Jay

she/they | queer and genderqueer | 29 | always talking about queer tv | you can pry sprizzy from my cold dead hands | perpetual doctor who enjoyer.

[awaywithjay]

A while ago I started noticing a recurring tone in fanfics that felt weirdly melodramatic. Like, fanfic is often melodramatic and characters are crying and sobbing all over the place when I don't think they should, but this was like in the writing itself, not in what was being described.

After reading about all the AI controversies on twitter I realized that's probably what it is. It's the clipped, serious statements, the similies that personify objects or concepts, the variations on "not x but y". And now that I see it I can't unsee it. I've read a lot of good Heated Rivalry fic these past few months but I've definitely also read some questionable stuff and it was probably mostly AI.

Which is like, I'm sad that it's so pervasive. Because, even moral and environmental impact aside, AI does read very monotone and stale even if the plot is interesting. And I can't always tell immediately either, which means it gets to waste my time before I realize and that really pisses me off.

[awaywithjay]

Bro this new season of Jet Lag, inject it into my veins immediately

Idk why but the rail-bound/road-bound seasons like South Korea, Taiwan and New Zealand are just less interesting to me. I didn't finish Taiwan until yesterday, and then when I went to watch the new season that was like straight crack in comparison

I just think jltg requires both strategy and whimsy and the linear formats don't provide enough of either

[sectarianswamp]

Happy pride month!!!!

[awaywithjay]

I'm still thinking about Phil calling Shane Ilya's "lad" during the vegas bathroom scene. He said "you need to see your lad is sad"

what if I CRY FOR MULTIPLE REASONS

[scunthotter]

Im so tired of reading Shane whump where he collapses or acts like a crybaby in public.

I want a Shane whump, where he locks the fuck in and down, gets through it, and then collapses into Ilya's arms when its over and he's safe. My dear friend Shane would power through, he is not a damsel in distress outside of role play with his husband. He would grit his teeth and he would bear it until he was in private with Ilya.

Then only after Ilya was telling him how brave and special he was would he start crying.

[awaywithjay]

Sadly I don't think anything will ever top the Great Ben Doyle Playground Bamboozle but that was still a fun ending to a great season of jet lag

Although I do feel like they are due for a little injection of chaos at some point to shake things up

[awaywithjay]

On this day of no AO3, may I recommend you all a delightful hidden gem Hilson fic from ff.net?

Paper Faces on Parade by Cardio Necrosis

It's complete, it's 86k words, it's from 2010, and if you haven't read it you should!

[awaywithjay]

It's time for another text post but seriously I am so interested in Shane and Yuna's relationship and I think most fics really chicken out by having her be super accepting and loving the instant she finds out about Ilya.

Like, I don't think she'd be terrible or hateful or anything, but I do think she would be judgmental. I think her worries for Shane would manifest in ways that are not initially pleasant or perfect. She would be skeptical about their future together because she knows how hard it's going to be. It would be so much easier for her to convince herself it's not real or lasting because that would be so much easier for Shane.

Not to mention the guilt she would feel that Shane hid this from her and the hurt she would feel that he didn't come to her with his problems. She strikes me as loving but a control freak. She thinks he tells her everything. She would absolutely be just a little bit too self-centered to set aside her hurt and negative feelings about the situation so quickly. She'd do it eventually but not straight away. It should be a process before she's able to be completely selflessly supportive I think.

Anything that involves her finding out or interacting with Shane or Ilya immediately after finding out is just way too fluffy like I don't buy it at all.

[awaywithjay]

The world if jupiter_ash ever finished A Study in Love

[awaywithjay]

I WAS HERE. I BEEN HERE. NEW CHAPTER JUST DROPPED??

[awaywithjay]

🚨🚨🚨

It's happening??? It's been over four years???? I'm FINE???

A Stuy in Love update????

You could tell me there's a new season of Sherlock being made and I wouldn't care half as much. Holy shit.

[leatherjacketeddie]

We have lost the meaning of queerbait

[leatherjacketeddie]

Just because what you wanted didn't happen, doesn't mean it's queerbaiting. It is now being used an excuse when the ship you want didn't get together. Queerbaiting has to do with marketing.

[shamebats]

Queerbait: A cookbook that you learned about from ads with pictures of people eating tasty looking soups and the author's social media posts about how soup lovers are going to love it, proves to have no soup recipes.

Not queerbait: A cookbook has no soup recipes. You assumed there would be some based on vibes and wishful thinking. No soups were ever advertised or promised.

Also not queerbait: A cookbook that was advertised as containing soup recipes has soup recipes but not for the types of soups you like.

