spaces and their LGBT+ spaces to reassure them about their favorite characters and relationships on the show? Should the creators really feel blindsided by the fan response when they spent time during the hiatus on lesbian-specific forums and read hundreds of posts that discussed the fans’ fears of Lexa’s death? Is lying to fans just to preserve the “shock twist” in the show really the right way to go about telling stories? Let’s discuss.
TLDR; shawna benson invaded our safe space to reassure us of Lexa’s survival when she’d been dead for months
forever done with clever writers saying ‘hey, let’s have the black guy be racist’
mack on agents of shield, pike on the 100, it’s allegorical racism in a world where normal racism doesn’t really apply somehow, so the only visible racism is performed by black men
and the white guys look super enlightened by comparison bc they’re not allegorical racists
anyways why do ppl like this show bc one of the showrunners? last week tweeted that the canon bi girl is going to end up, not with her tragic dead lesbian gf, but the angry white boy who has murdered hundreds of people IN THE LAST FIVE EPISODES
I don’t think Mack was portrayed as racist, or even short sighted or irrational. He was scared and wanted Daisy contained. He didn’t advocate killing her. Further, he is now one of the inhumans greatest supporters.
By your measure, you could call Joyce Summers racist for not immediately accepting Buffy as the slayer, Elena for not accepting Damon and Stefan…Showing characters reacting badly to things they don’t understand is realistic and a sign of a well rounded character.
Now, Pike has taken a very Trump like stance on the grounders and is playing on people’s fears. I can see the frustration here.
mack had a preexisting prejudice against aliens – which he claimed as a rational response to aliens like loki, but when it turned from ‘the worst behaved aliens’ to ‘all aliens by proxy’ that stops being true – and daisy got caught up in it, but he eventually overcame it.
but if you swap hunter for mack and asians for aliens, it’s clearly just racism. mack //was racist against aliens// but then he met a nice one and got over his prejudice. it’s not even subtle.
for comparison, joyce was being allegorically homophobic, like bobby’s mom in x2, all ‘have you tried …not being a mutant?’ the difference between joyce and mack is that mack hated what daisy was, where joyce hated what buffy did.
pike hates grounders, mack hates aliens. mack doesn’t have to want to kill aliens to be racist against them. though jemma did want to! aaaaaall of macks arc could have been on jemma, except they needed to give those traits to someone who can embody them without making the white audience feel bad, so her xenophobia arc was like two episodes where macks was a season and a half.
(Note that Bob Morley, the actor who plays Bellamy, is half Filipino, so as to not derail this convo.)
But yes! This is so annoying. I was putting it down as xenophobia, but allegorical racism, that’s it. It’s like that one weird ass book a while back that tried to portray some white girl as the victim in a “flipped” society, where apparently to make a commentary on race, the persecuted people had to be white and the bad guys Black. I assume they’re trying to make racists see what it’s like by taking away typical dynamics, but they just end up with extremely unsympathetic Black characters, so…? How would that be convincing racists? That’s how they see the world anyway. And it’s usually with white characters there to call them out, too, so it’s just bad all around.
forever done with clever writers saying ‘hey, let’s have the black guy be racist’
mack on agents of shield, pike on the 100, it’s allegorical racism in a world where normal racism doesn’t really apply somehow, so the only visible racism is performed by black men
and the white guys look super enlightened by comparison bc they’re not allegorical racists
anyways why do ppl like this show bc one of the showrunners? last week tweeted that the canon bi girl is going to end up, not with her tragic dead lesbian gf, but the angry white boy who has murdered hundreds of people IN THE LAST FIVE EPISODES
I don’t think Mack was portrayed as racist, or even short sighted or irrational. He was scared and wanted Daisy contained. He didn’t advocate killing her. Further, he is now one of the inhumans greatest supporters.
By your measure, you could call Joyce Summers racist for not immediately accepting Buffy as the slayer, Elena for not accepting Damon and Stefan…Showing characters reacting badly to things they don’t understand is realistic and a sign of a well rounded character.
Now, Pike has taken a very Trump like stance on the grounders and is playing on people’s fears. I can see the frustration here.
mack had a preexisting prejudice against aliens – which he claimed as a rational response to aliens like loki, but when it turned from ‘the worst behaved aliens’ to ‘all aliens by proxy’ that stops being true – and daisy got caught up in it, but he eventually overcame it.
but if you swap hunter for mack and asians for aliens, it’s clearly just racism. mack //was racist against aliens// but then he met a nice one and got over his prejudice. it’s not even subtle.
for comparison, joyce was being allegorically homophobic, like bobby’s mom in x2, all ‘have you tried …not being a mutant?’ the difference between joyce and mack is that mack hated what daisy was, where joyce hated what buffy did.
pike hates grounders, mack hates aliens. mack doesn’t have to want to kill aliens to be racist against them. though jemma did want to! aaaaaall of macks arc could have been on jemma, except they needed to give those traits to someone who can embody them without making the white audience feel bad, so her xenophobia arc was like two episodes where macks was a season and a half.
