Hello, I hope im not bothering you, but I can't help and ask. I know you said you had thoughts and to wait the end of the season, but not gonna lie, I feel suckered punched. I tried not to have hope, but still after all the promos ( I know most of them weren't official, but still...) and I wanted to know your opinion/feeling about it all. Im also using this ask to tell you that your posts and tags make me smile a lot, so I also wanted to thank you for that it gave me company in this fandom even thought I dont dare and reach out except now...

Okay, darling, first of all, thank you, I'm happy I can be a positive presence in the fandom for you. Second, I'm gonna be as diplomatic as I can here. One, I think some reactions the fandom has don't need to reach the people they are about, and it is shitty to put an actor in that type of position, even more when not something he said. Second, I think Ryan proved why he was in pr jail, because, well, they are in damage control mode, because considering the way queerbaiting is leading people to believe there will be a romantic relationship when that was never the plan, and like it or not, the things Ryan said paired with the new things that have been said, could be read as queerbaiting. Please notice I said could. We are dealing with an ongoing story, so anything is a possibility. Buddie is in the middle. I think contextually they make sense together, but I also think that they wrote themselves into a corner. I made a whole post about that you can read all my thoughts here, but the short version is that the stakes are too high. They can't not know the potential love story they have on their hands, BUT the potential they have of being one of the best slowburns in television makes it that much harder to actually write that payoff if there wasn't a plan in place and they accidentally did that by playing off of Oliver and Ryan's chemistry. They did establish Buck and Eddie as family, and yes, their bond is stronger than one would expect of two best friends, but while I think it would be unsatisfying, leaning into the family angle without making it romantic will always be a possibility. One of the logistical problems with getting Buck and Eddie together is that, unlike bathena and madney, they work together, so you either need to get one of them out of the 118 or you need to acknowledge their relationship every episode they are both in, and that is complicated in a show with 7 main characters. There's also the issue that the foundation they have laid out for buddie doesn't really allow for them to use the usual tricks to keep slowburns interesting because most shows tend to have issues with slowburns once the tension is resolved, and the build-up with buddie is high. Whether the build-up was intentional or not, you can recontextualize the show to make it seem like this has been building, it's what allowed me to write 4k words on how Eddie has been in love with Buck since 2x04 just by playing with the perspective around them. And you can very easily do the same with Buck. That kind of expectation is not good since it's not the buddie show. The show is not only about Buck and Eddie, but to put buddie in situations as an established couple could make the show about them because, since they are always together, there will be an expectation around showing them being a couple all of the time that they might not know how to work with because there isn't really another television couple that would fit in their category. Even if we compare them to shows like castle, the mentalist, bones, the couple are the main characters, so it's okay if the couple is taking away from the rest of the show, and honestly, all 3 of those shows kinda tanked their own build-up for a while there. And Buck and Eddie literally have a legal document binding them together, for all intents and purposes they have a child together, and they are best friends, so there's this expectation around them if they ever get to be a couple that they will be a good couple. You can't have them fumbling around much in the way other slowburns do because they are solid. So there's also the issue of keeping them interesting because television writers don't like letting couples have peace.

Sure there are issues you can place on buddie to "spice things up" if they think they got boring resolving the tension, like playing with the sexuality angle, or the abandonment issues Buck, Eddie, and even Chris have, but they are not things you can really drag out. They work in the immediate aftermath of them getting together, but then they would have to get creative and they probably don't know how to get there. But why am I talking about the logistics of the couple in the big picture? Well, I think Ryan has been playing Eddie as at least a little bit in love with Buck the whole time he's been playing Eddie, my main argument for that is that he has the same reactions for Buck that he had for Shannon (post on that here), so Ryan could very much just gotten comfortable and said his interpretation of Eddie's feelings for Buck without it being something he was explicitly told. Both Ryan and Oliver said Buck and Eddie are getting closer this season, so "trying to give the people what they want" could very much just be what Ryan himself is trying to do with the text he's being given. It could be that the marketing team didn't think the fans would react to what he said like that and that's why he was allowed to say it. They could be backtracking because Buck and Eddie are getting together and what Ryan said would be a spoiler. Or they could be baiting us to raise the ratings. Every angle here is possible. We only watched one episode of the season so far. We don't know where the story is going yet. It could be going anywhere. It could be going somewhere. Maybe by the end of the season, we will have something explicitly canon on buddie. Maybe they fucked up and the people calling queerbaiting will be somewhat justified because, honestly, I'm getting teen wolf cons flashbacks here. I do think it's fucked up that people are expecting Oliver to deal with something Ryan said. I do think emotions are running high because of many things that happened in the past 2 weeks. I don't think it is fair to scream queerbaiting yet. But I do unfortunately think we might get there if they keep raising the stakes between Buck and Eddie on the show with no payoff while letting Ryan say things like the things he's been saying. For me, the important thing to remember is that the story is in the middle, we don't know where the show is gonna take Buck and Eddie individually and together, so I think everyone needs to take a breath and stop acting like the show already ended and wait to see where it's gonna go.

