#shipbaiting

[unfuckablebogtroll]

A classic.

[mindibindi]

Don't make promises you can't keep...✍🏽

[peppermintquartz]

They're not queerbaiting, they're shipbaiting, the show has queer characters but the people you want to see smushing faces aren't smushing faces.

[yaz-the-spaz]

not to add my two cents on what is already a shitstorm beenado of discourse but i just wanna say that i find it real interesting that the tags on that buddie queerbait poll are full of ppl, mostly bt's (judging by the amount of pfp's with t's face in them), claiming how it's not the showrunners / producers / etc's fault that buddies felt baited, and that it's no one's fault but our own for somehow baiting ourselves and on the journos who wrote clickbait headlines to draw us in as if that's all it was that led to us feeling baited. which is insane to me cause it just categorically ignores the fact that that they chose to market the show by allowing certain interview questions to be asked, by allowing certain interviews to not only be framed around the question of buddie going canon but to specifically put the two actors of the ship in interviews together answering questions about the ship potentially going canon.

at the end of the day the journos and interviewers and whoever the hell else can choose all the questions they want but if the ppl behind the show - the showrunners and the producers and the pr team and whoever else may be involved in those marketing decisions - don't want buddie to be the focus they can simply. not allow those questions. because that's how marketing works. it is literally their job to analyze how ppl in the audience are gonna respond to promo and when you frame 99% of your promo around buddie, including putting the actors together to talk about it, knowing there's not gonna be any follow-through on the show, you have to be aware on some level that you're not only (cruelly) teasing the (already mostly disenfranchised) part of the audience that has been actively rooting for buddie for almost a decade, but also keeping it top of mind for non-buddie shippers who are seeing it alongside their consumption of the show, making everyone think it's leading somewhere it's not.

this is not just about being upset that the ship i wanted didn't happen. this is so much bigger than that. because if it's not happening and there were no plans to make it happen then fine, but why the FUCK was the entire promo run centered around buddie? even bt's have to admit that's fucking baity and a shitty thing to do. if you wanna pretend like y'all weren't also whining when they put your fave (t) front and center in promo scenes only for him to be on screen for all of 30 seconds of the ep then have at it, but ya'll know if it was your ship they'd done something like this for you'd be big mad too (and you know it's true because it's already happened small-scale).

and furthermore i also saw ppl making the claim that the show itself never actually baited buddie this season and that they unequivocally shut down buddie by having buck deny any feelings and eddie say he was straight and us still reading into things was just us baiting ourselves. but in fact for a lot of ppl who were previously oblivious to buddie it actually had the complete opposite effect. because, much like the promo mess, it was not top of mind until they made it top of mind and then you suddenly had a bunch of ppl in the gen audience going wait is there something there? are they putting seeds in place to get them together?

i am not alone in observing this firsthand. my own mother, who never for a second even considered buddie in any way shape or form as at all romantic, had this reaction completely independently during the beginning of 8b. i have never once mentioned buddie to her or around her, nor is she in any online fandom spaces (she didn't even know they existed until very recently and is not internet savvy enough to find them without outside help) so it was not at all my or anyone else's influence that led her to this conclusion. she got there all on her own just from watching what was presented to her in the show. and i've seen other ppl in fandom reporting similar experiences from their (often older) non-buddie shipping friends and relatives too. so clearly the writers' / showerunners' attempts to shut buddie down (if that's even what it was) was either really, really bad or just plain unsuccessful or both as it obviously did not at all have the intended effect for anyone (but maybe salty anti buddie stans who were looking for any excuse to gloat either way) and actually seemed to large-scale have the exact opposite effect.

anyways i just had to get all that out cause it was driving me insane having it all swirl around in my head while i scrolled through tags & comments but i digress (and for anyone who even bothered to read this long ass rant and got his far, thanks for reading & much love).

long gay sigh

[dwobbitfromtheshire]

Queerbaiting=Hinting heavily at making a character gay but then revealing they're actually straight.

Shipbaiting=hinting heavily that a ship is going to happen to the point where you mess with the fans but then it doesn't happen.

[phoebester]

Soooo aside from this

We also have this…👇🏽

I had to see it for myself so I rewatched Sozin’s Comet #2 and screen captured it

Yep, it’s there. So however you interpret it, its up to you.

Oh and lemme just add who the writer was for this ep.

Tadahhhh

Either that or blame the illustrator because we are just giddy in our own large zutara universe to pontificate it in whatever way we want lol.

[the-crow-binary]

Konami making Belmonts fight Dracula every hundred years or so is very shipbaiting of them, just sayin'

[sneezypeasy]

I’ve heard the argument that given the Zutara scenes were never explicitly romantic, it’s unfair to label any of those scenes as “shipbaiting”. Except shipbaiting, from what I understand it, is specifically *not* the depiction of explicitly romantic scenes, correct? Rather, it IS invoked through subtext, coding, framing etc is it not? Which led me to google the definition just to check I wasn’t going bonkers, and stumble upon this gem -

(Yes urban dictionary is about as reliable of a source as a celebrity gossip magazine on most days but the fact that Zutara literally came up as the first example made me giggle ngl)