this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2024
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The issue is that romance tends to be prioritized over friendship in media even for straight relationships, and so many romantic relationships are incredibly shallow or have very little reasoning behind them (the "I met this guy I have nothing in common with 2 days ago and we're so totally in love let's shoehorn in a sex scene" thing is played out so often for hetero romances) and LGBT relationships are so rare, that any subtext that even remotely hints at a queer romantic relationship has people grasping at straws. So companies use that to their advantage. They just dangle the barest hints of anything, because that's all they need to get people. And they dare not show anything more than the tiniest of subtext anyways, because anything LGBT is considered sexually explicit by default. Just look at how much the creators behind The Legend of Korra and Steven Universe had to fight for the queer romances in their respective shows. Both almost got cancelled because the writers wanted to show those relationships (and the Korra one was even completely unintentional, the writers just kinda realized it was developing over the course of the series and decided to go all in on it).
Edit: Forgot the part where they don't openly hint at or mention it because they don't want to piss off the homophobes. They want to straddle that line that let's them have their cake and eat it too.
This doesn't seem strange to me. Personally I do this. I'm ~~in a committed long term relationship~~ married, but even before that I prioritized romantic relationships above friendships. I don't get why this is weird (forgetting the exaggerated "I met this guy I have nothing in common with 2 days ago and we’re so totally in love" part).
OP said they find it annoying when romance is prioritized over friendship and how two people of the same gender who share a strong bond shouldn't be assumed to have romantic feelings for each other, even if there's a bit of romantic subtext to their relationship that never goes anywhere, and that that's not queerbaiting on its own. I was trying to say that even straight relationships in shows can often be shallow at best with barely any romantic subtext, so it's unfair to hold queer relationships in media to a different standard. Not to say that a deep and emotional bond can't simply be a friendship between two people, and media only has so much time to develop a relationship, but given two relationships with the same amount of shallow subtext, why are the two women just gals being pals and the guy and the girl are a couple.
I think society as a whole tends to prioritize romantic relationships over friendships, and media is probably partly at fault for that. I could go on a whole rant about how this is even further exacerbated for people raised as men because men aren't really allowed to have strong emotional bonds in friendships and so any form of emotional connection in a relationship is misunderstood as romantic advances, which is probably a major factor in the issues we see with men having trouble simply being friends with women, but that's stepping beyond the realm of this discussion.
Basically, I've seen so many straight romantic relationships in shows that feel shallow or out of left field and shoehorned in just for the sake of a romantic subplot, so why is it different when people say it's queerbaiting about two women or two men having the same amount of development in their relationship that doesn't turn into a romantic relationship?