Because the āshrodingerās queerbaitā nonsense will never go away, indulge me an analogy (and a long post).
wlw ships are the āmade from scratchā cake in a world where we only ever expect cake mix from the box.
Say you have a show where, in the first interaction between a male and female character, there is a red box. It could be a Betty Crocker box of cake mix. Because all it takes is just one smile ā one wink ā one raised eyebrowā and the fans donāt question it. Weāre clearly making a cake here. The box is red.
Meanwhile, you have two female characters building their own relationship that have elements that could build to romance. There are eggs in the fridge. A few more episodes, thereās flour in the pantry. Sugar. Baking powder. Queer fans start whisperingā¦we could be making a cake here. Other fans scoff āyou will read into anything. Theyāre just eggs! Everyone has eggs in their fridge!ā Maybe so, maybe not. They are written off as discrete ingredients, nothing to see here.
That red box is still sitting in the pantry. Obviously weāre going with that one, and itās definitely cake mix. That guy and girl stood next to each other again.
The wlw relationship is now full-on batter. It was a cake recipe all along, but itās not baked yet. The crowd that wrote off every ingredient is now saying the writers are just going to āsquanderā that box that could be ready-made cake mix or that theyāre being āforcedā to bake a cake with the very ingredients the writers deliberately bought and put in their pantry.
Now itās in the oven, the cake is baking. That crowd will still insist itās forced, or maybe its actually something else, or itās rushed, or itās pandering. Whether the writers painstakingly built a pantry to make the cake they truly wanted or they were cultivating good ingredients and realized they had the fixings for a more decadent cake and went there, it doesnāt matter. Itās still a recipe. One that fans who always have to piece together ingredients had hoped for or saw from the get-go, despite being scoffed at and disparaged. Just because that crowd didnāt see (or refused to see) those ingredients as part of a whole, doesnāt make it any less of a recipe.
And wlw fans shouldnāt have to keep writing essays to demonstrate that the wlw ācakeā has all the ingredients every cake mix does, or keep pointing out that fans were ready to believe a cake was being baked when they saw a nondescript box, but that theyāll do anything to discredit or doubt the cake from scratch thatās now cooling off on the counter.
It is partly a function of heteronormativity from the audience in immediately seeing romance in any whisper of interaction between m/f characters and passing off all charged interactions between female characters are sisterly or platonic. And it also comes from writers, who are either being cautious so as not to spook corporate overlords or audiences, or who are preserving plausible deniability.
To take the analogy further, box cake mix is fine! It works! It is, practically speaking, what a lot of folks know by default. I thought I was a Duncan Hines girl once myself. Vanilla cake mix has the ingredients measured out, itās a safe bet, it tastes like cake.
But it doesnāt mean every red box is cake mix. And it doesnāt make the cake that had to be pieced together from scratch due to censorship, caution, time, narrative build-up, what-have-you, any less of a cake.
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