Arkadians are such idiots

[u/Femadoration]

How do you go from knowing you'd lose a war with the Grounders in season 2 to believing you can somehow win a war against the 12 clans. Mount Weather had a similar population and a literal Nuclear Bunker and even they chose to negotiate when the only remaining option remaining to them was battle.

[u/GlobalSignature3601]

mount weather couldn't wipe them all out with the nukes because they needed them alive to experiment on them and find a cure or a vaccine for breathable air (if I remember well).

Pike was an idiot, and so were those who followed him. not all Arkadians agreed with him on this. He somehow underestimated the grounders capabilities, or he was full of hate that he couldn't see reality.

[u/MsMercury → u/GlobalSignature3601]

I think his hatred guided him.

[u/dabaconnation → u/MsMercury]

I think that's part of it. Rewatching the show with a friend and on season 3, he mentions several times that he'd rather strike first than wait to die.

I think part of the way he sees it is that the grounders will kill them either way whether that's fast or slowly, so he might as well bring the fight to them.

[u/I_amnotreal → u/GlobalSignature3601]

Plus Pike was never interested in playing fair. That's how he "won" the first "battle" - by sneakily attacking unsuspecting grounders who thought they were allies, using the advantage of modern weaponry. Now, the same wouldn't happen again, because it was a strategy that could work only once, but he could sow some chaos, especially with the clans fighting among one another because of the new Commander. Still, it would probably end up with the Arkadians being wiped out.

Which is something that Pike didn't even consider as an option, He was so blinded by his hate he hardly considered grounders to be human, just an obstacle that needed to be removed for "his people" to live their best lives. And you don't have to go far into the human history to find examples of exactly that.

[u/I_amnotreal]

I don't think those two cases are directly comparable.

Mount Weather vs, the grounders conflict was basically a stalemate before the Ark crash-landed in the middle of it. The grounders couldn't approach the bunker without having the acid fog dropped on their asses and the mountain men couldn't leave to fight a protracted war on the ground, nor do they really wanted to, because conquest didn't really bring them anything - they couldn't just move out and they needed grounders' blood to survive anyway.

Now, due to the actions of our protagonists, that status quo got shifted - the acid fog was out of the picture, but the process of sucking the marrow from the kids and giving it to their own people wasn't finished. So their defences were down, but they couldn't have any real feet-on-the-ground military power yet and they've ran out of time when Lexa showed up with her army. Negotiating was the only choice, really. And even then there was enough fear left for Lexa to agree to the terms of the deal. Both sides had something to gain from it and - perhaps more importantly - a lot to lose if the deal wasn't made.

Pike, on the other hand, is a fanatic. He is angry, he grieves the people he's lost to Asgeda and he doesn't think in the same gain vs. loss categories a reasonable leader should, because in his head the only way for the people of the Ark to live on the ground was when the grounders were gone or at least beaten into submission, by any means necessary.

[u/TheFawnCreekKid]

Pike believes that the Grounders will definitely attack at some point (an opinion which does have some strong evidence behind it), it is only a matter of when. At that point, he is trying to give them their best chance of winning, even if that chance may be small. He has had success using guerrilla warfare against a larger Azgeda force previously, so he wants to make the conditions favourable to using that kind of strategy again by striking the nearby forces before they can attack or trap them inside Arkadia while a larger force comes.

I'm not saying he was necessarily right but I do think there was a reasoning behind his actions beyond the hatred/racism line that is often thrown out without much evidence behind it.

[u/CptPlanetG14]

Mount Weather only negotiated when they had no choice, Death was literally at their front door.

I’m not sure what you mean when you say they wanted to go to war against the 12 clans. If you’re talking about Pike, you got to say that.