From Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The 100 and now to the Star Wars universe with Andor, the tragic and frustrating ‘bury your queers’ trope continues to haunt representation on television, turning moments of intimacy and reconciliation into preludes to death.
Noble Sacrifice
When you go in watching a prequel series to a movie where all the main characters die, the basic conceit you prep yourself for is that there will be a lot of death in the show. One of the things I really liked about Rogue One actually was everyone dying. We always joke about how stupid the Stormtroopers are, and how they can’t hit the broad side of a barn with their blaster. They’re so stupid, a rag tag band of criminals, politicians, and religious fanatics are able to take down the Empire.
While the original (and subsequent) trilogies are relatively light hearted, Rogue One was dark and grim, putting faces and feeling to the cost of those plans. We now understand why Princess Leia was so desperate to ensure their efforts were not lost. She felt for those who had died. They weren’t nameless background characters to her, and after that movie, they weren’t to us either.
Even with all that death, we had a feeling of positivity. After all, we know that the Death Star gets destroyed and the Republic is restored (for a while, at least). We know that the good guys are going to win in the end, so the sacrifice made, the lives lost, feel like they have a good purpose. They are, in fact, a noble sacrifice.
The Birth of a Rebellion
In the second season of Andor, one of the plots is what’s happening on Ghorman, a planet known for its spider silk tweed. Let’s put the spiders away. There’s also some Macguffin/Unobtanium (kalkite) that the Empire wants for the Death Star, and since the mining will likely destroy the planet, they decide to mess things up and use the Rebellion to help them make the planet theirs. This results in what is later called the Ghorman Massacre. But that’s not the point of the story I care about.
Cassian comes to Ghorman on behalf of the Rebellion to see if they can help out. He determines that the Ghormans started too late and now are rushing, which is going to cause more pain and suffering. While helping them may help the Rebellion, it will cause the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of Ghormans.
Side note: He’s totally right.
Still the Rebellion decides to send Vel Sartha and Cinta Kaz, a pair of operatives we last saw in season one, to assist the Ghorman Rebellion.
Thus we come to our lesbians.
Ignoble Death
Vel and Cinta had a relationship of sorts back in season one. When we see them again, they’ve been apart for a while but both agreed to join the Ghorman Rebellion because they knew the other would be there. As the two catch up, we learn Cinta was hurt and isn’t yet ready to talk about it. Vel wishes she’d known, and there is clearly still a spark.
This spark is fully rekindled the night before the heist, when they reconnect and have sex.
And then, in the heist, Cinta dies.
But it’s not just that she died shortly after sex, no no. Cinta died because some dumb ass kid, who wasn’t even supposed to have a blaster (gun), was fighting with someone else, and the blaster went off. She died because of a stupid accident.
She died like Tara, shot by a random act, moments after she and Willow reconciled and made love. The purpose? To fuel Willow’s descent into darkness. She died like Lexa died, shot the morning after by a misguided advisor who was actually aiming for Clarke. The purpose? A flimsy excuse to prevent an alliance with Skaikru. And now, Cinta dies at the hands of someone who wasn’t even trying to kill her. The purpose? Seemingly, to teach a random character, whom we will likely never see again, a lesson about the cost of war and the sacrifices of a Rebellion.
Grit Is No Excuse
I’ve said this before, about The Walking Dead back in 2016, but a show being ‘gritty’ and having characters die is no excuse for actively repeating the sins of the past. Tara died in 2002. Lexa in 2015. And here we are, a decade later and Cinta has joined their ranks.
Just because a show is dark doesn’t excuse meaningless death. George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars universe, actually said “the audience should care about [the MacGuffin] almost as much as the dueling heroes and villains on-screen.” He was talking about R2D2, whom frankly I cared about more than Luke as a kid. I will extend that to say that the audience must care about the death of a character as much as they do the MacGuffin.
Andor fails on both parts. The MacGuffin of kalkite should be powerful to us. After all, we know what the Death Star is (ironically its plans are the MacGuffin of Rogue One) and we know how terrifying it is. But any concern over its existence is mitigate to the point of absence because 40+ years ago, we saw A New Hope and we know Luke wins. And Cinta’s death only happened to show a kid the price he’s going to pay forever.
There’s a small part of me that wonders if the real lesson is meant to be the viewers. Are we meant to, in these turbulent times, see the risk and costs of a Rebellion. That even though it must happen, even though it needs to happen for the betterment of the world, we need to know people will die?
If that’s the case, they have a triple fail, because the only people who will care are us: the queers.
For the majority of viewers, Cinta’s death is a minor plot point, the loss of a recurring character in a story ostensibly about Cassian Andor. Other people died, after all. But for us queer viewers, who remain starved for representation and clinging to every glimpse of ourselves on screen, Cinta was ours. She was our Star Wars character that queer children on the jungle gym would pretend to be, like I did Han Solo, shooting the evil Imperial troopers and saving the universe.
And now Cinta is another painful reminder of how rarely our stories are allowed to be fully told.
