Rovickie, AIDs, Allan Turing and ST doc stress the ending’s fakeness
So I keep thinking how unneeded was side-lining of rovickie in the epilogue x and this scene at least
Given that the DB’s father was working in the institute supporting AIDS research and treatment, you can’t just having been raised in the family with such values and then, having an opportunity to convey the message in in your biggest show on earth, queerbait for no reason. You still could do that, having rovickie in the background, but actually “erasing” itself attracts attention to this unneededness queerbait wise. It was unneeded unless you were planning to make a comment about queer rep in general and you wanted to stress the absence of queerness in your show’s so called ending. It can’t be over for nothing bc it has reasons not to be there, and if byler could be read just as a bait leading to nowhere (bc it attracted a lot of attention the way it was built), the ship that wasn’t that serious had no other purpose to be temporarily erased to — later prove the point.
(It would be even weird to make this commentary having queer rep in the ending, contradicting the idea itself, that’s what I’m saying. Rovickiegate? lmao)
Here’s a screenshot on the matter from this post of @thatgirlalt :
You don’t speak about these topics accidentally. Same as you don’t queer code your main character this hard just to queerbait.
I can assume tho that you can queer code more secondary characters like Billy or like Murray to enrich your story’s symbolism but not to make them actually openly queer, as it doesn’t have the same effect as byler, no one’s being attracted (or mb almost no one, okay 😅) to the show bc of 1,5 scenes Billy and Steve had or bc Murray called Mr Clarke snookums. Although Murray x Clarke parallel Allan Turing (read more in this post of @slytherflowerao3) which enriches deepness of the show for those who care, not making it a blatant queerbait.
Honestly (and unfortunately), for queerbaiting you don’t need so much effort at all.
And after the show is for real finally over, I bet they will want to speak more about their values, being put in there, openly, as so far they’ve never really done that, even in their doc… especially in the doc containing no info on the story whatsoever.