Uprising Against Tragic Queers

CN: Death of fictional queer characters, queerness as tragic storyline in fictional stories. Mentions but not really spoilers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens and for Battlestar Galactica. Links include extensive spoilers Star Wars and many TV shows.

Several great posts lately have appeared on my social media feeds in rebellion against tropes in media (movies and TV mostly) about tragedy and queer life. I want to highlight these, largely because I’m also annoyed with the idea that queer life has to be tragic to be interesting or identifiable to audiences.

Do Not Make Luke Skywalker Another Tragic Gay Character – This article is amazing. Honestly, I would rather no queer characters exist in the Star Wars universe than for this to be the storyline, for EXACTLY the reasons Emily Asher-Perrin points out here. I’m a diehard Stormpilot shipper (one who believes that Finn and Poe are completely adorable and should do it a lot) but I’m open to other characters being queer in Star Wars. I just cannot stomach queerness being a tragedy again. Luke is tragic enough, don’t make my sexuality a part of that. Asher-Perrin concludes that if only one character should be gay it should be Poe and she has me utterly convinced. I recommend the whole article.

All 142 Dead Lesbian and Bisexual Characters On TV and How They Died – TV really loves to kill of lesbian and bisexual women. Like REALLY loves it. Want a good tragic story? Kill off a queer woman! Several of these are from series I adore (Battlestar Galactica has several) and I’m still mad as hell. Can’t we have some awesome lesbians that get to live through the end of a series please? I don’t mean one or two – I mean a percentage similar to the number of straight people that get to live through the end of series.

Queerness doesn’t need to be tragic. Much of the time these days it isn’t. I look forward to media figuring that out.

Uprising Against Tragic Queers
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