I'm not done watching kill la kill yet but somehow, despite it all, it is absolutely incredible

when does a relationship become queerbaiting? theres a book that i really like and the 2 male leads characters have a lot of storylines and arcs where they get closer and i think some of the tropes used can be similar to the typical romantic tropes, neither of them end up with anyone at the end of the story since its more about found family and the long journey the whole cast goes through. they even get shipped by another character as a running gag. personally i always saw it as being open to interpretation but recently the revised edition of the original novel came out and there were several lines those 2 characters had about each other that were kinda toned down, i didnt think much of it but i saw a post about how it was clearly baiting and the author was being homophobic for toning it down. i didnt think it counted as baiting since as far as i know, the novel was never advertised as anything with romance and the author never pretended they were gonna end up together. i am definitely a little weirded out by the decision to change those specific lines but a lot of the story stayed the same, including a lot about their relationship so idk what to think.

i guess im more confused on if it counts as baiting, or even substext??

Sooooo I am not the best person to ask about this, because I’m a cis woman who has thus far in life only been attracted in a romantic sense to cis men. I can talk a bit about baiting as a general concept in fiction, but you should definitely take it with some grains of salt. 

Baiting, for me, is like deliberately playing up an aspect writers have no intention on delivering on. Usually this is done for ratings, to tease fans, fanservice, etc, but without payoff, it is just bad writing. Red herrings are good in writing, but only can be successfully used if the actual result is more satisfying than the herring. This applies to writing in general, not just to romantic ships. However, when the baiting involves historically underrepresented groups for no reason other than to get fans to spend money consuming the story, I think we can all agree that becomes something more grotesque than just bad writing: it’s insensitive, socially irresponsible, frankly hurtful. 

Some common examples are Bridgerton which has a gay character, who is extremely minor, yet they played up this character in advertising. Also, Rizzoli and Isles I think actually had its producers mention deliberately playing up the lesbian subtext to hook the audience without ever intending on following through. 

That said, context also matters. Like, there are aspects of the culture of the work’s author, the target audience, and such that come into play here also (so like, romantic tropes differ by culture. For example, enemies to lovers is common in Asian stories but less in the west, and the “girl who pursues a guy” is extremely common in Japanese shonen in particular, while it is very much a cringe trope that almost never results in romance in American fiction. So if a writer reads, say, tropes that are common in America into a Japanese work and says it’s baiting, that’s quite possibly not the intent even if it may have been the experience of the reader. So even if there was no intent, there can still be hurt, and that hurt can be real, if that makes sense. 

The definition of what constitutes ‘baiting’ varies. I do think that, in true Tumblr fashion, the term gets thrown around a lot and loses its intended meaning, or is so rigidly defined that creators can meet the letter of the “not a bait” requirement while ignoring the spirit of it.

To start with the latter: regarding something hitting the letter of what most wouldn’t consider baiting yet not really the spirit, let’s look at The Rise of Skywalker. This movie had a genuine lesbian kiss in it... between two characters we’d never seen more than a glimpse of while others are celebrating around them. Since it has a kiss, it’s not baiting, right? Well... the director deliberately said in the lead-up to the film that he included it because he “wanted LGBT people to see themselves in the film.” If “see yourselves in the film” is like a nanosecond of background, then, like... idk. Baiting or not, it feels icky, and I know some people consider it baiting and some don’t even if they don’t like, love that representation. But I think this is more queerbaiting than like, Nobara and Maki, who don’t have explicit romantic coding. 

Going back to the former, in terms of ‘queerbaiting’ losing its intended meaning... I think there are a lot of really poorly written romantic ships out there, often het, while a lot of same-gender relationships are really well written regardless of whether there’s romantic coding within the text. The main emotional energy in stories with 90% male characters (as frankly many if not most stories are, great job world) is probably between two men. There’s just so much more potential with well-written characters who share a lot of screen time, so of course people are going to ship them. In my opinion, this does not inherently make it baiting, but it certainly creates an environment that lends itself to baiting even if the writers aren’t intending to do this. 

