Blapper of Water
RE 73: I agree. There needs to be that context. Those are good questions to put in the description, actually. I think there could be more, but those look like good "ground level" questions, so to speak.
RE: "this isn't just 'gay characters die'": I didn't think to mention this but we already have Character Death for those wicks where it's just "character dies." The CD trope is flexible enough to encompass "gay character dies." We should probably move such wicks from Bury Your Gays to Character Death. The CD trope is younger than BYG so the misuse could have been around since before we had a feasible trope for such wicks.
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Osamu Sato Fanatic
If I had to give my two cents—this seems to be a trope that might be trying to be the homosexuality equivalent of Black Dude Dies First or an inverted Final Girl; that is to say, in a horror film where people will die, the homosexual usually dies at some point. The problem is that the trope ended up also amassing other examples, and not just instances where it's not in horror films—I mean they ended up amassing instances where gays died, even when them being gay hardly had an impact on the story.
World's Toughest Milkman
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
I think that sums the problem up nicely. At one time, gays were often treated as disposable characters. And that's probably still the case to some extent—Hollywood isn't exactly on the cutting edge when it comes to social awareness. :)
So, that's probably where the trope started. Unfortunately, it didn't stay there...
edited 11th Feb '18 10:20:04 PM by Xtifr
Speaking words of fandom: let it squee, let it squee.
I think the opening statement of the GLAAD 17-18 report is pretty interesting/useful:
It suggests that the trope includes trend, which we've discussed in here as likely being irrelevant, and the death being to further a straight cisgender character's story. That's an interesting point we could discuss, as it's relevant enough for GLAAD to talk about.
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My proposal would be to TLP all the suggested tropes from the last few pages and then make Bury Your Gays a Super-Trope and index, the supertrope being for cases where it is clear the character death was because gay character on the show is treated as more expendable than the straight cisgender characters, but the situation doesn’t fit any of the subtropes. Thoughts?
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THAT sums up what the trope should be, gays being treated as more expendable. Having sub-tropes would be a start in cleaning it up. First idea for a sub trope, "Homophobic Hate-crime", where they're targeted due to in-universe homophobia.
Is that maybe covered by Van Helsing Hate Crime? Of course, doesn’t mean we can’t split it off
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Blapper of Water
Only if the magical creature's race is a metaphorical stand-in for a non-hetero sexuality, I think.
I think starting with subtropes is a good idea. I don't think we need to spend too much time discussing each of them here in TRS (since this is about Bury Your Gays and not these subtropes per se). Here's a list of possibilities. I might start a few of these drafts myself but feel free to beat me to the punch:
- Homophobic Hate Crime (when an LGBT character is assaulted or killed due to a character who is bigoted in-universe)
- Torturous Gay Afterlife (when the afterlife is shown or exists in-universe, and when the afterlife for LGBT characters is certainly miserable or terrible)
- Gay Guy Dies First (when there's only one LGBT character in the work and they die off first for "comedy" or some other reason)
- Kick The Gay (character does something mean or terrible to LGBT character to show their immorality or to show how such action is wrong a la Very Special Episode)
- Old Gay Suicide / This Miserable Gay Life (when life for LGBT characters is portrayed as inherently miserable to the point that LGBT characters commit suicide or at least contemplate it)
- Out Of The Closet And Into The Line Of Fire (when an LGBT character comes out of the closet and gets killed or harmed because of it)
...actually, do we have any hate crime tropes besides Van Helsing Hate Crimes? That feels like a pretty big oversight.
I'm just about to make TLP drafts for Old Gay Suicide/This Miserable Gay Life (here
) and Out Of The Closet And Into The Line Of Fire (here). For the first, I'm planning on using the quote that's currently on Bury Your Gays, so I imagine we'll be taking that off the page. Water Blap also made Torturous Gay Afterlife.
edited 17th Feb '18 8:36:44 PM by lakingsif
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Also: Stuffed in the Fridge as a subtrope, as it is about characters being killed so the main character can feel bad, in the cases when this character is LGBT?
edited 17th Feb '18 7:00:31 PM by lakingsif
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Bury Your Gays seems more like a sub-trope to Stuffed in the Fridge. Knowing this might help determine what is an example.
I don't think it is, maybe I didn't define SITF that well: Stuffed in the Fridge is more about the main characters and their reaction to the gruesome murder (from the page: "A character is killed off in a particularly gruesome manner and left to be found just to offend or insult someone, or to cause someone serious anguish.") — like Forced to Watch (but instead of watching, it's finding). The Kick The Gay subtrope idea would likely be a sub trope of SITF, but none of the others and not the main trope, either, I don't think.
