Trope Talk: Bury Your Gays

Hey… so the last Trope Talk I posted was back in April 2023… I did not mean for it to take this long for me to work on or put out the next one. It just sort of happened. Oopsie! Truth be told, I had a bit of a crisis with what I wanted to do, content-wise, and realised I wanted to do more than just post what are essentially book reports – I wanted more personality essentially. Will I be able to get that across through the written word? Hopefully. I do tend to type more or less the exact way I think, so there’s some lore about me for you. I do also want to say now that this isn’t going to be a deep dive into the trope by any means, either.

I did look back to my original Trope Talk and saw that I immediately started gushing about fake dating, which I’ll be real, hasn’t changed. Still love that bitch. Bury your gays? Bury your gays is my mortal enemy when it comes to tropes. Actually, I say that, I’m sure there are tropes that I don’t know about because they come in genres I tend not to read, but in genres I do read, or have read, bury your gays is my mortal enemy. I’m pretty sure that I actually ended up writing about it briefly in my dissertation for my MA (Call me Britney Spears with the way I lowkey have a master’s degree) where I was once again complaining about it.

For the two people consuming this content that don’t actually know what bury your gays is. It’s pretty self-explanatory. It’s the trope where queer characters are often killed off in favour of the heterosexual ones because the hetero ones are viewed as more important. First of all: Boo! To me, the bury your gays trope gives me very hetero vibes just in general. This is all just feeling coming from my brain for what I’m about to say, but I feel like it’s far less prevalent in media created by queer people. Be that books or TV. I feel like I’m much less likely to see bury your gays comes up in a book written by a queer person than I am a straight person. It also makes me feel like, if it’s created by a straight person, a straight person is dangling a queer character over me, saying, “Tee hee, look, we have gays” only for them to push me off a cliff when I’m distracted by killing the queer person.

Still, I have no real format for Trope Talk since the last one came two years ago, so I suppose it’ll just be me talking about the trope. This one was brought about after I read Dragon Age: The Calling. Mind you, I read the entire first three Dragon Age books, since they were all written by the same author, thinking they’d be a trilogy. They were all in the same world, and loosely related, and that was about it. But, yes, sadly, I was inspired to complain (lol) about this trope a little bit. So, I think in the whole of the first three Dragon Age books I read, that came out 2009-11, for context, there were two openly queer characters that I can remember – but also, don’t worry, every protagonist of the three books was straight, and the books made sure we knew that, even when it wasn’t relevant to the story. But the two I remember were Nicholas and Julien, who, if you couldn’t guess, since I’m talking about bury your gays, both die.

I definitely covered Nicholas and Julien in my post for The Calling and their whole arc throughout that book, and I’m going to talk about them again. Within the context of The Calling, and to be honest, that whole trilogy, there’s a full group of main characters who go on this journey, and in this journey – fairly early into it – run into this dragon that they all fight. Then out of the full ensemble cast, Julien ends up being the only one who dies, despite other (straight) people getting injured. The group then is sent into a place called The Fade (like another world where demons live) and here, they all see what is essentially their dream lives, and Nicholas’ involves getting to live out his life with Julien in peace, and then in The Fade, Nicholas ends up being the only one who doesn’t make it out of there. By that point in the book, only two characters have died and it’s both of the queer ones. Reading the book as it was happening, I was just so disappointed seeing both the queer characters go first, and almost being treated lesser than the rest of the ensemble – but also, the worst part is that Julien and Nicholas had the most compelling relationship out of all the characters in the book.

So I’m just not whining and bitching about gay people dying. I do remember in my dissertation that I talked about They Both Die at the End (TBDATE)and how that has an odd relationship towards the trope. Because, at the baseline, yes TBDATE does, technically, have the bury your gays trope, but given the title of the book literally tells you that they both die, in a weird way, does it? The whole point, well not the whole point, of the book is that it’s leading up to them both dying, and that it also blatantly tells you they die. I don’t so much have an issue with the way this book does it, especially since it’s not about the main characters dying. It’s about how the two characters choose to live out their final day. The best way I can describe it is the book takes the question, “Would you rather know how or when you die?”, and answers it with when, and then shows you what some of the people who know when they’re going to die choose to do with that final day they’re given. That’s more what the book’s about, rather than the dying. I suppose it’s also a bonus for me that the book ended up being queer. Again, it does, technically, have the bury your gays trope since the gays do get buried at the end, but to me, I don’t really find problem with it given the context of the book.

That’s sort of the route that I’ve taken when it comes to my own writing as well. The majority of it is queer-focused or has queer main characters. However, when and if I kill them, or make them have some kind of unfortunate unhappy ending, it’s never specifically because they’re queer. I’m sure there definitely is a time and place for queer suffering in literature, but it’s never going to be in my writing. Sure, I’ll have them be miserable for the sake of story, but I don’t think they’re ever going to truly suffer, even if my endings end up ambiguous. Also, if they end up dead, it’ll never be specifically because they’re queer. For me it’ll all have purpose, I don’t think I’m ever planning on ever killing someone just for killing them.

Ultimately, I think that’s the whole thing. It’s all context. Like, if I’m going to be reading a slasher book – something like You’re Not Supposed to Die Tonight – that’s also just queer. I’m not going to get overly upset when a queer person ends up dead, just because it’s the nature of the book. Like, it’s a slasher, people will, and wait for this revelation, be getting slashed. They’re more about the killing than the people. And in the piece that I wrote for my MA, I did end up killing a queer character in that short story, but again, it was wholly down to the context. I didn’t kill them for being queer – granted, I think I may have only had a cast of three or four characters, two of which were queer – I killed them because it made sense to do so in the context of my story. This might sound super haughty or conceited, but I’m not going to share the concept, because I still think it’s a really good concept that I haven’t utilised properly, or seen anywhere else, and I don’t want to put it out into the world until it’s supposed to be out.

Anyway, now for a violently abrupt ending. I think of those tweets or TikToks that say something like, “Why can’t I just end an essay with, ‘That’s it, bye’?”, because that’s how I feel about this post. You’re welcome. I’ve rambled on at you about bury your gays for a bit. Hate it personally.

Okay, bye!