Jay

I want a Shane whump, where he locks the fuck in and down, gets through it, and then collapses into Ilya's arms when its over and he's safe. My dear friend Shane would power through, he is not a damsel in distress outside of role play with his husband. He would grit his teeth and he would bear it until he was in private with Ilya.

Not queerbait: A cookbook has no soup recipes. You assumed there would be some based on vibes and wishful thinking. No soups were ever advertised or promised.

Both of your examples read to me like queer coding — the first is malicious, the second is benevolent, but they’re both about the text itself pointing towards queerness without actually containing it. Consumers of the media are experiencing the text as written, and the creators of the text want them to see the queerness they’re referencing — the cruelty of the first example doesn’t actually land if the reader/viewer can’t tell what’s being pointed at and laughed at.

Queerbaiting is writing a show that has two male leads who are not dating and never show sexual or romantic interest in each other, and then having their press tour include every queer media outlet, and making them do interviews where they hold hands and play the newlywed game and take compatibility quizzes, and having them kiss for magazine spreads, and cutting a trailer of the two of them half dressed over a song about men fucking. And that implies to the general public that these two characters have a queer relationship. And then interested members of the public watch the show and it’s just two men who do not have anything resembling a relationship.

There are levels and nuance to queerbaiting because (typically) every part of creating media has multiple people doing slightly different things. A possibility: The writers and directors never intended for a queer romance between two specific characters. The actors decide on their own that they would make choices as if the characters are in love. The print marketing and trailers have no mention of queerness. The social media team keeps sharing interviews where the actors talk about how they intended for the characters to be in love. That would be both queer coding (the actors are creators that intended queer readings of their work) and queerbaiting (the socials team is promoting a ship that is not actually there in the dialogue or plot or edit).

The difficulty with the cookbook analogy is that the purchasing behaviors of someone buying a reference text are different to those of someone consuming fictional media. You can generally flip through a reference text and look at things like photos, tables of contents, and potentially indices — that level of content is available BEFORE purchase. You could then consider those as both “part of the text” and “part of the promotional materials”, which muddies the waters wrt a queerbaiting analogy. In order to get that much access to fictional narrative content, you usually have to purchase (or otherwise obtain access to) the text. The difference between “text” and “promotional material” is usually MUCH clearer. (And none of this even gets into people who are drawn to a piece of media based on FAN-CREATED works — if both the text and the marketing have nothing to do with queerness but you got tricked by MissPureShipGoggles3034’s fan edit, then that’s a whole different ballgame).

HEATED RIVALRY | 1.06

But I wanted to highlight this gif set because most that I have seen (understandably) stop after the Shane and Ilya interaction, and I am like, but wait! There’s more!

As someone who is realistically closer in age to Shane’s parents than to Shane, that exchange between his parents is golden. They’re repeating back information they heard, and they heard the “oh god I don’t want to define fuck buddy/just a physical relationship to my parents” version.

But what they are saying to each other here, Shane’s mom and dad is, basically, yeah, you two were fooling yourselves if you think it was just physical. We know the deal. You might not have known the deal but we do.

And you can argue with me about this, but I think his parents are right. I think in Shane and Ilya’s minds they thought or wanted to think it was merely physical (not that there is anything wrong with that, by the way!) but they each brought too much baggage and also showed too much too early. Shane almost by being there at all. Ilya, too.

Shane and Ilya are still catching up with their hearts and their words but Shane’s parents, who have more life experience, are watching this and thinking, and more importantly, SAYING, yeah, this is a decade long relationship. You don’t get here without going through all of what they have. His parents see it. They’re joking about it, but they see it.

That Shane and Ilya are still trying to dismiss that early part of their relationship is telling. That Shane’s parents don’t miss it is also telling. They had a million and one feelings. They just don’t say it. They didn’t say it.

But it’s obvious if you have lived long enough.