#code307

Another year of missing Lexa goes by and while I’ve taken my pain and sadness and channelled it into good work, I still wish she was alive (and being written by Javi or Emily Andras. ;)). The surge of pure joy and raw completeness I felt watching her on the show has changed me forever. I gained an awareness and confidence two years ago today that I hadn’t known I was lacking.

“Why her?” It’s the question everyone in the Clexa fandom has gotten at least once, I imagine, and everyone’s answers are different. For me, it was because she was the perfect embodiment of what I’d like to see myself as: a strong, protective leader, devoted partner, and a flawed, vulnerable, and adorable human - a hero.

We all deserve to see ourselves as heroes: to feel pride for solving the nagging math problem or carrying our neighbor’s groceries up the stairs. Similarly, in the fictional world, we deserve to see our likeness in strong and laudable characters in books, advertisements, movies, and on TV shows: Women are Powerful because we have Supergirl and Olivia Pope, Black is Beautiful because we have King T’Challa and Nova Bordelon, and Gay is Good is because we have Nicole Haught and Josh Rosza .

But on current American TV women, people of color, and queer people (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender-nonconforming) aren’t always written as heroes. Quite the opposite. On most shows in the 2017-2018 television season, for example, as in most shows going back to the beginning of television in the 1930s, the majority of heroes are male, white, heterosexual, and cisgendered (“cis”). Broadly, this trend exists because American society developed as white/straight/male and cisgender-dominant, and remains so today, and because writers’ rooms in which TV shows are created and written reflect this false societal “norm” by employing mostly white, cis, hetero male showrunners and writers.

And so, given this “norm,” it’s no surprise that people in all other categories - so-called “marginalized” communities - are predominantly written as villains, buffoons, dangerous, non-sexual, or mentally ill, and are often the first characters killed off if a death is needed to further the show’s plot. These narrative “tropes” - a common or overused theme or device (that relies heavily on established cultural stereotypes) - are so popular, in fact, that some of them have names: The Black Guy Always Dies First, and Bury Your Gays, for example. Both are tropes describing the frequency with which such characters die. It is the Bury Your Gays trope and it’s negative effects on vulnerable queer TV viewers that I will focus on in my upcoming documentary film, “Clexa Is Ours: On the Need for Balanced Cultural Representation in Television.”

This morning my girlfriend, knowing what day it is, turned to me and asked how I was feeling. While thinking I’d say something pithy to toss-off my swelling emotion I realized that was silly, so I responded: “You know what? Fuck it. It still hurts.”