Representation is great. It gives young people of minorities hope for a future that will treat them better. So it’s pretty twisted and morbidly hilarious when the hope for the future that TV is giving us these days is the gift of an early death.
The Bury Your Gays trope is one of the less tasteful tropes in TV history; the bringer of death to unsuspecting LGBTQ+ characters. More often than not, its victim also happens to be a woman. It would seem that the merging of two communities exclusive of straight men literally causes their universe to implode. These characters must thus be killed for the good of mankind.
So how exactly did it originate? It dates back to the 19th century, when authors like Oscar Wilde struggled to write about queer characters against heavy censorship and indecency laws. And how did it make its way to Hollywood? It’s that pesky Hays Code again. In an effort to subvert the Code, creators made queer characters inherently evil, ultimately punished in some grotesque way deemed as justice. It was either that, tragic martyrdom, or suicide.
Previously known as the Dead Lesbian Syndrome, the trope’s kill streak reached its peak in the 2015-16 period. Viewers saw the uncalled for and illogical deaths of LGBTQ+ characters like The 100’s Lexa, Jane the Virgin’s Rose, and The Walking Dead’s Denise. The treatment of queer characters as expendable and their deaths serving purely as shock value has sparked widespread outrage.
Lately, entertainment has presented a blatantly exaggerated effort to circumvent the trope. LGBTQ+ characters aren’t dying off anymore, they’re outright immortal. Or at least, that’s what popular showrunners’ takeaway from it seems to be. Certain shows portray queer characters with an amusing survivability. They could be in a ridiculous number of near-death situations and live through all of them. Sometimes, it’s a well-developed character contributing to the plot in a profound way. Other times, they’re superfluous characters kept around just to fill the representation criteria. Either way, they’re a product of showrunners trying to evade the larger issue of misrepresentation.
It shouldn’t be that hard to create relatable characters who undergo meaningful character arcs and are a relevant part of the plot. If they were to experience death as a natural consequence of that, that’s perfectly acceptable. All we’re asking for are characters who are just as nuanced and whose lives aren’t solely dependent on their sexuality.
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