WARNING: This article contains SPOILERS for Star Wars: Andor season 2, episodes 4-6.
Marginalized communities are often expected to wholeheartedly cheer on creatives who do the bare minimum to represent them on screen or in print. No one was happy about the little lesbian kiss Star Wars fans got in The Rise of Skywalker in 2019, but not because it wasn't revolutionary for the franchise. It's just what everyone should be showing in their art. Barely.
To be fair, Andor did give us a much better kiss between two women this week, and you'd better believe I did cheer audibly on my couch when we finally got there. But it was almost laughably predictable that such a worthwhile moment had to be followed up with one of the two characters' untimely death. It wasn't even glorious -- she was hit with a stray shot from a blaster. Completely by accident. The point was that it should not have happened. And we did get a stellar performance from the other actor as a result, I'll give them that.
But we still have to acknowledge how hard this is to swallow. That we're still expected to accept this tired trope of minorities never getting the happy endings their white, cis, heterosexual counterparts so often get. Vel and Cinta were finally reunited after a year. They deserved to be happy the same way Bix and Cassian, also often forced to remain apart for periods of time, deserve to be.
It's hard not to blame creator Tony Gilroy, though he does claim it was purely a story decision. Cinta is not the first character who has exited the show tragically and certainly won't be the last, and putting these two characters together for a critical mission that one of them didn't make it out of does, admittedly, make total sense in this context. It does not feel completely like Gilroy went out of his way to kill off a woman in love with another woman. That can't always be said when this ugly trope comes back again and again in TV and movies overall.
That doesn't make it any less disappointing. So many stories featuring marginalized people end like this, as if our trauma exists for the sake of the majority's entertainment. Personally, I can love the show, respect the creator, and hate the outcome all at the same time. It's a weird, exhausting balancing act -- because the kiss did happen and for Disney to let it happen at all is a step in a positive direction and we really should acknowledge how important that is. But two things can simultaneously be true: Gays in space should get the same character treatment as their counterparts, but also, they should get to live happily ever after maybe a little bit more often because we're just so tired of this almost never being the case.