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So it is literally any romantic moment between two characters. Okay. That’s not a useable trope. The "too tease fans"qualification is meaningless because we seem to assume that any romantic interaction is "teasing" as opposed to simply telling a love story.
Edited by TheMountainKing on Dec 27th 2019 at 2:09:39 PM
Well, between characters who aren't already paired up...
There's a couple different purposes behind Ship Tease. There's, as the name indicates, teasing the viewers — building interest/investment on their part and playing on their emotional reactions. And there's Ship Tease as part of a Romance Arc. Some stories only do the former, and some do both.
Well, if anything, this trope exists because of modern fan culture; because writers know their fans want to see some romance, and know they can engage them by hinting at certain characters having romantic interest in each-other. That's what I'd consider "tease": deliberate hints and implications of romance between two characters that aren't currently dating, fueling the shippers and keeping people invested. It also builds up the romance slowly but surely without being too overt about it; a few moments here and there to keep the fans wanting more.
Of course, you could argue that non-serial and older works could do the same thing to keep their readers interested even without the shipping culture; writers know that people are interested in relationships and drama and romance, so it's not a stretch to imagine writers of older works deliberately teasing these things in similar ways, only to pair the characters up by the end of the story.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallBuilding interest/investment on the viewers' part and playing on their emotional reactions.
A viewer/reader still has to go through the journey of consuming the work. It's not instant. It's the same reason a standalone work can have character arcs and plot tension and climax and resolution.
If that’s how we're using "tease" the tropes description and laconic should be changed to reflect that. Right now they both read as being more about a Trolling Creator and their fandom (a relationship that can only exist for a serialized work and isn't the same as the broad concept of "audience").
Even we have a good definition, I still don't think listing every single romantic moment for characters who are part of a love story is a meaningful or worthwhile endeavor. But, reflecting on it more, that's not really how I see Ship Tease being used. I see a lot of Ship Tease generic examples just "these characters have Ship Tease", often just meaning "are love interests". The most detailed entries on Ship Tease tend to be the ones that were originally on Ho Yay and were moved when the relationship became canon (which is an interesting, as I often see non-canonical straight pairing with Ship Tease entries, but never gay ones).
Edited by TheMountainKing on Dec 27th 2019 at 2:43:50 PM
How...how would fandoms only exist for Serialized works? What about the fandoms of, say, standalone movies, standalone video games, standalone books? (E.g: The Rocky Horror Picture Show has one of the biggest fandoms there is, but it's a standalone movie and not a serialized work.)
Edited by WarJay77 on Dec 27th 2019 at 2:42:35 PM
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall
I mean the active interaction between creator and fandom in the work itself. If a person writes a single novel, a fandom can develop around it, but the novel cannot be altered to reference the fandom, whereas in an ongoing series of novels, the author can introduce things intended specifically to play to, tease, etc. the existing fandom. So a creator deliberate writing things into a work to tease fans can only happen if those fans already exist i.e. in a serialized work.
Edited by TheMountainKing on Dec 27th 2019 at 2:52:27 PM
Things are written in response to fans' anticipated reactions, not necessarily their actual reactions. It's the same with much serialized media. Imagine a one-season show. It's written and filmed in advance — there's no time to make big changes while it's airing. So even though the fans are getting the story in pieces, any teasing (of the shipping kind or otherwise) is not an ongoing dialogue between creators and audience, but the creators building off of the anticipated reactions to their work.
One issue I've seen is how Ho Yay relates to Ambiguously Gay and Ambiguously Bi. The descriptions say that Ho Yay doesn't count for anything, but many examples still list it.
That ties in to a massive issue with Ambiguously Gay, which is that both the actual page and its entry on Square Peg Round Trope state that it is about a characters having stereotypically gay mannerisms but the vast majority of examples are about characters having romantic subtext in interactions with other characters, which should be either Ho Yay or Homoerotic Subtext.
