#I'm generalizing of course! but it's a very consistently different vibe to watch the same shows in Finland and in Sweden

[starlene]

Theory: Så som i himmelen will never be half as popular here in Finland as it is in Sweden, not because we can't relate to the story or don't like the music – but because we Finns, as a people, are significantly more averse to expressing emotions while watching theatre (or otherwise, but that's besides my point) than Swedes.

It's a show that's purpose-built to make the audience cry. As such, it's always going to make us feel slightly awkward, and, thus, wary of it.

[tallochar]

☕️ musicals!

I loooove musicals so much!

This is going to be rambly, I apologize in advance.

I do my best not to cram stuff down people's throats and of course I have yet to see or listen to Every Musical Ever, but musicals just make the happy part of my brain that thrives on music and narrative sit up and bounce in my seat.

(I am currently listening to Celebrate from Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens on repeat and will be for some hours still unless something happens)

I tend to hyperfixate on specific songs out of each musical and then play them on repeat until my family (my mother as we currently live together but it used to be my brothers too) is heartily sick of them and then I put my earbuds in and listen to them some more, because it is very much a mood thing.

I think that that is because I grew up in a non-English speaking country and did not learn enough English to translate lyrics until my early teens so a good chunk of my formative experience with english-spoken music was more about vibes and mood than the lyrics itself.

Of course lyrics add a ton now that I do understand, but music always hits first and deepest for me. In some cases, some songs won me over because of the music first and then got archive as 'guilty pleasure' songs because the lyrics made me go Wait What.

(See: Sincerely Me from Dear Evan Hansen, which creeps me out if you go by lyrics but will listen to just because it's so goddamn catchy, or Shiksa Goddess from The Last Five Years, that I managed to listen to for hours without taking in the lyrics and then once I did just made me very disgusted at Jamie)

(These are also both musicals I cannot bring myself to go see in person because the first one is violentlly upsetting to me [the protagonist and his actions are repulsive to me and no I don't care that he doesn't get to go to college at the end, is that supposed to be punishment enough for what he did?] and for the second one I saw the movie and listened to the songs and it just makes me want to stomp on him and pop a bottle for her at the end and tell her she's well rid of him and that I'm sorry she sunk so much time into him and I end up virulently angry)

(I have absolutely nothing against people who enjoy them, more power to them and go and enjoy it, which is my general policy about most things, but I am not one of them and I think both things are valid, so please no one come after me for not liking them!)

I have been listening to musicals since I was a toddler!

Not just Disney, because like, one of my first ever musicals was Jesus Christ Superstar, as mom was a fan and she both had the VHS for it (with Italian subtitles rather than the cast singing in Italian) AND the cassette tapes as well and we also had Rocky Horror Picture Show also subbed English.

[Don't know if it's different now, but when I was growing up everything media available in Italy was dubbed, including anime and tv shows and movies {with some actors often voiced by the same voice actors to create consistency between performances, so Al Pacino always sounded the same but it wasn't actually Al Pacino, it was his Italian VA, to make an example} and so it was a rarer thing to have a musical that was in actual English with subs]

I used to go to musicals and I have seen the Italian versions of a fair few (Cats, Notre Dame de Paris, West Side Story, JCS with a sub electrical board on stage because apparently it was never translated in Italian, The Sound of Music just off the top of my head) but since I have moved cities and countries, I have been going whenever I can save up enough money for it (I am in London now so there is A LOT available to me)

And like the songs are GOOD but there just is something MORE about being able to see them being staged and the choices that are made for costumes and set and dancing and it's like an instantaneous pick me up and a guaranteed good night out for me if I am going to watch one :D

Sign me up every single time for one!

I love animatics of musicals as well, that's one of the ways I can get into new musicals (it's how I got into Sincerely Me, there's one by Szin on YouTube that is incredibly charming, despite the inherent creepiness of the song) and whenever I hear new songs or see a new musical then I go exploring YouTube for animatics.