[bemusedlybespectacled]

Queerbait: The cookbook repeatedly mentions soups and how this or that sandwich would be great with soup ("wouldn't it be funny if we put a soup recipe here," it says, though it never does), and perhaps even having recipes for gravy, hot chocolate, and pasta sauce with photos of each thing in big bowls with a spoon in them so they appear to be soups at first glance (but of course anyone who says that they expected a soup recipe is a moron, and the cookbook spends a whole chapter making fun of people who like soup).

Not queerbait: The cookbook is published in a country where soup is illegal or highly stigmatized. For some reason the recipe for "mashed potatoes" calls for leeks and comes out way thinner than you'd expect mashed potatoes to be, and the "tomato pasta sauce" recipe makes way more than you'd need to top a couple of servings of spaghetti, but there's definitely no soup in here, nope nope nope.

[startedwellthatsentence]

I disagree with the last two. The point of “bait” in the name “queerbait” comes from enticing people who were not already consuming the media into watching it. If you’re already watching the media, you aren’t being baited — you’re already on the hook. It’s imperative that the extra-textual marketing doesn’t match the content of the text. The text didn’t make a promise and break it — the text was fully created and produced without the intent to include queerness (or a specific form of queerness), but the trailers and advertisements and interviews all promise that the queerness exists or will exist.

Both of your examples read to me like queer coding — the first is malicious, the second is benevolent, but they’re both about the text itself pointing towards queerness without actually containing it. Consumers of the media are experiencing the text as written, and the creators of the text want them to see the queerness they’re referencing — the cruelty of the first example doesn’t actually land if the reader/viewer can’t tell what’s being pointed at and laughed at.

Queerbaiting is writing a show that has two male leads who are not dating and never show sexual or romantic interest in each other, and then having their press tour include every queer media outlet, and making them do interviews where they hold hands and play the newlywed game and take compatibility quizzes, and having them kiss for magazine spreads, and cutting a trailer of the two of them half dressed over a song about men fucking. And that implies to the general public that these two characters have a queer relationship. And then interested members of the public watch the show and it’s just two men who do not have anything resembling a relationship.

There are levels and nuance to queerbaiting because (typically) every part of creating media has multiple people doing slightly different things. A possibility: The writers and directors never intended for a queer romance between two specific characters. The actors decide on their own that they would make choices as if the characters are in love. The print marketing and trailers have no mention of queerness. The social media team keeps sharing interviews where the actors talk about how they intended for the characters to be in love. That would be both queer coding (the actors are creators that intended queer readings of their work) and queerbaiting (the socials team is promoting a ship that is not actually there in the dialogue or plot or edit).

The difficulty with the cookbook analogy is that the purchasing behaviors of someone buying a reference text are different to those of someone consuming fictional media. You can generally flip through a reference text and look at things like photos, tables of contents, and potentially indices — that level of content is available BEFORE purchase. You could then consider those as both “part of the text” and “part of the promotional materials”, which muddies the waters wrt a queerbaiting analogy. In order to get that much access to fictional narrative content, you usually have to purchase (or otherwise obtain access to) the text. The difference between “text” and “promotional material” is usually MUCH clearer. (And none of this even gets into people who are drawn to a piece of media based on FAN-CREATED works — if both the text and the marketing have nothing to do with queerness but you got tricked by MissPureShipGoggles3034’s fan edit, then that’s a whole different ballgame).

Tl;dr: queerbaiting does not refer to anything that exists within the actual fictional work; it is a MARKETING STRATEGY that exists to promote a work (and specifically one that is usually done post-hoc and out of the control of the creators).

[bemusedlybespectacled]

My problem with defining it strictly by promotional materials is that it would mean the two most prominent and obvious examples of queerbaiting to me - Sherlock and Supernatural - wouldn’t be queerbaiting by that definition. I will admit that Supernatural is a bit of an edge case because Cas *eventually* confesses his love and is sent to the Shadow Realm or whatever the fuck, though we can debate whether that invalidates ten previous seasons’ worth of “wouldn’t it be funny if Dean was gay? He’s not, though.”

But Sherlock, to me, would not be queer coding simply because the text explicitly acknowledges the existence of queer people while repeatedly saying, “But not these guys!” Sherlock turning what he assumes is a pass from Watson and Watson frantically backpedaling isn’t something that could possibly be queer if you look at it that way, because the potential queer interpretation is pointed out by Sherlock and then both reject the very idea. Sherlock and Moriarty kissing in the fangirl’s imagining of Reichenbach isn’t queer coding - it is literally two men kissing romantically, there is nothing to code - but it is immediately rejected by the narrative as a stupid idea. That Lucy and the football vibe is, to me, the essence of queerbaiting and what makes it distinct from subtext or just leaving it up to audience interpretation.

[awaywithjay]

Like, what would we even call Sherlock and Supernatural if we can't call it queerbaiting? I don't think "malicious queercoding" is an option that is going to work. It's better to just be able to talk about different kinds of queerbaiting, where the purely promotional kind is the default and the queercoded form is a variation.

