Bury Your Gays: Controversy on The 100

***Warning: This article contains spoilers***

A death on The 100 has fans in an uproar.

Reactions range from mild disappointment:

To indignation:

To calls for meaningful action:

To understand the outrage it’s important to understand the background of the show. The 100 is a fan favorite on The CW, and it’s a standard show for a network that targets teenagers and young adults. It follows a group of teenagers sent back to Earth from their space station to test whether the planet is habitable again, years after a nuclear apocalypse. Creators of culture inherently accept a level of responsibility for shaping their audience’s world views. When a creator provides characters with whom teenagers identify, especially teenagers who belong to a demographic that’s 4 times more likely to commit suicide, that level of responsibility increases exponentially.

What makes —what made this show stand out was its take on sexuality. Protagonist Clarke is portrayed as your usual post-apocalyptic hero. She makes the tough decisions and she falls into the leadership role easily. She’s smart, she’s a survivor, and she happens to be bisexual. Clarke has male romantic partners and female romantic partners, and it’s portrayed in the manner it should be: it’s normal. It is not something that has to be angsty when people discover it. The same importance is placed on all of her romantic interests as those of her straight counterparts.

In a quick moment, Clarke’s female romantic partner is killed by a stray bullet that was meant for Clarke. It’s a tragic death that leads to emotional moments for the protagonist. It is also a throw-away death for a strong queer female character and it happened almost immediately after she and Clarke have sex for the first, and only, time. The message this sends? “If you’re queer and sexual, there needs to be tragic repercussions.”

“Bury Your Gays,” is a trope in which gay characters’ arcs chronically have unhappy endings. According to TV Tropes:

[G]ay characters just aren’t allowed happy endings. Even if they do end up having some kind of relationship, at least one half of the couple, often the one who was more aggressive in pursuing a relationship, thus “perverting” the other one, has to die at the end… This trope can also be seen as a head-on collision between “Sex Is Evil” and “All Gays Are Promiscuous.”

Death isn’t the entire problem, however. Conflict is essential for plot development. Death is a huge conflict creator and in most cases creates enough drama to keep things from becoming stale. Straight characters, especially on The 100, die constantly to reinforce that there are high stakes and their new world is harsh and cruel.

The biggest problem is lack of representation. When heterosexual characters become victims of the writers’ pen of death, there are always plenty of other straight characters for viewers to see themselves in. For queer viewers, “Bury Your Gays” often leads to a complete lack of representation.

According to GLAAD’s 2015 report, only 4% of the current recurring characters on television identify openly as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. The recent Yougov Sexuality Survey shows 31% of people under the age of 30, The CW’s target audience, identify as queer. Using these statistics, queer people are significantly underrepresented in popular shows, and disproportionately given tragic story lines.

This isn’t a problem that’s exclusive to The 100.

Two other shows on The CW, Arrow and Supernatural, are equally guilty of this trope. Arrow killed a popular character, Sara Lance, who was a vigilante known as The Black Canary. This advanced her straight sister Laurel’s story, and Laurel picked up her mantel as The Black Canary. This plot development was eventually reversed when Sara was brought back to life, but she never regained her Black Canary status and was quickly shipped off to another show with a new identity and a lot of angst.

Supernatural featured a gay character named Corbett in Episode 3.13, “Ghostfacers.” Corbett is an intern for an incompetent group of ghost hunters. He is the first (and only) one from their group who is killed. The other characters use his death as inspiration to survive, but it doesn’t make Corbett any less dead. The other Ghostfacers show up in several more episodes until they eventually give up their attempt at fame and ride off into the figurative sunset, alive and well.

Later in the series, Supernatural uses the trope again when Charlie Bradbury, a plucky fan-favorite who happens to be a lesbian portrayed by Felicia Day, is brutally murdered. Charlie’s death is especially problematic because of the circumstances surrounding it; it was lazy writing and a huge character personality shift just to get Charlie into a vulnerable situation. Usually a logical and intelligent character, Charlie seeks seclusion at a motel because one of her companions was being annoying even though she knows she is being hunted and she knows she is not safe alone. The writers created an excuse for her to die, reducing her to a plot element, rather than a character.

Pretty Little Liars, which airs on Freeform (formerly ABC Family), is also widely popular with younger audiences, and has killed two lesbian characters for the sake of dramatic effect. This is made even more problematic by the fact that they were both queer black women in a sea of white faces. Emily, one of the main five protagonists, is the only protagonist who is gay, and she is also the only one whose romantic interest has died.

Torchwood (BBC) and American Horror Story (FX) are praised for their plethora of queer characters. They also fell into this trope. At the end of Torchwood, the only mortal character left alive is also the only straight character in the cast. American Horror Story murders a character during its Hotel arc right after he admits to himself out loud that he’s in love with another queer character.

Anyone with any creative control and a literary background has a responsibility to the audience they are so carefully trying to reach. This simple fact alone cannot (sic) only distinguish a well written show, but, it also serves to reinforce the positive aspects of the minority it has CHOSEN to depict with a chance to break barriers the LGBTQ community would not otherwise be given. — Leskru (The united clan of LGBTQ/supporters/allies named in true Grounder honor)

We owe our youth stories that are representative and not just tragic. Media is reflective of our society, and it’s time that we stop making the queer community a prop in a straight person’s story arc.