Misused: Ambiguously Gay

Aside from working on things like "Gender Nonconforming Equals Gay" (how does one follow a TLP draft, by the way?), and the separate image-picking issue does anyone else feel there's still more work to be done with this trope?

Because otherwise, I feel that we can finish work on "GNC = Gay" and treat Ambiguously Gay cleanup as a case of starting a Short-Term Projects thread to migrate these now-outdated examples to that one instead, and we can consider this thread closed.

Edited by AlleyOop on Sep 26th 2020 at 12:07:47 PM

From the main page of TLP, click the thumbs up button on the draft's listing. Then to see all your followed drafts, at the top of the TLP listings, select the thumbs up icon instead of "All".

Yes, the thumbs-up design is very confusing and makes it look like a "like" button; it's not.

This example on Beauty and the Beast (2017) isn't valid because LeFou is definitely gay, right? The Trans Equals Gay example is also iffy, as it's just about crossdressing.

• Ambiguously Gay: As far as is seen in the movie, there's just "wink, wink, nudge, nudge" and implications, but Word of God openly stated LeFou is gay. He also gets a dance scene with a male villager.

There's this example on Characters.Fullmetal Alchemist Military. It's nattery, but maybe there's a trope it could fit under?

• Ambiguously Gay:
  • Though [Alex Louis Armstrong's] sexuality hasn't been mentioned in any way he certainly looks like some Manly Gay characters. (There's also his somewhat homoerotic full-body Something Else Also Rises moment when Sig turns up to fight Sloth with him, and their earlier flex-off scene.)
  • He looks like a character from a Bara Genre story, but with the sparkles that would normally go with a more Bishōnen character appearing in a Yaoi comic, combining two different sorts of Ho Yay into one character.
  • Macho Camp is the most prominent stereotype for gay men in Japan, so take that as you will.

The first one is actually valid. You're right that the rest are Natter so just collapse it into a single entry. I'm assuming the middle entry was written before Macho Camp was created, hence the third bullet of Natter.

• Ambiguously Gay: Though Alex Louis Armstrong's sexuality hasn't been confirmed in any way, he certainly looks and acts very Macho Camp with his Bara Genre-esque character design combined with Bishie Sparkle. There's also his full-body Something Else Also Rises moment when Sig turns up to fight Sloth with him, and their earlier flex-off scene.

There's a trivia page for that, Word of Gay.

Edited by PhiSat on Oct 23rd 2020 at 3:41:20 AM

Bumping. What else is left to do for this one?

Mostly just to check older wicks from when the trope was still about characters being Camp to see if they still fit or now qualify as misuse.

The new definition still allows for stereotype-based examples, we just broadened it to include shipping-based ones as well. So we don't need to remove stereotype-based examples.

So we good then?

Until GNC = Gay or an equivalent trope gets off the ground to soak up some examples made under the former definition which would probably now constitute gray-area misuse.

This is still part of the description:

Note that the stereotyping mention makes it clear that the use of Camp stereotypes is purposeful as a means of Getting Crap Past the Radar. A lot of the very very early use of this trope is for characters who exhibited Camp qualities regardless of any sort of intentionality, because the Camp and Camp Straight tropes were not as well established in their use or simply did not exist at the time.

Thus there will inevitably be some examples of characters who tropers will list as Ambiguously Gay aka gay-coded just for having Camp traits, even if there isn't any sort of evidence that the narrative itself may be trying to push the insinuation that they're gay per se.

How's the TLP draft for Gender Noncomforming Equals Gay going?

I don't know. Nobody has linked to that draft.

Here it is: [1]. Apparently it should be ready for launching.

so is Ambiguously Gay and Ambiguously Bi going to be moved to the YMMV tab or not?

if that's not the case then I'll say this: I think these tropes should be YMMV, yes, since they're essentially fandom interpretations and may not be intended by the author. If the author publicly states that x character's sexuality is left open for interpretation then it can just be Word of Gay, but users should mention that x character's sexuality was intentionally left to be open up for interpretation.

An example from Mystery Skulls Animated:

• Ambiguously Gay: A large number of fans has noted that, in the Hellbent flashbacks, he seems to be craving for Lewis' attention.

It just sounds like it should be YMMV to me. If it were a non-fan based trope and instead is an in-universe thing (a character hides their homosexuality) then it would just be Hide Your Gays.

Edited by KingOfStickers on Jan 4th 2021 at 8:16:35 PM

If it's based entirely off of in-universe textual content, then it's not YMMV, anymore than Badass Bookworm should be considered YMMV because not all members of the audience may find them that nerdy or badass.

As for the latter, that's closer to Shrug of God than Word of Gay.

maybe. i might like a longer and/or better explanation.

Edited by KingOfStickers on Jan 4th 2021 at 8:19:23 PM

Regarding your Mystery Skulls example, that's just badly written in general. It sounds like it's confusing Ambiguously Gay (where the main work has overt signifiers such as characters commentating on it) for Alternative Character Interpretation or Ho Yay.

The page definition for Ambiguously Gay uses some examples to clarify the difference.

Edited by AlleyOop on Jan 4th 2021 at 6:06:36 AM

I mean, it's totally possible to be intentionally ambiguous, simply by not having a character outright state or confirm their sexuality in any way. If the author intended to make the creator's sexuality ambiguous, and fans noticed the hints, that's just a much a trope as anything else. If it's based purely on fan interpretation...might be a good time to point out that there's been discussion of making an Alternate Character Interpretation subtrope about fans interpreting characters as gay.

Sorry for butting in here all of a sudden and I don't know if this has been mentioned but I wanted to add something real quick as I noticed this was going on.

Specifically, I have noticed that Ambiguously Gay and Hide Your Lesbians seems to have a rather extensive amount of overlap and the two seems to be used interchangeably. Could perhaps be something worth looking into perhaps?

For starters, Ambiguously Gay is more characterization-based while Hide Your Lesbians is more narrative-based. While there might be some overlap, they describe distinctly different phenomena. They are not interchangeable.

Ambiguously Gay is for any instance of a character who, though the level of implicitness or deliberateness may vary, is implied by the text (not to be confused with audiences reading them as such for the purposes of shipping) to demonstrate exclusive attraction to the same gender, though not necessarily any specific characters. This can sometimes be confirmed later via Word of God, at which point it ceases to be ambiguous (although some examples might retain an entry on Ambiguously Gay for historic purposes if there was a large gap between the original work and the confirmation).

Hide Your Lesbians is when two characters demonstrate signs of homosexual attraction to one another that are quite overt (thus requiring a much greater threshold of deliberateness on the part of the creators than is necessary for Ambiguously Gay), but said attraction is couched in ambiguous terms. Hide Your Lesbians is also frequently done to characters who are intended to be explicitly homosexual (who therefore by definition do not qualify for Ambiguously Gay), whether via Word of God or via cross-media adaptation of a work that faced fewer restrictions in its original medium, in order to bypass Moral Guardians who won't allow anything more explicit to be depicted.

Edited by AlleyOop on Jan 30th 2021 at 6:57:41 AM

I know they aren't, but as I said, they seem to be used that way and that it can be difficult to tell them apart. Hence why I thought about bringing it up.

Edited by matteste on Jan 30th 2021 at 3:54:06 PM