Like, you could say the main emotional energy in BNHA is Bakugou and Deku. However, Bakudeku is 100% not queerbaiting. It’ll never be canon romantically (I don’t even ship it lol). There has been nothing to imply romance between them even if the main emotional message can be seen in their development. Deku/Ochaco is likely to be canon, but there is a significant lack of genuine emotional energy between them (the story’s plots and themes don’t coalesce around their relationship), so it’s probably going to feel forced. In contrast, Naruto/Sasuke had an actual kiss in canon, which while played for laughs is a lot more direct romantic coding than anything between Bakugou/Deku. I actually don’t think the majority of Narusasu is baiting, but I definitely think that one moment in chapter like 3 was really poor fanservice for yaoi fans, and has not aged well at all. 

It is also the case that fans can confuse headcanons with what is actually in the text, and that just never ends well. For example, Clover and Qrow’s ship in RWBY: a lot of people read Clover as gay, which led to “bury your gays” outrage when he died. A member of the crew stated explicitly they had never intended for Clover to be a love interest for Qrow, and truthfully here was nothing strictly romantic in their relationship--nothing like a kiss or a declaration of love or a parallel to another romantic couple. Hence, I don’t personally consider it queerbaiting or bury your gays, but a lot of fans felt that it was and their pain is legitimate even if I think textually the argument isn’t there. The one thing I do think is true about this in particular is that there was also no strict platonic coding, which encourages headcanons. Clear writing, yo. It can help. 

Note the word “can” not “will,” because strict platonic coding doesn’t always fix things, either. In what was probably a reaction to the outrage over Clover’s death, you had extremely blatant platonic coding of Ruby and Penny’s relationship this season leading up to Penny’s death. Ruby refers to Penny as “our friend” three different times, wherein “friend” sends a platonic message and “our” sends an even stronger message that it’s not about the two of them despite the fact that their friendship is one of the sweetest and most interesting in the show. A lingering Ruby-Penny hug then is followed by a lingering Penny-Weiss hug, then Yang, then Blake, etc. The writers went out of their way to hit people over the head with “platonic” and yet they have still gotten accusations of bury your gays and queerbaiting because people will see what they want to see in a story. 

Seeing what you want to see in a story also isn’t inherently bad. People who are underrepresented are going to have to read themselves into stories because Lord knows writers ain’t incorporating them well enough if at all. It’s why “Mary Sues” are common in fanfiction, which is primarily written by people who are not straight white men: because where the hell else are we to see ourselves in fiction? So essentially the macrocosm of culture creates this problem, both in terms of baiting and the misuse of the term, and the only fix is a shit ton more good representation.

Is no24 good

Okay, this took me a while to answer, so sorry for the late reply! And sorry for not putting a read more. I'm on mobile.

That's kind of a difficult question because I honestly don't know whether it's actually good or not. It's an original anime, so there's no source material to see more of its contents, and just one episode wasn't enough for me to decide whether or not I'll stick with it. The animation, art style, soundtrack, sceneries and narrative are pretty good, but there's a number of things that made me very wary of this show, so right now, I'm sitting on the fence. I'll list down the points that caught my attention so you can evaluate whether or not it's worth your time.

First, the bad ones:

1. It's extremely, unabashedly fatphobic. This is probably what turned me off the most in episode one. There's this one character who's actually a very nice but slightly overzealous junior of the protagonist, and it was honestly painful to see the way that the creators treat him. He's good-intentioned and energetic, and often sings his seniors' praises, yet there are many scenes that highlight unpleasant facts about him, which are all connected to his weight. For example, sweating a lot or having difficulty to pass through narrow spaces, or worst of all, that he stinks. This one made me seriously mad. I'm honestly hoping there will be some sort of scene later showing him playing a big part in something that will be of great help for the team (or at least for the protag) and that this will make everyone realize his true potential. But I won't raise my expectations because he's surely just a minor character. I feel really bad for him, and it's pretty hard to get attached to any of the characters who occasion  act like he's a nuisance.

