#byg trope

[sedlex]

The dark, cynical, and disrespectful take on superheroes show kills their resident lesbian, what a surpr...

... wait, nope: they didn't.

She had her "surprise, not dead and moving with her girlfriend to live the lesbian farm dream away from the shittiness of the main plot" goodbye scene just minutes later:

For a show that in the same episode dragged its Batman-ish character's entrails all over the floor, I'll take it.

[optimisticcoffeedelusion]

Remember what we did back when Lexa (and all the other lesbian and bisexual characters) died? Billboards to raise awareness around the Bury Your Gays Trope.

The amazing Killing Eve SubReddit (which already launched a very successful fundraiser for School Consent Project), together with LGBT Fans Deserve Better (the same from back then!) is ON IT! The goal is to raise 12.000 euros to rent billboards both in the US and the UK. If you want and can, please contribute. Don’t give up thinking you need to give a lot. A little bit from a lot of people can make a difference. Anything is great!

I feel like this is the best sort of things we can do as fandoms!

[transpidergwen]

Been thinking very hard about Charly's sacrifice and how that relates to Bury Your Gays. I want to preface everything with YMMV and it's completely valid if you're upset. In my opinion, Charly's death worked.

BYG is a set of tropes: when a characters's death is for shock value with little to no long term impact. Usually their death isn't about them and they have no agency in it, it's purpose is to inflict pain on their love interest (a main character) or to motivate another character, often for only a few episodes, often a straight man. There is also the element of creator bias, when they are aware how much that character/that relationship means to the audience and either ignorantly or maliciously choose to inflict the pain of killing them anyway. Arrow, The 100, Person of Interest, ST: Discovery, Supernatural and Killing Eve are the ones I'm most familiar with, but there are hundreds of others. Charly's death fits none of those criteria.

Charly had agency in her sacrifice. It wasn't a stray bullet, it wasn't pointless; she saved the galaxy and prevented genocide. Her decision was a reflection of her devotion to the ideals of the Union, even if she felt conflicted. The belief that all life has value, that even if it's your enemy and you have every reason to hate them, *genocide is always wrong*. That's what Charly decided. That was her story and her choice, no one else's. Consequently her actions have changed the course of the entire central storyline for the show. Her sacrifice *mattered*.

Contrast that with the Orville's Thursday counterpart, Strange New Worlds, which also killed a minority character in episode 9. It was pointless and he had no agency in it. A shock value death after the stakes of the episode had already resolved. It added nothing to the episode or the overall narrative. He wasn't even mentioned in the subsequent finale; he was disposable. In a lackluster and rushed funeral scene he got a short by the numbers speech about how he helped Uhura find herself, because his death wasn't about him.

Or go back a few years to another Trek when Discovery killed Hugh at the height of BYGs. Another pointless, shock value death that accomplished nothing except making Paul miserable.

The Orville has built up to this moment for three seasons. The episode was a culmination of every major storyline for the show, and the paradigm of the story has permanently changed because of Charly's actions. It's a tricky business killing any character in your story. It has to feel both too soon and inevitable, and making sure it matters to the narrative is something the majority of shows fail to do. This counts ten fold for queer characters. The Orville is a rare example that has met that threshold for me. To write off Charly's sacrifice as BYG is to imply that it didn't matter, and it did.

[thegoldenhoof]

Izzy and Bury Your Gays: The Amatonormative angle

This is mostly a thought that has emerged in attempting to write a response to the conversation happening on mottlemoth’s post about Bury Your Gays but I realized I was trying to articulate an idea that needed more than me typing on my phone during lunch at work

This takes a rather meandering path to my conclusion but I wrote it this way to show what my thought process was.

https://www.tumblr.com/ramblingruminations/732751632764403712/to-me-ofmd-works-because-the-revenge-is-an-entity?source=share&ref=ramblingruminations

[bluzarin]

screaming 'bury your gays' at ofmd, a show where the characters are pirates that fight all the time, very much in highly deadly scenarios, and pointing out that the character that died was the '''only''' one that had a queer self-discovery arc (though they wanted to die well before that arc anyway) is a little bit of a stale take, got to be honest

[lapis-lazuliie]

it's just. weird y'know. how the lads have treated tragedy/trauma/illness in previous episodes with the utmost care and respect but then their twist in tlw is 'oh it was fake i was faking my illness the entire time' like. idk. it's.....why do that. why make this choice

[sarafinapeclar]

This First Kill cancellation bullshit is so so frustrating. I feel like wlw are caught in this annoying af catch 22 where we want to watch our content but then someone gets killed or it gets canceled and then we don’t want to watch anymore out of protest. But theeen not watching means even less stuff gets promoted/produced and it gives credence to the idea that sapphic content is unpopular. I’m so tired, why can’t we have nice things wtf

[soliyra-the-sunbringer]

Good but not great. Employed a trope I've come to really hate.