Edit: I actually think that the proposed subtrope of Kick The Gay aligns as a Stuffed in the Fridge variant very well, especially looking at some of the examples that would go there on Bury Your Gays. KTG would basically be "SITF, for LGBT characters", as it is showing the attacker as horrible based on homophobia, and using it as a reaction for main-and-likely-straight characters to have their Pet the Dog moment.
Pt. 2: On a separate note, we briefly mentioned somewhere a Gays Never Die trope, which I think has some potential with shows both A. trying to avoid Bury Your Gays or B. some Unfortunate Implications in deliberately keeping a quota of gay representation on shows where Anyone Can Die. We could discuss this more, and if we want to TLP it can I suggest the name Untitled 'Unkillable Gay' Trope: a meta joke referring to shows being called "Untitled X Series" until they get ordered so we didn't bother giving it a proper name because we didn't know how long the trope would be running.
Pt. 3: And, another note, would Dying of AIDs be a good idea for a trope that can be, but isn't always, a sub-trope. I'm going to TLP it (here
), but it doesn't have to be part of this effort. It's a particularly horrible means of dying, provides lots of storyline potential with negative reactions from everyone, and is obviously skewed towards being given to gay characters based on, in fairness, historical propensity to be more easily contracted by gay men.
Pt. 4: Another noticeable trend is lesbian and/or female bisexual characters being killed off in finales — would that warrant a trope, in the style of Sweeps Week Lesbian Kiss (Series Finale Lesbian Death?) because of the "exploit for drama"-ness?
Pt. 5: Back to the Bury Your Gays define-and-clean: there's a lot of straight-up misuse and examples that can be moved to drafts or Character Death. For definition of the base Bury Your Gays, as a supertrope, it should be the examples which do not distinctly fit in the subtropes, or fit in many if not all of them. I think we can keep much of the description. A simple statement should be made somewhere near the top that the trope, including its variations, is in play when the LGBT+ characters are treated as more expendable than the heteronormative ones. Perhaps, now that I've repurposed the page quote, we could use that GLAAD statement as one.
Pt. 6: My suggested rewrites to the description (input, please):
The Bury Your Gays trope in media, including all its variants, is a homophobic cliché. It is the presentation of deaths of LGBT characters where these characters are nominally able to be viewed as more expendable than their heteronormative counterparts. In this way, the death is treated as exceptional in its circumstances. If a character dies in a situation of which their "deviant" orientation or gender identity is of no consequence and no effect, it is not this trope.
Often, especially in older works (to the extent that they are found in older works, of course), gay characters just aren't allowed happy endings. Even if they do end up having some kind of relationship, at least one half of the couple, often the one who was more aggressive in pursuing a relationship, thus "perverting" the other one, has to die at the end. Of course, it can also happen to gay characters who aren't in relationships, particularly if they're Psycho Lesbians or Depraved Homosexuals.
Nowadays, when opinions on sexuality have shifted somewhat, justification may be attempted via Too Good for This Sinful Earth. Sometimes it's because the Magical Queer has died in a Heroic Sacrifice so that the straights may live. Naturally, this is subject to Alternative Character Interpretation.
Also known as Dead Lesbian Syndrome, though that name has largely fallen out of use post-2015 and the media riots about overuse of the trope. And, as this public outcry restated, the problem isn't merely that gay characters are killed off: the problem is the tendency that gay characters are killed off in a story full of mostly straight characters, or when the characters are killed off because they are gay.
If the characters' relationship is obscured, or plain baiting, it drastically increases their chance of survival.
As stated above, sometimes gay characters die in fiction because, well, sometimes people die; this isn't correlation, and it's not always meant to "teach us something", nor is it necessarily indicative of some prejudice on the part of the creator. There are many Anyone Can Die stories: barring explicit differences in the treatments of the gay and straight deaths, it's not odd that the gay characters are dying. The occasional death of one in a Cast Full of Gay is unlikely to be notable, either.
Can be seen as Truth in Television in some cases, as gay and lesbian people are at a substantially higher risk for suicide and assault. The fact that AIDS hit the gay male community most prominently provided potent fresh fuel for this long running trope (which, like many things about the eighties, still has an effect on more recent works).
