The reaction to her untimely death was swift and passionate. Not only were fans furious by the death of yet another queer character on TV, but the events surrounding her death fell right into the ‘Bury Your Gays’ trope. Outraged fans took to Twitter immediately and kept Lexa trending for three days straight. The showrunner, Jason Rothenberg, lost more than 10,000 followers within 24 hours, and his following has been on a steady decline since. A week after the controversial episode was broadcasted, fans banded together to boycott the show and trend #LGBTFansDeserveBetter on Twitter during The 100’s regularly scheduled airtime. It worked, as the March 10th episode debuted the series’ worst ever ratings.

Lexa is not simply a tragic character death, but a prime example in a series of specifically queer character deaths that perpetuates a problem in the cultural narrative our media constantly regurgitates to the point of LGBTQ viewers seeing a new queer character on TV and simply assuming they will die so better not get invested. What an exhausting way to consume media – seeing representatives of yourself constantly being killed off to further another character’s development or to advance the story’s plot; what about our stories, what about our development, wonders the queer teenager, sitting alone in their room, wondering why they never get to be more than this one trope, this one cliché.

The media has tried to send us a message over and over, most recently with the death of Lexa in episode 3×07 of The 100. That message is: gays can never be happy, queer sex is punishable by death, and lead characters can never be in same-sex relationships. In other words, more of the same that we’ve been getting since the Hays Code in old Hollywood stipulated that homosexuals can only be portrayed as unhappy and must be punished. This is a pattern. It is a trope – whether employed consciously or not. It can be nothing other than a trope if you can name more dead TV lesbian and bisexual women than living ones. And we are tired of it.

How the death of one character may be a “mockingjay” for the LGBT community.

Last week I wrote an article about inclusivity in film, and how inclusion is not just a black and white issue. In that article, I also expressed the need for representation for the LGBT community as well, and it seems that need has recently become more pressing. On March 10, Twitter went ablaze with the trend LGBT fans deserve better, which raged on for around six hours worldwide.

In fact, Lexa is just one of the latest Queer female characters to be killed on television, the count being currently at 132 (and increasing by the day). It would be nice to think that Jason Rothenberg did not mean to add to this trope, but no matter what, he did.

When a gay character on a popular TV show was killed off, fans orchestrated an enormous online campaign. “LGBT fans deserve better” was tweeted more than 280,000 times in just a few hours. The hashtag was directed at the makers of The 100, an American post-apocalyptic teen drama.

In the intervening week outraged fans organised the Twitter campaign to coincide with the next episode, which aired on Thursday night.

We’re invested because this is it. Finally. A show that gets it. A show that wants our attention, that wants our viewership, that wants to tell our story and give us hope and make the bold statement to their audience that this, us, we are a topic this network cares about. So, maybe its viewers should try to care, too.

We’re invested because they wanted us to be and they knew exactly how to do that. They targeted us, trapped us. We fell easily into the snare. Why wouldn’t we? This is all we’ve ever wanted to see. Aside from actually wanting it for ourselves. Seeing ourselves in a positive light, knowing that we aren’t as undesirable as all of those other shows have made us out to be? This is new and it is bold, it is saying, out loud, what so many of us don’t have the voice or a safe enough space to say about ourselves, to the world. And the show runners are saying all of these things, too.

But we’ve invested too much.

I watched Buffy kill Angel and lose herself for a while before emerging out of devastation.  More recently, I watched Jessica Jones lose again and again to the man who had violated her in every way, before finally exacting justice.

These are the kinds of stories that inspire us, that promise us because they can get through so much suffering, perhaps, so can we.  These narratives are not nihilistic.  In the end, despite losing Angel, Buffy was free.  In the end, despite so many deaths, Jessica saved the one person she loved most and killed her worst enemy.

But on The 100, the message of 13 is a terrible and bleak one.  Why draw out a whole narrative thread around Clarke and Lexa’s growing intimacy – a counter to Lexa’s early mantra that love is weakness – only to demonstrate in the most heartrending fashion that love leads to the ultimate defeat, death?