#that's not how queerbaiting works

[n7punk]

what's the worst thing you watched and kept up with (at least for a while) because you were gay and begging for scraps? mine was probably pretty little liars

#what was her name? emily? whatever it was i was a simp for the lesbian character on PLL #and put up with three seasons of fucking Nonsense for it #words and things #i say 'probably' because there are worse shows i watched for various girls that i had crushes on over the years #but thats a different kind of simping. i didnt watch them for girl kissing i watched them for a girl who i knew was probably straight #gay #lesbian #bisexual #<- yall got it the worst half of these things were subtly biphobic too #oh god does anyone remember that show where the MC was a succubi but didn't know about monsters #so she thought she was just a freak and was always on the run until the monster world finds one of her kills and hunts Her down #and she ends up. idk working at a monster bar and helping her Monster Cop boytoy hunt runaway monsters? or something? #listen what i remember from that is how badly i wanted her and her simp (female roommate maybe?) to fuck instead #and i swear they queerbaited me a little. but i might have just been delusional tbh

[beautifularcadehottub]

I've seen people in the comments talking about queerbaiting in Good Omens once again which is MAKING ME FURIOUS

Maybe some of you don't remember the queerbaiting times with supernatural, merlin and sherlock (don't come at me, I truly love these shows)- so please be so kind and stop that.

This show has brought me so much joy (and pain) BECAUSE you can clearly see a distinction between Good Omens and e.g. Sherlock by how the actors and writers adress queer topics and just in general the tone of the series.

So it pains me to see how over the last years the word "queerbaiting" has been used VERY generously and especially MISUSED.

@neil-gaiman is a wonderful person so please don't accuse him of queerbaiting if you disliked the last episode because on the topic of real queer representation Neil Gaiman, Michael Sheen and David Tennant clearly delivered and slayed.

go and educate yourself before you say something mean on the internet

#good omens #good omens season 2 #queer #stop accusing people of queerbaiting thats not how it works #neil gaiman #thank you neil gaiman #queerbaiting #david tennant #michael sheen #lgbtq

[frodolives]

I know I already made a million posts for this but this is literally still so insane. This is more insane than most mclennon edits I have seen here on tumblr. These pictures with the corresponding lyrics? Literally just saying he loves Paul more than any other? On pride month?

I am high rn

#the mfs running these accs are learning how to queerbait and it’s working !! #the beatles #paul mccartney #john lennon #mclennon

[ctntduoarchive]

well. q!tntduo aren't queerbaiting. q!quackity has complained so much about "wilbur's other bitches" and referred to his as him husband. but q!wilbur? yeah his ass is queerbaiting with "quackity is my (LOUD, PURPOSEFUL COUGH) friend" and "i could never throw quackity under the bus, for some reason i just want to keep him around."

#so its Half queerbaiting i suppose #ALSO THIS IS A JOKE THIS ISN'T HOW QUEERBAITING WORKS #tntduo #quackbur

[remythologise]

2023 fujoshi wrapped

you got baited 24 times

you debated the difference between queer-coding, queerbaiting and censorship in the comments section 4 times

you revisited fanfiction for 7 hit ships from the 2000s

you got blocked 5 times for tagging paragraphs of old man yaoi ship meta on unrelated text posts

you played 585 hours of video games for a combined total of 10 minutes of gay subtext and/or sex scenes

you judged a BL manga or light novel by its cover 948 times

you told 39 friends to watch 3 gay tv shows that are 'actually really really well written and enjoyable and not just gay' and 0 of them did

#respectively: 1) my new boss is goofy. and I enjoyed it. 5 stars. would get baited relentlessly again #2) literally like. is anything queerbaiting but supernatural and maybe parts of sherlock. up for debate. anyway I still can't believe #someone called GAME OF THRONES queerbaiting. I'm still reeling from that. #3) Oh You Know. #4) I can't believe I found out paragraphs of tags annoys people. sorry for being alive on the Paragraphs of Tags blogging website I guess. #(this is because they now show up in notifications I know. I have been trying not to post like. Personal Lore as much like I used to. #trying to keep it related!!! :( sorry for annoying people... it's just how I've always blogged...) #5) disco elysium is the joke here but the hour count really. let's be real. bg3 #6) I do have a pretty good accuracy rate on whether a BL is going to be good based on the front cover art alone honestly. you can just tell #7) AND THIS IS ONLY ABOUT DEADLOCH AND IWTV WHICH I STILL CAN'T BELIEVE SO MANY OF YOU HAVE NOT WATCHED #do NOT get it twisted. 6) is about THOSE two shows. and also black sails eternally #kira for ts #bored at work. ama

[presentlydean]

my god the revisionist history in this fandom sometimes, like.  i guess some part of me should be glad that people watching it in 2023 can watch supernatural and say, this show was not queerbaiting, dean and cas are obviously together and anyone who watches it should know, and the confession was redundant and useless, but.

