Just a few of the wlw that have been killed off
A few statistics about the above characters:
- 12 were from media produced by men
- 7 were killed by white men
- 6 were shot
- 4 had intimate scenes with another woman just before their death
- 3 were women of color
- 3 were from shows on the CW
- 2 were from Pretty Little Liars
↳ “ Every season we celebrate the amount of lesbian and bisexual characters television has gifted us because it’s grown exponentially in the past 10 to 20 years. We’ve seen ourselves on-screen in a number of ways—butch, femme, in-between; all shapes and sizes and colors and ages. And while networks are getting better at putting LGBT women in more recurring and major roles instead of bit parts or very special episodes, one trend remains going strong: They keep getting killed off. In the last two years alone we can count on two hands the number of gay women featured on shows that did not live to see the end of a season, and in the past three months we have said goodbye to three major characters whose very existences were our entry points into their otherwise quite hetero-driven shows. These deaths, whether they are violent murders or inconceivable cancer diagnoses, continue to pain us years after we’ve had to endure them on TV.”
- The 35 Most Horrifying Lesbian/Bi Character Deaths on Television (October 27, 2014)
↳ “The problem isn’t merely that gay characters are killed off: the problem is the tendency that gay characters are killed off far more often than straight characters… Regardless of the overall death toll of a show, the death of a gay character nevertheless has different cultural context & emotional weight, as there are unlikely to be many other gay characters in the piece of media. Gay audience members are generally left with no one else to relate to, or only the grieving partner of the dead gay. Additionally, when one can count on one hand the number of gay main characters in all of the media they consume, the loss of any one of those is generally more keenly felt.”
- Bury Your Gays (TV Tropes)
↳ “That shows everyone who looked up to this relationship, everyone who looked up to them, everyone who saw ourselves in them, everyone who saw them and felt even a little bit justified in that our own sexuality could be valid, it shows us that our love can hurt us. It shows us that our love is tragic. It shows us that our love cannot be. It shows us that we cannot exist. And it hurts.”
- @checkeredsuspenders (x)
↳ “I can no longer look at one of my favourite shows and say “Look. There’s a character who’s like me. There’s a relationship like mine. There’s a woman whose story doesn’t revolve around her sexuality, and has a relationship with another woman while also having a kickass storyline. There’s my representation.” Thanks to you, none of us can do that. And you know what? We can’t just find that again. Unlike other relationships, there aren’t ten different replacements waiting in other shows. This was something unique, and special…”
- @carvggio (x)
↳ Further viewing:
- @honestlynatalie‘s reaction to The 100 3x07
- @sexyyuglyy’s video on Lexa’s Death (20:29)
thanks to @tmasisthenewblack for helping with this
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