10 unforgettable American Horror Story characters
By Tina Wargo
American Horror Story: Asylum, episode: “Spilt Milk;” screengrab via FX.
#1: Lana Winters (AHS: Asylum)
Ms. Lana Banana. Where to even start? She’s our point person for the season, and not just because we enter Briarcliff right alongside her. She’s the picture of endurance, a beacon of strength, the most absolutely unbreakable television character I can think of (sorry, Kimmy Schmidt), and she’s, to use her own words, “goddamn plucky, remember?” She finds herself in the asylum as a journalist, but stays as a inmate, locked up for her “impure” and “sinful” relationship with her beloved girlfriend. From there, things truly get worse at every turn. She’s kidnapped. She’s impregnated. She survives a botched, self-induced coat hanger abortion. She’s given electro-shock therapy to cure her of her “disease” of homosexuality. And still, she endures.
And she doesn’t just stay alive. She writes about everything. She exposes Briarcliff, the doctors, the priests, the corruption and the torture she faced. And her aforementioned kidnapper? She shoots him, point blank, before he even has a chance to think about saving himself.
She’s more than a TV hero and an LGBT icon: she’s the absolute patron saint of refusing to be broken. She tells her own story- even profits off of her suffering- and not just because she’s finishing what she, as a journalist, started. She owns her story so that no one else can take it away it from her anymore. Goddamn plucky, indeed.
American Horror Story: Asylum, episode: “Spilt Milk;” screengrab via FX.
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American Horror Story season 6 premieres Wednesday, September 14th at 10PM ET on FX.