bait anime: "I need you to tell me who to kill so that I can be of use to you. I've never known unconditional love so I'll become your tool in order to convince myself that I'm not alone."
Anime can be a bit more ambiguous too since there are in some cases active intent to portray a queer relationship but issues with censors with the broadcast standards and all that
I think we've broadened "Queer Baiting" as a term to just include "things that seem kinda queer but don't commit" which I don't always think is accurate considering how coy even American media still has to be and we're one of the more progressive media landscapes for queer rep
but also I personally hate the kind of fans who can then willfully ignore everything because it's not explicit and then yell at other people because their relationship is totally like a sibling's you know
I feel like a lot of romances in media don't put the work in, they always feel like they're just there because "well, you gotta have a romance", so you never get the characters putting the work in
i once did a con presentation on "queerbaiting"/ship goggles/"coding" in utena which is an anime thats juuuust old enough to be very removed from modern ideas of acceptable tv queerness
i have mixed feelings. on one hand yipes. on the other hand it is still explicitly by word of author a story about the roles women are forced into in society, how women that step out it are punished, how that forcing harms both women and men, and how cycles of gender essentialism are poisonous. which, rad, i do like that
sometimes they're not fucking with you they literally cant, but your ship goggles are still valid because the artist is in there making hand signals to indicate theyre being held hostage
yeah I dunno about how she's changed her stance since then but Chiho Saito was incredibly "let ladies do whatever they want but also romance should be het" in her other works (kanon and first girl both come to mind, and the former also has weird incest implications by the end)
Ikuhara is a bit more open about wlw in general but also, uh, veers close to fetishizing it sometimes I feel? that might just be me overanalyzing things tho
they can't