Apr 11
Killing Eve(n When You Should Know Better): The Persistence of Bury Your Gays
Here we are. It’s 2022 and I’m writing about this. Who would’ve thought? Not me! But alas, we have experienced another tired instance of Bury Your Gays, and thus, I must speak.
For the unfamiliar, “Bury Your Gays” is the catch-all name for a media trope where queer characters, very frequently queer women, are unceremoniously killed off in fiction. TVTropes.org classifies Bury Your Gays as “the presentation of deaths of LGBT characters where these characters are nominally able to be viewed as more expendable than their heterosexual counterparts […] In aggregate, queer characters are more likely to die than straight characters.” Also sometimes referred to in specific instances as “Dead Lesbian Syndrome,” these deaths are often sudden, played for shock value, and cruelly come after a happy relationship milestone. Add on the fact that just a fraction of major media characters are written in text as LGBT-identifying, and you’re starting to get a basic idea of why there may be a problem with these disproportionate deaths.
Queer audiences have a tendency to create the most passionate, dedicated fanbases in any form of popular media. Bigger than just “shipping,” these communities come together out of a shared need for authentic representation. They seek out tentpole fictional characters and relationships that reflect fractions of themselves, be that in who they are, the way they love, or the unique struggles they face. People who live on opposite ends of the world, come from different backgrounds, and speak different languages can find a common connection point in something that gives them hope and normalizes their existence. This hope and normalization can often be especially important to younger fans and fans of any age who may just be coming into their queer identity themselves. It serves as a comfort, a joy, an acknowledgement that their stories are important and deserve to be told (something becoming increasingly more urgent in the current political climate).
What message does it send when that representation is constantly catching bullets? That queer people shouldn’t wish for a happy ending? That the price they pay for living and loving authentically is death, nearly every time?
Sunday brought the finale episode of the hit series Killing Eve, and with it came the death of fan-favorite queer character Villanelle, played by Jodie Comer. Based on a series of English novels, the show was built around the cat-and-mouse relationship between Comer’s Russian assassin and MI5 agent Eve Polastri (Sandra Oh), which often danced along (and at times blatantly crossed) the line between adversaries and lovers. This past weekend’s conclusion found the two finally “getting together,” kissing passionately as they set out to complete their final mission…immediately followed by a sniper shooting Villanelle in Eve’s arms and a mic-drop “The End” title card.
I’m not entirely sure what response the show’s writers were expecting, or what the thought process was that led to this ending. Executive Producer Sally Woodward Gentle called the finale “operatic,” but if anything actually has been, it’s the backlash.
“there is something so horrendously vile about watching a character you relate to so much get only about 5 minutes of happiness before she’s shot dead and bleeding out in front of your eyes. i thought killing eve was better than this, i felt SAFE,” one fan tweeted.
“killing eve really just pulled the fastest bury your gays speedrun ever mfers had 5 minutes after their first kiss until one of them was killed off,” said another.
When I logged on to Twitter after the finale had aired (I am not a current Killing Eve viewer myself; I dropped off after season 2), the first thing I found myself faced with on my timeline was a thread of tweets from one audience member that started out excitedly celebrating the “Villaneve” kiss, but by the final tweet was cursing the show for “baiting them into thinking they would be happy.” The tweets were timestamped about an hour earlier, yet for a moment I swore I was looking at my own posts from six years ago.
The spring of 2016 sticks out in the mind of any television writer or queer fan because of one name: Lexa. In its own Bury Your Gays blaze of glory, popular CW show The 100 gained infamy by writing a death-by-stray-bullet ending for their own fan-favorite character in their third season’s seventh episode, just one scene after she’d consummated her relationship with series lead Clarke Griffin and after weeks of buildup and promotion directed primarily at their queer audience.
The response was immense, with heartbroken fans rallying together in order to both protest the show and to support one another in an instance of hurt. Numerous worldwide Twitter trends were organized, over $175,000 was raised for The Trevor Project, businesses such as Target were persuaded to stop running advertisements during the show, and billboard space was even purchased around Los Angeles to raise awareness of the harmful trope. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, LGBT Fans Deserve Better, was founded in order to advocate for better queer media representation. Industry-wide conversations were held about balancing storytelling vs. doing right by LGBT fans, and how much influence the media we consume truly has on mental health and perception of minorities in reality. The issue was forced into a harsher light as the television season continued and more queer characters fell victim to the trope (now nicknamed “Code 307” by Lexa fans) in quick succession, on shows like The Vampire Diaries, Orange is the New Black, and Person of Interest.
(You can read more about Lexa and the 2016 television season here, here, and here.)
