Since launching back in 2010, The Walking Dead has seen its fair share of controversy on its way to becoming one of the biggest shows in the world.
Fake-outs, cliffhangers and particularly brutal character deaths have all caused a stir online, but few controversies have been as long-lasting as the treatment of the show's LGBTQ+ characters.
The 'Bury Your Gays' trope refers to the onscreen deaths of LGBTQ+ characters who are viewed as more expendable than their straight counterparts. It's a cliché that has plagued film and TV for decades, with shows like The 100 being slammed by audiences for killing LGBTQ+ characters in service of other, more developed, characters.
Its impact was noted by GLAAD in their report on LGBTQ+ diversity in TV back in 2018 saying, "broadcast television (and television as a whole) has yet to recover from the past two seasons, which included the deaths of an overwhelming number of lesbian and bisexual women characters."
It's not until recently, when the use of the term 'Bury Your Gays' has received more attention, that LGBTQ+ characters have been treated with more care by writers.
Jace Downs/AMC
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But The Walking Dead, like most TV, has a long way to go.
For large stretches of the show's nine-season run, there have been a number of queer characters in The Walking Dead universe. Tara, Denise, Aaron, Eric and Paul 'Jesus' Rovia have all existed in the background of the show's main conflict, sometimes having a moment in the spotlight but rarely being seen expressing their sexuality.
Unlike The Walking Dead's many straight characters, LGBTQ+ characters are almost never given meaningful screen time, moments of intimacy or significant development to allow audiences to invest in their ultimate fate. This wouldn't be so much of an issue if they were still alive on the show. Of those five queer characters, four have been buried in various increasingly brutal ways leaving precious few LGBTQ+ characters behind.
Denise was the first to die, shot by future Savior Dwight in the season-six episode 'Twice as Far'. It was a shocking moment that lacked any real emotional impact due to the lack of screen time given to Denise until that episode.
Denise's relationship with Tara had been hinted at briefly but the only meaningful screen time she'd been given was in her role as Alexandria's medic. It wasn’t until the hours before her death that audiences were given a glimpse of her morality, which had begun to rub off on Daryl and Rosita, only for her to be killed off for the sake of a cheap shock that only served to motivate Daryl's character.
Flash-forward to season eight and we find another of our LGBTQ+ characters dying for the sake of motivating another character's development. Eric is shot in the abdomen and left to bleed out during an attack on a Savior outpost. Season eight's controversial war with the Saviors saw a great deal of overblown tragedy for all the group but the loss of Eric felt particularly needless. He died to motivate Aaron, whose character already possessed sufficient dedication to the cause having watched as Glenn and Abraham were brutally murdered in the season-seven premiere.
Once again, the show was killing off an underdeveloped LGBTQ+ character in order to serve the story.
Even though season nine won back a lot of viewers and critics, it also saw two more LGBTQ+ characters meet untimely deaths. Both Tara and Jesus faced particularly violent ends for the sake of making the shows new villains, The Whisperers, seem all the more threatening.
Gene Page/AMC
It's a tactic that The Walking Dead has taken flak for in the past, most notably with the death of Glenn, but these particular instances of a character dying to raise the stakes on the show only serve to underscore how little care has been taken with the show's LGBTQ+ characters.
"I spent a long time hoping my character was going to have more to do," actor Tom Payne, who played Jesus, told The Hollywood Reporter regarding his character's death. Jesus, a fan-favourite comic character, has a deeper, more meaningful arc on the page alongside some incredibly cool fight sequences that the show elected to omit in favour of giving more screen time to heterosexual characters, all before killing off yet another of the dwindling queer population.
This isn't to say that being LGBTQ+ in The Walking Dead universe should make you indestructible. If these characters were developed and their deaths motivated by more than shock value or the need to introduce a more terrifying villain then they might not have seemed so expendable.
But by having them killed in these ways, the show is telling us that they only exist in service of other characters and not because they are fully fleshed out in their own right.
While the show has sometimes mishandled straight character deaths too, they aren't often as noticeable because those characters – take Carl or Abraham, for example – are given much more screen time.
In the case of Eric and Denise, we'd barely gotten to know and understand their characters before they were dispatched. When Abraham was killed a significant chunk of screen time was devoted to developing his character making the impact of his death more meaningful, even if he was still being used to establish Negan as a terrifying new villain.
AMC
One of the main issues the final season of Game of Thrones faced was the writers keeping main characters alive despite insurmountable odds to serve a purpose to the plot. No character in The Walking Dead should be protected by plot armour – this is the apocalypse after all – but they should at least be more developed, allowing their death to have more impact beyond cheap shock value.
Back at the tail end of season nine, The Walking Dead introduced a new lesbian couple in Yumiko and Magna. Both characters had already appeared on the show, but late in the season they shared a kiss and confirmed their relationship.
The big issue with both Eric and Aaron and Denise and Tara's relationships was the subtlety of their affection. Unlike Rick and Michonne, they rarely expressed any intimacy or displayed affection lessening the importance of their relationship and the emotional power of their deaths. With Yumiko and Magna, it seems the show is trying to rectify their past mistakes.
Jackson Lee Davis/AMC
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"Obviously in the comics, it's obvious that they're a couple. But we wanted to make sure that it was also obvious in the show," Eleanor Matsuura, who plays Yumiko, told Digital Spy back in February. Matsuura fought for Yumiko's relationship with Magna to be more overt, hopefully helping to improve queer visibility on the show moving forward.
With season ten now underway, the show has a lot more work to do to win LGBTQ+ audiences. Maybe Yumiko and Magna can be a new frontier in representation for the show? Perhaps the show has learned the tough lessons from their previous mistakes and the future of The Walking Dead is more diverse and future queer characters will be handled with more nuance and care, even in death?
Let's just hope that Yumiko and Magna aren't the shows next victims.
The Walking Dead airs on Mondays at 9pm on FOX in the UK. You can also catch up on the show via NOW TV. In the US, the show airs on Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.
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