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I was considering making a thread about this in regards to The Last of Us Part II, but Kotaku has beaten me to the punch and written a great article on a subject that has long bothered me.
In short: video games, like many other forms of media, frequently invoke a frustrating, outdated, and insidious trope, commonly called "Bury Your Gays," in which queer characters are subjected to disproportionate amounts of violence, bigotry, injury, unhappiness, and death. As Kotaku's Heather Alexandra writes:
This article primarily focuses on queer representation in video games, such as Bioware's games, and in particular calls out two of the more well-known games that have condemned their queer characters to unhappiness and death: Life Is Strange and The Last of Us: Left Behind. Life Is Strange infamously forces queer protagonist Max into a plothole-ridden false choice between the life of the girl she loves and the lives of her friends and family, while Left Behind commits a particularly common subtrope of the Bury Your Gays phenomenon, in which two queer characters discover or consummate their feelings right before one of them is murdered.
What is particularly frustrating about The Last of Us Part II is that Naughty Dog has already killed one of Ellie's same-sex love interests, and is almost certainly about to do it again (spare me the "We don't know what happens to her" drivel -- Ellie's path of vengeance and rage in TLOU2 makes it pretty obvious her girlfriend isn't hanging around in the background chillaxing until she comes home).
A couple of months ago, I wrote a short analysis of the origins of this trope and why it is often committed by otherwise well-meaning LGBT allies like Naughty Dog:
In the Kotaku article, the author notes a common counter-argument to this trope:
There has been an increasing backlash against this trope in a variety of forms of media by the queer community, most notably with the TV series The 100, whose anticlimactic and cliched murder of a popular lesbian character caused a major boycott of the show and permanently damaged its reputation. While I'm excited for TLOU2, I also can't help but know that Naughty Dog is about to step into the same controversy they could have easily avoided in so many ways by actually sitting down and having conversations with queer people about what kinds of stories they'd like to see. Representation doesn't count if it's always just an "ally" coming up with whatever kind of story they want and knowing their marginalized viewers will show up out of obligation.
No one is saying queer characters should never have to suffer in fiction, but it is an unavoidable fact that they are made to suffer far more frequently than their straight counterparts. The number of mainstream films, TV shows, and video games with canonically queer protagonists who get their happy ending can basically be counted on one hand.
One suggestion on how this trope can be made less common is to expand the types of stories in which queer people appear. Often, queer characters are relegated to post-apocalyptic wastelands, gritty dramas, and violent fictional worlds where characters are more likely to meet a gruesome end. Featuring a wider variety of queer characters in a wider variety of fiction, such as comedies, fantastical sci-fi, and family-friendly fare would go a long way towards fixing the hugely disproportionate number of queer characters who are maimed or killed in fiction.
As a group of people who are already horribly oppressed in the real world, it would be nice if for once we could have a fictional representation where that isn't the case.
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