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I think we should write more straight relationships with 2010s TV queerbait tactics. Let that man and that woman’s lives be horribly intertwined, let them take bullets for the other, let them be each other’s meaning but NO KISSING. They are holding each other platonically. You’re crazy for reading anything romantic into it at all tbh
This is just bog standard TV.
The whole fear about if you let two high chemistry characters actually commit to a relationship, it kills the show. That’s very much a thing and writers will go to extreme lengths to try to maintain the tension as long as possible without actually letting the characters get together.
Some shows eventually do let the characters get together, but then immediately do something to separate them or break them up so they can either start over, or shove a new high chemistry non-relationship into the spotlight.
If a show knew it was getting canceled, sometimes it would let the characters finally get together in the last episode. But I don’t think that means the relationship had been planned. A lot of times it was just fanwank for the last hurrah. As long as the writers didn’t have to maintain the relationship through a whole season, they were like, yeah what the hell, let ‘em kiss!
And yes, those hetero ships can elicit as much vitriol from the shows creators as the gay ones. I’ve definitely heard writers and show runners throw tantrums about fans wanting certain characters to get together, even though they’re the ones putting all that UST on the screen 🙄
Sometimes the couple that the creators did plan just doesn’t work very well. The writing sucks, the actors don’t have chemistry, whatever. But maybe another pair of characters very much does seem to have chemistry that the writers didn’t intend, and they can get very upset that fans aren’t enamored with the ship they planned, so they get nasty.
If you don’t watch these types of shows, fine, understandable. But please know that this stuff happens in probably 90% of shows that exist currently or have ever existed.
The only reason queerbaiting even works is because it’s using the same tropes that people were already used to seeing in het stories, and seeing those tropes applied to same-sex characters gave scope for gay shipping.
Dear god just look at the X-Files if you need the world’s easiest example. It’s how much of early internet fandom and many of our current shipping conventions developed. In fact, we can thank the X-Files fandom (X-Philes) for the term UST itself 😉
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