fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2059 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2059 ⌋

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The number of gay people is relatively low, isn't it? I just looked up statistics and it said in most cities 1-4% of the population is gay, and even in cities like San Fransisco the number is only 15%. (At least according to here: http://www.domesticpartnershipflorida.com/gay-facts-statistics-2011/) So a show where, say, 50% of the characters are LGBT would be great to help increase the number of gay character on TV, but it wouldn't necessarily reflect reality and it wouldn't necessarily mean that a show that only has 5% of the cast being LGBT would be somehow discriminating against people of sexualities other than straight.

The problem isn't having a cast with 6 straight characters and 1 or 2 gay characters, the problem is when the gay characters might be more likely to be killed, percentage-wise, than straight characters on TV. (I'm not sure what the actual statistics on that is, nor do I know where to go find it--I'm guessing it's disproportionate because of the 'Bury Your Gays' trope, but I don't really know if that's true.)

(As a side note, I don't think it's a bad thing for a gay character to die if it makes sense within the story and it's not just something like "the villain is gay, so they have to die!" For example, if there's a situation where, say...the characters can only get out if someone stays behind and sacrifices themselves by...I don't know, repairing an escape pod from the outside. If out of the cast, only two of the characters knows enough about mechanics to repair the pod, probably whichever character is the more self-sacrificing (or a similar trait) is going to be the one to repair the pod. If that character happens to be gay, I don't think it'd be a bad them for them to be the one to volunteer to save the other characters. That being said, if out of the two characters the straight one is normally more self-sacrificing but the gay one is the one that ends up dying, that would look weird.

Is this metaphor even making sense anymore? I have no idea.)

Yeah, but let's remember that shows are not things that just happen on their own: a writer, or usually several writers, sit down and make decisions about what's going to happen. If you only have one gay character and then you also write a situation where that character is the only logical one to die, that's not inherently bad, but it does open you up to questioning if you've also done messed up shit with that character.

Battlestar Galactica is an unfortunately good example of this. Of the four queer characters, only one survived the series, and he was also the only able-bodied white dude of that group, and he was also pretty much a background character. The other three all turned evil and died, and two were brutally physically harmed before their deaths. This was all for plot reasons that weren't related to their being queer, and I'm not even saying any of it was badly written or inorganic, but it's still kind of "eeehhh....." when you put it all together.

That's true, and I understand why people are hesitant about it. But...well, personally I'm a writer, and I enjoy both consuming and writing stories with a lot of angst and drama. It would be very unnatural of me to write in a gay character into a story and then NOT have them go through angst and drama, or even a death, if it fit the story I was telling. If there hits a point where I'm so afraid of what people think that I wouldn't let anything seriously bad happen to the character, I'd feel like I'm not even writing a character anymore, I'm...constructing a symbol. And that's all well and good for some people--some people like writing symbols, or allegories, or creating a story with a specific goal of "a only-happy story about group X" but that's not exactly what I'm interested in writing. If I got to the point where I had to choose between writing a character that I couldn't do much with because they were gay and if anything bad happened to them it would offend people, and just not writing the gay character, honestly I'd be more likely to not write the gay character at all. Which would be bad, and I shouldn't do that, but...again, the way I write, a character that didn't go through at least SOME angst would be really out of place. It'd just come off as unnatural and weird for me to single out a character as not having any.

With the way I write, in the hypothetical situation I presented above, I might end up killing off the gay character if they were the one that made sense to volunteer to help the others, but they probably wouldn't be the only character I'd end up killing off in the story. There'd probably be at least a couple of straight characters who would end up dying before the end, too. I probably wouldn't write that situation going "Okay, I want to kill off Bob, here's how I do it," I'd probably go "Okay, this is the situation that I think would be the most dramatic/most likely to happen, which character does it make sense to sacrifice here?" and then pick the situation that made the most sense, regardless of which character I was killing off.

I haven't seen Battlestar Galactica, so it's hard for me to judge that example. If it was unusual for the straight characters to turn even and die, then that's definitely bad and the writers should've probably been more aware of WHY they were making those choices in the first place. But if the straight characters were turning evil and dying left and right too, then I honestly wouldn't have a problem with it.

Well, yes, that's why there's a balance, and it's important for people to think about these things when they do them, either way. I don't think anyone is saying "bad things can't happen ever." It's just that a writer needs to make sure of what they're doing and why. Does it really have to happen in XYZ way? Is ABC event the culmination of some other gross homophobic/racist/sexist shit happening? Thinking is key. Context is key.

In the BSG example, there were straight characters who also turned evil and died permanently (although notably, the most prominent one was also a woman of color), but it happened comparatively more with the queer characters. There was also a lot of attendant other grossness with those characters (for example, a bisexual male character whose one night stand with a woman was shown more graphically and given more weight than his serious long-term relationship with a man), so it became worthy of commentary.

In those cases then yeah, I think people have a right to complain. I agree that context matters a lot.

It's not wrong to give hardships to any kind of character. But gay characters in history have been known to participate in stories only for the time where they can make a minimal difference in the lives of the heterosexual characters before they're killed off - when that happens as many times as it has, you gotta stop and wonder why do writers decide to always kill off the gay one? It's one of those things that happens all the time because people don't bother to write these characters beyond their "gay role" in the story, so when they're the least developed character they are also the easiest one to get rid off.

Killing gay characters if the story calls for it is not wrong. But you might want to think about it and formulate why the story has to go that way, or if it's bad form, given the treatment gay characters have received throughout history, just like you'd do with female and black characters.

I'm inclined to try and look at it from the writers POV and not have a problem with it if it works with the story, but honestly most stories out there are about heterosexual characters, if I get into a gay character, as rare as they are, and then they get killed off so the heterosexual ones get their stories furthened, I can't help but feel ripped off.

Well, I definitely wouldn't want to just kill off everyone that's [insert minority here] to further the story of people that fit into the majority. I think if I was actually going to kill off a character, I'd be doing it because they were more important to the story and I liked them more. ...I'm weird like that.

I guess it all really depends on the death's context within the story. Like, if you're going out of your way to kill gay characters that's pretty...weird.

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