Bookfessional: Guilty Pleasures – The 100 (@jessicadhaluska)

Bookfessional: Guilty Pleasures

I tried to watch The 100 a year or so ago, but after about twenty minutes of almost pure Young Adult angst, I called it quits.

It was just so . . . YA. YA Sci-fi, which is better than the standard contemporary YA, but not by much.

Earth had been nuked into radioactive slag a hundred-ish years prior, and the last remnants of humanity are orbiting from space in the last space station, waiting for their long-ago home to deemed livable once more.

According to their calculations, that won’t be for another hundred-ish years, and in the meantime, life in space is no picnic.

Due to the limited resources, the penalty for every transgression is the same . . .

Theft of medical supplies for your sick child?

Get tossed out of an airlock.

Break population restrictions to give birth to a second child rather than terminate an accidental pregnancy?

Get tossed out of an airlock.

Attempt to be a whistleblower about the failing life support systems on Space Station?

(Altogether now:) Get tossed out of an airlock.

The colloquial term for such transgressors is “floater,” so the first time you hear one character telling another to “go float yourself,” you get the reference . . . Which is kind of hilarious in that grimdark way that I do so love.

You: That doesn’t sound so bad.

Me: Yeah, the premise is actually pretty dang cool.

You: So what’s the problem?

Me: In the opening scenes, a bunch of young people are being dragged out of their cells by people who are obviously soldiers—

You: Wait, why are their cells if the only punishment is DEATH?

Me: Their version of juvie. If you commit a crime while you’re a minor, they lock you up until you’re eighteen.

Which is admittedly better than getting floated. Or it would be, if they weren’t all being tagged with stabby wrist monitors and thrown into a shuttle before being launched toward Earth.

You: But I thought the earth wasn’t supposed to inhabitable for another hundred years . . .

Me: It’s not.

You: WTF??

Me: Kinda, yeah . . .

And that’s where the YA bit comes into play, b/c once the delinquents exit the shuttle and don’t die, instead of being concerned with immediate concerns like, oh, I don’t know, food, water, and shelter, they’re all parrrrr-tay.

All of them except for Clarke and Wells, that is, who are (former) bffs, which makes their combined levelheadedness almost as exhausting as the YA-ness of everyone else.

From there they encounter one crisis after another, the first of which being that not only is the surface survivable, but they aren’t the only humans surviving on it . . .

YES. That’s right. It’s like the Native Americans vs. the Western Europeans all over again, only this time the Natives are wise to their invader’s ways. Or maybe they’re just as warmongering . . . Either way, it’s not pretty.

But as the show progressed, I was more and more entertained even as I recognized ALL the sci-fi tropes, all bundled up together for my viewing pleasure: misunderstandings between “grounders” and juvenile delinquents, scarily logical AI, scheming and machinating among “advanced” cultures, etc.

BUT.

I bloody love it. #sorrynotsorry

What about you? Do you love THE 100 too? Have a different guilty pleasure? What is it/are they?

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