fandomshatelgbtqpeople

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

I really wish people would understand that there are other forms of queer rep besides two same gendered people kissing.

A queer character is queer rep regardless of their romance or a lack thereof even. Ace and aro people exist. Trans people exist. Bi people exist. Queer characters are rep by existing, not just by who they interact with. If a character is nonbinary, they are queer rep whether they kiss someone or not. A bi character in a relationship with someone a different gender is still queer rep because they are still bi. Queer characters can even just be friends with one another. They can be single! And still be queer because that’s who they are not who they do!

This whole trend of deciding if art is valid representation based on romance and ships is reductive and dismissive of identities existing within individuals. And of the communities that we all need.

Just please, stop reducing entire identities down to relationships. Its all good and fun to enjoy your ships, but you have to remember the community is bigger than just romances.

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

One of my biggest frustrations in trying to discuss queer media is how many people seem incapable of separating "this is an important milestone in representation" from "I did or did not enjoy this piece of media." Media analysis goes beyond just "fandom stuff," and queer media in particular deserves analysis and discussion because of how hard it's been stifled.

It doesn't matter if you hate Steven Universe, it's still important to talk about, because it showed the first queer wedding in American children's television. It has been cited by the creators of subsequent queer family animation as a major milestone in allowing their shows to enter production. The Ruby/Sapphire wedding is a historical milestone, and that doesn't stop being true just because you hate the show or think the ending was bad.

It doesn't matter if you think Will & Grace is entertaining or if you have any real interest in watching it, it's still a majorly important entry in televised queer representation. It kicked down the door to allow even more to come after, and deserves credit for what it did even if you don't personally care about the story.

It doesn't matter if you have any personal interest in Rocky Horror Picture Show, it's still got a ton of important history in queer spaces. Understanding why Rocky Horror showings were and still are hubs of queer expression is important even if you despise the movie and the creator.

Giving credit for representation milestones doesn't mean you can't have criticisms of a piece of media, it doesn't mean you have to like the media, and it doesn't mean you can't prefer other media. It doesn't mean it's free from problematic material, it doesn't mean it's god's gift to television, it doesn't mean it's better or worse storytelling than other stories.

It just means it's worth talking about and understanding the context in which it was made.

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

“The overrepresentation of butch women with regard to lesbians in media” is my favorite discourse topic that’s blatantly, obviously untrue

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

idk im really tired of 15-17 year olds who have never interacted with the gay community irl and spend too much time on tiktok trying to act like the authority on all that is lgbt+ 

#resources

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

What gets me about the queerbaiting accusations with regards to Valkyrie in TLAT is that they never gave anyone a reason to think she would get together with any particular woman, and actually if Valkyrie can be "king," a "queen" doesn't have to mean a woman, but they did repeatedly say from Ragnarok's release through the rest of Phase Three that Valkyrie and Thor were written as a romance, which ended up being sidelined in TLAT. But fans who throw around the word "queerbaiting" do not care that the Black bisexual female lead of the previous film has as of now been denied her love story with the protagonist and was altogether diminished in TLAT for a white straight woman. They also follow the promotion of the film enough to know that Natalie and Taika, both straight, said the film would be gay, but their interest in the WLW character apparently stopped short of paying attention to the bi actress playing her to know that Tessa requested the script be changed because being queer was initially all Valkyrie had in it and Tessa found it dehumanizing.

I had to do some digging for sources for the quotes you're mentioning, and it looks like you might be misremembering what was said back during Phase 3. According to Thor: Ragnarok's writers, Thor and Valkyrie's relationship was written as romantic in the original draft of the script but that subplot was scrapped when the movie was still in development (i.e. probably before casting) because they decided they wanted to focus on Valkyrie as character independent of Thor and didn't want to commit to a romance between them right away. From Thor: Ragnarok writer, Eric Pearson:

“But we didn’t want to start from that place [a romance]. It was like, Let’s give Valkyrie her own story that connects with Thor … and if it makes sense for them to get together, then great. You’ve got two really good-looking people who can fight and who’d probably be [good together] if the story went there, but it just didn’t. It became more about the mutual respect, and also dealing with her PTSD."

[source]

So it seems like it's less that an in-progress romance was removed and more like the door was left open for a romance and they chose not to pick it up (yet?). But I definitely agree that Valkyrie herself was backburnered in favor of Thor and Jane's romance, and I really hated that she got left out of the final battle. She wasn't written as a sidekick in Ragnarok, but I feel like Love and Thunder used her as one. We really didn't need to spend all that time rehashing romantic Thor/Jane. They could have just been two people who were very important to each other but weren't in love anymore. That would have worked just as well, and it would have freed up more time for Valkyrie to have her own character arc.

It seems that you might also be slightly misremembering what Tessa Thompson said about Valkyrie's bisexuality. From her interview with Yahoo:

“We talked about it a lot, it was big topic of conversation, because I think rightfully there’s this real want in audiences to see characters be very clearly queer or LGBTQIA inside these spaces. And I think it’s hugely important to have representation. And also as humans I think that we are not defined by our sexuality, and by who we love. And so sometimes I think to hang a narrative completely on that is a way of actually diminishing the humanity of the character. Because you don’t allow them to be anything else.”

