This scene from season 3 of The CW’s hit show The 100 unexpectedly set off a firestorm
of anger and shock from it’s fans this year.
The episode called “Thirteen” premiered on March 3rd.
Right where this google trend chart for the show peaks.
So, what happened?
Well, these two characters, Clarke and Lexa, were in love.
And after seasons of pining for each other
Caroline: Finally get together, have a happy moment, Lexa walks out of the bedroom and
gets shot by a stray bullet meant for Clarke.
Fans were deeply deeply hurt on a level that the writers did not anticipate
So, a character died, and that seems to happen all the time these days.
What’s the big deal?
Well, the scene perpetuates a pretty toxic trope, called “Bury your Gays” where LGBTQ
characters just seem to never have happy endings.
Caroline: The thing is it didn’t start with television.
To understand what’s happening here you have to go back to lesbian pulp novels that
sprung up in the 1950s and 60s.
The genre was notorious for building up a relationship between two women and then at
the very end they would be punished in some way.
Caroline: Marijane Meeker was one of the most famous Lesbian Pulp novelists of the time
She wrote under a few pseudonyms including Vin Packer for Gold Medal.
Caroline: And her first novel Spring Fire followed that to a tee
Meeker was told by her editor from the beginning that the book should not have a happy ending
or the post office might seize it as obscene.
In the end, one woman goes crazy and the other renounces her lesbianism altogether.
Caroline: This is why when Patricia Highsmith wrote The Price of Salt, which the Movie Carol
was based on, it was immediately a big deal simply because it had a happy ending.
Caroline: If you look at the history of queer women dying on television it goes back to
even the 70s.
Autostraddle has a pretty comprehensive list of queer deaths on TV.
One of the first deaths comes from the show Executive Suite where the character Julie
died
Caroline: Her love interest had just walked into traffic after realizing her lesbianism
and Julie was chasing her.
Autostraddle currently lists 152 queer deaths since 1976
Caroline: One of the main ones that people always point to is Tara on Buffy which actually
The 100 death really eerily mirrored.
Caroline: The same week that Lexa died on The 100 a character on The Magicians was introduced
as a gay woman of color
And then killed herself two scenes later
Caroline: Also that week Denise on the Walking Dead got an arrow in the eye when in the comics
that happened to a guy.
Caroline: On Vampire Diaries a gay witch couple decided to kill themselves together rather
than one of them just dying.
So they both died.
On Empire, Camila killed her wife, Mimi with poison and then was killed herself.
All of these deaths on their own might not seem that crazy.
But let’s put this in perspective.
During the 2015-2016 tv season, 22 lesbian characters that appeared in 3 episodes or
more were killed off.
That’s 25% of all female deaths on TV and 10% of all deaths on TV.
Caroline: Proportionally speaking that makes no sense.
So, why did lexa’s death ignite such a visceral reaction?
Caroline: These fans being able to talk to the creators in a way that they’ve never
been able to really accelerated a lot of this conversation.
The creator of The 100, Jason Rothenberg, later apologized to fans in an open letter,
acknowledging that in trying to heighten the drama, he ended up perpetuating a disturbing
trope.
Caroline: I would never suggest that a TV show could never kill off a gay character
or that anything is forbidden from writers.
But I do think it’s worth being conscious of this trope and knowing what they’re doing
when they are doing it.
And making sure that the death has some resonance and really that’s what we should be doing
anyway is making sure that a character death means something.