#danny is ambiguously queer and that is all he ever lets me know

[surelysilly]

Your full body Danny drawing reminded me of this and I had to find it

Anyways I found even more stuff I think is Mr fear au kind of vibe

Every Danny in these AUs except like... 3 are short stacks and im not sorry about it

i love him short, wide, and fat, amen 🙏

Danny doesn't know what he is, but he is GRIEF STRICKEN, HOMELESS, IRRIDATED, and NEW TO TOWN, yes. God, i want to draw the second one now though, help akjsdhasd

[queerfables]

Hmm, some of this is... I think "subjective" is the best word. I do not think that Sterek was ever seriously on the table as a potential canon ship. No one outside of fandom would have looked at their dynamic in s1 and thought there was something romantic there. It was a very contemporary slash dynamic, which is to say they were funny and snarky and it was easy to imagine their antagonism was a cover for a different kind of tension. I think Arthur/Eames from Inception hit similar notes (and, similarly, captured the fannish imagination with only a few scenes together). A lot of Marvel ships worked the same way, especially around the time the first Avengers movie came out. It was a popular dynamic, is what I'm saying, a common dynamic between (apparently) straight male characters, and yeah shippers will always find that kind of dynamic compelling but to your average audience member or network executive, it's all just funny banter and watchable interpersonal conflict. The only difference is these big blockbuster movies were absolutely never going to make their heroes queer and fans thought just maybe there was a snowballs chance in hell that a trashy mtv drama might. I'm not sure that belief was supported by anything other than the comparative likelihood of Iron Man and Captain America making out on the big screen of 2012, though.

People hoped that Jeff Davis would push the envelope on how queer the show could get. And he did! Danny didn't have a huge role when the show started, but it grew, and more queer characters were introduced through the show's run. My personal guess is that the deck was stacked against Davis precisely because he was openly gay. The whole "I don't care if you're gay just don't shove it in my face" argument was pretty big in the early 2010s. Even if he wanted to have a queer romance between two members of his main cast, it would have been a really hard sell to the network. In the unlikely case that any of the main characters came out, I suspect they would have ended up paired with an established queer side character or a newly introduced love interest. My money was always on Stiles/Danny above anything else, and even that was a long shot.

I'm not 100% certain on this, but I'm relatively sure that just-turned-19 Derek was always a fanon interpretation of his ambiguous age. When his age was made explicit, he was actually much younger than I'd assumed (and his relationship with Kate was way creepier than the early seasons implied, imo!) Yeah, Stiles says Derek is "a few years" older than he and Scott are, but he also says the fire that killed Derek's family was ten years ago, when later that season it's confirmed to have only been six. He's basically just sharing gossip, with precision being much less important than mystery and intrigue. Maybe I'm forgetting something, please let me know if canon contradicts me on this. It's just... If Derek had been 19 during s1, he would have been 13 when the fire happened, and regardless of how old Kate was - even if she were the same age - it would have been a very bold move for MTV to casually imply they were having sex at that time and skip right over any follow up questions. I'm not saying 13 year olds don't ever have sex, but they don't usually have sex in light-hearted MTV shows aimed at teens.

So, yeah, my initial understanding had been that Derek and Kate were around the same age, both older teenagers/young adults when they dated. Their relationship was explicitly paralleled to Allison and Scott's, so I took that as a rough benchmark. It was later confirmed that Kate was 21 and Derek was 16 when the fire happened, which put a whole different spin on what happened between them. Incidentally, these are roughly the ages of Derek and Stiles at the start of the series. This is another reason I'm skeptical of any age retconning related to whether a Kate/Derek or Derek/Stiles age gap was more uncomfortable. They could easily have leaned harder in one direction or the other if that was their concern.

It's true that Sterek fandom had some weird moments towards the cast and showrunners but in fairness, the show shamelessly exploited Sterek fandom right back. Anyone remember that infamous "we're on a ship" video? The term queerbaiting gets some dubious use these days but if anything qualifies... Listen, I'm not a Sterek fan but that was egregious.

Anyway it probably was the case that you had to be there. It's also true that some of us who were there still ended up shipping Scott/Stiles the most, lol.

bordering on entering s4 of teen wolf and i fully do not understand why sterek is the fandom’s number one ship. they’ve talked like maybe ten times across 3 seasons. stiles absolutely wants to fuck him but stiles wants to fuck anything that moves. and derek needs to be 51/50’d and enrolled in an extensive full-time therapy program for a minimum of 3 months before he’s in a place to be dating ANYONE let alone the human personification of adhd