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#queerbaiting
dis-a-ppointment · 1 year
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Anyways, this is fucking disgusting.
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^ Becky Albertalli author of Simon vs. the Homosapien Agenda
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^ Dove Cameron
Listen, I understand being curious about celebrities' lives. If you see a celebrity doing a bunch of gay things you might think "hey, maybe that artist is queer" but that's as far as it should go. You should never harass, or threaten, or force anyone to come out. That is fucking disrespectful and wrong. Queerness is about including anyone who feels that they do not fit into normal society, there is no one way of being queer. It's not a box, it's free and open and that's the beauty of it, so how about we fucking stop forcing queer people to come out, or label themselves, it's none of your business.
This has become a pattern and it needs to STOP
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potatomoonjuice · 6 months
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Marvel will literally put a guy on top of another guy, chest on chest, and swear on their life they're not gay. BFFR
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magicalfeminazi · 2 months
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lately I've come across a couple people both here and on tiktok that are now getting into supernatural and basically going "woah you destiel shippers were not kidding, I always thought you were probably exaggerating". And it's like we definetely were not, but I also wonder where this reaction comes from and I think I've got it.
We all know what fandom is, especially if we're talking about non-canon ships. We take the subtext and make it textual, we live in the crevices of stolen glances and romantic paralels. But most of the time there's another (straight) canon ship that the writers can use to queerbait us, being like "see? this is who he really wants". Take BBC Merlin, for example: the devotion and closeness between Merlin and Arthur is obvious, but it's easy to point at Arthur's feelings for Gwen and say "see? this is what's real. you're reading too much into it".
Destiel doesn't have one. The very (mysoginistic) nature of the show means neither Dean nor Cas have any significant relationships the writers could point to and show us the "truth" so there is nothing to distract from what's obviously happening on our screens. There is no great romantic storyline to tell us "this is who he really wants" so they are all that it's left and what's between them becomes undeniable. What's even worse, the other main relationship in the show is as platonic as you can get because Sam and Dean are related (let's ignore the existence of wincest please and thank you), so the difference between Dean's relationship with Sam and his relationship with Cas is so stark, so obvious, that is hard to even begin to compare them and try to paint them both with the same brush.
I know I'm just rambling but would love to hear your thoughts on it.
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kaos-snakey-loki · 6 months
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honestly house md isnt even queerbaiting because house and wilson are just dumb and stupid. its queer rep for the dumbass queers like myself
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what i love for the live action ATLA is that the fandom is fully aware that sokka and zuko's actors are queerbaiting us, but every post is like "YESS!!!! TRICK US HARDER!!!!! I LOVE YOU!!!"
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bloggingboutburgers · 7 months
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...Maybe queerbaiting can only ever mean homobaiting or transspecbaiting
Idk don't kill me those are just cans of worms
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jellyish · 2 years
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normally I’m against queerbaiting but when Taika Watiti slips a bit of gay vibes into a marvel blockbuster it feels less like baiting and more like an inside joke, a cheeky little wink
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corujalesbica · 5 months
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Queerbaiting at its finest
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sonora-reyes · 1 year
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I don't know when everyone somehow collectively forgot the actual definition of queerbaiting but like... yall know queerbaiting was never about REAL PEOPLE'S actual identities right? It's about the MEDIA they put out.
Queerbaiting is when media hints that there will be queer rep to lure in a queer audience with no intention of ever delivering on that rep.
Queerbaiting is NOT when a celebrity experiments with gender or sexuality without coming out. They are allowed to explore!
Queerbaiting is NOT when an author writes a queer book without explicitly stating they share the same sexual or gender identity!
Queer media is NOT queerbaiting just because you don't know the creator's sexuality or assigned gender at birth!
Is the media explicitly queer? Then it's not queerbaiting! Simple as that! No one owes you an explanation of their own identity, full stop.
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cinnamon-coffees · 1 year
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kit conner isn’t queerbaiting you.
billie ellish isn’t queerbaiting you.
taylor swift isn’t queerbaiting you.
harry styles isn’t queerbaiting you.
REAL PEOPLE ARENT QUEERBAITING YOU!! it’s a term used in media literacy. no one owes you an explanation about their sexuality.
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luckshiptoshore · 9 months
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I have been having Feelings about Supernatural again, and I am finally ready to drop my most controversial and yet correct take.
Caveat all the below with the facts that 1. I am still on season 8 of a 15 season show and 2. I have largely avoided finding out what was going on around the show itself while it aired. I don’t really know what actors and writers were saying at the time, and I don’t know how it felt to be a fan in (eg) 2013.
