Fuji’s explanation covers the reason why fans like the ship, but the reason it’s considered queer baiting is because the creators used the popular ship to sell the show.
There were multi fandom polls that TW would officially encourage fans to vote for sterek in. There’s the video of Dylan and Tyler on a boat holding each other and making jokes about being on a ship as official promo material for the show coming out of comic con. They acted, in an official capacity, as if they might actually make it canon just to keep viewership. This is what makes it queer baiting.
In the show they kept peppering in things that seemed like they might be laying foundation for this relationship and then immediately yanking it away. Like making Derek inexplicably older because he looks older with a beard than how they presented him to be in season 1 or giving them both female love interests. They wouldn’t even make Stiles bi officially despite all his comments about wanting to know if gay guys liked him. The closest we got was a girl who is bi asking if Stiles was and him not responding.
They were deliberately giving just enough for shippers to hold on hope and just little enough that someone who, like OP, comes in blind with no influence may not pick up on it at all.
And it’s happening at the same time as a lot of other shows using this exact same deliberate technique as framing things as queer for the sake of selling the show to queer viewers, but never outwardly actually taking that step as to not rock the straight fan base (Sherlock and Supernatural were also guilty of this).
And you might ask, what’s the difference between that and queer subtext? It’s that it didn’t need to be subtext and they were doing it to sell the show to viewers not express something they have no other way to.
Teen Wolf is extra frustrating because the creator is gay and he made several other gay characters in the show. If they could make their hyper masculine jock Jackson bi, why couldn’t they make the one everyone wanted to be that they kept teasing that they would?
And I don’t know, it could be lots of reasons. It could be the actors didn’t want to do it or were encouraged against it. There was still stigma around actors who play queer characters being able to play leading men, so it could have maybe kept Tyler from becoming Superman or Dylan from booking the maze runner. But why it didn’t happen in canon doesn’t matter. No story teller is obligated to cater to the fans. It’s okay that they didn’t.
The problem is that they purposefully pretended that they might.
Hence why it’s one of the biggest queer-baitings of the time period, regardless of if you ship the characters.
germansingergirl
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
turnnoffyourmind
kianamaiart
yousharknotpass
gummygunk
