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."
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.”
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.
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