BSG vs The 100

[terresdebrume]

See the fun thing about watching this after The 100 is that BSG is comparatively a lot less explicit in its torture–there’s less of a “look at the pain loooooook” feel with BSG. Which probably tells us more about the evolution of television/storytelling than the respective publics, since BSG was (afaik) marketed at older individuals.

Either way though, there’s a very different handling of the conflict and the enemy–the Cylons are firmly on the “not human” side, despite some of them being unaware of that. However, the narrative goes out of itay to highlight similarities to humans, and even gives us the Boomers, who both seem to be going against their programmingto some extent.

By opposition, the Grounders in The 100 are known for a fact to be humans, but season one systematically places them in the role of the enemy–they’re constructed as the Others and dehumanized through much of the season and by most of the characters (even Lincoln, the exception to that rule, remains an outsider)

It’s also interesting to note that BSG’s other, superior to humans in many ways (more technologically advanced, faster, stronger, supposedly more intelligent etc.) is mainly composed of white models and the Asian one is the one who’s most likely to be ‘defective’ which is both bad (because it isolates Boomer  being ‘less’ than the other Cylons & makes one of the two women of color of the show into a machine) and good (because it humanizes her and makes the audience root for her and her humanity).

But in The 100, the ‘primitive’ culture forced to go back to rougher ways of living, is represented by two people of color (Lincoln is black and Anya is a brown woman whose ethnicity I don’t know) which plays into unsavory habits (people of color as savages/uneducated/culturally violent etc.) though I suppose at least they did seem to make the cannibalistic ‘worse than the bad’ group mostly white (it was hard to tell) instead of mostly brown.

 

I don’t really know where this is going yet-especially given that The 100 is still ongoing, and that the two shows are located at different point of the post-Apocalyptic narrative (BSG is immediately during and after, The 100 is a lot later). Plus of course the difference in publics, though some plot points are similar (the sacrifice of a few for the need of the many, for example, appears in both shows, but while BSG puts the responsibility of destroying a ship full of people on Roslin an the Adamas, The 100 does everything it can to keep Jaha and the Council innocent (on the surface at least) when 300 people are required to die so the rest can survive.

Nevertheless, the contrasts and similarities are interesting to watch out for,and I think I’ll go back to those if I ever write a post-ap story tbh..