SO I've seen this floating around, not just on Tumblr but on YouTube and News Articles and all that stuff. TV Tropes actually has this for the issue: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BuryYourGays I see people, not just people in the LGBT+ community but other people as well REALLY quick to judge the media and Hollywood for killing off their gay characters, but I think the criticism isn't that well-founded. I understand the pain of trying to find a movie about lesbians on Netflix, that isn't straight up 'erotica' or that isn't a coming out story or a tragedy. But at the same time, to say that they're killing off the lesbian characters in movies because they're lesbians, I just don't know about that. LOTS of YA books, whether it's straight characters or not, kill off their characters. Even most popular romance novels, kill off one of the people that are in the relationship. You have your John Green type of guy, your Divergent series, your bad Netflix movies, your 1$ romance novels, Shakespeare and all of that stuff, in which someone in a relationship either dies or loses their memory. Something ******. I think that the problem is, is that, most movies and books nowadays kill off their characters. It happens regardless of their sexual orientation, characters just die. The coolest and edgiest thing you can do now in a movie or show or book is kill off your characters in the most painful, possible way that your audience will be effected by. My thought is, if a writer makes a romance story, isn't it just interchangeable? If John Green said "Hey I want to write about these two kids with cancer but one of them has more cancer and dies", and made the characters gay, I mean obviously one of them are STILL going to die regardless. Because in the actual book it was a straight character and they STILL died. If you change the characters but keep the plot, the result is the same regardless. Do you see what I mean? I don't think that a writer has the "I'm writing a movie about lesbians and one of them has to die that's the rule" What I mean is that, for example, when I first started writing my book it was a straight couple, later I changed it to be a lesbian couple because it was my artistic vision, or something, but that didn't change the outcome. The outcome was still just as ******, and possibly actually better then what I originally had. Maybe that's why this peeved me so much because I don't want to be the author that 'buried my gays'. I think the problem is is the representation here, which I don't want to get too much into but I think it's important. If in 1/10 movies someone in the couple DOESN'T die, then obviously when you get to movies about gay couples, it's probably like, 1/2, because there just aren't as many movies, so it seems like they're dying more. I think it's an Inductive Reasoning: I've watched 10 movies with gay couples, one dies, therefore, all movies with gay couples must have a character who dies. It's the same as me saying I've read 10 Shakespeare plays and each one was a tragedy, the rest of his plays must also be tragedies because **** man we're past 10 and all of them I've seen end this way. Obviously they're not all tragedies, but after you read Merchant of Venice, a comedy, as your final play in high school, your sub-conscious is like, yeah, everyone's just going to die because I've read 10 other ones and everyone's just died off like flies. It's the sample size and representation if ANYTHING because the representation is so minimal we only get through so many movies and books before we've basically lost all hope. I know there are lots of people who just want more main-stream movies that have a gay romance with a 'regular plot' that doesn't fall into the "coming out story" or "One of us has aids" category, and I want that too! That would be awesome, but where I don't get on the bandwagon are the people saying that this is some sort of conspiracy or something.
I mean, it's certainly not a conspiracy, but it is a problem. Part of it, I agree, is likely because of how it's becoming popular to kill off characters for the sake of killing off characters. Another part is related to the representation problem--when queer characters are introduced, they're most often side characters outside of the core cast, and are thus more expendable to the overall plot.
