5 Times Queer TV Characters Were Killed Off For Absolutely NO Reason

At the time of writing, it is 2025.

You would think that TV creators would have nuanced and sensitive attitudes about queer TV characters by now. You would think that they had read all of the articles about the “Bury Your Gays” trope. You know, the infamous tendency among TV writers to kill off queer characters simply for dramatic effect, for a quick jolt of pathos. However, the “Bury Your Gays” trope refuses to stay buried! Even though academics have exposed how the trope perpetuates the idea that queer characters are expendable — that queer people have less meaningful lives than straight people — the trope is still alive and well. Without being spoilerinas, we can say that the trope most recently appeared in HBO’s hit series The Gilded Age, in the most melodramatic way possible. A queer character’s already-depressing life cut tragically short, just like that!

If you’re feeling a bit furious after reading that, then just wait. Here are five other instances of the Bury Your Gays trope refusing to die.

**Oh, and consider this your official spoilerina alert!**

Villanelle in Killing Eve

In the long ago era of 2022, the Bury Your Gays trope had already been dissected ad nauseum by the mainqueer media and seemed to be in decline. TV writers appeared to be hip to the musings of queer academia, and had begun to write happy endings for their fictional queers. Then Killing Eve killed off Villanelle. Perhaps this ending was always written, but why did it have to come immediately after Villanelle and Eve finally kissed? It’s the stuff Bury Your Gays stories are made of: Women are unhappy; women kiss and are finally happy; women are immediately punished by horrific trauma. 

Ser Joffrey Lonmouth in House of the Dragon

This entry is infuriating for at least two reasons. First of all, it’s classic Bury Your Gays behavior. Just moments after we meet Lonmouth, one of the series’ only queer characters at this point, he’s brutally murdered. Basically, he was gay just so that we’d feel extra bad for him when he died. After all, gay relationships are so hard to come by and thus special, that they’re extra tragic when they fall apart. And on top of that, the guy who murders Lonmouth, Ser Criston Cole, gets off scot-free! 

Lexa in The 100

Lexa’s death is legendary in Bury Your Gays mythology. When her character was given a meaningless death on The CW’s The 100, it literally inspired the entire anti-Bury Your Gays movement that continues to this day. Autostraddle even launched an exhaustive catalog of every queer woman who has been killed on a TV show. It remains up-to-date even now.

Loras Tyrell in Game of Thrones

Many people cite Oberyn Martell as GoT’s worst Bury Your Gays offense. But the Red Viper dies a hero’s death, at least. Loras Tyrell, on the other hand, is transformed into a pathetic figure — in a departure from the books — and submitted to homophobic torture at the hands of Westeros’s new religious government. It’s a tired iteration of the classic Bury Your Gays move: Subject a gay character to homophobia to capture the audience’s sympathy and up the dramatic ante. Why can’t audiences just sympathize with a happy gay person as he peacefully sends out 5am d**k pics while watching a sunrise?

Dorothy Chambers in Black Mirror

Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that The Gilded Age just pulled a Bury Your Gays, considering that Netflix already did this once in 2025. In the episode “Hotel Reverie,” Dorothy Chambers is not merely given a tragic backstory involving a life in the closet, an involuntary coming-out, and a suicide. She’s also stripped of her chances of finding love at the very last moment. Just when we think she’s going to transcend the stifling, repressive limits of her 1940s background, she falls prey to yet another modern tragedy: Writer Charlie Brooker’s bad mood! The same man who gave us the all-timer “San Junipero” seems hell-bent on making queer women sad now, because he steals away Dorothy’s light at the end of “Reverie” for cheap tears. Worse, he does it just to quickly enliven the story in a purely cosmetic way. There must have been a better way!