I recently watched Attack on Titan (spoilers coming up from seasons 1-3!). In the show there are two girls, Ymir and Christa (or Historia), who spend a lot of time together and seem to have a special bond from the very beginning. I remember how, after watching only a couple of episodes of the series, when I wanted to refer to Christa I called her “the small blonde one, one of the girlfriends” since I couldn’t yet remember her name. Throughout the series I kept thinking that the two were a couple because they seemed so fond of each other. Then, in season three, it was confirmed: Ymir wrote Christa a letter in which she said her biggest regret was that she was not able to marry Christa. You would think that I would have totally expected something like this to happen, but honestly… I was in shock. In reality I had never thought that the runners of the show were going to confirm the relationship no matter how obvious it was to the people watching the show. And this got me thinking, why? Why did I not expect them to make the relationship canon?
The answer to that is quite simple: queerbaiting. Queerbaiting is when for example shows or books hint at a queer relationship, but never confirm it. For instance many fans thought that Bucky Barnes and Sam Wilson showed romantic interest in each other in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but their relationship was never made canon. Another example would be how J.K. Rowling told fans that Dumbeldore is gay but in the Fantastic Beasts -movies he has showed no interest in men romantically, at least so far. In a situation like this LGBT+ people are told that a character is a part of the community but yet no effort is made to represent the community on screen.
Queerbaiting happens because studios want to lure in LGBT+ folk to consume their products without losing the support of the homophobes. We LGBT+ people want ourselves represented in the media which is why we often seek out LGBT+ content. Unfortunately, there is still not enough of it in for example major tv shows and movies, which is why we seek out characters who depict queer traits and behaviours in hopes that they will be confirmed LGBT+ later on. Unfortunately this seldom happens because that would push away homophobes. If a character’s sexual orientation or gender is never confirmed, homophobes can keep thinking that they are cishet, while LGBT+ people see them as belonging to the community. Or like in the case of Dumbledore, he is confirmed gay but never depicts gay behaviour which allows homophobes to dismiss his sexuality altogether.
I absolutely thought that in the case of Ymir and Christa the showrunners were just queerbaiting because, sadly, that is what I am used to. But luckily there are more and more shows, movies and books in which there are actually canon LGBT+ characters who act like LGBT+ characters. Some might actually say that Christa and Ymir’s relationship was queerbaiting because, for example, we never see them kiss on screen. Then again, we don’t see anyone else kiss either because they are too busy not getting eaten by titans. Christa and Ymir’s relationship is arguably the happiest in Attack on Titan, even though it ends badly.
So the takeaway is that we should absolutely hold shows, movies and books to a high standard. If the show has happy, long term straight couples, we deserve happy, long term queer couples as well. If there are happy cis people, we should also see happy trans and non-binary people. We must demand the media to do better and maybe one day, we’ll get the representation we actually want and deserve.