#team queerbait!

[hoodie02]

guys, is this allowed??

[kai-strophics]

Canon gay rep is good, really it's good but oh...it is OH SO boring....Pass the Queerbait cocaine....

[theodorerror]

HAPPY DNF WEEK LETS GO!!

Prompt: kiss + snapchat

Two best friends... they might kiss (and profit)

[miax7535]

How do I express to the writers of criminal minds that I cannot take one more season of no canonical lesbian Emily Prentiss. Oh and I can definitely not take anymore queerbaiting

I mean I love the show but it’s more than just about crime and profiling. This show is nothing without the characters.

[gayofthefae]

Just remembered all the money The Duffers threw away for 5 years on marketing Byler knowing damn well hardly anybody cared and not paying a cent for Milkvan content, merch, photoshoots, anything.

How could it be queerbaiting? They didn't even have to advertise them pre-season 4 but they said "no, we're gonna move money from our budget towards a 2017 photoshoot and AWAY from other important things on our budgeting list. Noah, tweet that they definitely aren't gay."

Like really just maximized story telling. We don't want you to know until we want you know but we're gonna subliminally open your mind to it. And somebody saw "they def aren't gay" and went "hm I'd never thought of them as gay before...honestly kinda good idea ngl".

For the Duffers to not make Byler happen would be inherently and exclusively malicious, a malice intended from the beginning. There weren't even enough people in 2017 to actually queerbait. Because there weren't enough to make money off of. The marketing tells us it was planned from long before people were on board. So either they planned to tell Mike and Will's love story or they planned to snub queer viewers for the sake of it, willing to make financial sacrifice to do so, both by investing in something people weren't buying and NOT INVESTING in something people WANTED TO BUY (milkvan content and merch) in order to convert people away from Milkvan and to Byler to also maximize the damage they were spending their money to create.

Lord have mercy if it's the second one because Jesus Fucking Christ usually showrunners hurt gay people to gain money, they don't usually PAY to hurt gay people because they just wanted to that bad.

Example of their weird anti-money marketing decisions

Other examples

[darklinaforever]

I still can’t believe in the show, Rhaenyra involved Mysaria (a woman who just weeks/months before had aided in her being usurped!) more than her heir and first born son, Jace. Jace seemed heart broken and confused at Rhaenyra’s illogical actions. Do you think the writers made Mysaria so important just to queerbait Rhaesarias and Rhaenicents?

Well Mysaria is supposed to play a fairly important role in the black team. Whether as a spy or story-wise to sow discord between Daemon and Rhaenyra. The problem is that the writers did anything with the character. They rejected the fact once again that a woman could be morally ambiguous or evil to make Mysaria a sincere person with Rhaenyra, which is ridiculous with what she does later, although I doubt the writers will keep this scenario of Fire and Blood, this does not fit at all with their agenda on the treatment of female characters. Yes, Rhaesaria, like Rhaenicent is just queerbaiting. These relationships will never go anywhere. And again, I find Rhaesaria worse. Because at least Rhaenicent seems to have some form of attention from the writers. A completely ridiculous and inconsistent attention depending on the episodes and interviews, but still we can say that they are trying to write this relationship with some form of objective behind it. But Rhaesaria doesn't have that. It's just an actor's improvisation, added just to, I suppose, shock the screenwriters while checking the diversity box, and which therefore has no impact on the scenario. The scene could have never happened and it wouldn't have changed anything. The scene once again wasn't even supposed to happen at all. And it feels good. Normally, an actor's improvisation is accepted because it adds something, an additional layer to what has already been written. It doesn't come just to be there without contributing anything to the story. Yes, clearly that kiss was just queerbaiting. I was disappointed and angry when it happened on screen. This means that the information had leaked, and I didn't believe it because it was so ridiculous from a plot point of view, and when I saw that if it was real and they had done this kiss... Suffice it to say that I no longer have any confidence in the writers of this show.

[propheticjester]

bonkers interaction with a coworker today where he tried to make smalltalk over tv shows and i mentioned that I'm watching Gotham, to which he replied "oh, I liked how that show started but the ending... They made the penguin gay :(" AND I-

first of all, i think my brain did a complete factory reset bc I am NOT used to hearing people say things like that outside of family gatherings but anyway:

that's just the ending to him??? like, i'm literally on season 2 and i swear to god that bird bitch is just short of making out with Ed every time they're on screen together what show was he even watching?????

