this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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I absolutely find it annoying when romance is prioritized over friendship but this isn't quite what queerbaiting is. At least, not on its own. Two same sex/gender people being very close and sharing a strong connection or even having some romantic undertones that never become "official" isn't automatically queerbaiting. Those things can happen in real life without those relationships being or becoming romantic. Queerbaiting is when the writers/showrunners purposefully insert romantic subtext into the story and advertise it as if it will become canonically romantic with the primary intention of gaining more lgbt viewership, while never actually following through on those implied (or even occasionally explicitly stated) promises. The way it is presented and marketed is an important part of what makes it a problem, hence the "baiting" part. There's nothing wrong with keeping a relationship ambiguous, or portraying a platonic relationship as being as deep, important, and emotionally intimate as romantic ones are typically portrayed without making them romantic, but if you try to manipulate or outright lie to viewers to make them think a relationship is going to be something it isn't in order to gain their viewership and support, only to pull the rug out from under them, then that's when it becomes sleazy, especially if you're taking advantage of the fact that they're a marginalized and under-represented group desperate to see more people like them in media.
I know this is just a joke comic so "it's not that deep" but I see a lot of people online who misunderstand what queerbaiting is and accuse shows/series of queerbaiting unfairly so I thought I'd bring it up.
The issue is that romance tends to be prioritized over friendship in media even for straight relationships, and so many romantic relationships are incredibly shallow or have very little reasoning behind them (the "I met this guy I have nothing in common with 2 days ago and we're so totally in love let's shoehorn in a sex scene" thing is played out so often for hetero romances) and LGBT relationships are so rare, that any subtext that even remotely hints at a queer romantic relationship has people grasping at straws. So companies use that to their advantage. They just dangle the barest hints of anything, because that's all they need to get people. And they dare not show anything more than the tiniest of subtext anyways, because anything LGBT is considered sexually explicit by default. Just look at how much the creators behind The Legend of Korra and Steven Universe had to fight for the queer romances in their respective shows. Both almost got cancelled because the writers wanted to show those relationships (and the Korra one was even completely unintentional, the writers just kinda realized it was developing over the course of the series and decided to go all in on it).
Edit: Forgot the part where they don't openly hint at or mention it because they don't want to piss off the homophobes. They want to straddle that line that let's them have their cake and eat it too.
This doesn't seem strange to me. Personally I do this. I'm ~~in a committed long term relationship~~ married, but even before that I prioritized romantic relationships above friendships. I don't get why this is weird (forgetting the exaggerated "I met this guy I have nothing in common with 2 days ago and we’re so totally in love" part).
OP said they find it annoying when romance is prioritized over friendship and how two people of the same gender who share a strong bond shouldn't be assumed to have romantic feelings for each other, even if there's a bit of romantic subtext to their relationship that never goes anywhere, and that that's not queerbaiting on its own. I was trying to say that even straight relationships in shows can often be shallow at best with barely any romantic subtext, so it's unfair to hold queer relationships in media to a different standard. Not to say that a deep and emotional bond can't simply be a friendship between two people, and media only has so much time to develop a relationship, but given two relationships with the same amount of shallow subtext, why are the two women just gals being pals and the guy and the girl are a couple.
I think society as a whole tends to prioritize romantic relationships over friendships, and media is probably partly at fault for that. I could go on a whole rant about how this is even further exacerbated for people raised as men because men aren't really allowed to have strong emotional bonds in friendships and so any form of emotional connection in a relationship is misunderstood as romantic advances, which is probably a major factor in the issues we see with men having trouble simply being friends with women, but that's stepping beyond the realm of this discussion.
Basically, I've seen so many straight romantic relationships in shows that feel shallow or out of left field and shoehorned in just for the sake of a romantic subplot, so why is it different when people say it's queerbaiting about two women or two men having the same amount of development in their relationship that doesn't turn into a romantic relationship?
That was a very interesting read. Do you have any examples of queerbaiting or portrayed relationships that are commonly mistaken for queerbaiting in shows? Being a very boring stereotypical heterosexual, I've never paid attention to that, and I admit I haven't heard the term before today.
I think the above comment was kind of blowing the comic out of proportion—I mean it’s a 4 panel comic it’s obviously not going to be able to give great nuance but I think it’s easy to read it as “proper” queerbaiting.
Anyway, the Wikipedia page has a good list of examples if you’re interested in mainstream examples.
