The 100

Wells, the son of the chancellor, is another point-of-view character in the series. He is traditionally handsome, and due to his privileged position on the colony and his guard officer’s training, he emerges as an authoritative figure amidst the crisis on Earth. When he and Clarke still lived on the colony, they were romantically involved and often helped each other to deal with life’s stresses. For Wells, this stress stemmed from his role in enforcing the Gaia Doctrine, which he did not completely agree with. As an emerging leader on the colony, Wells should be eager to do his part to help people survive, but all he can see is that the system is broken and the unfair concentration of power has led the council to make immoral decisions. 

On Earth, Wells’s privileged position also causes him problems because the other kids see him as an embodiment of everything that was wrong with the council’s leadership. As a result, they refuse to allow Wells to take up a position of authority, ignoring his objective leadership skills and practical knowledge. For these reasons, Wells’s complicated relationship with authority and power leads to internal and external conflict rather than helping to resolve situations.

Wells’s issues with The Power Inherent in Privilege also complicates his initial portrayal as a romantic hero. From the moment Wells realizes the truth of what Clarke’s parents are being forced to do, he makes poor decisions that have dire consequences. He does not want to betray Clarke’s trust by telling his father, but he also cannot bear to see Clarke in so much emotional pain. Ultimately, his love for her and desire to help her make him confess the truth to his father. Because this results in the execution of Clarke’s parents and Clarke’s arrest, Wells’s feelings only make things worse.

In this same vein, his decision to expedite the failure of the airlock in order to save Clarke’s life shows that he is willing to sacrifice hundreds of people to save the one person he does not want to live without. Any romantic connotations to this decision are irreparably tainted by the fact that his actions are tantamount to murder, given that he puts the people of Walden in imminent danger of running out of oxygen. Wells makes a similarly selfish choice when he prevents Clarke from rescuing her friend in the fire. In this moment, he is unwilling to let her make her own decisions and even goes so far as to hinder her efforts to help others, out of fear that her altruistic urges will bring her to harm. As a result, Clarke’s friend burns to death. Thus, the narrative makes it clear that Wells’s love for Clarke borders on obsession. His behavior demonstrates the harsh reality that even positive emotions, when pursued to excess, can bring about negative outcomes.

Bellamy is the only point-of-view character from Walden, and as such, he serves as a foil for Wells, Clarke, and Glass’s more privileged outlook on the world. Through flashbacks, Bellamy’s mother is revealed to have experienced mental illness and to have emotionally and physically abused her children. As a result, Bellamy grew up quickly and became the primary caretaker for Octavia until she was placed with the other unregistered kids whose parents had broken the Gaia Doctrine. Bellamy spent his entire childhood taking rash risks in order to survive and to protect his sister. In the narrative present, he wryly notes that he “had been doing stupid things his whole life, and he had no intention of stopping now” (26). His choice to force his way on to the Earth transport is yet another example of this pattern. However, with this first taste of a freer lifestyle away from the oppressive colony, Bellamy experiences The Impact of External Change on Internal Growth, as his presence on Earth allows him to become the person he had always believed he could be. His protective instincts make him a natural hunter and guardian, and his skills grant him a place of respect in this fledgling society of children and teens.

Bellamy’s greatest strength—and his greatest flaw—is his capacity to trust. Though he is generally wary of people he doesn’t know, he is drawn to protect his loved ones and initiates new bonds with people who intrigue him, such as Clarke. His capacity for trust also causes issues in his own family dynamics. For most of the novel, Bellamy believes that Octavia has been unjustly punished by the colony’s harsh rules and that despite her traumatizing childhood, she is a selfless person. Thus, when he learns that Octavia took the camp’s only medicine because she has an addiction, Bellamy’s understanding of the world changes. He realizes that he is one of the few people who chooses to believe the best of people until they show him their worst. After his mother betrayed his trust so deeply, he wants to trust the other kids and find a way to belong with them so that he doesn’t have to keep running somewhere else in order to find safety. At this point in the series, Bellamy’s past hardships have forced him to put up emotional walls and become someone he doesn’t like in order to survive.

Glass is the fourth point-of-view character and the only one who spends the duration of the novel aboard the colony. While Clarke, Bellamy, and Wells’s experiences highlight the struggles of reclaiming the Earth for humanity, Glass’s arc follows the increasingly dangerous situation on the colony to foreshadow the fact that these two story arcs will collide in future installments of the series. In particular, Glass’s arc highlights how the people of the colony are threatened by the council and The Power Inherent in Privilege. Through flashbacks, the narrative reveals that Glass was arrested for breaking the Gaia Doctrine when she became pregnant without the council’s permission. Between breaking the Gaia Doctrine and escaping the transport, Glass commits enough infractions to be executed, but because of her Phoenix status, she is granted an exception. In this way, Glass becomes a symbol of The Power Inherent in Privilege, and her experience exposes the council’s oppressive tactics to keep the people on the colony submissive and divided. 

These events change her entire outlook on the colony, and she condemns the injustice of the council’s habit of favoring Phoenix over Walden. Although she, a girl from Phoenix, is given a second chance after her infraction, the boy that she falsely implicates in order to shield Luke is summarily executed. Glass also realizes just how completely her life is controlled by the council, and she is furious that natural human behaviors are now punishable by death. At the end of the novel, Glass’s choice to be with Luke in Walden despite the deadly danger shows that she has discarded all concern about class differences and has realized that Luke is more important to her than any special treatment she might get from being a resident of Phoenix.

As Bellamy’s younger sister, Octavia is the main motivation for his actions throughout the novel, and with her long, traumatic history of hiding her existence from the colony, her experiences demonstrate The Struggle Between Oppression and Freedom on an individual level. As a child, Octavia lived in hiding so that her mother would not be executed for breaking the Gaia Doctrine, but her mother, who experienced mental illness, also habitually abused her; the woman lived in terror of what would happen if the council ever found out that she had two children. As a result, Octavia grew up with a level of trauma that was directly caused by the council’s oppressive rules. When she was finally removed from that situation, the trauma of that stress stayed with her, and she developed a drug addiction in her efforts to quell her debilitating nightmares. 

In the narrative present, her history has filled her with a deep bitterness. Once she arrives on Earth, she behaves as if she deserves to take anything she wants because she has long been denied her basic needs. This selfish exceptionalism leads Octavia to steal the camp’s medicine because she believes her needs are more important than the needs of others. However, when she finally realizes that her selfishness could lead to the death of Clarke’s friend, she acknowledges that she is not special or exempt from consequences. Her decision to tell Bellamy the truth about her past and return the medicine suggest that she is ready to constructively deal with her past and put it behind her in the quest to start a new life on Earth.