Saving Hope Writers sign LGBTQ Pledge

Since you seem to believe to be the only qualified adult person to comment on the issue, let me just point out that I do fulfill all the requirements you deemed necessary to be allowed to have an opinion on the matter: I majored summa cum laude in Literature, Culture and Media Studies with a special focus on English Lit., am over 18 years old and have never participated in a so called “shipping war”.
I am German though, so please excuse any typos or grammar mistakes.

The problem has hardly anything to do with genre conventions even though they are often used as an excuse. Sure, the misery or even death of major characters is vital to dramatic narratives, and when dealing with dystopian settings these aspects are often even brought to the extreme.
I also agree with you that creative freedom and a storyteller’s autonomy should be protected and “bullying” writers or producers into changing their creative visions is despicable.
(However, I do believe that with the perk of being able to create stories that reach a large audience comes a certain responsibility… but that’s not the point either).

Unfortunately all of the above is only partially relevant to the core issue. Instead it comes down to simple statistics. Statistics that you got hella wrong.
I quote:
“Relating to that, let’s do a body count on cisgender deaths vs. LGBT deaths on television in the past few years. I’m not saying “let’s kill them all equally” – I’m saying TV deaths are not any more prevalent with LGBT characters. ”

Now, Math has never been my strong suit either so I can understand how one might get confused and reach such a strange conclusion.
Because the problem is exactly that, dear ByGolly10: TV deaths ARE a lot more prevalent with LGBT characters. That’s what all the “whining” as you so empathically called it is about.
It’s a question of ratio. But instead of just comparing the number of overall deaths between heterosexual/cisgendered characters and LGBTQ characters you need to take the number of heterosexual/cisgender characters on television the past few years then look at the number of deaths within that group and at the number characters who survived/are still alive (which gives you the death:survival ratio as well as the deathrate). Afterwards do the same with all the LGBTQ characters seen on tv. Then, and only then, you can compare the numbers. They might surprise you. Same goes for the principle of the happy ending when it comes to straight vs. gay characters or couples by the way (“vs.” in this context is intended as an indicator of a contrasting juxtaposition, not as some kind of philosophical stand-off).

You could also take another approach and calculate the deathrate over the last few years in percentages. Same numbers, one more step of mathematical conversion = same result/horrible conclusion. Might be more convenient since it allows you to directly compare percentages and therefore make the results even more apparent.

To oversimplify: you can’t take 10 oranges and only 4 apples, notice that 3 of the oranges and 3 of the apples have worms in them and say that the batches of both fruits were of equal quality because there were 3 bad items in each of them, when the evidence suggests that while 75% of the apples (ratio 3:4) were bad only 33.3% (3:10) of the oranges had worms in them.
Which (without wanting to take this crappy analogy too far) still leaves you with 7 good oranges but only 1 edible apple.
…And it might give you the impression that most apples are bad or not worth your while.

Lastly…you might also find it unfair that a batch of oranges contains a whopping 10 of them, while these stupid apples only come in tiny nets with 3 or 4 (something I’d be completely fine with if 75% weren’t rotten). Alright…embarrasing fruit-analogy over. ^^

Fact is: over the last 3 decades more than 150 lesbian characters died. And I personally can’t recall more than 20 (INCLUDING minor characters and guest roles) that had a happy ending.
As Dorothy Snarker so eloquently put it in a blog post entitled ” Another Four bite the Dust”: “The stories we tell, particularly about underrepresented groups – like queer people and people of color and people with disabilities and the like – matter. They feed into a cultural narrative which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy – both for LGBT people and how the outside world views LGBT people. It really isn’t much to ask that the majority of stories told about queer women not be tragic. ”

Nobody wants a guarantee that every single LGBTQ character on tv stays alive and gets to happily ride into the sunset… believe me, that’s the last thing I’m hoping this pledge is going to achieve (because without stakes, plot twists and shifting dynamics regarding the characters you identify with, what’s the point of watching/reading/consuming stories? All it would do is to creatively restrict storytellers and their audiences alike, not to mention hurt the practice of storytelling itself). But is it really too much to ask to balance the scales a little bit and make some of our stories less depressing? To call for the people responsible for our current tv landscape to be less repetitive, develop more original ideas and add some positive and meaningful representation to the hordes of psycho-killer lesbians and dead lady-loving-ladies on our tv screens?
This pledge is definitely a step in the right direction and I, for one, admire the Saving Hope Writers for their honesty and their efforts. I’m also excited to see were this call to action/responsible writing takes us.
A few hours ago I read that the “The Catch” writers and producers have signed the pledge as well.

And with that, ByGolly10, I wish you a lovely day. =)