2. Some characters look too childish. I mean, I can totally understand that people look like they're fresh out of high school during their first year in college, but that's not the case with the main character, and a few of the characters look straight-up like middle school kids. It's weird, specially when you think that the audience is supposed to feel charmed by their looks.

3. The pacing is a little fast. A lot happens in just one episode, and it's a bit hard to empathize with the characters while keeping up with the issues presented when you don't even know why you should be caring about them in the first place. So far, I've only managed to get attached to three or four characters even though dozens of them were introduced.

Now, for the good ones:

1. The storyline is fairly original. This normally earns points in my book. I won't go too much into detail, but first things first, it's very rare to see a sports anime centered on adult characters, who are college students, rather than teenagers. The premise is that the protag was involved in a motorcycle accident and got severe hernia, so he can no longer play the sport he loves, which in this case is rugby. He has gone through intensive rehab for many months and now has to repeat a year. In order to help his team and stay as close as he can to the field, he starts training to be the club's manager. That of course means heavy work, which he shouldn't be doing but does either way because it's all he has now. He screws up at first and is aware that he must look lame in the eyes of some teammates, but he continues doing what he thinks is best. I've never seen a plot like that before, so kudos to the writers for that sparkle of creativity.

2. The main character, Natsusa, is also pretty different from any I've ever seen in a sports anime. Girly name, girly face, but no one makes a fuss about it. He's passionate about rugby and was good at it, but he's no genius with miraculous talent that everyone is jealous of, no authority figure with exemplary discipline, no nerd with hidden skills that only work for specific moments of the game, and yet he's most definitely not what you could define as "normal". He's the idol type, and it shows both in his looks and personality. This is normally the kind of person that men hate, both in anime and real life. But he has leadership and persuasion on his favor, so he's liked by juniors and seniors, except one particular guy whose motives we don't know yet. He's also very perceptive and tries to do what he can for his teammates, going around helping them solve their respective problems, rather than the whole club's teamwork centering only on his issues for some reason and all of the members going through unnecessarily dramatic trouble to help him solve his problems instead. Natsusa tries to face his obstacles with positivity and optimism, so he doesn't lose face. In other words, he's not hotheaded, geeky, aloof or overly innocent like most sports anime protags, but fragile-looking yet charismatic and shrewd. He's also apparently from a functional family and it looks like both of his parents are alive. Also, rather than having one best friend who's like an overbearing mom and one rival who's always pushing his buttons, he has two best friends, one who's caring but not obsessive, and one who has seemingly screwed up big time. But Natsusa himself holds no grudges against him from what we have been shown, so there's probably more than it meets the eye to the whole situation. I like that breath of fresh air, though some of the cuteness in Natsusa is annoyingly exaggerated at times.

3. The characters seem generally less cliché and more human than average in this one. They have differing body types and not all of them are conventionally attractive. Moreover, you can tell they have underlying personal issues that are realistic and more drastic than the usual stuff, which involve health and sometimes cause them to give up things they love. Kudos for that realism, and I commend the narrative for throwing bits of info in the right places and doing foreshadowing the right way. And who knows? Maybe this also involves family problems and whatnot. It seems like a story about overcoming these issues and moving on in unexpected ways too, and if so, I hope it keeps up like that. The opening made me fear that I was going to watch a show about an idol group camouflaged as rugby team and I was scared shitless for a second, but I'm glad to have been betrayed on that matter.

Other than this, there's a lot of gay subtext going on, as one would expect, but I'm not sure what to think of it. It's open and heavy, even more than the doses of fanservice you'd find in most series. I'm praying that it'll turn out to be more than just that, but again, this show is clearly full of female fetishes, so I won't get my expectations up.

I hope this wall of text wasn't a pain to read and that it answered the question! If not, feel free to come back anytime.