You know, I think this might legit be one of the reasons behind why Juliantina is so good.
Telenovelas lean into romance and so-called cheesiness and straightforward stories in a way a lot of other media thinks it’s too good for. English-language media’s so cynical and seems to hate for people to be happy and left satisfied. Combine that with some weird obsession with needing to be shocking and unpredictable and you get TV that’s hard to watch as a character-lover.
That doesn’t mean that all telenovelas–or indeed, all makers of this kind of media, so Bollywood, kdramas–will automatically do well by their LGBT characters or relationships, there’s still so many other biases to get over, but once they include them, there’s hopefully not the same need to include a stray bullet twist where the victim is all too obvious.