Period fiction also needs to take into account the lack of understanding of gay characters, whereby depicting the death or murder of gay people may not reflect the views of the author but the social dynamics of the setting. However, again, there were gay people throughout history who survived and lived full lives, and it is possible to tell those stories rather than working on the assumption that tragedy is the only narrative option. Defaulting to the reasoning of Truth in Television provides some justification, but does not necessarily negate this trope.
The revival of this trope in 2015/16 (especially with regards to things that happened in reality), particularly for female LGBT characters, sparked a lot of outrage and a pledge to encourage show-runners' reconsideration if planning to implement the trope. Read a thesis written about the trope and its consequences here. It's possibly also for this reason that a small British future dystopia series was brought into the spotlight, and won two Emmys in 2017: it deconstructs the hell out of the trope.
Specific variants:
- Indexed sub trope list
As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.
edited 18th Feb '18 3:07:46 AM by lakingsif
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Blapper of Water
Apparently people are adding bombs to the Torturous Gay Afterlife draft because they think it's NSFW. You can't make this shit up, ffs. If you'd like to help out with the draft, please do.
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty
A short post: we’re working on the TLP drafts so that’s all good, feel free to help out. For the main Bury Your Gays Super-Trope, do you all feel like the criteria on this page and the last are suitable, and should we write it up into paragraph rather than list format to add to the page description or do you feel like with a series of well-defined subtropes there is unlikely to be misuse even without an effective checklist?
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Created Tragic AIDS Story and Preserve Your Gays.
Update: and Gayngst-Induced Suicide.
edited 22nd Feb '18 6:34:59 PM by lakingsif
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Do we think that a trope for when gay characters don't necessarily die, but are left more miserable than their straight counterparts, would be valuable?
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I don't know, it seems too subjective. Plus, I can easily see people misusing this trope. For instance, let's say there's a work where a gay character gets rejected romantically. I wouldn't be surprised if some people would list that as an example of this trope.
Well, it wouldn't be that hard to add in the description that it has to be a comparative?
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Captain of USS Bajor
I think ultimately, Bury Your Gays is a Trope in Aggregate: it's a pattern across fiction that you have to step back from and look at multiple works to see (and yes, it's basically the LGBT version of Black Dude Dies First: non-cishet characters are more likely to be badly mistreated, especially killed off or rendered non compos mentis, by narrative forces than cishet ones). It's a documented phenomenon that has actually had professional critics linking to This Very Wiki to explain the term, and I attended a sci-fi convention panel discussing the phenomenon of the "tragic gay" back in January (which coincidentally was less than a week after Star Trek: Discovery killed off the gay chief medical officer Dr. Culber, one episode after also rendering his partner Paul Stamets non compos mentis).
edited 7th Mar '18 4:18:11 PM by StarSword
yes, I agree it has definitely grown with trend — and there are ways of doing it that are executed with specific purpose and/or meaning, hence the subtrope effort. The main page will hopefully be tweaked into more of a description of the simple supertrope and its effect. I've got a draft going for that, I might add an explicit link to Tropes in Aggregate when I go over it again.
I still feel that a gay character being more miserable than their straight counterpart is a bit too subjective to be a trope. Unless there's an extreme disparity in their endings (like if a gay character ends up in prison, while their straight counterpart becomes a CEO of a Fortune 500 company) I see this just resulting in prolonged discussions over which character has it better. Isn't that what we are trying to avoid?
edited 8th Mar '18 9:38:50 AM by SharkToast
I guess it would be better defined, like in an ensemble where the characters are closely linked and tragedy is used to progress the storyline, the tragedy always happens to the gay characters, not the straight ones
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While we're at the subject of it, am I permitted to ask about a particular example here? Sorry if it ends up repeating points mentioned above. In Brokeback Mountain, Jack's death's inclusion in this trope primarily come from Ennis assumption thus everything is ambiguous (but not far-fetched considering the setting). Does that still count or should it be omitted? In general, if the "Homosexuality as death's catalyst" falls under ambiguity, should it be included or not?
bump, and also re. 73 — those are perhaps not completely necessary as reasons why the character being gay has anything to do with them not having a happy ending can often just be because they are gay: at its core Bury Your Gays is a homophobic cliche that, even without meaning or actual homophobia anymore, is still perpetuated in works. Of course, that still isn't just "any gay character dies in a work", and hopefully clearing out misuse will help with works using it as cliche (only gay character or significant in plot - like Willow from Buffy, I guess).
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