Okay, but I am eight seasons in at this point, and here’s the thing: I was not expecting to see the show I’m currently watching. I expected to see manly men shooting werewolves and demons in the face a lot, then going to bars and banging chicks about it. I assumed that Dean and Cas were both just white and symmetrical and near each other, which is why they got shipped together.
But god, was I wrong. I was so wrong. I am so sorry.
Now, my (incorrect) assumptions weren’t totally wrong for the first three seasons. There’s something strange that you can feel, something simmering beneath the surface, lots of funny little moments but … nothing you can put your finger on. I quit watching originally during season 3 way back in 2007 because I just started finding it unsatisfying.
But then. If I’d only stuck around! Then season 4 happens, and then season 5 happens and then season 6 and season 7 just keep HAPPENING and now I’m on season 8 and … listen to me. Please listen to me. I am ready to say it: at least up until season 8, Supernatural is not queerbait.
This show is not queerbaiting anyone. It has been slandered! This is an intensely queercoded text specifically about queer men who have queer relationships with each other (and Sam is also there).
Prevailing fandom wisdom will say at this point that I need to have a lie down in a dark room until I come to my senses. I keep thinking that I’m completely out to lunch and high on fanfic. But then I watch another episode and it is goddamn UNDENIABLE. What I am seeing is text! Supernatural is a fundamentally queer show, just one written at a time where it was still impossible for a mainstream normie tv property to be a queer text.
There is something astonishing about tracking the way queerness is presented in the show, season by season, and linking that to the accepted bounds of how queerness was able to be presented in media in general. It’s the best reflection I’ve ever seen of how queerness shifted as an American pop cultural object during those years - it’s damn near perfect, and what it depicts is always right on the edge of what was possible at the time.
It’s true that in those first three seasons, gayness is largely played as a joke. Sam and Dean are always being mistaken for ‘antiquers’ (blech), and there are lots of nasty little microagressions. It’s all quite uncomfortable, I’m not going to deny that. But I think that there is something interesting in even that ham-fisted, vaguely homophobic representation. Because queerness is there. It keeps coming back! It’s hovering around the boys (around Dean), and it’s never really allowed to go away.
In season 4, though, there’s a real turn. Cas obviously turns up and gets right in Dean’s FACE and sits on his BED and looks at him with his EYES and … you know. Queerness is suddenly in the room in a much more real way. But it’s not just coming from Cas. Suddenly Dean is having charged moments with other male characters too (the chief? hello? THE SIREN??). Queerness is happening, we can finally see it clearly, even though the show still absolutely cannot talk directly about what’s going on.
By seasons 5 and 6 queerness is becoming both even more real (we get more and more queer background characters) and more dangerous. It’s often a site of genuine peril for Dean, something that he can’t lock down and shut away, something that he’s forced to be more honest about in a way that can literally come back to bite him (Live Free or Twihard, a bi Dean thesis episode of all time). And it’s not just Dean and Cas, now! More and more of the main male characters are having more and more queer moments, too - I think Season 5 is the moment when the show’s first gay kiss happens (which, if you think about it, is bananas! 2010?!) and in season 6 we have Cas and Crowley LITERALLY CONFIRMING THAT THEY HAVE HAD A SEXUAL RELATIONSHIP.
What goes canon in Supernatural is a constant source of shock to me. I can’t think of another show from that era that would have made the sexual relationship between Cas and Crowley a main plot driver for a season arc - and by definition, the break-up of Cas and Dean is part of that arc too. The end of season 6 into season 7 doesn’t work if Dean doesn’t experience a romantic betrayal. Dean then mourns through season 7 like he’s lost a partner, and the show gives him the space to do that. And in season 8, Benny’s relationship with Dean (and the missing Cas) is explicitly, repeatedly paralleled with Amelia’s relationship with Sam (and her missing husband). Dean even gets a moment with Charlie where he confirms-by-denial that they were a couple. IN 2013?! In TWENTY THIRTEEN. When it was still not legal for Dean and Benny or Dean and Cas to get married in most states. (I mean, putting aside the human/vampire/angel thing).
Dean’s queerness is not just situated in his relationships, though. It’s text all the way to his tiniest character choices. It is impossible to seriously read him as straight. For example: though he is repeatedly referred to as a hero, he is never referred to as a king. He only gets the title of queen, and he’s called a queen by multiple characters, across multiple seasons. Charlie puts her queen’s crown on his head in season 8. In season 5 someone asks Dean who died and made him queen. and on and on and on. Purgatory is a gay club in Miami to him! One of the things he knows for sure is that Bert and Ernie are gay! He is a queer character, and both the writers and the actors clearly understand this.