[rhaenin-time]

[djevelbl]

BRANZYCRAFT WON BY .5 PERCENT!!!!! RHAT MIGHT STILL BE A TIE BUT WTV

Under the rules of the contest it's technically still up in the air whether he's won or not but idc if they team up bc so long as Branzy keeps on being in the competition, then to me tie is just a weird french spelling of win /silly

[applepie2523]

Rip rhaenicent

[samgirard]

└asher hong and john jayne

[hoodie02]

Zampunzel lmao

im sorry i felt the urge to doodle this

clip for context:

[sarah-fandom-account]

the new Wicked movie’s portrayal of Elphaba and Glinda and Arcane’s portrayal of Jayce and Viktor’s relationship are about the same amount queer coded, and I really don’t know how to feel about that considering Wicked was very Intentionally queercoded. They have a gay relationship in the books. The actresses did portray it pretty well but at the end of the day it’s all subtext that can be dismissed as being because they are ‘best friends.’ Meanwhile Jayce and Viktor hold hands and touch foreheads as the power they created and allowed into the world destroys everything. And the creators, for some unknown reason, find it necessary to emphasize that this is a purely platonic connection.

Idk, I just find it all very weird. In the Wicked movie, we have queer media created for queer people by queer people that is… decidedly tame; created to be palatable, for all of its merits, it’s hard to deny that.

And then in Arcane we have sapphic queer representation already with Caitlyn and Vi, but the (heterosexual) co creator of the show is on record saying that their relationship is brotherly. Which… Viktor confesses he has visited every reality and only Jayce can ever show him the power of the arcane. Jayce resurrects him from the dead. Jayce tells him that at the end of the day all he wants is his partner back… at the end of it all, they outright state that they care about each other way more than their research or inventions or anything else. In the end, it’s just them, obliterated by the thing they created together. It just all seems very (just sub explicitly) queer, and yet.

I would probably be fine with watching Wicked with my mother, and it would be uncomfortable to watch arcane with her during the Jayce and Viktor scenes alone (not even the caitvi.) Jayce and Viktor’s love is implicitly something more than platonic love. Maybe it’s just because society (and therefore individual people) view platonic touchy feely and emotional closeness between two men as more inherently unacceptable than between two women. It’s always suspicious between men, but fine between women who are more sentimental? or something.

I don’t even know what I’m trying to say here really. It’s just all very weird to me.

[voidify333]

I’m not sorry

[starforgedthor]

If you let yourself get queerbaited by Loki and Owen Wilson With A Moustache on Marvel dot Disney dot com backslash Season 2, I literally don't know what to tell you. it's not even clown behaviour at this point, every single clown I know has more sense than that .

[theladyrebecca2]

It's human nature to gain or lose hope when you see Netflix socials promoting Byler or Midleven, but we've gotta pull back the curtain to see the full picture.

First, always remind yourself that the Stranger Things team and Netflix are completely separate entities. Netflix is the vehicle the ST team are driving their story on, but they're not the same people who actually create it. They get little to no say in what the ST writers write.

I say 'little' because the bones of each season will have been greenlit by select Netflix higher-ups (with NDA's signed). But if the Stranger Things team want Storyline A, and Netflix were to say no, what about Storyline B? Then the ST team are absolutely capable of standing their ground and not moving. Perhaps some compromises can be made, but the final say will be down to how stubborn the ST writers can be. This was made apparent by the Duffer Brothers’ open stance on the writing and acting strikes, which directly opposed Netflix. It mattered to them that in the future, writers will continue to have control over their work. That Netflix can't just weasel out of their contracts with shows and write their own endings with AI. Right now, Netflix provide funding, connections, and a platform to host stories on. The ST team provide their content, the original idea, the heart and soul. It's a mutually beneficial relationship.

When it comes to promoting stuff on social media, we have several teams working separately. This leads to exchanges like this from the Netflix Tudum event:

This is two completely different social media teams interacting with each other. Most important to remember though - right now, the Netflix social media team won't know anything about Season 5. The earliest they may be told anything important will be at the start of the Season 5 promotional campaigns, but even then, it's not a given. NDA's will be in effect at Netflix right up until the bitter end. The social media people will be working in tandem with the marketing team, all of them given set content or working under guidelines when told what they can promote/ talk about.

Secondly, they're just ordinary people doing their job. When it comes to liking comments or replying to them, it will all differ depending on which person happens to be logged into the Netflix account at that time.

For ST5, it looks like Dana and Chris are two Senior Social Media Managers at Netflix US:

But look at all the related connections, and you begin to realise just how many people make up these social media teams (and marketing, which is related). And remember, this is just Netflix US - not the ST team.

So just think about how each person has their own opinions, has their own views on the show. How many of these people might ship Byler? How many ship Midleven? I bet they have their own interpersonal work politics behind the scenes, hoping their idealised ending is the right one.

My point is, there's no point freaking out about this occuring underneath Netflix US's recent post about ST S5:

All this shows is that we have a Midleven shipper in the social media team. After Season 4, a lot of people got excited at this:

But again, all this indicates is that we also have a potential Byler shipper in the Netflix UK team. It's just as pointless getting happy and excited about pro-Byler stuff on there, as it is to get worried or upset about pro-Midleven stuff.