Oh my god. People are really comparing Kl@nce to Destiel and Johnlock?? Like. Y’all.
Words mean things. Queerbaiting is not when there’s queercoding and the ship doesn’t become canon.
Subtext can exist without authorial intent. Queercoding is deliberate, and historically employed to skirt censorship. QueerBAITING is when people weaponize that coding to milk their queer audience. By definition, queerbaiting requires a conspiracy to string queer people along with no plan to deliver actual representation.
The VLD showrunners did NOT do this.
I understand this was probably a lot of Gen Z’s first brush with queerbait-lite. I was there when Sherlock started and I was there when Voltron started. I followed those shows all the way to their train wreck conclusions, and I can tell you right now—if KL qualifies as queerbait, then social media marketing is to blame, not the showrunners or the show itself.
As early as S5, LM and JDS went out of their way to explicitly state they WOULD NOT MAKE KL CANON. That’s the OPPOSITE of baiting your queer audience with vague answers and symbolic breadcrumbs. Some of the meta I read about elemental symbolism and stolen glances and character arcs was backed up with textual evidence. AND the showrunners did not INTEND for any of those creative choices to read like a promise. Both things can be true at once.
The two times I feel like I could even remotely call KL queerbait were
1. When social media managers (again, not the showrunners) tagged Keith’s vlog as “Kl@nce”
2. Netflix fucking around like so:
The marketing department recognized the popularity of KL as a ship and sought to monetize queer people’s attention. The result was a lot of misplaced (but understandable) excitement, as these strategies afforded KL an air of legitimacy. They showed Dreamworks and Netflix were not only aware of KL’s popularity but “supported KL” enough to (allow their social media managers to) associate their brand with the ship name.
But if that’s enough to qualify as queerbaiting, then—
Hot Topic has changed the description since 2018 (something tells me they got a lot of angry messages) but look at this:
Compare that description to the one under “the KL shirt.”
Back when I was in Voltron mode, I could deliver an impromptu three-hour Ted Talk (with slides) on Sheith and all the moments that made the ship “glaringly obvious” to me in a way that “must have been intentional.” I do believe a couple VLD artists and writers snuck some gay stuff under the door for us (thank you for my life)! And I still wouldn’t call that queerbaiting. Because queercoding is not queerbaiting.
The crew drew KL. They also drew Sheith (#heslookingatKeith). Several of my friends work in animation and they draw ship art sometimes. It’s been bizarre to watch fans SO successfully rewrite the narrative over the past seven years so that KL was a geyser spewing rainbows out of the screen and the creators were busy stoking the flames for profit—when in reality LM and JDS cared about their queer audience enough to TELL THEM DIRECTLY that KL wouldn’t become canon. (Time code 3:46)
“We’re not trying to cater to or bait anyone. We’re just trying to do what’s right for the story.”
In the above clip and this Screenrant interview LM and JDS go on to explain that KL was a big surprise to them—and that even if they WANTED to take advantage of the ship’s popularity, the production pipeline meant they’d missed their window to make KL canon a long time ago.
Just. PLEASE know that when you see Voltron listed next to fucking SUPERNATURAL and SHERLOCK as “the pinnacle of queerbaiting”…that’s nonsense.
KL fans are allowed to be disappointed their ship didn’t become canon. I’m not denying chemistry or coding, even. But if KL even remotely qualifies as queerbait, then so does Sheith, and the bait never came from the show itself. The creators, while new to showrunning and (I say this with love, plus the knowledge that Dreamworks threw LM and JDS to the wolves with zero guidance) not great at PR, did not mean to manipulate KL shippers. In fact, they tried to WARN THEM!
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