Undeniably, there was a pattern. One that hadn’t even started with The 100; some would argue that the modern age of the trope began with Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s killing of Tara Maclay, also by stray bullet. And even before that, there had been a long history of queer characters being killed off in fiction because giving them a happy ending would be seen as “promoting” the taboo of homosexuality.
With national attention on the Bury Your Gays trope and so much retribution coming down on the entertainment industry, you would think the importance had been taken to heart. There would be change, no doubt.
Yet, I am faced with devastation from my community again all these years later. A queer character, a tender moment, a bullet. And it’s like no time has passed, no lessons learned. We were heard, but not listened to.
Comparisons to 2016 have been inevitable, with one fan tweeting shortly after the Killing Eve finale had aired: “just saw one of you fuckers use the names villanelle and lexa in the same fucking sentence and it better not mean what i fucking think it means”
Another lamented, “No, you’re not different #killingeve, you’re exactly the same as the 100 and every other show that went with this awful trope. giving villanelle a few minutes of happiness and then kill her? Fuck this.”
Javier Grillo-Marxuach, who holds a writing credit on the episode of The 100 in which Lexa was killed (and who is a wonderful man, adamant about owning his part in the matter and listening to/learning about the concerns of queer viewers), added his two cents on the Villanelle outcry as well: “ATTENTION SHOWRUNNERS: BEFORE MAKING THIS NARRATIVE CHOICE, PLEASE CALL ME. I CAN EXPLAIN FROM EXPERIENCE. IF YOU CAN’T HIRE/LISTEN TO LGBTQIA+ WRITERS, THEN MAYBE I CAN BREAK IT DOWN FOR YOU.”
There are a few things that stand out to me, though, that separate Villanelle’s death from Lexa’s and make it an interesting (in the worst way) instance of Bury Your Gays.
For one, the book series that serves as the basis for Killing Eve involves a staged death instead of a real one, after which Eve and Villanelle do end the story both alive and in a relationship. I understand the show deviated immensely from the source material, but it isn’t at all lost on me that a happy ending was not only possible for these characters, but was written and published as canon for their original versions, and the Killing Eve adaptation went out of its way to make sure that ending did not come to fruition. They stared a canon happy ending in the face and actively decided they wanted to go in the direction of Bury Your Gays instead.
Unlike the departure of Alycia Debnam-Carey’s Lexa on The 100, Villanelle’s death was not prompted by an actor’s scheduling conflict or burgeoning career that would call for the departure of the character. This was the ultimate finale of the story, the last episode; there would be no lengthier commitment were the character to stay alive, nothing a death like this would serve an outside purpose for. It was executed simply because it was seen as the best story option, and that is a complete and utter failure on the part of those in power to understand the painful history Killing Eve is now a part of. After Lexa’s death, The 100 showrunner Jason Rothenberg was quoted in an interview as saying “I don’t even want to talk about the trope that’s out there about LGBT characters; that is not something that factored into the decision.” There’s both an ignorance and an arrogance involved in believing that your work is exempt from a greater social context, and I believe Killing Eve leans even further into that faux pas as a BYG in a post-BYG world.
What’s especially unique about Killing Eve’s situation, though, is the fact that Villanelle is portrayed throughout most of the show as a villain. And a good one, at that; the character is so well written and highly praised that many fans claim the show subverted another harmful trope of LGBT characters always being painted as devious “bad guys.” Much of her storyline has been the push-and-pull of redemption, of growth, of backsliding on that progress in a battle with yourself and having to start again. She is a complex individual who struggles to find love with Eve despite being deprived of it for most of her life.
When you present a queer character like this, and at the end of the series instill the idea that all that work and suffering has no payoff other than dying in your partner’s arms, that death is still the bleak fate befitting of Villanelle after her redemption arc, that Eve (who’s gone through many of her own intense battles in pursuit of this relationship) is meant to end the story screaming in agony, alone, watching her dead gay lover’s corpse float away after an out-of-nowhere sniper attack…yeah, I’ll let you figure out how that affects the queer psyche.
The viewers seem to say just as much:
So, how do we combat this trope and protect vulnerable queer audiences just searching for themselves, while also respecting the integrity of creativity? Am I saying you can never kill an LGBT character, lest the wrath of your audience bring dishonor on you, your family, and your cow?
No! Surprisingly, I’m not saying that at all. It is possible to write the death of a queer character that is necessary to the story without playing into Bury Your Gays. But it takes a lot of care, and focus on intent, outcome, and respect. That is where the line is drawn. It’s my personal belief that writers and producers who scoff at issues like this trope and say that discarding it impedes on their storytelling abilities simply do not want to take the time to learn the distinction.
