Bury Your Gays/Playing With

Basic Trope: Gay characters die in the course of a story.

• Straight: Ted and George are gay, and Alice and Bob are straight. All four fight the Big Bad, but George dies. Ted is left alone miserable while Alice and Bob live on.
• Exaggerated:
  • Ted, George, Alice, and Bob all fight the Big Bad. During the dramatic climax scene, Alice and Bob manage to escape. However, Ted and George are left behind, and die so horribly that noone is gay ever again.
  • The Big Bad's plot involves murdering all gays... and it works.
• Justified: Anyone Can Die, regardless of sexual orientation. This is a work where a lot of people get knocked off, and that list naturally includes gay characters as well as straight.
• Inverted:
  • Bob dies, Alice is miserable, but Ted and George go on with life.
  • Revive Your Gays - By the end of the story, every prominent gay character previously killed is raised from death.
• Subverted: It seems like George has been killed, but he manages to survive with an inch of his life thanks to sheer determination.
• Double Subverted:
  • ...Sadly, George only lives long enough to die from his injuries later in a hospital.
  • Alternatively, as George goes to inform his same-sex love interest he's okay it turns out the love interest died of something totally unrelated to the rest of the story.
• Parodied: Alice, Bob, Ted, George, and Stella all go fight the big bad. Ted and George die immediately, and Alice, who is pretending to be Stella's girlfriend so she can repel another girlfriend, is killed too. This makes Bob, Alice's real boyfriend, complain. Somehow Alice is magically revived.
• Deconstructed: George considers himself an inferior person as a gay man, due to his conflicted religious views and sexuality. This leads him to care less about his own life and take too much risk in a battle, leading to his death.
• Reconstructed: This leads Ted, who also considered himself an inferior person, to to come to terms with his sexuality and persevere.
• Zig Zagged: The show at first kills off Ted and George, but then they are both brought back. Then Alice and Bob are both Killed Off for Real. A gay villain is killed, but two straight villains manage to survive until next season. Then they turn out to have been lovers. And THEN it turns out in the afterlife Everyone Is Bi.
• Averted:
  • No characters who are gay die.
  • Alternately, there are no gay characters. Or nobody dies.
• Enforced:
  • "To show that things are serious, let's kill off a minority."
  • One of the writers is a Heteronormative Crusader.
• Lampshaded: "Damn it! Damn it to hell! Why does every guy I love end up dead?!"
• Invoked: George ends up engaged in a hopeless fight, but Ted decides to stay along with him until the end. If he's meant to die, he'll die with him too.
• Defied: Detecting the clear signs of the universe conspiring to kill them, Ted goes to great lengths to ensure his and George's survival.
• Discussed: "Bob's crush on Joe doesn't speak well about his chances."
• Conversed: "Have you ever noticed how gay characters seem to have a higher mortality ratio than any straight co-protagonists?"

---

Back to Bury Your Gays.