Is Killing off Monica an option?

Honestly, Monica’s character in Yellowstone feels like pure fetish casting. Taylor Sheridan has a history of dating Asian women, and you can see how that preference bleeds into his work. Monica isn’t just written as Indigenous—she’s cast with an actress (Kelsey Asbille) whose claimed heritage has been widely questioned by Native communities. That’s not representation, that’s aesthetic appropriation.

She’s constantly portrayed through a lens of suffering and moral purity, like some tragic, beautiful symbol for the white male lead’s emotional development. It plays right into the old Western trope of the “exotic Native woman” who exists to deepen the cowboy’s story—and let’s be real, it’s designed to appeal to a certain viewer who fetishizes Asian and Indigenous women.

It’s not just about who’s on screen, but why they’re there and how they’re framed. And when you connect the dots between real-life dating patterns and casting decisions, it starts to feel less like art and more like a fantasy dressed up in trauma.

Kill the character off so we can have a fresh start please.