My favorite television series of all time is The Haunting anthology, consisting of 2018’s The Haunting of Hill House and 2020’s The Haunting of Bly Manor. I cannot possibly sing enough praises about Mike Flanagan and his work — his projects are consistently masterpieces that explore the beauty and tragedy of life, death, love, guilt, and our complicated human existence. What he also pulls off — and these are spoilers if you haven’t finished Bly Manor, reader beware — is the ultimate demise of Dani Clayton, a lesbian au pair and lead of The Haunting’s second installment.
Dani’s death in the series is not immediate, shocking, or unexpected, to start off. It’s stated plainly in the top half of Bly Manor’s finale: Dani is living on borrowed time, doomed to eventually be consumed by the vengeful spirit she’s welcomed inside of her in order to save the children she cares for. She’s hesitant to proceed in a relationship with her partner, Jamie; she doesn’t want to hope for a happy life together when she knows it’s meant to end. They take it one day at a time, at first expecting each day to possibly be their last together. But as the show itself narrates, “the days turned to months, the months to more […] a year had passed, a trip around the sun, and she was still here […] One year became two. And from two, it spread into an endless time, or so it seemed. Three, four, five years would pass, and there was peace…” The two lovers are granted several more years together, and the audience is able to watch Dani and Jamie live out a loving, healthy relationship where the milestones come without death: moving into their first home, opening a flower shop together, a proposal and civil union.
When Dani does die, it’s not without agency. Her original sacrifice, and later her death, are choices made by her that do complement the completed arc of her character and of the show itself, rather than destroying it. Without turning this essay into a full-on recap and fanfest, I will say that Bly Manor does not communicate to its queer audience that their love will be punished by death. Rather, its underlying message is that there is beauty in mortality, that you should choose love every single day even if everything is meant to end, and that “to truly love another person is to accept the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.” The final frame of the series shows what is presumably Dani’s hand resting on an older Jamie’s shoulder, leaving the audience with the notion that she has been watching over Jamie in the years since her death and their love has never died, even if Dani has left the physical plane. The show’s tagline is “Dead doesn’t mean gone,” after all.
(It’s also very worth mentioning that neither of the secondary heterosexual relationships in the show receive even remotely “happy” endings, with Dani and Jamie experiencing a comparably better conclusion.)
I often jokingly refer to Bly Manor as the “lesbian Titanic,” because to me, that’s what it is. It’s a beautiful, tragic love story, and there is no tale I love more than an angsty tragedy that means something. Straight media is chock full of it, and it’s wholly possible for it to be well-done with queer characters as well if that’s the story you want to tell, but you need to put the work in to tell it correctly from the get-go instead of playing into lazy tropes and calling it “groundbreaking.”
But that’s just one example. And most cishet showrunners, as we’ve seen, are not Mike Flanagan and will fumble queer characters more often than not. Where do we go from there?
There’s only one clear path for us to start repairing the way we are represented and to squash Bury Your Gays: we need to push for more LGBT people in charge.
I’m not just talking about queer staff writers (I love you, queer staff writers). There were queer people in the writers’ room when The 100’s third season was written, and there were queer people in the writers’ room for Killing Eve’s fourth. While having a voice in these rooms is an important step, and these people do the work to advocate for our stories, ultimately storylines and character arcs are always under the jurisdiction of the showrunners, executive producers, and higher ups. What they say goes, and that can mean overruling the vocal concerns of a queer staffer who can see the writing on the wall.
It isn’t enough to just be in the room anymore. We need to be giving LGBT people their own rooms, queer women and trans/non-binary folks in particular, where they can spearhead these plotlines and be in control of the narrative. The only way through this is to uplift the voices of our own people and demand that they’re given a chance to tell stories that only they can do justice.
Until that day comes, all we can do is be loud, be proactive, and take care of each other.
I was still a teenager when Lexa died, and I can remember so vividly what it felt like to cry myself to sleep that night over a grief most people couldn’t understand. It breaks my heart now, a few years into my 20s, to watch people who are that same age cry over what may very well be their Lexa. In 2016, getting up every day brought dread over politics and uncertainty that was compounded by the betrayal of the one form of comfort I held dear. In 2022, for this audience, it seems things are no better.
But we didn’t take it lying down then, and we won’t take it lying down now. Our LGBT family is tired but still strong in the face of Bury Your Gays, and we can, and will, demand what we deserve: better.
UPDATE 04/22/22: Luke Jennings, author of the aforementioned book trilogy that Killing Eve draws inspiration from, has spoken on the finale. He condemns the Bury Your Gays trope, and similarly likens Villanelle’s death to Lexa’s. You can read his statement here.
