Should Bury Your Gays exist?

My point is that saying "It is rarely used straight now, in the media and works that most contributors are familiar with, therefore it isn't a trope" is Demographic Myopia  ^*

. Most tropers are young, and have at best a limited exposure to the media of 35 or 40 or 50 years ago. Most tropers are into gaming, comics, Science Fiction, fantasy, anime, and a (relatively) very few tv shows.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

We should maybe put up a note on the page saying it's mostly discredited now so think REAL hard about adding an example in the last ten years?

One of the biggest problems I see with a lot of tropes, in fact, is people not understanding that half the trope is "What does the use of X mean", not just "was X used". "Someone dies and is gay" is different than "The gay character died to bring home the moral that the gay lifestyle ends in tragedy for all"

edited 10th May '10 12:15:56 AM by Yamikuronue

BTW, I'm a chick.

I wouldn't go so far as to say it's discredited yet. Look at the recent examples. There are quite a few of them that do fit the definition. It's just not quite as common as it once was, and there are some media where it it is even more uncommon. But discredited means it virtually never shows up played straight anymore. It's far from there yet.

It's a very uncomfortable trope to acknowledge, but it is still a trope, and it's still being used. Writers are simply being (very subtly) more subtle than they were 40 years ago.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

This debate reminds me of a recent one we had about Black Dude Dies First, which is much the same really. It's discredited now, but the word now does not mean always, and it definitely did use to be played straight.

Would you kill your best friend, can you save yourself?

Incidentally, I'm kind of skeptical that Red from The Shawshank Redemption actually is a Magical Negro and think that it's kind of exaggerated to see Morgan Freeman as always in this role.

They guy accidentally-on-purpose killed his entire family for one thing (Red, not Freeman) which I think puts him out of the running, Sympathetic Murderer or not, and in a lot of ways, Andy is an inspirational figure to him as well as vice versa.

Hodor

Magical Negro is defined by his/her relationship to the protagonist and sympathetic portrayal as a character. Whether you think he deserves to be viewed sympathetically is a completely different question,and has no bearing on whether (s)hes a Magical Negro or nor.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Oh, I think he's definitely a sympathetic character, but (in my opinion at least) Magical Negro has a Too Good for This Sinful Earth element- they are morally better than the white character- Red lacks this aspect.

And more importantly, the white character helps him to a roughly equal degree has he helps the white character.

Hodor

A Magical Negro doesn't have to be "morally better", though, They simply have to "step ... into the life of the central character (often white, American and racist) and, in some way, enrich the central character's life."

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

The "Bury Your Gays" page specifically says that it's not for every instance in which a queer character dies, but rather, it's for works where a character is killed for being gay, or where gays are more likely to die than straights.

If tropers are applying it to every single instance of a queer character dying - even when it's, say, a 100-year-old gay man dying of natural causes in the arms of his longtime lover after a lifetime of shared happiness - then the problem is that people are applying the trope way too broadly. Not that the trope doesn't exist.

Anyway...I'd argue that it's almost irrelevant whether the creator is queer, or whether there was homophobic intent on the creator's part. As the trope page says, sometimes an author will make a point of killing off queer characters because they think it makes them seem more sympathetic. Or because they want to highlight how much anti-gay violence is out there. But killing off queer characters that you wouldn't have killed off if they were straight counts as an example of this trope, even if the intentions are good.

The biggest problem is still that it can happen by chance, but most of the time that it happens by chance there's no way to prove that. And it's usually possible to come up with some plausible sounding theory as to how the character's death is connected with being gay. It may not be true, but you can't disprove it. (Someone actually put Ianto from Torchwood on there, on the grounds that since his gayness was emphasized before his death more than it was earlier, he was obviously killed for being gay. It's absurd—but you can't actually demonstrate it to be wrong.)

Now, if you want to limit it to cases where there is proven Word of God, where the work was written during the Hays Code, or something else which gives you more reason to believe it than just that there's a gay character who died, fine. Good luck getting the editors to cooperate.

And the same goes for any "stereotype which also appears by chance" trope.

of course there is no way to prove that sexuality has anything to do with a character's death, but that's the point of looking for patterns. Either way, this is a trope that's mostly done for drama or tragedy, so if the death is supposed to be tragic or dramatic, you can be pretty sure that it's a case of this trope.

