st_aurafina | (Reply)

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I wish there was more room in fandom to say, "Narratively, this makes sense and it works for the character, but on a meta level, it participates in and contributes to a huge problem of representation." You can have a well-written, meaningful character death that is still Kill Your Gays or some other awful trope as well. But what I keep seeing is fannish polarization, with people either absolutely defending the creators' choice and saying it makes no difference that the character was queer/a woman/a person of color (suuuuuuuure it doesn't) or else shouting "THE SHOWRUNNERS HATE LESBIANS/GAYS/WOMEN/PEOPLE OF COLOR AND ANYONE WHO DISAGREES IS A BAD PERSON" at the top of their voices.

Sometimes the outrage is fully justified--everything I hear about The 100 and the lesbian being killed by a stray bullet as soon as she starts a relationship makes me furious--but sometimes things are mixed. And I think it would be helpful to be able to have a conversation about good narratives that are bad representation, and what we can do, and how we can critize them effectively.

(ETA: I haven't seen season 5 of POI or The 100, so I'm judging based on people's descriptions of what happened.)