please tell me people are joking when they say sonic prime is queerbaiting with sonic and shadow. that is not whats going on here please be serious you guys just see sonic and shadow interact in any way and become unable to turn your shipping brains off

why are we having queerbaiting discourse as a fandom in the year of our lord 2024 😭😭 we're just as bad as twitter oh my god

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sorry just dipped over to twitter to find out they’re still using the term ‘queerbaiting’ wrong and comparing buddie to any host of queer ships from voltron

((saw someone say gus, gale and lalo were queerbait and im ready to throw my laptop across the room))

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Its genuinely funny to me that dcc still tries to capitalize on gay shipping to the point of making whole ass merch focussed on just 2 members when they can't even be bothered to properly promote the official debut solos. Like your most lucrative members in terms of industry presence are Siyeon and Dami but they get peanuts, your regularly booked members for radio shows are SuA and Handong but they get peanuts, your most visually intense member with the best acting is Gahyeon but she gets peanuts. But the 2 members who blew up because people got obsessed with them as a ship are the central characters of half their nightmare arc and have 70 to 80% of the screentime with some members getting paid actual dust, are the only members to get exclusive merch and their whole claim to fame is that people want to see them smooch.

BBC Sherlock might be completely unwatchable to me now and also I may rag on it and call it irrelevant and I've forgotten 80% of it but I WILL still fight tooth and nail with anyone who says johnlock wasn't queerbait as fuck in that show. I remember what they did to those ugly british men. I remember what they put those fujoshis through. the gaslighting. the zigzagging. the same string cords played over and over (<- just a general gripe) and I wont let anyone say different. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote queerbait too but he gets a pass because he really did do it on accident

bbc sherlock is only completely unwatchable to you bc it mostly sucks but you're literally right. there are scenes in that show that literally do not make any sense if they're not supposed to be gay/queerbaiting. somebody explain why they put the scene with john and irene in the power station where she's like "you love him" "im not gay" "well i am" like............TELL ME WHY THATS THERE

I stopped watching the show because my sister and I watched it together but she started to have some non-related issues and we stopped watching it, but I always kept up with whatever was happening

Watching this just made me so emotional. I literally sobbed on my bed after watching a 10 second clip because my god this is HUGE.

After supernatural, i thought that every show would always queerbait, and i was kinda expecting 911 to do it too, or at least not make buck nor eddie canonically queer, and i was fine with it, even if thats not what i wouldve wanted, but it is. They listened. They cared.

imo there’s a difference between “queer coding” and very specifically playing to both sides whether or not the writers/artists/directors intended to make a character queer or not. I think that for enstars specifically, with the new valkyrie event, while people are happy that some characters such as shu and mika in the new event are being shown expressing their love for each other and their views on their sexuality and expression, people are frustrated that it is not explicitly said because of the company’s need to not confirm a character as queer in order to not alienate (homophobic!) fans. Because at the end of the day in happyele’s eyes, if that homophobic fan spends a lot of money on the game then they’re worth pandering to (shrug emoji) And I mean some people also just don’t like shumika

anon i understand where you're coming from but i think you are wildly missing the point in my original post

my point is EXACTLY that if you need the characters to walk up to the screen and say "i'm gay" or "i'm [insert some 21st century-friendly label]" or "this is my boyfriend" for it to count as queer media in your eyes than i think you need to do some reexamining about what exactly your views on queer media as a whole are

plus, they DO do this. they explicitly talk about queer themes out loud many many times in enstars. shu says to mika that they should, together, create the happiness that his grandfather was never allowed to have, after they spent the entire story detailing shu's grandfather's queer romance story. they probably kissed in hermitage, and the lyrics to acanthe talk about them kissing. rinne proposes to niki in every other story they appear in together. he told him to do a striptease during nightclub. tori has very explicitly gay feelings for eichi. arashi narukami exists. eichi, while talking to arashi in pretty mission, says "people like us," confirming himself to also be some form of queer. kuro calls keito an old word for spouse or husband. and SO many more examples. this is not "queer coding" or subtext, its just text.

in any case, authorial intent is generally of no interest when it comes to examining media. the conversation of what the author could have meant by something is wildly less interesting than the conversation about the ways in which the audience can interpret it. what the writers intended should have little to no place in the discussion. what we should be talking about is what the thing itself is saying, both implicitly and explicitly.