guys.

i'm not saying this undercut the work of many writers who spent years layering in details of queer subtext, parallel storylines, and meaningful moments between dean and cas.  those things exist—alongside actively homophobic text, yes, but they exist, and they are important—hugely so to me.  but there is a reason why destiel is a case study in academic works on queerbaiting.  there's a wink and a nudge that comes with a lot of the queer subtext in the 2000s and 2010s, where creators can allude to their characters being queer either by having other characters joke about them or by putting them in queer situations, but the audience is supposed to be in on the ‘joke’ and nothing is meant to come of it.  nothing was meant to come of the queer subtext on supernatural.  it was always meant to be queerbaiting.  

i'm going to call out season eight/season nine era specifically because it was mentioned in one of the posts i'm vaguing (if you see this—i just didn’t want to reblog yours to be grumpy and contrary so i made my own—no ill will!).  watching supernatural as season eight aired was actively painful because you would see these parallels between sam and amelia and dean and cas; you’d watch the writers layer in romantic tropes for dean and cas; you’d have dean on his knees, bloody, saying “this isn’t you, i need you;” you’d have all the deans cas was brainwashed to kill; you’d have “he’s in love…………………with humanity”—and then a fan would go up on stage in a convention and ask a simple question about the relationship between dean and cas and get eviscerated.  that's if you manage to get a question about them past the censors—oh! because questions about ‘destiel’ were literally banned.   

a teenager says she’s bisexual and is booed by the convention audience and dismissed by jensen ackles (“i'm gonna pretend i don’t know what you asked,’ as i seem to recall him saying) for saying she sees a lot of herself in dean and asking if he might be bi.  homophobic jokes from the actors.  big, blow-out fights between fans and creators.  a bigwig getting on twitter and calling fans delusional for pointing out what was actively happening between the characters and what it implies (this is where misha collins’s “your not crazy” tweet came in, and let me tell you people held onto that one like it was a lifeline—because it was).  people quit the fandom then, a lot of them, because of how vicious it was.  people would send anon hate to destiel shippers telling them to kill themselves while literally quoting jared and jensen’s nasty comments on dean and cas.  after that point, even the show started trying to dismantle some of the affection between dean and cas after that point (cue someone asking about the relationship between the characters and jensen saying they don’t really have one this season, and it’s refreshing because the dean and cas thing has been blown out of proportion).   

as someone who was a young adult and had imprinted on this show like a baby duckling, it was just a straight up bad time.  and i'm sorry, you cannot say that just because there was a subtextually queer connection between dean and cas at that point, the show wasn’t queerbaiting.  if the creators cannot respond to polite questions about the basic queer subtext of their show, that’s queerbaiting.  it just is. 

and as for the confession?  it was hugely important.  and half of what made the confession powerful actually was “in just saying it,” not just for the characters, but also given the fraught context of the show.  in speaking it, they made it real in a way that it wasn’t before simply because of the cultural context it exists in.  they said the thing that they had forbidden. 

when i say ‘unparalleled media experience’ when talking about supernatural, i really do mean it.  never have i seen a show so actively hateful towards its fans turn around and say, no, we were wrong, you were right (and then weirdly try to reverse it after the show ended????).  i stopped breathing when cas started his confession because, after the pain that came from season eight and nine, i never thought they would get as close to explicitly stated destiel again.  and then they did it.  they said that right there.  after all those years. 

dean should have kissed him.

#destiel #supernatural #junespeaks #queerbaiting #sorry a couple of posts got me worked up tonight #have a rant #and really if you wrote one of the two posts that prompted this #i do mean you no ill will. i just have a lot of feelings about this #and i think that people forgot how bad it was to be in the fandom at that time #it really hurt #and what we got was important #even though we didn't get everything #suicide mention cw #homophobia cw

[i-dont-bite]

i feel like the writing team the duffers the marketing team etc are all sitting at a table rn discussing what the hell to do with us

#like 'should we give them a lil hope and promote the ship or shove them down to not spoil' #and yk they probably know how queerbaiting works #and maybe they are gonna try and do the opposite that most queerbaited shows have done #which was promote the ship a lot tease the shippers and give them hope #byler

[lucifer-kane]

actually, the only thing that wont be retconned during the final rvb season IS the grimmons fucking in a closet scene

#but sammy how does that work you ask #they found a way. they would find a way #jokes goofs all goofs #rvb #red vs blue #im still on the 50/50 of. it would be neat if they somehow ACTUALLY got together finally #but on the other hand. this is the only place i think the continued queerbaiting would be fucking hilarious

[literallysatanofficial]

I gotta say, like. I haven't seen the ep 9 and 10 leaks, nor do I want to (I watched pine barrens early and I wish I hadn't) but I swear, at this point I'm convinced everyone's overreacting for no reason; like there is NOTHING that the show could possibly do that would disappoint me on such a level that ppl are saying they don't want to continue watching the show. Unless they kill off the entire cast, pull an X-files and replace everyone, I just can't see it being as dire as people are making it out to be. Like... let's all calm down. You're getting (at best) a choppy machine translation, and at worst what is essentially a silent episode with 0 actual context for what you're seeing. From my experience watching pine barrens in Russian, I can tell y'all that things were interpreted incorrectly (both in summaries AND by me while I was watching) and watching the actual english episode was an entirely different experience.