[dkmshaboogie]

Clexa was not queerbait they canonically had sex lmao. It was bury your gays for sure, but the gays were definitely gaying in this instance.

While yes, it definitely was an act of the Bury your Gays trope and from my own experience and circles, one of the major instances to really bring to light this trope, I would argue that they're not mutually exclusive.

To me, Clexa was huge back in 2014/2015, it was a depiction of something that I wanted for my own life. Now almost being a decade later, I don't think I could confidently say how much they put into marketing it without my own biases coming in. But again, to me, it was huge, to have this build up of tension and "will they, won't they" and finally seeming like they were going to actually have a queer relationship, even if the two separated, only for the two to have sex and then immediately kill off Lexa? It buried the gays and queerbaited. It was a tactic to "bait" and appease queer/ally fans into watching their show by touting this relationship while simultaneously appeasing everyone else through her death and then bringing her back like once? And then never mentioning her again. Now, I didn't watch much past her death, so I don't have the grasp on anything that happened after, but that is what I understand of it.

Lexa was gay, and slept with Clark once, and almost immediately died after, and while it is textbook bury your gays, it was also a tactic to Queerbait the audience.

I don't care to argue the semantics of it, this is my position and has been for the past 9 years.

[baked-hylian]

next time I am reading a detailed synopsis and reviews before I dive mostly blind into an anime

[leighlew3]

WLW Shows/Fans Taking HITS

Willow = canceled (sorta? now debatable) Warrior Nun = canceled Batwoman = canceled Legends of Tomorrow = canceled Charmed = canceled Legacies = canceled First Kill = canceled The Wilds = canceled Gentleman Jack = canceled A League of Their Own = reduced/canceled Killing Eve = BYG trope Supergirl = lead ship queerbaited And more... just over the last year or two. And some of these had solid ratings, mind you. Topped the charts of their streamers/networks, even.  "LEAD SAPPHICS/WLW = 🚫" - TV Execs/Hollywood

This. Is. Not. Okay. 

[lesbianjamies]

i was going to say that ema and whitney's fallout was like some lesser version of the byg trope bec no one dies but like literally after they kiss something Bad™ happens to them BUT later in the episode hannah gave that love confession to shira and that kinda blew me away?? so i guess i'll allow it lmao

[nyaruhodou]

its shocking to me how some people dont understand what makes the Bury Your Gays trope bad. its bc those characters are getting removed from the narrative entirely and their deaths are often used as cheap shock value.

this does not apply to media where the queer character is "dead" but still part of the narrative. like, lily from zombieland saga is not BYG just bc shes dead. literally all of them are dead thats the point. she is still active in the narrative and functionally alive. calling zls a bury your gays show is just bizarre and wrong!

and the same applies to TAZ balance with lup. like sure shes "dead" but she is still part of the narrative and gets a happy ending just like everybody else! and hurley and sloan die at the end of petals to the metal, but that was the culmination of a tragic arc for them, was thematically fitting, ANDDDDDD they come back too as dryads!!!!

[foibles-fables]

Potential contentious ask, but I don’t see it being discussed anywhere: does the ending of WN s2 count as bury your gays?

This is a super complicated question to answer, because I feel like one needs to consider it from two perspectives: the other characters' and the viewer's.

One thing about the pacing of the finale--we can't really make a solid inference about what the other characters think about Ava's field trip to the Eeby Deeby. They knew Lilith came back, and one could argue that they all seem pretty nonchalant about their holy relic being Gone, but...their headspaces surrounding Ava's departure would be something interesting to explore in S3. Especially Bea's, of course, who might view losing Ava as a punishment for herself. So maybe it could be a case of BYG for the characters themselves? I don't really think that's how BYG works, however.

For the viewer, though, I don't really think so, for a number of reasons. First of all, the mid-credits stinger. The sword glows, Ava is back, roll away the stone. That's cut and dry and done, even though we don't know how much time has passed between that moment and Ava's initial departure. Also, one has to consider that Ava is Thee main character of the series. This means that her """death""" didn't come about as a product her purely being more expendable than a non-queer character (of which there are arguably few in the show anyway), but as part of a purposeful and predictable narrative arc.

If one squints, you could argue this (thanks TV Tropes, now I'm stuck):

But again--Ava was already resigned to being destroyed before the kiss, and that part of her narrative was sealed. And also she's back! So not super relevant anyway.

Definitely open to debate, here. I don't think it fits the trope, though!

[mayasdeluca]

I used to watch Chicago Fire, and I agree it was top notch. Until they pulled the BYG trope just for the man pain and I noped the fuck out of that show so fast.

Oh yeah, I remember this vaguely. It was the blonde girl right? And there was like no reason for it? That's unfortunate.

[michaun]

ppl comparing what happened to clare in derry girls to the byg trope please get a grip good god lmao