I was about to start a thread about this exact thing. It’s not YMMV because it’s not an audience reaction and objective examples can and do exist, but I’ve seen my fair share of misuse that’s based on unintentional subtext rather than intentional implications or Word of God. Maybe it needs a cleanup thread?
Edited by RainbowPumpqueen on Aug 8th 2024 at 9:28:59 PM
Feel free to help with the sandbox or edit my troper wallI generally see it used for characters who express some kind of attraction to a sex they never actually date, but sometimes it's not clear if it is attraction or admiration or just being friendly.
Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.I think this is a non-YMMV trope when it's used to describe situations where characters are purposefully meant to be Ambiguously Gay. In cases where it isn't purposeful (as far as we know at least), then that's Ho Yay. The former is based on the work itself, the latter is based on fan reactions to it.
...No? Trivia is for stuff external to a work. Many tropes rely on author intent.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallGenerally, tropes are about the work itself, so what happens within it. They can be unintentional, but something like Ambiguously Gay has to be intentional (or at least seem to be, it can be hard to tell the difference between Ho Yay, which is unintentional homosexual undertones and YMMV, and Ambiguously Gay, which is when a character is meant to have signs pointing to them being gay without explicit confirmation). If it wasn't intentional, then it would just be people saying "these people seem to be gay based on my interpretation of their relationship" (Ho Yay), which is an audience response and not a trope within the work.
I'll use Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul as examples to show what I consider to be the difference between Ambiguously Gay and Ho Yay. Gus' ambiguous relationship with his dead partner, with references to them being lovers but no explicit confirmation (the people saying this are explicitly mocking him, so could just be using homophobia to mock a platonic relationship), is Ambiguously Gay, since there are intentional signs he is gay or bi, but no explicit confirmation (outside Word of Gay). Someone finding Walter White and Jesse to have romantic undertones would be Ho Yay and therefore YMMV, because it isn't something intentionally invoked or hinted at, but the audience response to their interactions.
Edited by king15 on Aug 8th 2024 at 5:10:47 PM
Part of it is that there's been long periods of history when overtly including queer characters literally wasn't allowed (which is still true in many parts of the world), so creators who wanted to have queer characters had to resort to subtler means to clue the reader in. E.g. the Confirmed Bachelor, especially in historical works, is often actually intended to be gay or ace but it would be scandalous if the creator actually came out and said so.
Trust me, I'm an engineer!I always thought of Ambiguously Gay characters as deliberately showing gay stereotypes (lisp, fashion sense, "gay" interests) combined with being suspiciously chummy with men but suspiciously less so with women, yet still having some wiggle room for Plausible Deniability (even if just a comically tiny bit). I think of characters like Waylon Smithers of The Simpsons before he officially came out in 2016. Without any objective attributes associated with gay people, it can cross into "Ho Yay except you can put it on objective pages."
I think the oldest copy in the Internet Archive
kind of underscores the points made in posts 9 and 10. Although it looks like the definition may have shifted as a result of this thread
as summarized here
.
Edited by MorganWick on Aug 9th 2024 at 6:17:56 AM
There have also been some attempts to make queerbaiting or queercoding into tropes on their own, but it's very very difficult to wrangle those concepts into tropes because of the subjectivity and behind-the-scenes knowledge required.
It'll be an uphill battle, but my gut feeling is "in-universe gay speculation" usage for Ambiguously Gay (like the old page image
◊), with audience speculation headed to other tropes like Rainbow Lens (probably too narrow as is), and "artist forced to censor" examples to Hide Your Lesbians etc.
You can also get into situations where the queer character isn't a viewpoint character and therefore directly bringing up their gender and/or sexuality simply never becomes convenient without doing something awkward. I've got it in my head with my fanfic series Bait and Switch (STO) that Dr. Wirrpanda is gay, but I've only written a couple USS Bajor stories where First-Person Smartass Eleya isn't the viewpoint character and so it just hasn't come up.
Trust me, I'm an engineer!Context clues tropes have always had a hard time because people can't help but project absent evidence that the narrative never supports. Ambiguously Gay ideally is when someone is shown as consistently straight in their dating life but has Stupid Sexy Flanders remarks as a Running Gag.
Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.![]()
Uh, no, that would just be Even the Guys Want Him. A same-sex person lusting after a straight person doesn't make the straight person bi.
I think Stupid Sexy Flanders could be used as evidence for someone being Ambiguously Gay or Bi, but I think there are other signs. The Talented Mr. Ripley, and several of it's adaptations, are an example of how a character can be Ambiguously Bi. Tom is shown married to a woman in the sequels, but also has an obsession with the male character Dickie. What makes this a clear cut example of Ambiguously Bi, and not Ho Yay, is that Ripley is accused of being 'a fairy', and in his inner monologue acknowledges that he's not sure what his sexuality is.
Granted, I think some of the examples for Ambiguously Gay and bi are a bit too speculative (which is more Ho Yay), are disproved in the work itself (and it is disproved without a real shadow of a doubt) or is confirmed in the work but still treated on this wiki as ambiguous. This could, I think, do with a clean up thread, but I don't think the trope itself is an issue.
Ho Yay and Ambiguously Gay/Bi definitely have overlap, and I could easily see it becoming YMMV (similar to what happened with Ambiguous Disorder), since there are already tropes that cover the concept in-universe.
Do not mess with creatures which you do not understand.If a character appears to be straight but is a magnet for "Was that gay?" jokes that's the ambiguous part of the trope. Stupid Sexy Flanders is one way of doing it, a man being The Fashionista is another, That Came Out Wrong, Freudian Slip, etc. The majority of the time the character is entirely straight but a collection of gay stereotypes.
The issue with the YMMV was that people were taking "Never has an overt love interest" as evidence, and then rationalizing their otherwise obvious appreciation for the other sex as Armored Closet Gay.
Comics are just words and pictures. You can do anything with words and pictures.IMHO the ideal thing to do with tropes like these is to leave them in mainspace (because they have examples that are clearly intended by the author) and just move ambiguous situations to YMMV on a case by case basis. That might not always work, though, and it could lead to it being listed in both if someone later comes along and goes "why isn't this here? Sherlock Holmes is clearly ambiguously gay!"
(Although really if it's just fans then it's Alternative Character Interpretation instead.)
But for something like, say, Frog and Toad, where the author himself was a closeted gay man while writing it and whose family says they believe the work was intended as a way for him to come out to his family, clearly it belongs on the main work page.
Edited by Aquillion on Aug 9th 2024 at 4:32:08 AM
I do think cases where character(s) being in-universe suspected of being not straight (but the story can be interpreted either way) belongs to a separate trope from how Ambiguously Gay is currently used. Where that trope should be located is a different story.
Scientia et Libertas | Per Aspera ad Astra Nova
No, that would very much be a Main/ trope if we were to make it. In-Universe reactions to another character are by definition not Audience Reactions.
I feel like fan interpretations are already covered by Rainbow Lens, Ho Yay, Fanon, etc. We don’t need a split.
Feel free to help with the sandbox or edit my troper wall![]()
That in-universe split probably needs to be done on TLP, since the number of on-page entries that specifically mention to be in-universe isn't enough to sustain a trope.

I cannot count the number of times I've seen these tropes on character sheets and most of the examples are based solely from a fan's Ho Yay fanaticism and none of the instances are commented on in-universe. I'm not sure if that's even allowed.