(Note that Bob Morley, the actor who plays Bellamy, is half Filipino, so as to not derail this convo.)
But yes! This is so annoying. I was putting it down as xenophobia, but allegorical racism, that’s it. It’s like that one weird ass book a while back that tried to portray some white girl as the victim in a “flipped” society, where apparently to make a commentary on race, the persecuted people had to be white and the bad guys Black. I assume they’re trying to make racists see what it’s like by taking away typical dynamics, but they just end up with extremely unsympathetic Black characters, so…? How would that be convincing racists? That’s how they see the world anyway. And it’s usually with white characters there to call them out, too, so it’s just bad all around.
i absolutely did, it absolutely was, we discussed it, and yet, in spite of all of our best intentions and conversations, we were naive enough – or arrogant enough – to believe that the lgb representation in our show, and out ability as witers would superate/redeem our use of the trope. we were wrong.
holy fuck they genuinely thought they were so fantastic at their jobs that we wouldn’t mind the lesbian death trope in the show…. bye
I just…I keep thinking I’m going to step away from this because they’re not worth it, but. How…? Which part of it was going to save them?
But anyway, I want to know how they write this upcoming narrative where they’ve been copying Pocahontas/Avatar/FernGully/etc (extra marks again for having a white girl play the leader of the native population) except instead of having the sympathetic colonizer understand the native viewpoint they kill off the native and have the colonizer take over. Their ability as writers should blow that out of the water.
i absolutely did, it absolutely was, we discussed it, and yet, in spite of all of our best intentions and conversations, we were naive enough – or arrogant enough – to believe that the lgb representation in our show, and out ability as witers would superate/redeem our use of the trope. we were wrong.
holy fuck they genuinely thought they were so fantastic at their jobs that we wouldn’t mind the lesbian death trope in the show…. bye
I just…I keep thinking I’m going to step away from this because they’re not worth it, but. How…? Which part of it was going to save them?
But anyway, I want to know how they write this upcoming narrative where they’ve been copying Pocahontas/Avatar/FernGully/etc (extra marks again for having a white girl play the leader of the native population) except instead of having the sympathetic colonizer understand the native viewpoint they kill off the native and have the colonizer take over. Their ability as writers should blow that out of the water.
Posted on
I’m sad. And I didn’t even want to get into it for so long, and I KNEW the problems they’d had with racism and sexism. I don’t know why I let down my guard, I thought they’d learned something and improved, I was just so desperate for something. And now we’re at this point. I’m never watching again, it was a terrible show outside the Clexa and Grounder part and it seems like they’re gearing up for Clarke to be the master benevolent colonialist, at least better than the evil Arkadia colonialists. Whatever.
But…people are so sad. I was into this for like a month. How’s the f/f community going to get past this? When a new show they can’t trust? When? I can go and watch some good happy-ending movies but we have like, what, three? After that, it’s still coming back to this. And this will remain with us for a long, long time.
Posted on
I’m sad. And I didn’t even want to get into it for so long, and I KNEW the problems they’d had with racism and sexism. I don’t know why I let down my guard, I thought they’d learned something and improved, I was just so desperate for something. And now we’re at this point. I’m never watching again, it was a terrible show outside the Clexa and Grounder part and it seems like they’re gearing up for Clarke to be the master benevolent colonialist, at least better than the evil Arkadia colonialists. Whatever.
But…people are so sad. I was into this for like a month. How’s the f/f community going to get past this? When a new show they can’t trust? When? I can go and watch some good happy-ending movies but we have like, what, three? After that, it’s still coming back to this. And this will remain with us for a long, long time.
like literally if lexa had even just like fucking died on the battlefield or something that would have been different
we would have been upset that we lost yet another lesbian character but you know what like Fuckign hell it would have been in her character and it would have been in the world and we would be like okay we still have Clarke at least she won’t die
But no
This is literally the worst fucking way you could have done this you just recreated by fucking rote the exact mechanics of the scene that solidified the dead lesbian trope and made an entire generation of queer girls forever nervous about any media that does so much as acknowledge us
But no
you had to kill her on the heels of a love scene you had to kill her with a lazy stray bullet meant for her lover you had to kill her in a way that literally says “this love got you killed” and i cant believe for a while there i really thought I could trust a show but they will never truly get where we are coming from when we say that you can’t operate like you’re writing in a vacuum
like literally if lexa had even just like fucking died on the battlefield or something that would have been different
we would have been upset that we lost yet another lesbian character but you know what like Fuckign hell it would have been in her character and it would have been in the world and we would be like okay we still have Clarke at least she won’t die
But no
This is literally the worst fucking way you could have done this you just recreated by fucking rote the exact mechanics of the scene that solidified the dead lesbian trope and made an entire generation of queer girls forever nervous about any media that does so much as acknowledge us
But no
you had to kill her on the heels of a love scene you had to kill her with a lazy stray bullet meant for her lover you had to kill her in a way that literally says “this love got you killed” and i cant believe for a while there i really thought I could trust a show but they will never truly get where we are coming from when we say that you can’t operate like you’re writing in a vacuum
