Why did the Internet loose it’s shit over Lexa?
Honestly I don’t know. I’ve been somewhat involved in the nature of lesbians on TV since Xena, give or take and I’ve never seen anything like this before. All I can assume is that we’ve finally hit critical mass and we’re just not going to take it anymore. In the wake of Lexa’s death, everyone woke the fuck up and realized that, as tongue in cheek as everyone can be, this is getting worse, not better.
This is just a small, small sample of the shit storm that keeps going.
- Elyza Lex™, Riot Grrrl, and Creativity in the Face of Grief: A Fandom Love Letter
- What TV Can Learn From ‘The 100’ Mess
- TV kills another lesbian character: What’s going on?
- Bury Your Gays: Why ‘The 100,’ ‘Walking Dead’ Deaths Are Problematic (Guest Column)
- Queer women have been killed on television for decades. Now The 100’s fans are fighting back.
Someone left a comment on the EW article that struck me:
The 8 LGBT women killed off in 2016 represents roughly 28% of the LGBT women currently on network shows. The equivalent would be if 384 straight characters had been killed off network shows in 2016. If 384 straight characters had been killed off this year so far, wouldn’t you be pissed about it too?
Thats an impressive number and not in the good way…
AutoStraddle made an infographic to explain exactly why this shit is a problem (click to see it bigger and on AutoStraddle):
I feel the need to point out that out of the 18,500 characters on TV, 383 aren’t straight. So the next time someone tells you “Well straights get killed off all the time” feel free to slap them with this. And that’s just shows that aired in the US.
We’re behind on that list of 148 dead lesbians on this site. We’re working at adding them all, but it’s a lot of work. We just got to Leila and Rafaela from Torre de Babel in (1998). I actually pushed to add all the happy lesbian and bisexuals first. We have a massive list of the dead, and of a lot of others to add. We will get through it.
One of the things we want to be able to do is generate stats like that. To that end, we’re organizing out database to include values for ‘main character’ and we should be able to apply that and get some more, pretty, stats for you.
Because representation matters.
