So after what happened with 100, I’ve been seeing posts about the Bury Your Gays trope. It’s a very important conversation to have, and I’ve definitely seen people on my dash talking about how they are just completely done with queer female characters dying in media. I’ve largely missed out on queer representation in media growing up, so I haven’t been overexposed to this trope.
But I have noticed black characters being killed off so much that I’ve been utterly done with the killing off of black characters in media in a similar fashion as I’ve seen people feel about the above trope. Does this have a trope name? And is there a similar list like there is with the bury your gays that I saw on my dash recently? I’ve been actually trying to find one to fully articulate how I’ve been feeling about that, but it definitely doesn’t feel like my place to make such a list… not to mention how large a task it is.
Well I’m white in a country that’s 99,9% white but even before the internet we used to call it ‘Black Guy Dies First’ because that was what happened in all the US movies that were ‘progressive’ (for the day, sadly they were, media moves so fucking slow) for including a black character in the main cast at all. Black guys were the obvious Redshirts.
Maybe try that on TV Tropes?
It’s The Black Dude Dies First trope, of which The 100 is also guilty and handled the aftermatch of it REALLY poorly as well. Clarke doesn’t even mourn him the next episode, we see her burying somebody and at first I was confused whether they would play the death of her BEST FRIEND that cheaply so at first I assumed it was the grave of the nameless kids who died during the impact on earth on which she placed the flowers on. But no. It was not. They literally killed off Wells in under 30 seconds.
The deaths in this series are so badly written. The suicide of that girl kid who killed Welles was also poorly played, simply to dodge the complicated moral dilemma of whether/how to punish a traumatized child murderer. Is there a name for that trope, too?
God damn. Yeah, i stopped watching 100 at that episode. I was worried for Wells almost immediately (tweeted something about how he better not die Ep 1) and was so mad that they finally establish Clarke finding out what he did for her, and he immediately dies just after that resolution and that he died at all and the way he died was fucking gross, and I felt sick to my stomach and nauseous watching it.
I always wanted to get back to it, because I knew it had queer representation. But I was so done with the killing off of black characters, and now I’m glad I stopped and never got back around to it. I would have stopped again anyway if I saw Clark nonchalantly burying the character who allowed her to believe he got her father killed so she wouldn’t hate her mother and committed a crime for her so he could be where she was just to look out for her after her father’s death. What the actual fuck!!! That’s infuriating.
Thoughtfulfangirling 