Lesbian here, I'm not sure about the cast size, but I think even if it's very diverse I think it should have at least one good character with the same label, since sadly even in the community there's a lot of toxicity with different sexualities and genders. So like, if you put a evil lesbian I guess it's fine as long its not THE lesbian? It's one of the lesbians. And ofc,have other traits for the characters, both for the bad, the good and neutral. Still it's good avoid hurtful tropes.
The cast in this particular story is pretty small so the most sympathetic character is gay, but a gay man. I've asked friends what edits would pull it further away from that trope and I have gotten the suggestion to add specifically another lesbian in which might be difficult and involve a lot of rewrites because of how short and small the story is but I do think I could see about making it work.
The first draft is finished and I'm currently working on the second. This trope didn't enter my mind once while writing the first draft and none of my beta readers gave me that critic so I didn't end up realizing it might come off that way until I started working on the second draft.
I really appreciate you taking the time to give me some suggestions. I think getting this right will take a lot of rewrites, beta readers, and research but I hope to get it to the point of leaning as far away from that trope as I can possibly get. I would consider the main character, who is currently the protagonist and the antagonist, to be an extremely flawed victim of neglect and is the target of a serial killer. (The serial killer is not the lesbian in question or a lesbian at all the main character is the lesbian in question.)
I'd say this story is very important to me because the take away is supposed to be expressing the infantilization and removal of agency from disabled people that occurs, sometimes without people noticing they're doing it. I, as a disabled queer person, have been experiencing this for my entire life so you can see not only do I not want to misrepresent fellow queer people, but I do not want to take away from the actual message of the work.
I'm sorry if this is very long, I thought some context on the story I'm trying to tell might be helpful to the discussion. I do think it's important for both the main character and the disabled girl she has a toxic relationship with to be women. It's, in my view, the only way the story makes sense. It is in no way a romance and is exclusively a horror tragedy.
Another thing I struggle with is how sympathetic to make the main character because I have gotten many critics that it's a bad idea to really make her sympathetic at all, but I think it may lie in a bit of a gray area right now personally and could be pushed in either direction with the new draft.
I'm definitely very interested in hearing more feedback and finding more lesbian beta readers to look over the next draft. I also plan on adding a disclaimer in front of the story regardless. It is a horror story and definitely isn't targeting the same demographic as the light-hearted Rainbow. So I think a disclaimer will also help people understand this story is not similar at all to our previous work incase a pretty intense(in comparison to Rainbow) horror tragedy.
Thank you to everyone willing to give your time to help me work on this story! We appreciate it so much! ❤️❤️