[awaywithjay]

I'm having an unnecessarily fun time with Heated Rivalry fic (the premise is primed for like 7 of my top 10 fanfic tropes of all time and people are writing so much right now) but it's also making me miss ofmd.

Like, weirdly. Because ofmd fandom was/is a shitshow in the sense that there are two distinct camps and they mutually annoy the shit out of each other (and then some). But even so, the ofmd fic I used to read was this beautiful exploration of queerness and community and gender identity and polyamory and transgressive existence and so on and so forth. It really felt like we were all here because we were wanting to get into stuff that's so far past the queer 101 experience.

HR being like, baby's first fandom or baby's first queer show gives me such whiplash when it comes to the fanworks and fandom culture.

Ofmd fic was just kind of full of people who were on the same page (even if they had vastly different preferences or reads on the characters and relationships). It's so different. I'm definitely getting too sappy about it but I think both the ofmd show and fandom had something pretty unique going on in terms of queer media and community.

[awaywithjay]

Someone explain to me why some British fanfiction writers insist on writing "mum" in their fics about American/north American characters. In the dialogue!!

Personally I don't care if you use a BrE spelling convention, you can even get away with some British English expressions, but "mum" is absolutely where I draw the line.

Do you guys not read fic imagining the voices of the characters? Mum and mom are not the same word to you, surely?

[altschmerzes]

i for one plan to be more insane about platonic relationships in 2025

[altschmerzes]

happy new year’s eve. let’s be even more insane than that about platonic relationships in 2026.

[ngalitzine]

HEATED RIVALRY | 1.06

"What a ridiculous word. What a ridiculous, wonderful word."

[severedreamerfox]

Okay, okay. I am not immune to the gay hockey show.

But I wanted to highlight this gif set because most that I have seen (understandably) stop after the Shane and Ilya interaction, and I am like, but wait! There’s more!

As someone who is realistically closer in age to Shane’s parents than to Shane, that exchange between his parents is golden. They’re repeating back information they heard, and they heard the “oh god I don’t want to define fuck buddy/just a physical relationship to my parents” version.

But what they are saying to each other here, Shane’s mom and dad is, basically, yeah, you two were fooling yourselves if you think it was just physical. We know the deal. You might not have known the deal but we do.

And you can argue with me about this, but I think his parents are right. I think in Shane and Ilya’s minds they thought or wanted to think it was merely physical (not that there is anything wrong with that, by the way!) but they each brought too much baggage and also showed too much too early. Shane almost by being there at all. Ilya, too.

Shane and Ilya are still catching up with their hearts and their words but Shane’s parents, who have more life experience, are watching this and thinking, and more importantly, SAYING, yeah, this is a decade long relationship. You don’t get here without going through all of what they have. His parents see it. They’re joking about it, but they see it.

That Shane and Ilya are still trying to dismiss that early part of their relationship is telling. That Shane’s parents don’t miss it is also telling. They had a million and one feelings. They just don’t say it. They didn’t say it.

But it’s obvious if you have lived long enough.

(Also Shane’s dad beginning with the phone charger speech killed me dead. 💀 It’s such a dad thing.)

[awaywithjay]

"you are a boyboss, buddy"

Kill meeee

[skodasforge]

I don’t think we’ve talked about how the front half of the episode has Ilya mostly as the passive partner in his sex with Shane. Shane is riding it like he stole it, Shane is straddling him on the couch and asking “are you gonna cum for me?” and of course competitive ass Ilya isn’t going to just give it to him (“fucking make me”) but he’s letting a lot of control slip from him to Shane and what a way to show the characters relationship developing through sex. Ilya was the one fully in control in the first two episodes but now that he likes Shane, now that he feels comfortable with him, he’s willing to drop the constant performance of dominance and let Shane happen to him. And I don’t think that’s a coincidence when everything in his life is so rigidly structured by other people and he was taking back control when he was having sex with Shane at first. This is a different type of losing control, it’s letting go and trusting someone else. No wonder it terrifies them both.

[skodasforge]

And from Shane’s side of things, his life may be even more rigidly structured. He never has control over anything, we see that in the montage of commercial shoots and his teammate essentially acting like his dad and asking him when he’s going to Do The Milestones. We saw this with his parents in the first two episodes and his “fortress of solitude” still being an easy drive for both his parents to come by. Taking control clearly does not come naturally to him but he’s found a way that he could do it safely and comfortably and after Ilya dangling it in front of him that night in Vegas, he’s finally taken it up and become an active player in their sex life, taking what he wants from Ilya. It’s Ilya letting him have complete control in the couch frotting that completely breaks the façade that this isn’t something more than just sex and I think that’s deliberate.