#because you literally can't comprehend those books if you don't put in the legwork yourself

[dedicatedfollower467]

okay so wrt that last post: yes, we want the sprinkling of queer romance on top of the rest of the plot, not for queer romance to be the entirety of the plot, that's definitely a thing and yes we want more queer sci-fi and queer fantasy etc etc.

BUT ALSO on the subject of those queerbaity shows and early 2000s shipper fandom....

i think the fact that you HAD to work for it was, in fact, part of the appeal! you didn't just get the queer romance handed to you on a silver platter, you had to, like. figure out the parts that were secretly queer, look for all the little hints that were dropped.

honestly? theorizing about queer-coded characters that were not explicitly textually queer felt a LOT like the internet working out the existence of standford pines on gravity falls, or steven universe fans figuring out garnet was a fusion. like, yes, sometimes it felt like the writers WERE leaving clues that you WERE intended to pick up on if you wanted to look! it was like solving a mystery, by looking into all these little tidbits and possible clues that were sprinkled everywhere. you had to WORK for it to read the relationship there, and that was part of the fun!

granted, the difference is that the queerbaiting was JUST queerbaiting and the gayness did not get a big dramatic reveal because they were not INTENDED to be part of the story, but there was still real sense of enjoyment we got out of deep analysis and queer readings that i think is kind of. lacking in modern shipping fandom?

idk, you just don't get 3k-word posts about how dean winchester is named for dean moriarty from on the road who was based on a man who may have been bisexual in real life and how that underlies the way he's written and portrayed on the show in a way that may not even be intended by the original authors in modern fandoms these days.