Ones that stick out off the top of my head I’ve personally watched were Sherlock, and Teen Wolf and Rizzoli & Isles to a lesser extent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queerbaiting
One rather infamous case of Queerbaiting was with the BBC's Sherlock. Watson and Sherlock have been a popular couple for decades and the show played around quite a bit with the idea. There's lots of essays on YouTube and the net about it if you want to dig into the details, but there are many jokes in the show about Watson and Sherlock being a couple, and hints that Sherlock at least is gay/bi. The running gag is Watson repeatedly telling people he isn't gay, but he still seems jealous of other characters who have eyes for Sherlock.
All of this seemed to pretty deliberately play into the popularity of the pairing, with even a few nods to it in the show. But in the end, nothing came of it, and fans felt that they had been "baited" into watching and driving the popularity of the show without any payoff. In hindsight, the whole relationship had only been used as a joke and a lure, which was especially galling since representation of homosexuality in mainstream entertainment was still fairly rare. Thus did it receive the label of "Queerbaiting".
Now for an example of something that's not queerbaiting (though it was sometimes referred to as such) we have Steven Universe. The short version is that there was a popular pairing between two female characters in the show, and one could easily assume they were an item since they lived together and were generally only seen with each other after a certain point in the show. However, their relationship was never officially confirmed and there were hints from an artist/writer of the show that they hadn't been allowed to be as explicit as they would've liked about it.
So what makes this not queerbaiting? The biggest defense against the label is the context that Steven Universe as a whole was a very LGBTQ+-friendly show, featuring the most explicitly gay couple in the channel's history with two of the main characters. It also had a litany of other gay relationships and LGBT+ individuals. Further, the contentious couple was never officially disproven in the "it was all a joke!" sense of the previous example, it was just left open to interpretation. In total, it's clear the show wasn't using the couple purely as marketing and that the creator did genuinely care about LGBTQ+ representation.
In summation, queerbaiting isn't just "the gay couple I wanted didn't happen." There has to be a deliberate effort on behalf of the showrunners to keep people watching by heavily hinting at a payoff that will never come.
If the characters you're talking about fro. SU are who I think they are, it's also worth mentioning than there were also a lot of hints that one of those characters was acearo or at the very least served as an allegory for the acearo experience, which iirc was eventually confirmed.
Thank you!
It's hard to think of off the top of my head because I admittedly have not gotten into a lot of the more popular examples, and a lot of them mix together, but a typical indication that someone is using the term wrong is if they try to point to evidence inside the show of how the couple should be canon because they have so much chemistry but the creators just won't commit and make it canon. Those are typically just people wearing shipping goggles using the word as a way to say "I want them to be canon, therefore they SHOULD be canon, but they're not, so it's queerbaiting" even though the creators have never at any point indicated that the two characters will ever be in a relationship in advertising, interviews, previous drafts of the script, or otherwise, and at most the actors may have joked about how the ship is popular or mentioned that they personally enjoy it (which isn't the same as using it in marketing or promotional material or teasing the possibility of it becoming canon). Queerbaiting can also take place even if a couple or sexuality DOES become canon if it's halfassed or skimmed over or done poorly. Some famous examples of this are Shiro and his relationships from VLD and Destiel from Supernatural.
Hibike Euphonium anime is often accused of queer baiting even though they are just friends even on the original work.
Even though Japan still doesn't have gay marriage, lgbt couples are well represented on their yaoi and yuri bubbles, so there's no need for authors to be sneaky about it and use queer bait.
There's this "kids" show called Sakura card captor from the makers of X tv...
Seems you didn't get the memo, 2 boys or 2 girls can't be besties now, they must be gay for each other so fanfics can have more weight.
A guy and a girl being besties never stopped fanfic writers before. If media ain't gonna give queer people actual relationships, they'll just have to make their own (with blackjack, and hookers!).
I mean as someone who is acearo myself and would like to see more relationships that reflect my own sometimes too, I'd love to see more cases of guys and girls just being friends and not getting shoved into a relationship automatically.
I'm a straight guy and my first best friend was a girl. We never had any feelings for each other, and I've continued to have many platonic female friends over the years. I also would like to see more of that in media.
I agree. I'm bothered by it from two different angles. On the one hand, we've got so many instances of people with no chemistry or anything being shoved into romantic relationships because they're a guy and a girl so obviously they're in love; and on the other hand two girls making out is just gals being pals but a guy and a girl making eye contact is enough for them to be soulmates.
Let guys and girls be just friends and don't make people jump through extra hoops to justify the existence of queer relationships. That's all I'm asking for.
i think that what you are talking about might be related to Amatonormativity (and maybe Allonormativity a bit too)