It's just ... someone sits down and writes a story and it's a SUNG story and then more people get together and make MUSIC of it and they ACT IT OUT but they are also DANCING and SINGING and it's all so intensely done and felt and expressed and you can bring it with you when you are going around and evoke those vibes by listening to it and you can sing it at home or like, if you go to a cinema that does a Sing-Along show (if anyone is in London, look up the Prince Charles cinema schedule for that, they do it and it BLEW MY MIND) then you can go in a public space with a lot of other people who love it as much as you AND SING ALL TOGETHER!

It makes me *vibrate* in my seat just to think about it! Musicals are just ... amazing to me *wide sparkly eyes and fisted hands under my chin because O M G YES!*

[roo-bastmoon]

Just my 2 cts but some fans are either really young or just don’t spend much time around young men tbh… The things I read on sm about the members and Jikook always surprised me. as a woman with 2 brothers + spending a lot of time around my fiancé’s friends I think a lot of Armys don’t have much knowledge about men’s behavior in general(there are variations, of course). For them it’s either 1-the members are all bffs without boundaries hence why the recurrent "poly bts" joke- when the only two who have shown consistent lack of space/boundaries/romantic vibes over the years are Jimin and Jungkook 2- they’re dating every single women that are less than 10feet from them and that have worn the same trendy shirt or accessory or god knows what 3- they’re never ever dating women and only have very chaste thoughts haha4-they’re even less dating a man.. I have been around my brothers and my fiancé’s groups of male friends so much, they come from various backgrounds, ethnicities, a few are gay men, and they can be really touchy, tease eo all the time and flirt for fun (seriously, do these fans have spend even a tiny bit of time around a bunch of guys?) but they never gave eo hickey made a whole romantic video vlog of their trips suck on eo’s ears and all…. Men don’t behave like this with their friend/bestfriend. For real, spend time with men, just observe them around their friend. Take a look at JHope and Jin almost accidentally brushing their lips at an event (can’t remember which one it was) and the same thing happening a few times between Jimin and Jungkook: very different reactions, those two don’t seem phased at all… Or make your male friends watch GCF in Tokyo and ask them about it. men and women have a different vision of friendship I think (I know nowadays it’s not very popular to highlight differences between the two sexes..). I feel like as a lot of armys are teenage girls or young women, they project their own friendship with their female friends onto the members. It’s not that uncommon for teenage girls to have such a close relationship with their bestfriend that the boundaries between friendship and love mingle a bit (happened to me). Young men’s/young women’s friendships tend to be very different. I can be biased as well, but to me it’s pretty obvious that Jimin and Jungkook share a different kind of bond and their behavior/touches are usually more charged and clearly not usual at all for friends. Especially now that they have grown up and the boundaries between the members are increasing as you would expect for adults friends. They all share a close bond with a bit more skinship that we’re used to in the west but behind that aspect you can still spot patterns in behavior and for me no other duo has made me raise my eyebrows. Sorry for my messy English

Hi Nonie!

First off, your "messy English" made perfect sense so please do not apologize!

Second, I'm sure there's lots of nuances to gender, age, and culture at play here that many non-Korean and non-male Army are missing (I know I'm one of them). So it's natural to try to view and interpret things through your own lens because that's all you have for reference. But yeah, I often find myself thinking things like "Why didn't Jungkook mention Jimin's OST on his Instagram??" or "Why didn't Jungkook reach out to comfort Jimin when he was crying during Festa dinner?" Because that is absolutely what *I* would do if *I* were blessed by the gods to be in the same orbit as Park Jimin. But I'm a 43-year-old cis-het white American woman who has been conditioned since birth to demonstrate emotions and do emotional labor. I don't know any 25-year-old males that would constantly telegraph deep feelings the way that I would, even if they didn't have to contend with a glass closet.

