Warble

It literally doesn’t matter if ilia is sympathetic or redeemable material right now (which she is but I digress). This isn’t even necessarily about her as an individual character. It’s about the fact that the first main character that RT decided to reveal as LGBT is a direct antagonistic force to our heroes. It is neither new nor interesting to make antagonists non-straight. Think about the sheer amount of villains in all kinds of media who are queercoded in some fashion. It’s a powerful holdover from old censorship laws that forced any depiction of gayness to have implications of immorality so that the gay lifestyle was explicitly seen as condemnable, tragic (such in the case of Bury Your Gays which often goes hand in hand with this), and deviant. There is also the longrunning trope of lesbians enacting horrible things upon their poor straight love interests. Whether ilia is doing these things to blake because of her feelings or not is completely irrelevant. Because of the sordid history of how media portrays gay women, the unfortunate implications run deep.

If heroic characters had been revealed to be LGBT before ilia was, her revelation would have been less of a problem, because we would have some indisputable good guys to be LGBT rep. LGBT characters are so rarely portrayed as undeniably kind and heroic and just and good because of the longstanding media association of gayness with deviancy, immorality, selfishness, and tragedy. RT revealing ilia as gay does not break from this trend in the slightest, whether ilia is redeemable or not, whether they are aware of this history or not.