TV's most exhausting horror series The Walking Dead will feature a lesbian couple in the latter half of its ninth season.
Yumiko and Magna debuted on the show last fall, but their relationship won't be made explicit until this Sunday's upcoming episode airs. Eleanor Matsuura, who plays Yumiko, confirmed the coupling to Digital Spy.
"In the comics, it’s obvious that they’re a couple. But we wanted to make sure that it was also obvious in the show," Matsuura explained. "So we fought really hard to have a kiss between us included in one of the later episodes, so we’ll have that to look forward to!"
Cheers for explicit LGBTQ representation, something The Walking Dead has struggled with in the past. The show has enlisted a handful of gay characters but most have only mentioned their sexuality in passing and never acted on it (Jesus, Tara), or shared a quick kiss before their storyline faded into the background and they met untimely deaths (Eric, Aaron).
"We will see a lot more of Magna and Yumiko functioning as a couple, and it’s something that I fought really hard for and Nadia (Hilker) fought really hard for, to make sure we have that inclusion," Matsuura emphasized. "I don’t take it lightly. I’m delighted to be representing where I think television and actually all platforms and media need to be going. I’m happy to be part of it."
Matsuura concluded, "We feel very proud to be representing the LGBTQ community. I feel a responsibility about it."
Normally we'd be ecstatic about the addition of the lesbian couple to TV, but we know by now that there's no such thing as a happy ending on The Walking Dead.
The post-apocalyptic horror series has boasted a healthy amount of LGBTQ characters, but their sexualities have historically been underdeveloped or straight-washed compared to their characters in the comic book series. Not to mention that literally everyone on the show meets obscenely gruesome deaths, further contributing to the overplayed "Bury Your Gays" trope that frankly, we've seen far too much of.
So yay lesbians?