Maybe it's just because I haven't gotten my hopes up about nandermo getting together this season there have been PLENTY of clear signs that it's not happening but I legit can't even imagine a worst case scenario that could prevent me from enjoying the show at this point. It feels like so many fans have gotten swept up in fandom hype (which is totally fine and completely understandable, I'm not immune to this either) but it's almost like... there's a terrifyingly big divide between fanon and canon this season. It's just a silly dumb little show. If you wanted it to go one way and it didn't, bummer, I guess, but to write off an entire show because the conclusions you've drawn up with friends weren't the way it panned out is so odd to me. It's understandable when theories like there being something in the walls that colin is trying to get to or whatever spread, but at the same time it could just be a running joke about him being a little shit of a kid. If this isn't addressed, I wouldn't be surprised. I don't think it's really ever been pushed like that, it's just that it gained traction in the fandom and a lot of fans started clinging to it (as well as some other common theories like it) but is it REALLY being teased? Or was it not meant to be anything more than a surface level joke.

I don't think it's right to be disappointed when stuff like this has been hyped up by the fandom rather than like... official marketing material or something, and I think that can be applied to every prediction that seemingly didn't come true.

I just see a lot of hostility and accusations thrown around, and some truly bizarre takes, and it's just... it's a show. it's a show, guys. it's just a show.

#wwdits #what we do in the shadows #ive been rewatching to recap the season for the wiki and like. #idk. ive thought some of the nandermo theories this season have been pushing it but MAN #idk how much clearer guillermo could be about not being into nandor anymore #i have no fucking idea if this is the source of all the vague complaining but it really seems like this is the root of the issue #the anger at last season's finale for 'queerbaiting' and now i guess anger about them not getting some contrived jealousy arc #ill be honest like. if it was some wack ass shit like nandor killing guillermo i still would not give a shit. #cause as we saw with last seasons cliffhanger and this seasons premiere ep. it doesnt matter #ITS JUST A DUMB LITTLE SHOW!!!! #i feel like everyones taking it SO seriously like its.... expectations are so high #its a tv show these characters arent real and they are all terrible stupid people #ada speaks #not to be all like 'calm down son its just a drawing' but can we maybe not hold this show to impossible standards #like its not some revolutionary all important work of art its a shit and fart comedy show with some plot to it #IDK MAN. IDK

[nostalgia-tblr]

.

#recently i am having to work VERY hard not to say something like “two men talking to each other isn't actually queerbaiting” #i've JUST SPENT YEARS (literally YEARS) being told that boyslash is so common because “men get all the good friendships in media” #except now if two men don't actively hate each other this is EXACTLY THE SAME as cruelly teasing us with them being lovers??? #like don't get me wrong i read shippiness into everything too but i am aware that i'm wilfully misinterpreting most of this stuff #and i wouldn't get mad about how the shit i made up in my head is deliberately placed there as bait to get me to watch stuff #but then i don't even think sherlock was queerbaiting given that the writers KEPT TELLING US it wasn't a romance so... #(tjlc being of course a fantastic example of a fandom making shit up and then insisting it's true despite being repeatedly told otherwise) #disk horse (sorry)

[m0e-ru]

in every universe adachi and the attendant ARE friends it's just that the one we're in is the outlier.

#kommento #// it SUCKS here . come on #// somewhere out there is a musical stageplay and they have a duet and it reprises in a minor key during the magatsuinaba arc #// somewhere out there their actors start queerbaiting on instagram stories and yt shorts to promote the stageplay and it WORKS #// theres a mangaka revealing in an interview they have an annotated copy of sogabe's volume 12 with sticky notes flaglets and bite marks #// theres a spinoff novel writer surprised as much as atIus how people liked their part specifically in the anthology with other writers #// theres a miscellaneous drama cd of glimpses of life outside the IT and the mystery itself and the bts says that kasuyan cosplayed #// theres a pixiv artist drawing them since 2009 and have cryptic art in the middle of their own gag 4koma and other longform manga project #// im stuck in the universe where everyone else sucks and i put them in tomodachi life so mimi gets divorced 4 times