expanding your view on what exactly can be seen as "queer media" can only do you good. and it would do so much good to not give a shit about the possibility that homophobic people will also like the thing and interpret it as not queer. that is literally not my problem whatsoever, and it shouldn't be yours either.

what it seems like to me is that no matter what pieces of queer media will always be criticized in some capacity. if they're not explicitly queer enough, they're just bait and have no merit. if they are explicit, then they're promoting stereotypes, or its rainbow capitalism, or it's fetishization. there is no winning. the standards for queer media are absolutely absurd, but they don't HAVE to be. you don't have to look at a piece of media through this kind of silly cynical lens if you don't want to.

the discussion about a work loses so much interesting and important nuance when you try to shove it into a box of "good representation" or "bad evil queerbait." thats just really really boring way to view stories

isnt it crazy how most of the queerbait ships that people try to compare to byler dont even have a single one of the characters in the pairing confirmed canonically in love with the other or planned gay from the beginning (and their sexuality actually being integral to their character arc and the show’s themes)...or have a seriously written storyline emphasizing how beautiful and genuine and deep the character’s love for the other is like im sorry but some people try too hard to look for similarities that just arent there imo 🤷‍♀️

the thing is people think the only basis for byler being endgame is in subtext or subtle hints in the show and since thats also how people picked up on other queerbait ships they assume its gonna be the same of byler but...we’re not just basing off of subtext here. its an actual plot point in the show that will is in love with mike and their relationship is being developed in a similar manner they’ve done with canon couples in the show (interruption trope, heart to hearts, essentially gluing them together as a team for an entire season), for fuck’s sake they built up an entire painting plotline for them that imo would be anticlimactic or a complete waste of time if the big reveal would just end in a rejection or their relationship staying exactly the same as it did 😭 its actually ingrained in the writing that the most logical outcome is them. its in plain text. if you understand how they wrote the arcs of both mike and will then you’d know the outcome is them ending up together too.

it’s always “the duffers are cowards” “they’d be too scared of backlash” but they're literally already getting backlash from homophobes for canonizing gay will and in love with mike? the moment will’s feelings for mike were brought into fruition they already took the risk and went in too deep already. also when people say that they wouldn’t have “time” to develop their relationship in the last season i get so annoyed because what the hell else do you guys actually think season 4 was all about like their work is already half done, they completely removed will and mike from the supernatural plot just to focus on their relationship 😭 im literally so tired of having to explain this but i wish i could debunk every argument people have about byler being queerbait atp cause its really not as complicated and hard to pull off as people make it out to be

meanwhile BBH was literally Forever's best man at his elvis wedding..... just let the man be gay for his minecraft crush c'mon

right its truly not that srs...and what irritates me the most is that bad never clarifies his sexuality bc its NO ONES BUSINESS ??? theres a reason he only uses gender neutral pronouns. like think with ur heads people clearly he doesnt want people to know 😭 and thats not queerbait

hello loveliest person ever. would you consider no byler to be queerbait ?

hey bestie

if byler didnt happen i would genuinely believe that their intention was to go through with it but they dropped it or were told to drop it. because if its queerbait theyre literally doing it all wrong? the ultimate goal of baiting is to gain an audience from a selected community, in this case the queer community, by promoting the media as potential representation and yet they have done everything in their power to AVOID this with byler.

for starters the majority of queerbait is usually achieved in the marketing side of things. and yet there was ZERO joint press with noah and finn, where they could have promoted byler the most. almost all of their scenes are together but they deliberately separated them so there wasnt even a chance for spoilers about byler. that is not how you queerbait.

queerbaiting is supposed to be obvious. it shouldnt require elaborate theories, it should be thrown in our faces. this article shows a clip of a trailer from riverdale that includes a gay kiss. i think the kiss was just to distract the character, it wasnt intended to be romantic at all and yet they put it in the trailer? that was obviously for the goal of getting queer audiences more excited and more likely to watch this (absolutely fucking horrendous) show.

on the flip side!! theres also straight bait and again, aaaaalll in the marketing.

i cant even believe these are real lmao.

they did this for s3 too. theres a flash of this in the s3 trailer, which had lots of mlvn shippers thinking this was the season of nothing but love for them and yet el broke up with him in the second episode. we also get audio of mike saying “we’re not kids anymore” but no visuals that showed he was talking to will and definitely not the “its not my fault you dont like girls” line, which would have been such a clear opportunity to queerbait.

and s4 was very gay and they could have so easily grabbed a LOT of peoples attention and curiosity by adding some byler scenes in the trailer but there was nothing.

