#and form opinions around those interpretations and then clash with ppl who formed different opinions

[usercelestial]

i have complicated feelings about where the word queerbait leads us in current time. we're a long way from where we started with tumblr's big queerbaits. there are a lot more shows with real queer rep now, queer characters are becoming more and more normalized. which means now, when we have a show full of queer characters, they're going to be subjected to some of the same bad writing or baiting that any straight character could. i don't keep up with the press or the marketing, so i can't say for sure what exactly nandermo was being presented as, but as the fandom's Big Ship i'm sure it was being pushed quite a bit. i don't think it's fair to call it queerbaiting when, historically, that's been used to say they're promising queerness and not delivering. the queerness of the show was present the whole time. i understand why people are upset, even if i've never approached the show with a nandermo lens, but i think it's hard to have a conversation when everyone seems to be operating with completely different ideas of what queerbaiting is.

i absolutely get this perspective, queerbaiting has a very long and complicated history. i think where I lie with nandermo is that the show recognizes the potential of the ship and understands it gets traction and marketing potential from it, a really egregious example of this is promoting the season with guillermo and nandor edited into The Bodyguard poster. personally i don't think it's that big of a deal, i figured they were playing it up for promotion and weren't planning on following through with it because the show isn't a romantic comedy, it's just comedy that has a theme of things never really changing but even if you didn't expect it to happen i understand why it's frustrating that ship was never taken seriously but was used as promotional material. i think paul simms comments about it being problematic and not wanting to pervert the relationship also contributed to people being pissed off because obviously the entire show is problematic if you want to get into semantics, najda literally hypnotized laszlo into sleeping with her and they have literally fucked on screen as bats, so people took those comments as very homophobic because obviously you let the man and the women get freak nasty and be in love (and allow for gay sex scenes of minor characters for laughs (not judgement)) but when it comes to the relationship between two male main characters, suddenly a romance plotline is perverted and problematic because of power dynamics. it feels a little like he just didn't want to commit to a permanent on screen relationship between them.

i think when it comes to nandermo, we need to purge the word queerbait from the discourse because you're right, no one can seem to settle on one solid definition. i think the arguments of "they were acknowledged by canon" + "the show has queer characters" are equally as reasonable as "relationships between two men don't seem to be taken as seriously as the ones between a man and a woman" + "the one relationship between two men is hinted at and joked about but is never pushed further" and to be honest, i think all of these opinions need to coexist because this show DOES have good queer rep, its fun and silly and light hearted, i enjoy the fact that we get nasty gay sex scenes occasionally and it's treated as a normal or even encouraged act, it's very unapologetic and real HOWEVER that doesn't mean it's immune to treating the queerness of these characters and the relationships they have as less than or using them as surface level marketing. we should always be pushing for more and better, even if we have what we asked for.