The 749

Lore & Background

The 100's world begins with a dying space station. The Ark, humanity's last refuge in orbit, has been rationing food and water for so long that its leadership decides to send a group of one hundred juvenile offenders to the surface to determine whether Earth can once again support life. That single act—part scientific experiment, part social experiment, part act of desperation—sets every subsequent conflict in motion. The hundred land in a world that is green and alive but already inhabited by the Skaikru, a people who have lived on the ground for generations and view the sky-dwellers with suspicion and fear.

As seasons unfold, the 100's numbers grow through additional drops from the Ark, and the political landscape fractures. The Grounders are not a monolith: clans like the Mountain Men operate under their own codes, and alliances shift with each new threat—radiation, hostile tribes, the slow unraveling of the Ark's infrastructure. The central tension of the series is whether a people scattered across a hostile planet, divided by origin and ideology, can build something that outlasts any single leader.

The broader community that emerges—sometimes informally grouped by fans under collective labels like the 749—represents the messy, unglamorous reality of post-collapse society. There is no clean government, no single capital. There are villages, trade routes, old grudges, and the ever-present question of who gets to eat and who gets left behind. The 100's narrative treats this not as a backdrop but as the central drama: the politics of survival when the number of mouths exceeds the number of acres.

In Their Own Story

The dust had settled over the valley for three days, but the smell of the burning still clung to the back of Octavia's throat. She stood at the ridge where the old marker stones were half-buried, watching the column of smoke rise from the eastern camp. Someone had made a choice down there—someone had decided that the water rights belonged to one clan and not another, and the smoke was the answer.

She thought of the Ark, of the clean white corridors and the way the air recyclers hummed a lullaby she had forgotten the sound of. She thought of the hundred of them, crammed into a transport, told they were pioneers. They hadn't been pioneers. They'd been the first dominoes.

Now there were more of them than she could count, spread across the green and the grey, and every camp had a name, a leader, a grudge. The Mountain Men watched from their peaks. The Skaikru elders spoke in proverbs that meant nothing to the kids who'd grown up under artificial light. And somewhere, a number was being tallied—how many could be fed, how many could be spared, how many the ground would take before winter.

Octavia turned from the ridge. The smoke was thin now, almost gone. She walked back toward the camp, her boots crunching on the dry earth, and did not look up at the sky where no station was left to glow.

Reader's Guide

The 100's surface world is organized around a handful of major groupings rather than a single unified state. The 100 themselves—originally one hundred juvenile offenders sent to test Earth's habitability—become the nucleus of a growing colonist population. Their leadership rotates and fractures: Bellamy Blake's pragmatism, Clarke Griffin's moral authority, and Octavia Blake's evolving ruthlessness each pull the group in different directions across the seasons.

The Skaikru, or Grounders, are the indigenous surface people who had lived on Earth for generations before the 100's arrival. They are not a single polity but a collection of clans and villages bound by shared culture and a deep wariness of the sky-dwellers. The Mountain Men represent a more militaristic, isolationist strand within the surface population, operating from the highlands and engaging in raiding and territorial defense.

As the Ark's resources dwindle and its political structure collapses, additional waves of colonists arrive on the ground, swelling the population and intensifying competition for arable land and water. The 45—a group who remained on the Ark longer than the original hundred—represent a later, more traumatized cohort whose integration with the ground community is fraught. Internal politics within the 100's camp shift from military hierarchy to something closer to a contested council, with key power struggles turning on who controls the food supply, who holds the weapons, and who gets to define what 'home' means when the sky is no longer a shelter.

By the later seasons, the old distinctions between 'Ark people' and 'Grounders' blur as intermarriage, shared trauma, and common enemies force a new, uneasy coalition. The community that emerges is neither the 100 nor the Skaikru but something new—imperfect, argumentative, and stubbornly alive.

Did You Know?

• The 100's central premise—sending juvenile offenders to test a planet's habitability—mirrors real historical 'lost colony' narratives while inverting them: the colonists are not noble explorers but the society's outcasts
• The Skaikru (the Grounders) had been living on Earth's surface for generations before the 100's arrival, meaning the 'colonization' dynamic in the show is deliberately framed as an inversion of historical power structure
• The Mountain Men, one of the most recognizable surface clans, operate under a code of territorial honor and are known for their distinctive painted faces and mountain-fortress strongholds.
• The Ark's slow resource collapse—water, food, oxygen—functions as the show's ticking clock, forcing every political decision to be made under the pressure of a population that is literally running out of air.