could you imagine if they showed one of these in the trailer?? they had such a clear opportunity to queerbait and they didnt.

the only thing they did include was this and i didnt even notice will the first time i watched it.

the only things we’ve seen in the marketing that relate to byler are from netflix accounts in other countries that loosely imply that they ship byler but thats literally it. and these accounts dont actually have any access to the writers room. theyre not implying or confirming anything theyre just trying to be relatable and a lot of people would relate to the post if they mention byler.

aside from them just avoiding the topic in the promotion for the show, theres also the fact that byler has inspired loads of in depth theories and analyses based on how they portray them in the show. the point of queerbaiting is to throw it in your face. “look a gay kiss! watch our show to see gay people!” the fact that we’re reading into shit like lighting, colors, music, framing, all this stuff that the ga doesnt read into is a big sign that their goal isnt queerbait. one time i got an anon that summed it up perfectly, “why would they queerbait only to gay film nerds?” and its so true.

queerbaiting should not have people thinking too hard. like the kiss in riverdale, its supposed to be shoved in our faces in order to actually achieve what theyre trying to do. not everybody has time or cares enough to read entire analyses on specific film choices, and because of that, they would be completely failing to bait people. the goal is to gain their audience and no one has been baited for this because it doesnt seem obvious that its actually going to happen.

because of all this if byler didnt happen i dont think queerbait would be the right word. itd be a whole different thing entirely and i would genuinely believe they were forced to not go through with it if it didnt happen. but i highly highly doubt that would ever happen. its netflix’s biggest show and they trust the duffers and its the last season so even if people dont like it its not like theyd lose money because people would stop watching. by then theyd already finished the whole show.

Been awhile....

I genuinely have no clue about the drama surrounding Soda_stuff. It's probably because I don't have discord but what I can gather from her is like....she kinda gives off bad vibes. & I understand that she's a real person & everyone makes their own mistakes but like....honestly I feel like anyone who regularly uses Twitter is kinda....yeah

Also the shipping thing confuses me. She made a whole post about like not having ships in game because its a fighting game, & thats okay, I understand that- but then it mentions queerbaiting. She literally fucking does. She draws ships that everyone loves which like- yeah shes doing it to draw more attention to the game & getting more views & popularity, but its queerbaiting nonetheless. Shes a hypocrite.

Honestly I don't really give a shit about drama all that much since if you focus on it too much it ruins the media as a whole, but its really hard to ignore when you see it everywhere & see everyone bringing it up. Honestly Soda also deleting her tumblr account pissed me off too like. I get you're used to fucking Twitter but you're just getting rid of all that media & content some people CAN'T use discord &/or twitter its good to have your stuff on multiple platforms so its more accessible to others.

Anyways mod you're awesome keep being awesome bro.

-🦐 anon

Thanks shrimp Anon.

And also I get Soda is her own person who makes her own choices, but I think she should have at least a few other social media things, because not only are there some people who can’t use Twitter, but also because there’s people like me who vehemently refuse to use it because… well… it’s Twitter. I am NEVER downloading Twitter.

what’s going on (i’m seeing out of context spn posts on my dash). what happened

HII OK SO actually im not even 100% sure on the details of this one but basically two actors on spn (one played a vampire who was lowk def fucking dean and the other played deans werewolf bf or actually like a human turned werewolf but thats not the point) were like best friends during filming like went to the others weddings and kept posting on twt abt being besties etc etc. but like literally all of the spn cast acts like theyre in love w each other genuinely they could be making out in public and everyone would be like “wow the cw is going hard w the queerbaiting promo this time”. but also like. i think ty (the vampire actor) literally posted a pic of them on best friends day and went like “we’re non-sexual life partners” or some insane shit like that a bunch of years ago so. so really it was a mess

anyway but like yesterday dj announced he was like fully in love w ty and also they were getting married!!!! im not totally caught up on the lore but judging by general reactions this was NOT expected. so for a normal tv show this would be met w “good for them!” but everyones still a little traumatized from bishagate two years ago and ppl were like okay this is gonna turn out a mistake he prob meant “platonic life partners” again this could be queerbaiting to promote s16 (which like isnt even confirmed yet) but like ppl werent fully sure??? like its PROBABLY real and that means being super happy for them but like their coworker literally accidentally came out once and didnt say anything for two days so who knows. but like. its prob true!!!!! and the trend of ppl getting married w their spn coworkers?? its insane. AND the werepire jokes bc they had the funniest possible casting combo AND the fact that they went from “im so happy youre getting married to her!” to “im marrying you asap”????? sooo funny i love spn sm we’re getting endless updates on the lore