I’ve had a bee in my bonnet for a while now over the concept of representation.
Every now and again, I hear someone complain that x person on x show is “bad rep”, maybe because they’re a promiscuous bisexual or a flamboyant gay or whatever, and I find myself wrinkling my nose because I don’t really…agree, and quite often those characters are simply good characters, so I don’t… see why this sparkling concept of Representation™ matters in this context?
And, like, don’t get me wrong - representation matters. Having representation on mass media matters so much, and having good rep matters too.
But I think I’ve narrowed down my issue with the concept being applied so broadly.
Before I get to that, let me dig into how I feel about ‘bury your gays’ in mass media. Many will not agree, which is fine, but my idea of 'bury your gays’ is that if your show has one lesbian and you kill her, you fucking suck. If your movie has one gay man and you kill him, you fucking suck (and so on and so forth). If your show has a bunch of lesbians and one of them dies, that isn’t bury your gays.
Similarly, in my opinion, if your show is something like Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead, where characters die all the time, killing a (or even the) gay character isn’t really bury your gays. It’s a little iffy if you introduce a replacement gay character in the same episode you kill the current one, but generally speaking killing gay characters in a show full of death is just… it makes sense? I don’t really want all gay characters to have magical plot armor for the rest of time because Bury Your Gays sucks as a trope.
Which brings us back to representation.
A few years ago, The 100 season 3 was filming, and the head writer Jason Rothenberg made a huge deal about Lexa, the lesbian Commander of the Grounder Coalition. He’d share bts shots of her actress, he’d talk about his pride in having her as representation, he’d get people to follow him on twitter to 'earn’ more bts shots, outtakes, bloopers, whatever, and then he killed her off 7 episodes into a 13 episode season.
And it was shitty. It was shitty because he built this self-aggrandizing, masturbatory back-patting club around himself and then killed her off and thought it was funny. It was shitty because at that time she was the only lesbian character in the show (we had Clarke, who was bisexual, but bisexuality and lesbianism are not the same), and it was shitty because it made no sense (but that’s an essay for a different post, frankly).
Lexa was representation because JRoth wanted her to be representation. He made a huge deal about her being representation and so she was.
Other shows, or books or movies or whatever else, do this too, talking about how their characters are representation in interviews or on Twitter, but often they don’t. Their characters are just… their characters.
Sometimes, people write characters because they want to write that character, because the tropes and traits involved in that character are true to the character being written, not because they’re Good Bisexual Representation or whatever.
I think when there isn’t an explicit goal to create representation, it’s rather unfair to get angry at writers for writing 'bad representation’ or just sub-par representation when the goal is simply to write an authentic character, rather than a specific sexuality to be held up on a display and presented for the world to see.
Not to mention that every time I see someone say, “This character is bad rep because they’re xyz trope!” I see someone else say, “Yeah… so am I… this character represented me so well…”
No group is a monolith! You will never represent an entire group in one character, not ever.
But I think the itch for me has always been, and continues to be, the idea of yelling at someone for poor representation without ever knowing if that’s what they were trying to achieve.
I don’t think Laenor in Fire & Blood was meant as Good Gay Representation, I think he was just right for the story, and the fact GRRM repeatedly includes queer people in his medieval fantasy as just a part of the world to me means so much more than him trying to shoehorn in a perfect example of representation. Similarly, I definitely don’t think Aneela and Kendry in Killjoys were meant as Good Lesbian Representation (far from it considering they both spent many seasons as villains), they were just good characters and having those two be who hooked up instead of Aneela and Johnny (a somewhat obvious direction for the show to go, if you ask me, had the show been more traditional with its tropes) or Kendry and idk Pree for the sake of horrifying example.
Trying to write perfect representation always ends in shallow, two-dimensional characters who inevitably let someone down, and slandering people who write three-dimensional characters for those characters being imperfect is cruel and unjustified and I think that is what’s been bothering me every time I see conversations about representation.
Not all characters are representation. Sometimes they’re just characters.
