#to be clear i'd be fine with lokius happening

[jimintomystery]

@sunflowerdigs replied to your post “Wow”:

It wouldn't be to spite queer fans (though it would do that). It would reassure straight viewers that Lokius could never happen. It would be classic queerbaiting, really. Rope in queer viewers with subtext, but then appeal to the straight majority audience that Marvel actually wants once D+ has its subscription money. It's definitely not unheard of. The panic based on unsubstantiated rumors is silly but the distrust of a major franchise isn't.

For what it's worth, I'm willing to believe some media has intentionally queerbaited its audience. The problem is that all I've read about the topic relies on anecdotal evidence: "I expected this queer ship to be endgame, but then it wasn't, so those awful producers must have tricked me." If there's an interview or something, where somebody in the industry admitted to using queerbaiting as an actual strategy to increase viewership, then I'd be very interested in reading that. But even then, I'm skeptical that the strategy works at scale, or that Disney would bother employing it on Loki.

The motive for queerbaiting, as you've laid out, is to "rope in queer viewers" without alienating homophobic viewers, to maximize total viewership and therefore profits. That seems plausible for a show on the CW that's subsisting on a deeply hardcore audience. It makes less sense on a major streaming service that owns Star Wars, the Simpsons, and all the Marvel superheroes and all the Disney princesses. Disney+ doesn't have to do some intricate balancing act to play two opposing audiences against one another in a single show. For one thing, Loki is a spinoff of a billion-dollar movie. For another, if Disney just wanted to maximize profits, they would have used their Loki budget to make Iron Man vs. Darth Vader instead.

So I think it's fair to say Disney already has a stranglehold on "the straight majority audience that Marvel actually wants." That's not to say they wouldn't go the extra mile to string along queer subscribers as well. But if that was the play for Loki, they kinda gave away the game two years ago, when Sylvie kissed Loki, and the fandom denounced the show for queerbaiting. Why bait your queer viewers, and then chase them off before the second season? Granted, a lot of Lokius shippers weren't chased off, although a great many of them expect to be queerbaited some more. At this point the bait analogy falls apart--the fisherman crafts the perfect lure, but then tries to scare away all the fish, except the ones who would jump straight into the boat without any incentive at all.

Again, I'm willing to keep an open mind about this stuff. But from what I've seen so far, if the Loki showrunners are queerbaiting, they're doing a shit job of it, for an audience that sees right through the trick and pays to watch anyway, which makes the bait a complete waste of effort. It makes no sense. So it's easier to buy the alternative--nobody was trying to deceive the Lokius shippers, and they played themselves.

#loki #loki series #loki show #loki season 2 #lokius #loki american style #shipping discourse #to be clear i'd be fine with lokius happening #it's a perfectly good ship #the show just never made me think it'll be canon #maybe i'll be wrong