[source]

Unless this is not the interview you're referring to, she never mentions asking for the script to be changed or for anything to be removed. She's just talking about working with Taika Waititi during the writing process to make sure Valkyrie's bisexuality struck the right balance between being visible but not being her whole personality. Crucially, she does outright say that Valkyrie doesn't have a romance, which undercuts the accusations of queerbaiting pretty significantly, so it is clear that no one making those accusations read this interview.

However, I do want to give people the benefit of the doubt in that it's possible they weren't following the promotional material at all and just heard about the "super gay" thing through the grapevine (like I did, lmao). People have been talking about that on this website for weeks. If it makes you feel better (sarcasm), Tessa Thompson also got accused of queerbaiting by one of our anons this morning, so she hasn't been completely ignored.

#mod k #queerbaiting

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

Maybe I am projecting my headcanon onto to Jane Foster then ha ha. Though Thor Love and Thunder already has two, awesome queer people Korg and Valkyrie. Also off screen ones Korg’s Dads and Valkyrie’s girlfriend. Korg is a superhero too right? Two queer superheroes!

I mean, I love the idea of Jane/Valkyrie, so I'm definitely in favor of a queer reading of Jane! I just didn't really notice any queercoding.

#mod k

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

“And people really think it’s worth the sacrifice so they can feel morally superior over any piece of media that didn’t play out exactly the way they wanted it to.”

I am sorry people are warping the word. But I am not sure if everyone is doing it with bad intentions or wanting to feel morally superior. People are upset with a lot of homophobia in media and as someone else said that is a limited vocabularity to express this upset. And some people are not always able to articulate their feelings due to things like learning disabilities, toxic masculinity or just not being good with words or maybe english is not a person’s first language. You can disagree with someone without accusing someone of feeling morally superior. Though some people in social justice spaces do use it as giving them a sense of worth because usually being queer in a lot of society’s means your society can hate you.

I would be more inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt if it wasn't part of a larger trend of co-opting social justice terminology and representation language for use in ship wars to prove that your ship is the only objectively right ship and everyone who doesn't ship your ship is morally inferior.

Hopefully I'm not swinging at a hornet's nest with these examples, but after Avengers: Endgame came out, the Stucky fandom co-opted the word queerbaiting along with a handful of other social justice terms (including conversations about misogyny in the movie) to make the argument that Steve's ending was morally wrong and that anyone who didn't ship Stucky was homophobic, even if they were shipping other same-gender ships. The Klance fandom similarly co-opted queerbaiting along with other language related to racial representation to argue that Klance as a ship was morally superior to Lance/Allura as a ship, despite there never being any textual or extra-textual indication that Klance was going to happen.

I also think if it mostly came down to language barrier, people with learning disabilities, and men not being able to express their feelings, it would not be so common and people would not be so resistant to learning that they'd been using the word wrong. The pushback we've received on this just today tells me that there's a motive behind wanting the term to be used this way.

#mod k #queerbaiting

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

Im fine with non canon shipping, that wasnt my point i just meant that its funny when shippers convince themselves and others a ship will become canon and then it doesnt and they get mad at the writers who never promised anything

Its like this, imagine you are at a restuarant

You order something to eat lets say a burger.

The waiter in no way warns you its spicy, it has 0 indication that its spicy on the menu, you get the food bite into it and get mad at the waiter because you thought the burger was gonna be spicy and it wasnt

I apologize for assuming. It was the "made up ships" comment that made me read that into your tone.

I don't really find it funny though. It just frustrates me, especially if it's a fandom I'm also in and I actually liked the way things were going (or even if I didn't like it but I expected it). The way it just dominates a fandom when something like that happens is the number one reason for me just feeling the need to log off for a week.

#mod k

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

Do you think Jane Foster is queercoded in Thor Love and Thunder?

Not really

#mod k #wish she was more queercoded tbh

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

“Some queer people have different definitions of the word queerbaiting.” Yeah, but it’s not supposed to have different definitions. That’s the whole point of this discussion. The whole problem. Too many people have warped the meaning of the term, and now the term is borderline useless. 95% of the time if a post uses the word queerbait I already know I probably can’t take it seriously because it’s just somebody who’s upset the canon didn’t play out like their fan fiction even though it was never going to and no one ever suggested it would.

In 2016, if someone told me that a TV show queerbaited, I would know not to touch it or anything else made by that showrunner with a ten-foot pole. In 2022, if someone told me a TV show queerbaited, I would probably just assume their ship didn’t happen.

The ability to describe and warn people off of a legitimately painful and degrading experience is what we’re losing here. And people really think it’s worth the sacrifice so they can feel morally superior over any piece of media that didn’t play out exactly the way they wanted it to.