A Font of Anger
The last time this happened, it was for a beloved show with fantastic (until then) queer representation, that had given us a slow burn romance. Everyone was excited. And then Lexa died, we all stopped talking about The 100, and a convention, ClexaCon, rose from the ashes.
Andor is not a story about lesbians. Hell, they were only in a few episodes. There won’t be an uproar like we had for Buffy either.
Instead what we’re left with is a bitter taste in our mouths. Is that it? Is that all we’re going to get from Star Wars? Is it only background queers (see The Rise of Skywalker), mom-queers (see Skeleton Crew and Young Jedi Adventures), or the random non-binary Jedi (see Young Jedi Adventures) whom we know is getting killed off by Anakin later?
Are we supposed to be happy for this? Are we supposed to say “Hey, but we got some rep!”
When the best thing I can say about the representation is that their sex scene was equitable compared to the heterosexuals’ scenes… What does that even mean? The moms never have any growth, and the young Jedi … well all we really know about them is they like lightsaber combat.
Death of Growth
Now, I personally believe that it’s okay for queers to die on TV, when it’s appropriate and meaningful to the story.
Root’s death on Person of Interest hit me hard, but at the same time she died for a purpose. The Machine loved Root to bits. Root was the Machine’s best friend (or mom or child, depending on how you look at it). When Root died, the Machine took on her voice because of that love. It was the final straw to make the Machine understand the human cost. The Machine understood loss.
Anyone other than Cinta could have died, and the point would be the same. That stupid kid killed a human by accident. Would it not actually be more poignant to have him kill off someone he knows well? To not only have to live with the ghost of the dead around him, but for all his fellows in the Rebellion to see it on him every day? Instead, he killed off a random bossy leader who swooped in to help.
It’s the worst of both the BYQ and Background Queer trope. You could replace Cinta with literally anyone else on the show, and still have the same point.
In the end, Cinta’s death in Andor serves as a stark reminder that even in a galaxy far, far away, the shadow of the “bury your queers” trope still looms large. Her death underscores the disparity between how these deaths are intended and how they are received, and reignites the flame of the urgent need for more nuanced and thoughtful representation of queer characters. True inclusivity requires more than just including queer characters; it demands that their lives be valued, their stories be told, and their futures be imagined with the same care and consideration afforded to their heterosexual counterparts.
Until then, the “bury your gays” trope will continue to haunt us, a constant reminder of the precariousness of our place on screen.
+ “It was the final straw to make the Machine understand the human cost. The Machine understood loss.”
> it would’ve been better if that was the case. iirc tho, she died so that finch can finally change his stance on letting the machine fight back. it was still just the same with buffy. a sapphic’s death is needed as a catalyst for a main character to go 180.
+ bury your queers trope haunting us once again
> it’s weird tho how lexa’s death sparked the “lgbt fans deserve better” movement and for a while, representation did seem to increase with no major deaths. then it turned to cancel-your-gays. and then now in 2024/2025, english shows are going back to bury-your-gays. all while thailand’s gl/sapphic shows’ industry is booming. the reversal is just wild. as a previously baby gay from southeast asia, i had to watch western shows and movies early on because we barely get representation here because of the conservative nature of most asian countries while western countries are more liberal. i never expected to see the day where sapphics still get crumbs and then go back to tragic/cancelled endings from western shows all while thailand has finally realized sapphics’ untapped marketing potential and now has produced so many shows that really just have sapphic romance as its premise. dramas that are no longer just web dramas but now have increasing budgets and are actually aired on national television channels. sure, we might not have gripping narratives like western shows with sapphic characters but as a lesbian who’s really just a fan of the romance genre, thai gl shows was such a big win for me. (shoutout to japan too as there have always been a lot of sapphic content in different media every year but now we’re getting tv shows as well). it’s such a shame that two remaining western shows that i was looking forward to this year (the wheel of time and andor) ended with these deaths.
Just FYI, US went through what Thailand is doing right now in the 1990s and 2000s with “lesbian chic.” It was a response to both the negative stereotyping of gay men during the HIV/AIDS crisis and to the 1970s and 1980s anti-pornography feminists. But it also specifically packaged lesbian representation for heterosexual consumption through a neoliberal marketing model in the mainstream, divorcing it from the activist purposes that it was meant to serve, and ultimately ushering in the rise of American homonationalism (support for white, femme lesbian representation in media and rights-based discourse, while characterizing people of colour in the US and anywhere the US wants to invade as uniquely homophobic).
None of which is to say that Thailand’s manifestation of this will necessarily follow the same trajectory, but be wary of the ways high visibility for a specific kind of queer woman in the mainstream does have ramifications for queer people who don’t live, experience, or express their queerness in the same way. Thailand isn’t white, but that doesn’t mean it lacks the reflex to reinforce narratives that can be oppressive, even when ostensibly providing representation for a group that is, as a whole, underrepresented—in the same way that Western mainstream media does. Mainstream is, after all, mainstream largely *because* it essentializes.
Oh, we’ve been doing “lesbian chic” in the US since the 80s :/ It’s depressing to see it come back.