Tag Archives: Queer Character

Vanessa Morgan Discusses Riverdale’s New Queer Character

Vanessa Morgan is set to play openly bisexual character Toni Topaz on the second season of The CW series

For those unfamiliar with the world of Archie Comics, Toni Topaz is a relatively minor character. In comics, she becomes friends with Jughead Jones because of their shared love of hamburgers. She also has distinctive pink hair and is bisexual in the comics.

Morgan, who previously played a lesbian character on The Shannara Chronicles, says that Topaz will be getting a lot of screen time in Riverdale‘s upcoming second season and is glad that she is able to bring the bisexual character to life.

In an interview with Popsugar, Morgan said that there is a progressive reason behind her character and storyline.

It’s showing that there are a lot of people who don’t see gender, and they actually love whoever is a nice person. I love that.”

Morgan also says she has already seen her fair share of Internet shippers, aka people who want Toni to get together with one character or another.

Right now, I’m seeing a lot of me and Cheryl. Then, I’m seeing me and Betty. People are shipping hard for different storylines.”

Riverdale returns for a second season on Oct. 11.

Long Time Coming; Grey’s Anatomy’s Arizona Is Finally Going To Get Some Lovin’

Dr. Arizona Robbins (played by Jessica Capshaw) is getting a new lady love interest in Grey’s Anatomy.

According to the shows executive producer Shonda Rhimes, she’ll indeed find romance in season 13.

We’re absolutely going to see it. Jessica was very, very delightfully pregnant at the end of last year, and so she’s not in the first two episodes — which everybody brace yourselves for — because she’s taking a little bit of time off for kids, but then she’s back. I’m very excited to introduce a love interest for her, and to get to tell a story with her that lets her be who she is, and to see who she is post the relationships that she’s had.”

While Rhimes doesn’t share too much on who the love interest might be, the she does stresses that she doesn’t want to force the relationship.

You don’t want to just stick two people together. I want to do it organically and I want the audience to be rooting for it. So I think we’re going to have fun with it.”

The news comes in the wake of Callie (Sara Ramirez) leaving Seattle for New York, providing the opportunity for Arizona to really move on with her life — though that’s not to say Callie is out of her life for good.

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We’re playing that Arizona gets to go visit her daughter and her daughter gets to come see her. So it’s not this sense of loss. In our world, Callie still exists.”

Grey’s Anatomy returns this fall on ABC.

‘Supergirl’ Gives Us A Queer Girl In Season 2 To Look Forward To.

This news is something we all need to get excited about girls.  A new TV character to crush over. Executive Producer, Ali Adler, who by the way is also out, said during TCA:

Maggie Sawyer is an amazing character from the DC Universe who is a bad ass, gay character, who we’re bringing in and she is so cool. The actress, Floriana Lima, is amazing. We’re so excited to get started with her and it’s just gonna be an amazing addition to our cast.”

This news is sure to get the lez community inspired as well. It’s great when an intriguing LGBTQ character is introduced to a series because it helps promote our community in a strong way and encourages others to realise that we are all just regular people no different than anyone else. Positive LGBTQ characters in mainstream TV programmes are an absolute must.

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Another Exec from the DC universe team, Sarah Schechter, added:

What’s important for us in Supergirl is that all women in the show are really strong, I mean it’s important on all of our shows and I think you see that in all the shows, but Supergirl, it’s like, if you have a great villain, it elevates your hero. If you have a strong woman, you want to surround her with other strong women and so Maggie’s sort of suspicious. She’s grounded; she’s [sort of not] a superhero—she’s a regular real life hero.”

We’re getting the feeling she might be more than an anti-hero type character? If so, that’s just great. They’re the best kind and normally show real dilemmas between saving themselves or saving the rest of the world. Ultimately, we all have to make decisions like this sometimes.

It seems that another intriguing hook is coming into play during season two as well. In the form of a character that would be ‘exploring their sexuality’ and ‘coming out.’ Greg Berlanti, an Exec working on Supergirl hinted:

It is a significant character and we’re not being coy about it. We really want the audience to enjoy the character development, you know, and not necessarily being ahead of the storyline.”

Speculation is already flying around as to who this might be. You never know ladies it might even be a female character that has a relationship with the newbie lez, Maggie Sawyer. That would be interesting. Whatever season two has in store for us I’m sure it’s fan base will increase dramatically after this exciting news so we can all wait in anticipation until October 2nd when season two will kick off on the CW.

 

Why Queer Character Deaths Always Matter

It might not seem like the death of any character is more monumental than any other. In fact, up until pretty recently, I thought that was the case, too. But after I noticed that all of my favorite queer characters were being killed off in the most dramatic way possible.

It’s always either AIDs, bullying/murder, or… You know… The arrow through the back of the head.

No spoilers here, but… That one actually caught me off-guard. I’m pretty sure I actually jumped because it was completely out of left field (literally and figuratively). I read up and found that it was essentially just a variation of the source material, and I was satisfied for a minute.

Which is probably what the producers were going for.

It seems like a minor difference to switch up a character who’s going to be killed off, but circumstantially, swapping a straight character’s death for a queer character’s death is adding yet another name to a long list of statistically doomed characters.

When we’re fighting as hard as we are for adequate representation, killing off the characters that embody everything we’re looking for in our queer characters: The strong, relatable ones that have more going for them than just sex and short skirts. (Not that there’s anything wrong with those characters, either, but statistically they’ll probably be killed off, too.)

Do we just feel like more gay characters die, because there aren’t as many of them?

That’s what I thought at first – after all, with only a handful of lesbians on the line-up until OITNB comes back, each one is automatically a larger portion – one out of five feels like more than five out of a hundred.

But Autostraddle did the math on this one, and it’s actually a little deeper than that.

According to them, there have been 147 lesbian and bisexual female characters who died on TV. And these are becoming more and more frequently as we have more queer female characters on television.

This is to be expected, especially when you factor in shows like The L Word where 99% of the cast plays queer female characters, or shows like American Horror Story and Scream Queens where every episode you’re basically betting on who’s going to die today.

But if those numbers still sound pretty high, they are.

According to a different list from Autostraddle, the number of queer female characters who ended up with happy endings: 29. Many of these were couples, which counts as “two characters” but only one happy ending – and, all in all, only 15 shows had happy endings for their lesbian and bisexual characters.

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A quick flip through both lists is a bit devastating, honestly. We’re definitely not saying that queer characters need to be invincible – but they shouldn’t be killed off just for a plot twist. Let their deaths have meaning.

Let us mourn their deaths, instead of just getting angry with the writers!