If people watch original content (and sadly many don't, which baffles me) they will quickly see patterns in BTS that raise questions. Yes, there's just a TON of skinship among all of them (they kiss anywhere but the lips, they hug, they sleep in the same beds, they compliment each other's looks, they hold hands, they eat each others' food, the list goes on and on). And for some reason fandom seems to hyper-focus on the maknae and tries to compare the relationships among that line for "supremacy" (which makes me sad because there's overwhelming evidence they all truly care for and delight in each other, so pitting them against each other feels a bit sacrilegious).

For me, only Jikook does highly, highly suspicious stuff. Jungkook is super playful and affectionate with all his members, and Jimin is the human embodiment of loyalty and comfort, but the vibe completely changes when it's them with each other, versus them with the other members. Now, they aren't sharing as many glimpses into their personal lives these days so I don't have tons of recent examples (outside of concerts) but there are hints everywhere you look that they still mean the world to each other. But even if you wanted to dismiss years and years of their lingering looks, magnetic pull toward each other, intimate knowledge of each other, time off-schedule spent together, intertwined family and friends, and downright giddy flirting, the most telling aspect of Jikook is the way the other members react to them (especially Hobi and Joon, bless them).

This is my reaction every time I watch the rest of BTS tense up and hold their breath when Jimin and Jungkook are having a moment:

So yeah. I haven't been around young men in well over a decade. I'm ancient and an introverted recluse. I probably fall into the trap of filtering BTS' behavior through my biased lens all the time. But when I step back and just view the content independent of my own desires, what I see is that Jimin and Jungkook have something unique between them. The only way to discount that is to actively dismiss mountains of circumstantial evidence.

[thedogsled]

I'm interested in hearing about the Merlin queerbaiting thing because I seem to remember someone saying that this homoerotic subtext was upped after the producers or writers or whoever had been asked whether the queer subtext was intentional or something like that.

tbh the likelihood is you probably heard this from me, but who knows. I think it’s clear to a lot of people in Merlin fandom either way, although maybe not everyone feels that way. I’m going to go riiiight back to the beginning, though, to the very first episode where I was coming off my last fandom (Harry Potter) and had nowhere else to go, and there was this awesome show on TV…

First of all I’m going to drop this here:

So this was my experience, back in 2008, when I got to go to MCM London. The show had been on maybe a few weeks at the time, and not much had been developed back then, but there was no doubt that they were writing the pair of them very well as a strong male/male friendship. Now the subtext was glorious, because as you can hear right here it wasn’t the intention of the writers to put any of it in there, and it came off so naturally as a strong set of bonds forming between two guys. Nobody was aware of it, and then bam there’s all this fanfiction being written. This was the first ever question these guys had been asked on a panel ever. We’re not talking like the pussyfooting into asking those kinds of questions like you see with SPN panels, these guys were fresh and green and had no idea what they were getting into, and the unequivocal downplay from the writer ‘No, this is a story about friendship’, well it should have stopped there. But as you hear the writer go on to say, as they laugh about the idea of people shipping Merthur at all, these sorts of heroes journeys do have a homoerotic subtext. He acknowledges that, but he’s also forthright in saying ‘no, that’s not what this is, end of story’.

So for me, that should have been what it is, i.e. it’s not queerbaiting because there’s absolutely no intention of going there, and they’ve made it clear. Unfortunately that’s not what happened, and the consequence is that it wasn’t made clear to the audience. Sure, that crowd at comic con of a few hundred people, but not the audience (also I’m disappointed there wasn’t more to that clip, because the writers (there was at least one other person, a woman there, backed and forthed briefly on the topic, “is that a thing?” or something like that, but it was ten years ago so I’m afraid I can’t remember exactly. By this time next year people were cosplaying Merlin, it had played in the USA and everything was really taking off, but that first season was in the can at this point, and consequently precious and innocent. The friendship between Arthur and Merlin was as untarnished as you could get, because the writers had no idea what they were doing, and the actors had no idea of what was coming across in those intimate moments, so that was perfect too. Seriously, that first season of Merlin is superb.

