Spoiler Alert: Orphan Black, The 100, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Legend of Korra
There are two surefire ways to die in this world: One is to fly a spaceship directly into the sun, and the other is to be a queer person on TV or in movies. And one of these happens much more often than the other.
This is called the Bury Your Gays trope, which describes how queer characters are pretty much always killed off.
Yes, I’m aware these characters aren’t real. I’m aware that it’s just a show or a movie. But the media we watch and consume does affect us. Little queer kids watching TV deserve people who they can look up to and see have a happy ending.
Because when all you see is your people dying left and right, it makes you question if you can have a happy ending at all.
Now, the reason I’m talking about this is because of a recent episode of The 100, a story that, up until this episode, had been really amazing in terms of queer representation.
The two main female characters, Lexa and Clarke, were in a romantic and sexual relationship. Both of these women had been written so well. They were morally conflicted, they were in positions of power, they failed, they grew, they succeeded.
And after they finally had sex for the first time and it seemed like they would have their happy ending, Lexa was killed when her “father figure” was trying to kill Clarke and accidentally shot Lexa in the stomach. Ugh.
Now, in a perfect world, this wouldn’t have been such a big deal. If queer people were well represented on TV and in movies and didn’t have a history of being killed off, this could’ve been brushed off as just another character death.
But this show does not exist in a vacuum – it exists steeped in a culture that seems to think it’s impossible and unrealistic to give a queer couple a happy ending.
Autostraddle put together a list of 143 lesbian or bisexual women who have been killed off just in TV alone – and the list is still growing.
One of the most common ways to die seems to be by gunshot. In a very similar fashion to Lexa, Tara from Buffy the Vampire Slayer had sex with her lover and then was killed by a stray bullet, and Daphne from Orphan Black was also shot in the stomach.
Basically, if you’re a lesbian or bisexual character on TV, you’re best off wearing a bulletproof vest just from the minute you enter the show.
And if you have sex with another woman, you’re basically a ticking time bomb of death. This is actually tied into another trope, Death by Sex, which is where characters often die after having sex, basically as a punishment.
People say that these deaths are for “shock value” or to be “surprising,” but at this point, it would be more surprising and shocking to have a queer woman live.
We just expect it by now. As soon as queer people hear about a show that has possible queer representation, our next question turns to, “But will they be allowed to live?”
And that’s a really sad point to be at when all you want is to see yourself represented on TV. Straight and cisgender characters very often have happy endings and live to the end of the show.
I don’t think it’s asking so much to just… not kill us.
I know people will argue that if we want queer people to be treated like non-queer people, then they should be able to die like them, too. And I agree.
But the fact of the matter is that right now, queer characters die at much, much higher rates than their non-queer counterparts, so it’s not comparable.
That’s like if you have a show with twenty characters, 19 straight and one gay, and you kill one straight character and the one gay character. You could argue that killing off the gay character was justified because you also killed a straight character – but straight people still have another 18 characters to identify with; meanwhile, 100% of the gay characters have been killed off.
And yes, of course, you don’t have to be queer to identify with a queer character, just as you don’t have to be straight or cisgender to identify with a straight, cisgender character – but I think that’s just all the more reason to have more diverse characters.
Straight, white, cisgender men are seen as the default, as the “blank slate” that anyone else can project onto, but there’s no reason we can’t also empathize with women, people of color, or queer people.
And for queer people, the feeling of seeing an aspect of yourself that people have told you your whole life makes you abnormal represented on TV is indescribable. Queer characters give queer viewers a sense that they’re valid, that they’re okay, that they’re normal. And killing them all off robs us of that.
I also think it does a world of good to normalize being queer to a straight, cisgender audience. If non-queer people never see queer people represented in the media, it can be really easy for them to think we just don’t exist – or that we exist in stereotypes.
And if the only time they ever see us, we get killed off, it’s not sending that great of a message.
The only show I’ve seen that actually had a happy ending for a canon queer couple was the Legend of Korra, which ended with two bisexual women of color holding hands and basically walking off into the sunset.
I mean, it sucks that they didn’t kiss on screen, given that the show had shown kisses between men and women before, but it was something. And it meant a lot for the queer community because a popular, mainstream show basically said, “Look, it’s okay to be queer, and you can be happy.”
Anyway, we need to be done with this Bury Your Gays trope. It’s not revolutionary. It’s not creative. It’s tired, it’s been done, and we can do better.
To learn more about all this, I would really recommend my friend Rowan’s videos. She did a video back before Lexa died about why LGBTQIA+ characters always have to die, and more recently, she made a six-minute compilation of lesbian and bisexual women being killed off on TV. There’ll be links in the description to both of those.
And this video is a part of a series I’m doing for Everyday Feminism, a website dedicated to helping you stand up to and breakdown everyday oppression. I’ll put a link down below so you can check out my previous videos in the series.
And as usual, I love you all very much, I hope have a wonderful day, and I’ll see you next week. Bye!
