People love Root and Shaw as examples of the bury your gays trope, but hardly ever as examples of representation. And honestly, possibly controversial opinion here: Root’s death was a good decision on the part of the writers of poi.
Literally the only thing that makes it a remotely bad decision is about representation, which I totally understand.
But poi, overall, dealt very well with a lot of complex subject matter, and in all seriousness, they killed three other key characters, one of whom was one of the two (presumably) straight white male leads, and another was a straight white male recurring.
Stop bringing up Root as an example of a pretty devastating trope when actually, poi is the only show where killing the character made sense. The writers on poi explored the entire thing with ease and taste, and they didn’t use unnecessary exaggeration or frustrating caution. Root is gay, but unlike Lexa or other LGBT characters, it doesn’t feel like her gayness kills her.
In fact I would argue Root is the worst example of bury your gays. There is no “oh my god Root’s gay” moment, they just fell in love, there wasn’t unnecessary queer baiting, they actually gave the audience a relationship between two awesome characters who happened to be super intelligent, super damaged but also completely kickass and well developed.
That’s not to say I wasn’t devastated when Root died. God no I was a mess. But I was a mess because Root was an awesome character, my favourite in fact, and I think to be bitter about her death because it falls into a horrible trope actually erases the best parts of a pretty spectacular character.
Not only that, the character lived on the best possible form! As the voice and personality of a thing she loved, as an extension of herself.
Honestly, watch the whole show and you’ll see that Root’s death really was just another character death, and not a bury your gays moment. Carter died. Elias died. Root died. Reese died.
Let’s not erase the representation of a bisexual woc in Shaw by focusing on the negative. Let’s not erase the beautiful love story by focusing only on the ending.
If we tear down the people that write us good characters, we’re not supporting the cause for well written representation.
If Root’s death had come at a time when representation was better, it would have been perfectly acceptable. The writers made the mistake of not writing within the current rep context.
Rant over.
