Lexa's legacy

Why is she so important?

After Lexa's death, things started to change a lot for the lgbt+ community.
The fans of the show fought back and started an lgbt+ revolution that's still ongoing today, three years later.
The new fans continue the fight, some of the old fans are still fighting.
And this fandom has achieved a lot.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual and other lgbt+ characters have been killed off or treated badly for a long time.
According to statistics from GLAAD, only 12.8% of television characters were a part of the lgbt+ community in 2017, which is even 5.6% less than in 2016. Most of these characters are gay males and the minority of them are lesbian or bisexual girls.
The enormous numbers of dead characters and characters without a happy ending can be found on Autostraddle.com (link in my bio)
It's shocking to see that the majority (95 out of 383) of the already very small amount of lesbian/ bi characters is dead.
But Lexa's death changed this.
Because the fans started showing their anger.
A pledge called The Lexa Pledge was created and signed by film & TV makers/ writers/... for a better lgbt+ representation.
To show their support, various actors posted pictures of them wearing a "support positive lgbt representation" T-shirt, one of them being Eliza Taylor.

Since 2018, there have been increasingly more lgbt+ characters on television, especially on Netflix, so it seems like film makers have finally understood how important representation is for the lgbt+ community and Lexa is one of the reasons for that for sure because her fandom's fight has gotten worldwide media attention.

There are various websites that have published articles about Lexa, for example on Variety.com (''The 100: Lexa dead after sex with Clarke; why her death matters'') or on BBC.com (''Fans revolt after gay character killed off'') and 3 years on, there are still new articles like for example the text ''Why Lexa's death still matters three years on'' on Seriesfuse.com.

The title of the last article already shows us that the whole story of the fandom is still important even though Lexa has been dead for 3 seasons of the show.

Lexa's story matters.
And here's why.

The fandom has donated $174,200 in Lexa's name in 3 years to the Trevor Project, $46,000 of them have been donated in two weeks after her death on March 3rd. The Trevor Project has been around for 21 years and is an lgbt suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for lgbt+ youth in need.
There have been raised $505.181 in total for different charities and awareness campaigns (in 2017) like the LGBT Fans Deserve Better billboards or the Koh Tao School in Thailand.

LGBT Fans Deserve Better billboards

There has been a Con named ClexaCon every year in either London or Las Vegas ever since 2017. It is the first and largest multi-fandom event for lgbt+ women and allies celebrating positive representation and giving the women a place to feel welcome and supported. Its name is the shipping name of Lexa and Clarke, "Clexa".

In 2019's ConAgeddon (a con for The 100), Clexa fans raised $7160 for the Clexa bed selfies that Eliza Taylor published after 3 years to raise money for Cancer Gets Lost which is where all the proceeds went to.

Over the years, there were many Twitter trends for Lexa and there's one traditionally every year on March 3rd. In 2019, the trend was called "Lexa IS" and became a worldwide trend with more than 25.2k Tweets in 2 hours.

There are also a lot of hashtags that are still being used, the most popular one of them is #lexadeservedbetter which has been shared for countless times. Rin-Says (on Tumblr) hosted a project for this hashtag in 2016 where fans could share photos of little notes saying "Lexa deserved better". In that video there are 179 photos from 153 cities that all have the same message.

This year, I created a second part of that video including 84 pictures from many different countries.
(both videos can be found in the next few chapters)

The fandom is still growing and there are new people who join our fight.
Lexa's death started a whole new chapter of the history of the lgbt+ community but it is not her death that makes her such an extraordinary character, it is her life.
You could say that all of this happened after she died and that this death is the reason for the revolution.
But we never would have started the fight if she hadn't been special when she was still alive.
It's her life that impacted us, her unique story that is different from anything we have seen before.
The love story between Clarke and Lexa.
And Lexa herself. Her backstory and the fact that she's the Commander. Her actions and her character development.

She was a well written character unlike other TV characters and taking her away from us was a big mistake.

She didn't only impact the lgbt+ community but was a fan-favorite in general, straight kids and adults loved her dearly and are deeply upset about her death.

Lexa's fight didn't end when she died.
It didn't start either.
Instead, our voices started getting louder and her story finally got heard. Her fight began when she first appeared on screen as an innocent girl and we started falling in love with that girl that would later change our lives.

_______________________________________
So this chapter is all about her legacy.
I found the statistics and information online and don't guarantee everything's 100% correct. I tried my best to find reliable sources and checked the official websites if possible.
If there are any mistakes or contents you want to be corrected or taken down please dm me.
I do not own the credits for the numbers, everything was counted carefully by specific people and can be found online, I didn't include all of the numbers since they have spent hours calculating everything.
Thanks for reading and I hope you like it.