#stop saying it would be like johnlock or klance it would be way worse

[izzymeadows]

Okay some of you NEED to read this.

Johnlock wasn't queerbaiting. The show never tried to make them look romantic, even if they did look romantic sometimes, and the showrunners made a fucking point of saying they weren't gonna be a pairing. If anything, the show made a point of mocking the fans for shipping the characters. Remember that there's an episode where the characters spend like 15 minutes reading theories about what happened to Sherlock and Moriarty and mocking them. It's a very obvious, very clumsy way to make fun of the fans of the show and their theories and fanfics, and honestly, i don't know how they got away with it to the point of still having enough audience to make another season after that.

Klance was only partially queerbaiting. Netflix totally used the interest of the fans on the ship for marketing purposes, which is a way of queerbaiting, and iirc some of the voice actors said they shipped it as well, but here's the thing: the show itself never treated them as anything remotely romantic. They were rivals that became friendly rivals. Lance was consistently written as annoyingly heterosexual and spent a big part of the show openly interested in Allura. And Keith's most important relationship through the whole show was with Shiro. Most of the disappointment was on the fans themselves, not on the show, because Klance is very obviously written as platonic.

Byler would absolutely be queerbaiting. They would have used Will's feelings to help a straight pairing and he, the only male gay character of the show, would be the only one not only to not get his happy ending, but also to not have had a romantic relationship in the whole show. They also made a bunch of merch of his painting, an expression of his feelings for Mike. It would be a total queerbait because it would be inside and outside the show. Byler is undoubtedly written in the show and not going on with it would be deceiving the whole audience, not only the Byler shippers.

It is indeed not the same. Byler would be way worse than anything you might have felt with the other pairings, because the other cases ARE cases of fanon ships that people took more seriously than they were. None of them were written as romantic in their respective stories. Byler is, to the point that not making it endgame would make the whole show objectively worse.

#byler #let's be serious #this would probably be the biggest queerbait ever #stop saying it would be like johnlock or klance it would be way worse #it would be fucking up the writing of the show to make something that's been built up to since s1 not happen