But now everyone is self conscious. They know they have this audience and they’ve been exposed to how loud it is, how superbly influential. The feeling of watching Merlin season 2 was therefore entirely different to watching season 1. Bradley and Colin carry themselves differently. The wording choices in the scenes become deliberately nudge nudge wink wink. The scenes themselves are more homoerotic because of this conglomeration of ideas and acting choices. Merlin talks about how he ‘feels’ about Arthur and there’s shitloads more shirtless scenes and long silences and held glances between Merlin and Arthur than Arthur and anyone else. 

I’m saying this as someone who didn’t fall for the queerbaiting, because I knew from that unequivocal “this is a profound friendship” declaration that they were never, ever going there, that Arthur was destined to get with Guinevere (that was the societal wall i.e. class, that he had to jump over) and they weren’t ever going to do anything but straight and hetereosexual on Saturday night on BBC1 (an opinion I changed for Sherlock but very quickly changed back when I saw the same tone and delivery grabbing for and successfully pulling in the audience who so desperately wanted to see what they were being teased at. Merlin and Sherlock really coincided at the sweet spot of queerbaiting (which incidentally is when Cas joins SPN, and coincides with the most queerbaiting seasons of SPN as well.) But I was at ground zero for Merlin, before shipping Merthur was cool, and you can betcha that the writer declaring that there were only straights here put a dead end to that before it could begin. Just imagine a writer saying something like that now. We track all the panels, we record everything. We’d tear them to pieces in a second flat.

The mood in S2 just changes. Here’s a bunch of clips from S2. I’ve stuck it on a late timestamp, but that’s only because that particular scene is a standout example: gay 4 comedy. By the middle of S3 filming, everyone is well briefed on the interest in the ship. The baiting gets really hard and comedic by season 4. I’ve jumped to some of the worst offending moments in this series of clips here. And remember Sherlock’s first season aired just before this, thus my accusations of a queerbaiting heyday. It was all getting into stride about this time, carte blanche to suck in queer viewers with no intention of following through and use ‘they might be gay’ both as an endless mockery, as in these Merlin clips, and as a way to add seriousness to some scenes. My memory of feeling mocked and ridiculed by Merlin is just so strong, and reviewing some of the episodes really nails that down for me. Having known where the writers come from, knowing the sentiment behind their approach to their queer audience…it drives me up the wall even right now.

So season 5 they pull it all together, and - spoilers - Arthur dies in Merlin’s arms, and there’s an unspoken I love you, and Merlin waits for centuries for the return of the Once and Future King. And this, coming back to the strongest part of the story in order to deliver the final emotional punch, the part that carried it through (the relationship which could be misconstrued between the main characters) and offering a flimsy not quite there delivery of yet more subtext (because you have to be in on the queer reading to see it), was a final spit in the eye. It’s why you’ll see a bunch of people in fandoms who are disgusted by the idea of a kiss in the last scene, they die together, or a subtextual drive off into the sunset ending, because it’s such a familiar and heart wrenching and aggravating cop out. It’s not even Thelma and Louise, you know? Because over years and years, you’ve been driven by this show, by what you’re seeing on screen, and your reward is a lacklustre nod in the last few seconds; what you’re there for you never get, and yet at the end of the day you’re supposed to be delighted they gave you even 50% certainty that your ship would end up together. Fuck you.

Merlin could easily have been read as not queerbaiting. That’s the thing. Some people will outright tell you that Sherlock is easily read as not queerbaiting too. Those people will also say ‘why is it that two guys can’t have a relationship without people thinking it’s romantic.’ Well, they can. They can. But I point you to the word ‘bromance’. These shows deliberately either take romantic storylines and apply them to those characters, or play up the gay for laughs. Especially at this sort of 2008-1016 sweet spot, pre The 100 drama, they absolutely did. They didn’t see the harm, and what they got back in return from fandom involvement and viewership and repeat viewing was absolute justification for those choices. Merlin benefits from it’s queer audience, but it also benefits from a storytelling perspective as having been intended as a heterosexual friends only story in the first place, and the first season (and season 3 largely, idk why) play out like that. That’s what lets it off the hook when people are looking for queerbaiting in the show, because it’s absolutely not from the get go. Like with Destiel it establishes naturally, both as a result of the story and because of the vibe the two main actors have with each other. 