#mod k #queerbaiting

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

Not the other anon about non canon ships, but that’s happened in the Legacies fandom, where people shipped two of the main characters together, who were BOTH canonically sapphic, but never got together in canon and the fans of that ship claimed the show queerbaited them even though one of the characters wound up with a girlfriend. Mind you the ship fans were racist af to the girlfriend but… yeah.

#mod k #queerbaiting

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

I think people just need more words than queerbaiting. They're often identifying real issues (prejudiced studio decisions making it hard for creators to put in queer rep, queer identities being aggressively downplayed in text but marketed up [much more arguably queerbaiting at least], etc) but are trying to shove it all under the term of queerbaiting that doesn't fit. Also sometimes people are just mad the piece of media didn't give them the exact ship/representation that they wanted when it didn't do anything wrong. Also also sometimes people are identifying problems in larger media trends that actually aren't necessarily a problem in individual media (the trend of gay relationships not working out in media as much as straight relationships is heteronormative , but that doesn't mean any individual piece where a queer relationship didn't work out is heteronormative)

Completely agree that these things are all at the root of the issue.

If anyone is up for helping coin some terms we can use on this blog to differentiate between different situations that tend to get called queerbaiting, we can totally do that.

#mod k #queerbaiting

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

Anyone else laugh when a fandom decides two characters should date and so they try convince themselves and other fans that the two will date, and then the two never date and the fandom gets mad at the show writers even though they never promised stuff.

Like they blame the writers cause their made up ship never went canon

Okay, if you came here looking for someone to bash non-canon ships with you, you're going to be disappointed. Non-canon shipping is something that is extremely historically important to queer fandom. I personally still really enjoy non-canon shipping, and I am aggressively in favor of people shipping their ships and being passionate about it regardless of how likely they are to be canon. Shipping is a lens for interpreting a piece of art, and technically all artistic interpretation is made up. Canonization isn't even something all shippers want.

The problem is when a fandom gets popular meta or collective headcanons mixed up with what has actually happened onscreen (or on the page) and make assumptions based off that about a ships likelihood of becoming canon. I've definitely been in close proximity to fandoms who were absolutely convinced a ship was going to happen despite it never being hinted at either textually or in marketing. Keeping straight what's in the text and what's in your interpretation of the text and respecting that no one has any obligation to follow your interpretation of the text is something that younger fans need to work on.

#mod k #non-canon shipping

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

I’ve not yet seen TLAT but with what I know from my girlfriend who has… like sure it’s maybe not as explicit as Eternals with an onscreen gay kiss, but there is queer characters. It’s just not about a queer romance. And I think that’s where people get tripped up, because they think a queer story needs to have queer romance, and that’s not all I’m here for.

I agree that's part of it. A lot of people definitely seem to think you have to have a same-gender romance for the representation to "count," as if a queer person can never be single.

I'm once again lamenting the fact that there's not a reliable way to search for fics about a character being gay without searching for a ship.

#mod k #it's the amatonormativity

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

Didn’t people who worked on Thor Love and Thunder say though that Valkyrie would be looking for a Queen and it would be super gay? How is only have a mild bit of gay, not lying about it being super gay? Mild gay is not super gay.

It's a colloquialism. It was a tongue in cheek comment. We're not going to break out the dictionary to analyze it. Again, it's actually a good thing for creatives to not shrink away at the suggestion that their characters might be queer.

Tessa Thompson did say that Valkyrie would be looking for a queen. Valkyrie is bi in the movie, but even if she wasn't, it's actually fine for an openly bisexual actress to make gay jokes about the characters she plays. We're not here to police how queer artists interact with their art.

#mod k

[fandomshatelgbtqpeople]

Some queer people have different definitions of the word queerbaiting. Nitpicking the definition of the word isn’t really getting to the point of why some people are upset with some rep in movies.

It's true that queerbaiting has some subjectivity around the edges. A director joking about a movie with queer characters being "super gay"* is not in that grey area. It is unambiguously not queerbaiting.

The word has a definition, and it refers to a practice that is extremely homophobic. Watering it down to mean "I was personally disappointed" makes it so that when someone is using the term to refer to the very serious thing it actually means, people don't take it seriously. You could be talking about a TV show that intentionally strung queer viewers along for years with promises of representation that never came while the writers were making fun of queer fans behind their backs, and all the other person will hear is "my ship didn't happen."

If people want to talk about why they're upset, they need to explain why with words that actually mean what they're using them to mean. I have no idea why people are upset with Thor: Love and Thunder. Is it because they were genuinely expecting Jane/Valkyrie to happen? Is it because they're tired of hearing about Taika Waititi and are looking for a reason to knock him down a peg? Are people just frustrated with movies that revolve around m/f romances and it's really not about Thor: Love and Thunder specifically? I couldn't tell you because the only thing anyone in our inbox has said about it is "it's queerbaiting." I'm not a mind reader.

#why is this the hill you all want to die on #using one word to mean 10 different things actually makes it harder to talk about why something upset you #not easier #mod k #queerbaiting