Hello again! Another busy month is in the books. The best news for the month was that this new thing called The Lexa Pledge was introduced, and showrunners have been signing it, promising to treat LGBTQ+ characters with more respect and awareness of the world. More on that in a bit.
Meanwhile, we’ve added a lot of new shows and characters, and while some of their data pages need more information, getting as much data out there is important.
- New Shows: 113
- New Characters: 263
And that includes all the dead lesbians and bisexuals from Autostraddle, shows from Wikipedia’s list of American TV shows with LGBT themes from Pre-Stonewall, the 1970s, and the 1980s.
All The Dead
Yep, we got everyone from Autostraddle’s list added, and then a few more. There was a lot of reading of the lists from shows like Prisoner: Cell Block H to get the most accurate list. I think we’ve read more about shows from random wikia links than anyone has a right to.
We left Lucy (from Dracula) off the list since she’s not ‘dead’ but turned into a vampire. If she’d been dusted, she’d be dead, but ‘turned into the undead’ is different.
Our statistics on death have been expanded to list out shows where no one died and shows where all the queers are dead. We felt those were valid data points people might want in a handier list.
By the way. Can you believe the CW killed off more lesbians? There were two who died on the 31st of March, right after we published our roundup.
Nora and Mary Louise, The Vampire Diaries
Cause of Death: Suicide. They destroyed a magic sword together to prevent Nora from being forever trapped in it, knowing that destroying the sword would kill them both. They chose death rather than having to be apart with Nora trapped in the sword.
Credit: Autostraddle
Not long after, two more lesbians died in a ‘murder/suicide’ that was a lot messier than all that, over on Empire. And then? Saints & Sinners killed a bisexual regular, while The Catch introduced one, only to kill her off.
The Catch happens to be one of the shows that signed the Lexa pledge… and killed off their bisexual soon after. Sherry White, who signed the pledge, later explained she’d signed it because she realized that she had propagated the trope, and wanted to publicly acknowledge she could, and would, do better going forward.
Back to the Past
We’ve started working through lists on Wikipedia of ‘Special Gay Episodes’ which has allowed us to add shows like The Jeffersons and Kate Loves a Mystery. This means our numbers of death are very different from Autostraddle, who specifically did not add one-episode guest stars, unless they were of a notable significance.
Most of these shows are not worth watching unless you’re into it for historical reasons. For example, Police Woman is so not worth it even though their lesbian episode was groundbreaking in that protesters managed to get it never re-aired. On the other hand, All in the Family is totally worth your time, not just for the “Cousin Liz” episode, but for how it consistently changed people’s views.
Accessibility
We also spent a couple days using WAVE to make the site more accessible to screen-readers. This mostly involved making all our icons properly render text for screen-readers. Everyone should be able to enjoy this site.
New Features
Besides making the site more friendly, we’ve added in a couple new features you may like:
- Show listing includes icons for clichés (with text hover tips if you don’t know a skull means dead) and thumbs up/down/meh.
- Individual show pages and character pages include date of character death (if applicable).
- Shows with gold or silver stars mark that in all locations.
- You can also see a list of all gold star or silver star shows.
- Want to see a list of all shows with thumbs up or thumbs down? You can!
- The page for statistics on shows has begun.
- You can now see lists of most recently added shows or characters.
- You can check out all Regular, Recurring, or Guest characters.
- Trigger Warnings are flagged on Jessica Jones (and a couple other shows) that touch on some heavy topics.
Suggestions? Still Welcome!
Is there anything we’re missing that you think the site needs? New ways to sort characters and/or shows? Some big time items missing entirely?
We did have a suggestion to list deaths by ‘value’ — that is to say, was a character killed for manpain or was it a hero’s death? The problem, as we talked it out, was that Xena was a stupid death and a hero death and the call was just too subjective. We’re already subjective about if a show is worth it.
