Tag: dead lesbian trope

Can you think of any scenario where Lexa could have been killed off and it wouldn’t have been a big deal?

I think there are fans who would say that Lexa *could* be killed off if she were somehow *revived* at a slightly later point (aka Jon Snow).  If it were just some sort of cheat, something to fool others.  I’d add that if they had really invested in the AI storyline, in Lexa’s role in that (if we had discovered she was a cyborg before her death, if we had some knowledge that Lexa’s consciousness would be preserved), if they’d developed a proper virtual world that Lexa could live on in, later to be joined by Clarke (something ,strangely enough, presented in the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror), the pain might have been a little less. It wouldn’t change the reality of the trope, however.  

Remember how girls swooned over Jack’s death in Titanic?  Why didn’t they swoon over Lexa’s, even though her death was very much in that tradition of the noble lover who sacrifices him/herself for his/her beloved?  

In a perfect world, we’d have dozens of lesbian characters to look up to and choose from on the telly.  But we don’t.  Killing Lexa in any fashion you might devise, no matter how thrilling, self-sacrificing, bloody or deserved, still repeats the Dead Lesbian trope.  Within the narrative of the show, Lexa is a betrayer of her people and if she had been a male character, no one would have remarked about her death – it was always going to happen. She was always going to be punished. Within the narrative of the show, everything was designed around her death and the chaos it would bring. She was written no differently than if she had been a male character in that scenario.  We were supposed to hurt because they knew the fans loved her.  They thought the pain would be lovely, because it was *lovely* when Jack died. When these noble male heroes die.  We all swoon and they become legends in their deaths.  

It doesn’t really work that way, of course.  Straight people might like to present themselves that way, might like their heroes that way, but not everyone else cares for it.  Just once, it’d be nice to have our heroes alive and showing the world how it could really be done.  It’d be nice to change the world.

yesbothways:

Straights don’t seem to understand oppression very well.  But they understand the concept of meanness.  They know what is simply mean, and the loving ones hate that stuff when they recognize it.  So here is my flawed but I hope useful analogy for OB regarding Delphine.  The point here is not to make oppression more transparent.  The point is to highlight the meanness here.  

Let’s say I was born into a world where bunnies were raised for food by almost everyone.  Most people had a few warm feelings about bunnies here and there, but that obvious, stark divide between bunnies and people always enabled them to feel fine about the fact that bunnies were really just food for people.  Even when bunnies got a little love, that was more than their right.  And when they died for people’s consumption, that was fine, just the way it is.  

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Very well put here.  

Sadly, I think those entitled persons who have no trouble making fun of us and what we love would just tell us (as some were saying yesterday), to just get over it.  It’s their artistic right to have their fun, their way.  

We’ve developed different values and since their values dominate, we’re the interlopers into their ‘culture.’   It’s kind of horrific.