I think it’s really instructive to compare Supernatural to other shows airing at the time. Sherlock also has a main m/m pairing that is and was hugely shipped, and it’s also accused (correctly, I think, this time) of queerbaiting. In Sherlock, just like in Supernatural, characters are always confusing John and Sherlock for sexual partners. But in Sherlock, each moment of confusion is always immediately denied and forms the punchline of the joke. Geddit?! it’s funny!! the men aren’t GAY! They just live together and are obsessed with each other.
This isn’t, ever, what happens when other characters describe Dean and Cas as being in love in Supernatural, though. It happens repeatedly, several times a season, but when it does there is never a comeback. There’s no denial. There’s just silence. Awkward silence, maybe, but silence. The show is saying, we all know this is true. They know this is true. Maybe they can’t say it to each other, but it is a fundamental truth about them. It’s a joke, but the joke’s on Dean and Cas, two dumbasses who can’t admit what everyone else understands.
I’ve said before that I sometimes feel like I’m watching two Supernaturals, the gay show and the show the team are pretending to make. And I also think that there are two fandom versions of Supernatural: the keyboard monkey Supernatural and the Supernatural that takes into account the historic context of the show. Because it is history, at this point. It is so easy, even with the constant attacks on the queer community going on in 2023, to forget what it was like to exist as queer in 2008, or 2010, or 2013. It’s incredibly hard to convey, if you weren’t there. It sounds so made up. You mean you couldn’t marry whoever you wanted? You mean people didn’t casually use labels like bisexual? You mean there were so few publicly queer role models that most queer people literally did not know they were queer? Supernatural is from a time when there were so many fewer words, and so many fewer options, for queer lives. What I’m seeing when I watch it are people who couldn’t articulate queer experiences in the way we can in 2023 - partly because they weren’t allowed to, and partly because they weren’t able to - but who did what they could anyway, to tell the stories they wanted to tell.
And hey, maybe I’m being hopelessly starry eyed! Maybe I’ve just inhaled Jackles’s brain worms! But I do think it’s relevant to point out that in June 2023, three years after spn concluded, we are still waiting for a mainstream m/m pairing between two leads on a show not originally conceived of as a romance plot to go canon. We’re very likely about to get it in the next year or so, but as of this moment I am typing this I cannot think of a single show not initially imagined as a gay romance where networks/execs allowed the male leads to kiss romantically. The Destiel ending we want is still not possible.
And look, as I’ve said above, I am missing part of the live spn fan experience! I vaguely know that Jackles said some weird stuff, and the writers said some weird stuff, and I’m sure it hurt deeply when fan expectations weren’t met. But what I see when I watch the show on its own is a piece of media that is deeply and intrinsically queer, and made so by the work of actors and writers and producers together. And I wish that was a more common fan understanding of the show! It is pretty delightful to discover in real time, though …
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fleursfairies · 3 months
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id rather be queerbaited than watch a show full of very toxicly straight people
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syzygy-yzygy · 6 months
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"claiming these two characters were queerbaited/queercoded implies that you can't be close with your friends without it being romantic." No it does not. Not it fucking does not. You know why? Because while fiction undoubtedly reflects life, it in no way is an accurate representation of it. Life makes terrible fiction because it's messy, illogical, and almost never has a satisfying ending.
When constructing a story writers always take certain liberties. In this case, writers will use certain romantic beats that in real life don't mean anything. For example, today me and someone I know both reached for the same pencil and our hands brushed. This means absolutely nothing, of course. It's literally just a coincidence. But in fiction, everything happens for a reason, and this kind of thing only happens when writers are gearing up for a romantic subplot.
In real life we also don't have things like score or framing techniques to indicate what is and isn't romantic. These kinds of moments are especially interesting because the characters aren't choosing to add romantic score or lighting to a scene. They aren't intentionally editing things with romantic implications. That's the writers, choosing to add all of those things because it's one of the many ways they cue the audience in on the tension between these characters.
When you point out the fact that these tropes are being utilized, you're not implying that these moments in real life are inherently romantic. All that you're doing is drawing attention to these tropes.
In an ideal world, two characters can have a close and meaningful friendship, and we don't see relationship beats used exclusively for romance. But we need to acknowledge that we weren't in that world when queerbaiting was at its peak, and we're still not in it now
Side note: this is why real people can't queerbait. In real life, every relationship and every person is different and it's insanely dangerous to treat real people as though they are equivalent to characters in a TV show.
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if you think forcing an 18yo to come out before he is ready is activism, then just go fuck yourself. you're not helping the community, you're not helping anyone. you're just a bully.
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tchotchkesandwhatnot · 5 months
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Today I had a woman at a PROFESSIONAL CONFERENCE tell me how meaningful it was that Good Omens wasn't queerbaiting her after the absolute disappointment of BBC's Sherlock. I almost asked if she had a tumblr.
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