Listen: once upon a time, you couldn't just hit up the creator of your fave thing on twitter and ask them for extra details about the thing they made! And it's super cool that this can happen now - but only when people aren't dicks about it! Which includes both creators AND fans-
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- but not in the way some fans seem to think, where a creator refusing to endorse their fave interpretation - for the simple reason that doing so *sets it above other fan interpretations and alienates fans who feel differently* - is a sign that The Creator Is Hostile To Fandom.
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So now you've got creators trying to engage with fans from all different perspectives on a good faith basis, only there's fans explicitly looking to take any comments they make in *bad* faith, because it's Not The Right Take, and if they didn't get THEIR answer, no one can!
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A common example of this is conflating a brief response made to a single individual with a blanket, all-encompassing take on a related topic. For instance: Creator says they didn't write Character X as gay, therefore Creator is a homophobe! Like I'm just. YOU GUYS.
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Unless that statement is followed up by some Actual Homophobic Bullshit (TM) such as "this sort of character can never be gay" or "being gay is bad", all you're doing is making a deliberately bad faith leap based on a perfectly neutral - and factual! - statement.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
Genuine question: what if the author doesn't explicitly say anything homophobic, but the source material has an explicit track record of queerbaiting the character in question?
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Replying to @BinJLG
See, I'd argue this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what queerbaiting *is*. Source material *on its own* cannot queerbait - this is an explicit action undertaken by creators, wherein they promise to include queerness and then don't. The term is very misapplied right now.
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Replying to @fozmeadows @BinJLG
What I see happen a lot is: fans decide a particular character or pairing is queercoded and/or just wants them to be canon gays, expressing this to the creators; not wanting to be dicks, the creators say "we're happy fandom exists," and fans tinhat this as a covert promise.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
That does happen, but that is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about things like when the text explicitly frames two men or two women as a couple and then pulls a "haha JUST KIDDING THAT WOULD BE RIDICULOUS CAUSE THEY'RE STRAIGHT."
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Replying to @BinJLG @fozmeadows
Like, I'm not a big Sherlock fan and I've never shipped Johnlock, but WOW does that show queerbait its main characters a lot. That is the level of baiting I'm talking about.
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Stephen Moffat fills me with rage for a number of reasons, and I'd agree that his approach to Sherlock constitutes queerbaiting, or at least gross dickishness.
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Replying to @fozmeadows
lol same. I'm still curious tho: does fans (especially queer fans) being upset about a creator saying something like "I never intended for X to be gay" when there is a history in the source material of X being queerbaited fit into your theory?
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Replying to @BinJLG
I mean, again, material can't queerbait on its own, so it depends if the prior source material is the work of the creator in question. I know it pains us all to admit it, but straight people do exist, and simply saying "I thought this character was straight" is not de facto Bad.
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