🔥 topic of your choice
I think we share most of our unpopular fanfiction/shipping-related opinions and I’ve ranted about them before so, something else related…
I’m starting to think “queerbaiting” might not be the best term for what people took issue with in the specific shows that inspired that term. Like the issue was less “unfulfilled subtext” and more “people textually joke about the characters being together and that’s played off as some wild ridiculous accusation.” It’s less “bait” and more the presence of a “switch” to that bait (the explicit reminder that It Could Never Happen, How Dare You Get Your Hopes Up) that makes it Problematic, at least for me. Even heterosexual couplings on TV can have unfulfilled subtext! But you don’t get it shoved in your face how dumb it is that you responded to wanting this man and woman to get together, etc.
And that vagueness is what leads to “queerbaiting” applied to everything from shows that do have canon gay relationships but it’s not “explicit enough” for some fans, somehow (like Yuri on Ice), to shows where the fandom confuses their intense desire to see two characters hook up with what’s really there, which is nothing, not even subtext (as I’ve been told is the case with Voltron).
So I kinda feel about it the way I do with “cultural appropriation” (a neutral term in its original, academic usage) that as a media buzzword, it’s kind of useless…. being specific with what your issue is will take you further!