[end-orfino]

droners might have some flaws but i really think that if someone wants to write a proper rivals to lovers dynamic then they should study whatever hannah and corto have as a reference

#like just. i have heard a bunch of people complain about enemies to lovers dynamics sometimes accidentally turning out to just be toxic #because of the writers not nailing down the jackpot of the hostility from both parties being balanced #and also other reasons. and i myself have my own too. bcs its just not an easy dynamic to write #but genuiely so far? so far these two have none of these issues #their relationship goes from hating each other to considering each other a more respected rival to genuine friends in a great way that- #-doesnt feel rushed or unnatural #and they're unified by having far more similarities than you'd think they'd have at first glance. which was both why they hated each other #and why they work so great now that they're friends #AND their haterism towards each other back when they werent friends was very balanced and equal. they both hated each others guts lmao #and now that they're friends they still bicker but it was said directly that now its just how they act when racing is involved & theyre- #competing against each other. like that one 'best friends off court sworn enemies on it. athletes understand' meme #and outside of it they're genuiely friends and like each other #and EVEN DURING RACING. HAVE YOU SEEN THE MECHANIX RACE #their bickering during the race is pure fun for them they're LAUGHING TOGETHER it's so great #PLUS THE SHOW WENT OUT OF ITS WAY MORE THAN ONCE TO SHOW HOW WELL THEY CAN SYNCHRONIZE. #HOW WELL THEY CAN WORK TOGETHER. #i could say more. i could say more about them. but just know that the droners yuri is real #for the record though they're not. canon. i dont want to queerbait anyone on accident. #but i havent seen a single fan that wouldnt agree that they have something going on there #which even with a fandom this small is saying something

[tryin]

god i hate you "this is queerbaiting bc my ship is queer and they're not together" bitches can we please have some fun.

#do queer ships have to be happy for you to recognise them #this is abt the johnlock-esque good omens viewers. can you be normal #you dont Need theories this is not queerbait its just a silly fun show and aziracrow are going through the miscommunication trope #also directed at the macden shippers who have migrated in from tiktok who think sunny revolves around macden #ITS A SILLY POOPY FARTY SHOW #i too theorized abt dtamhd because its fun to roleplay as a johnlocker for a 2005 sitcom #and also im pretty sure everyone theorizing macden gay sex 30 minutes uncut for dtamhd was doing it for funsies #and not writing long ass documents clearly showing how you one don't know how writing works and two have no respect for your 'peers' #nandermo 'queerbait' allegers i hate you too can u open ur EYES

[lonelyquail]

oh is feeling a looming sense of dread when you see a romantic subplot in the distance even if it's not a straight one not normal

#its not like i dislike romantic storylines in fact most of my ocs have partners and i like working w their interactions #but like #i really dislike how certain romantic subplots will kind of. have the characters pause in being characters to make time for the relationship #the Best characters are ones who are definitely dating/married/whatever but are like. Well Into It #so theres less will they wont they drama more (this person is an extension of my heart and i trust them to always be beside me) #big fan of subtler growth like that. even if its not like Already dating/married and you just see em get closer #not Inherently romantic but you can definitely see it there. no confessions are given but theyve already made their vows in blood #You Know. #i like romance in my medias and also in real life god knows i am in love with love but #i think more things should be vague enough to make people cry queerbaiting. because it also makes it feel a lot less. uh #whats the word for (they kiss on screen so the audience can start screaming and then they just have a very different dynamic now)

[tyrannuspitch]

i'm gay but i'm also kiss repulsed and sex repulsed so if i ever get a bf we're just gonna have to queerbait to show our affection

#ace tag #joke post over genuine Complicated Feelings abt how queerbaiting is often more Like Me than any hypothetical resolution #and yet how queer ppl talk abt relationships w/o kissing or sex as miserable and repressed and sanitised and *unrealistic* and Barely Alive #like yeah ofc i know what they mean but like #it's just obvious that *i* know what *they* mean while they have no idea ppl like me exist and might not believe me if i told them #and like what do u do if ur ideal looks like everyone elses self loathing #what do u do if the template for an ideal is so wrong for u that u cant even work out what u DO want #what do u do if u run from straight society bc it demands something u cant give and it terrifies u #and then u get to queer society and it expects the exact same thing #:( #and then the ace community. well. hhh. i dont wanna get into it rn :(

[nyxi-pixie]

me packing up my shit and becoming a mitochondria is the power house of the cell shipper because some random person told me byler is the new j0hnl0ck

#byler #like yes ofc bestie byler is just like x queerbait ship 🤩 #tell me more about how i dont understand how queerbait works or how im an idiot for thinking that this isnt🤩🤩 #tell me that i havent experienced fandom before yesyes youre so right🤩🤩🤩 #eveRYDAY I WAKE UP.