Isn't a character dying pretty much always done for drama or tragedy? I don't really see how that's a useful distinction.

^Agreed.

But that's where the pattern comes in, isn't it? Just as we can't judge every case where a woman gets lower paycheck than a man as discrimination or not, this is something that we can tell from quantity, not quality.

But I do get a feeling sometimes that gay characters are treated as inherently more dramatical in pop culture. Say we have someone die, that's tragic. If that character is gay, that somehow makes it even more tragic, since the viewer is supposed to have their sexuality and the hardships that comes with it in the back of their head while watching it. I can't explain it clearer than that; we may think of oursemves as progressive, but the connotations of a certain minority still shapes the characters belonging to it.

There are tons of tropes out there that are impossible to prove conclusively. I don't see any way to prove that a character is a Mary Sue unless the author admits, "Yeah, that character is an idealized version of me, so I didn't give her any real flaws, and I put way too much emphasis on her."

If someone puts an example on the Bury Your Queers page, hopefully they'll give a decent reason for choosing that example. If they have nothing to back it up, then the rest of us are free to question it. I still don't see anything uniquely problematic with this trope that merits its elimination.

this is something that we can tell from quantity, not quality.

No, it's not, because you can only tell from quantity if most of the examples are real. If most of the examples are real, any particular example is probably real (even if you can't prove or disprove it). If most of the examples aren't real, then any particular example probably isn't.

And the proportion of examples that are real changes. Often drastically.

I would guess that most examples that happen after 1990 or so aren't real. The same goes for Magical Negro, Dragon Lady, and the other race and stereotype related tropes, perhaps with different cutoff dates. Rita Repulsa is not a Dragon Lady, and Ianto in Torchwood is not Bury Your Gays, and adding an example to any of these should require more than the equivalent of "they're gay, and they're dead, so it counts".

You know, people can still do stereotypical or offensive things, even if they don't mean to.

It's just in modern show, they're more likely to be result of ignorance or lack of forethought, as opposed to active bigotry.

It's a more subtle form of Values Dissonance.

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^This. (Another reason may be that they're thoughtlessly using old tropes, without thinking that they may be offensive to the groups in question.)

I'm fairly sure the Magical Negro is alive and well, for one.

You really have only a few choices:

1. Decide that every dead gay character (including Ianto) is Bury Your Gays, with no proof required. And every magical black character is a Magical Negro, and every Asian domineering female villain is a Dragon Lady.
2. Demand some plausible explanation of why the example belongs. This is what we have now. It sounds good but it utterly fails to be, in practice, any different from #1.
3. Demand some stronger proof than that—either Word of God, or behind the scenes info, or that the series was created back when the stereotypes were more common.

Saying "it's okay to include the example if they're thoughtlessly using old tropes" is still basically identical to #1. Any example can be described as thoughtlessly using old tropes.

edited 24th May '10 11:43:15 AM by arromdee

#2 is the standard that's used across the wiki. If no reason is given why something is an example, and an editor disagrees that it's really an example, all (s)he has to do is delete it and put the reason in the edit reason box. A trope doesn't cease to be a trope just because it was used accidentally.

edited 24th May '10 11:42:31 AM by Madrugada

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

A trope doesn't cease to be a trope just because it was used accidentally.

If the trope was "gay person dies", then yeah, it could be used accidentally. But the trope is not that. The trope is really about a trend—more gays dying than you'd expect. A single example is only an example if it's part of the trend. An example that was used accidentally is not part of the trend, so there should be no such thing as an accidental example.

No, it is not about "more gays dying that you'd expect". It is about gayness and being killed being linked in the work. It's not as simple as a ratio of Gay characters dying to Straight characters dying.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

For almost every gay character who dies, no matter where and how, there will be a loud contingent of fans and/or critics who think their death had to do with their gayness. It's the way fans and critics are.

How do you prevent every gay character who dies from being added? Your best suggestion is to delete the example but that isn't a permanent solution; the example would just get added again.

^The exact same way that we deal with other bad examples: Edit them out and leave a reason. That's the way a wiki works.

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

THIS.

Heaven doesn't want me, and Hell's afraid I'll take over.