Compare to Sherlock, which went for it right out of the gate “Is this a date?” and never backed down, applying the queerbaiting consistently until they were done as though I think to legitimatize the writing choice. “See, it wasn’t queer, that’s just how we wrote it, you’ve all got dirty minds.” That same show will be defended with ‘why can’t guys just be friends’, and implications that any suggestion of physical intimacy doesn’t make it gay and is harmful to guys in general. There may be some truth in that, but there is also truth in the use and manipulation of queer audiences, and there are plenty of touchy feely male/male relationships which aren’t queerbaiting; look at most buddy cop shows (I exclude due South from this), JD and Turk, McGee and DeNozzo, Esposito and Ryan. Well written brotherhood and friendship is out there which does not rely on one character waiting for another to come back from the dead for centuries, or casually delivering that Cas ∴ Cas

I’ve been going on for a while, but I’m going to just make one last swing for it before I conclude. Take in mind that original quote, then. Look at this article. The quotes here are notorious in Merlin fandom, of course, but even from an outsider they leave a bad taste in my mouth. 

“Murphy points to the moment where Arthur finally dies as what the entire series has been building towards. At the “just hold me,” Murphy justifies to a shocked McGrath that, “well, he’s dying, the man he loves is dying, so he’s holding him.””

Maybe it wasn’t queerbaiting to start with, but Merlin knew what it was doing. S1: “Merlin is about a friendship between Merlin and Arthur, and they do care about each other hugely, but um it’s not necessarily, you know, it isn’t a gay love story, no.” vs. S5: “I think you maybe just confirmed what a lot of people thought, and I’m glad that Julian could do it, because he’s probably the only one who could have gotten away with that commentary.”

I don’t know where Merlin fandom stands on this. I know there’s an undercurrent - because I’ve read it - that some people like the ending as it is because they don’t think that all love has to be shown in smooches. But that would be fine if it wasn’t raising a strawman to argue against (I see it a lot in these conversations). Nobody is even talking about kissing. A relationship of any shade which is confirmed and genuine is fine. But queerbaiting specifically is this kind of stringing people along by dancing around the suggestion of something, and then coming back to state that it was there all along, or worse still just go “Maybe~ If that’s the way you see it~”. Nobody is saying they have to bang it out in a clearing in order for it to be legitimized, but that’s a whole other level from ridiculing people who see it that way, playing it as a joke, or stringing those people along right to the very last gasp.

For sure, if you don’t think it was queerbaiting then that’s great, and I’m actually glad for you! I’m sure people disagree with me on a handful of things I’ve said here, but Merlin was a huge disappointment for me as a creative. I wanted to play in that universe, but the seed was planted that every hint of homoerotic subtext was targeting me, or making a mockery of me, and it poisoned that well from the get go. That I’m still harboring those feelings a decade later probably shapes the way I interact with canons now, but it also is an indication of how strongly I feel about Destiel that I can get over it; once burned twice shy usually applies; it harmed my viewing experience of Merlin, Sherlock, and Hannibal, and I won’t deny it affects me when I watch SPN (and some other shows) too. It’s part of why I think this show has such an opportunity to do something different. But there’s still that tugging part of me that insists that because this is a show nurtured in that sweet spot, I have no reason to believe it should do anything outside the norm. Perhaps the situation with The 100 doesn’t affect it, or maybe it will have learned from it? Some things, like the queer hires to the writers room, fill me with hope. But who knows? That’s unfortunately the state of the uneasy relationship I have with it, particularly as a queer person who wants to see those stories on TV. To tell the truth, this uncertainty and unease is the damage that queerbaiting causes in the long term, and we deserve better stories.

This got super duper long, so thanks for sticking with it.