Some of this may have to do with my being one hundred years old, but like…I totally get wanting to understand if a series or some other media you’re considering engaging with contains a certain type of relationship, or certain types of subjects that you may particularly want to avoid or would particularly love. That’s completely fair, but I nonetheless feel so bewildered by the proliferation across fandoms of a specific style of question about queer “content.”
is there yuri / is this bait (positive) / is this bait (negative) / is the toxic yuri from the gifs real / how much gay is in it / do they want us to ship it / was i supposed to ship this / am i just seeing things? what the fuck? if they didn’t want me to ship it why would they put stuff like this in it / can someone please tell me if there’s real yuri / if they weren’t canon why do they seem so GAY / I’m so stupid I fell for the gifs but there was nothing there but queerbait / i can’t tell if i’m supposed to ship this and i’m going to be so mad if this isn’t actual yuri / am i hallucinating because i thought this was supposed to be queer
It’s not like these are illegitimate questions (if it’s a burning question a person has, it’s legit for that person, and I absolutely understand that there’s a material difference between a canonically queer character and a tragic missed opportunity, and some of those missed opportunities really are tragic). Nor do I think people should censor themselves from asking the question if they really need to know. I’m sure many people in the queer fandom side of tumblr dot com have asked some form of at least one of these questions, myself included, while shopping for shows. But the helplessness and genuine fear behind it, coupled what feels like a rapid uptick in this rhetorical style, makes me kinda sad because it feels like a real shift in how audience engagement works.
I want people to enjoy thinking about things! The pleasure of interpreting things with your own brain is so good! It is possible to relish coming to a conclusion that doesn’t perfectly line up with how/why a story was told in a given way! You can guess “wrong” and still find value in your guess! You can guess “right” and still choose to explore it deeply, or imagine alternatives! Liking or disliking something on your own terms, based on your own thoughts about what you saw, isn’t embarrassing. At the end of watching something, you don’t get assigned your own executive producer from Hollywood who smugly tells you what was real queer content and what wasn’t and why you did it wrong.
And even this world where more queer people have the funding and platform to tell queer stories (and there needs to be a LOT more where that came from, it’s still DIRE in so many ways), it would be such a shame for expectations around representation to result in a loss of understanding of the many different layers of how stories are told. Subtext is important not just for decoding whether queer sex is going to happen—it’s a way to tap into all sorts of character desires and motivations, often unspoken but visible in texts just as they’re unspoken but visible in real life. There is real, transgressive, electric pleasure in a story that gives you a queer experience whether or not two particular characters literally fuck at the end. Why nope out before you get there because you’re afraid of being wrong, or afraid it won’t be obvious enough?
There’s a real danger of collapsing all the nuance and brilliance of modern storytelling into something flat and boring if watching TV is just about this transactional thing where viewers are waiting terrified for the moment they’ll be made a fool for “seeing things that aren’t there.”
But I guess if you can’t trust your critical thinking brain, or you don’t understand how to identify if you’re actually being queerbaited by an evil person or if you’re just responding to different layers of writing and direction and performance in ways that might be frustrating at times but also might yield some really cool fandom experiences? Then yeah, it would be really scary to dive into a TV show without knowing, in so many words, if the yuri is real.
I think it would be really cool for people stuck in some of this fear-based viewing to recognize the lack of self-confidence that could be lurking behind questions like the above and tricking you into thinking you aren’t smart enough to make your own discoveries. Everyone is smart enough to do this, and if that doesn’t feel true it doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get there. If you see something queer, you are almost certainly not hallucinating—you’re simply applying a queer reading to a text. There is soooooo much joy—and occasional pain—in doing that, and it is WORTH IT to do that with your own mind!!!!!!!!!!!
