If anything, the biggest point behind The Lexa Pledge is not to prevent showrunners from being able to do their job. It’s to remind showrunners that they need to put more thought and foresight into their creative decisions, especially when it comes to their LGBTQIA characters. It’s about keeping the issue alive so that when plots and storylines are discussed in the writers’ room, the creative team has that awareness and understanding of the trope that has been very harmful to fans. And it’s about creators acknowledging legitimate criticism and learning how to take that into consideration moving forward, especially if they haven’t lent much thought to these important issues in the past.

Covington’s remarks are a perfect example of the mindset that showrunners and television writers need to move away from. Looking at the pledge as a means of censoring creative freedom is part of the problem. The question shouldn’t be, “How is this going to affect my ability to tell a story?” It should be, “How can I tell this story in a way that serves the character in the best way possible?”

Multiple TV producers were left at a loss for words about how to reconcile the “Bury Your Gays” trope during a Thursday night panel discussion at the Writers Guild. “If a character dies and it had a bad message, I support [the Lexa pledge],” Covington said. But otherwise, “It’s dangerous to tell the showrunner how to tell a story.”

“You have to serve the story [and] serve the character,” Hoffman said. “It’s so tricky. For [characters that are] gay, lesbian, people of color, there’s probably a feeling that they’re more expendable,” she added. “It would be very hard for me to do that, to kill them off, because I’m aware of how much that character means to people.”

But emotional arcs often mandate storm clouds, including for LGBT characters.

“Once you’ve achieved happiness [in a story], you want to bring conflict back,” Bloom said. “That’s a general storytelling thing: ‘Where do we go with this character?’ But gay characters are more than their sexuality. We should move past that trope.”

I’d also like to address the predictable knee-jerk reaction by some in Hollywood to the campaign. When faced with criticism, your first instinct shouldn’t be to throw up your hands and say, “Fine, I’m taking my toys and going home.” Yet there are some who counter reasonable concern about the Bury Your Gays trope with the claim that people will be too afraid to write LGBT characters at all now. The answer to poor representation is not less representation. When we say we’re sick of the Dead Lesbian Syndrome, the response shouldn’t be to say well then we’ll just stop writing lesbian characters. The point, you seem to be missing it.

The point is to write realistic, representative and non-reductive LGBT characters. Which, really, should be the point of writing any character. Why write a whole character simply to prove a tired point? Unless you’re writing a modern version of “Aesop’s Fables,” the goal of character development should be a fully realized person with agency – not matter the person’s gender, race, sexual orientation, whathaveyou. You need a way to give your straight white (usually male) lead more motivation. Buy him a poster with a kitten hanging from a tree limb that says, “Hang In There!” It’s not less original as it is to kill off the woman or minority or gay character.

This may seem small. 15 signatures in a sea of thousands? What can that do? It can start something bigger. It only takes one stone to start an avalanche and given that Lexa’s legacy has refused to gentle into that good night, this could grow much bigger than 15 signatures. Who could have predicted on March 3^rd that the death of a character could bring anything more than ineffectual twitter outrage and Rothenberg losing 15k followers? Who could have predicted that the end of her story would be the beginning of a new one, one with the potential to impact TV and film for generations? When we look back years from now, I hope to be able to say that I was a part of changing LGBT representation for the better.

The pledge isn’t an immediate fix. The Catch joined the list of shows that has killed of an LGBTQ character this season along with the likes of the aforementioned The 100, Empire, The Vampire Diaries, The Walking Dead, etc, just days after Sherry White, the show’s co-executive producer, signed her name to the pledge.

Yet instead of running from her mistake, White released a statement acknowledging how The Catch played into the “Bury Your Gays” trope — and cited the pledge as a way forward.

On “The 100,” a lesbian character named Lexa was unjustifiably dropped from the show just after her relationship with the lead character, Clarke, had begun. This happened after fans had been teased with hints of the relationship all season long, both onscreen and through the show’s social media account. The fans then concluded that they had been turned into pawns in order to boost the show’s ratings, to which they responded with disappointment and anger.

Thus, the Lexa Pledge was born, a seven-part petition devised by television producers and writers in order to honor LGBT characters with meaningful storylines.

Lexa’s death was the last straw for many fans who’ve had to watch their LGBTQ+ representation die over and over again on the small screen, and ironically, she was far from the last — since Lexa, four other shows (“The Walking Dead,” “The Vampire Diaries,” “The Magicians” and “Empire”) have killed off six lesbian/bisexual female characters.

A total of 14 lesbian/bisexual characters have died so far in 2016. Last year, it was 19. And that’s not even counting the male LGBTQ+ characters.

It’s been a less than impressive year for LGBTQ characters on TV. Sure, there has been a fair amount of representation, but time and again, exciting, compelling LGBTQ characters have been abruptly killed off — and the consensus is that it’s not just mere happenstance, but an epidemic.

Thankfully, several TV writers and producers are listening to these concerns, and have penned a seven-point pledge to assure viewers that LGBTQ characters will be treated with respect and to respond to calls from the public for “meaningful change.” Dubbed the “Lexa Pledge” as a reminder of the controversial killing of Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey) in the CW’s The 100, the letter was created by Saving Hope writer and co-executive producer Noelle Carbone, producer, writer and director Michelle Mama, Saving Hope producer Sonia Hosko and Gina Tass.

The seven tenets include promising to introduce characters with significant storylines and arcs, refusing to kill a queer character just to further the plot of a straight character and never baiting or misleading the fans on social media channels.

LGBT Fans Deserve Better, the queer activists behind the revolutionarily successful campaign to stop the Bury Your Gays trope, are teaming up with TV writers and showrunners to instill The Lexa Pledge in writers rooms. The pledge seeks to shine awareness on the dangers of the ubiquitous cliche and to provide accountability for quality queer representation on TV. LGBT Fans Deserve Better joined with the creatives at Saving Hope to make their dream a reality, and are adding TV executives every day.