To make it worse, Ambiguously Bi is, at least as far as I can tell, about characters having subtext in their interactions, as there are very few to no stereotypicaly bisexual mannerisms. So essentially Ambiguously Bi is an offshoot of a misdefinition of Ambiguously Gay.
Edited by TheMountainKing on Dec 30th 2019 at 5:07:57 AM
So, Recap.
- Ship Tease is for any intentional romantic subtext between two characters who aren't currently in a relationship, done to keep readers invested in the romantic stuff and build up to a potential They Do. In this trope's case, it's easy to tell whether or not something is intentional, as the writing and acting makes it obviously romantic.
- Homoerotic Subtext is for when two characters have intentional gay subtext between them to emphasize how close their relationship is. It's hard to tell whether or not the subtext is intentional or not.
- Ho Yay is for when two characters have moments the fans interpret as having gay subtext, despite that the creator didn't intend it to be this way. It's hard to tell if something is intentional or not, and certain works have different standards of LGBT+ acceptance, which makes it even harder to tell the creator's intent. Despite this, it's a term used outside of the wiki to mean any LGBT subtext.
- Ambiguously Gay is for when a character has gay mannerisms, not for when they have gay subtext with other characters; those examples would either be Ho Yay or Homoerotic Subtext, but again, the line between intentional and unintentional is blurry. To make things more complicated, Ambiguously Bi is about relationship subtext, not personality stereotyping.
Edited by WarJay77 on Dec 30th 2019 at 6:02:01 AM
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper Wall
Homoerotic Subtext is often played for laughs, especially with male characters. These cases are pretty easy to identify as the trope.
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It’s also important to note with Homoerotic Subtext the two characters are not actually romantically/sexually interest in each other in the text.
Edited by TheMountainKing on Dec 30th 2019 at 6:40:20 AM
Yeah, I intended to say that when I was writing but I obviously didn't, so good catch.
What do we consider for the kinds of examples under Ambiguously Gay that involve things like implied (but notably not confirmed, merely alluded to, sometimes half-humorously) Incompatible Orientation with the opposite sex? They're not based off either mannerisms or specific subtext with another character of the same gender.
"Ambiguously X" tropes are also problematic, IMO, because it relies on unconfirmed implications that may actually be nonexistent apart from Shipping Goggles, Rainbow Lens and the like.
Why does "showing no interest in the opposite sex" automatically indicate "interest in the same sex" if the latter isn't actually shown? We do have tropes such as Celibate Hero, Chaste Hero and Asexuality.
Edited by Adept on Dec 31st 2019 at 2:25:37 AM
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I assume that's a necessary prerequisite (to avoid overlap with Camp Straight), because if showing no romantic interest at all is enough to be an example than the trope is absurdly broad and completely useless.
But I believe your question is whether the character is suggested by other characters to be uninterested in the opposite gender. That actually might point to a useful fix for the trope, changing it to be "the character's sexuality is the subject of in-universe debate or speculation".
Edited by TheMountainKing on Dec 31st 2019 at 3:21:09 PM
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Well, disinterest in the opposite sex in conjunction with implications towards the same, as opposed to the trope being defined entirely around Camp.
Crown Description:
What would be the best way to fix the page?

Right; all that's required for Ship Tease is that two characters have romantic or shipp-y scenes added specifically to tease viewers, or at least with the intent of hinting at romantic feelings between them. But they should at least be intentional; a moment so obviously written to be romantic, despite the characters not being in a relationship at that point.
I actually think it's easier to determine intent when it comes to Ship Tease than Ho Yay or Homoerotic Subtext. With Ship Tease, it's usually pretty overt, because the writers want the fans to notice. The two characters won't just look at or hug each other for a long time; they'll stare dreamily into each other's eyes, or dance, or take notice of the other character's appearance...because these things are very obviously romantic, whereas Ho Yay can be anything from "Alice and Carol really like to hug each other" to "Bob and Danny both professed their "platonic" love to each other", and both of these scenarios could honestly be intentional or unintentional depending on context...
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