“The Fans Are Gonna Love That!” Queer-Baiting in the Pretty Little Liars Fandom

In Monday’s post, we talked about the canon of Pretty Little Liars on Freeform: how the couples Paily (Paige and Emily) and Emaya (Emily and Maya) provided representation of gay teenage girls on TV and opened up a realm of possibilities including the hinted-at pairing of Emily and Alison, known as Emison to the fans. Today we’ll talk about “shipping” and “queer-baiting”, and how, in my opinion, Emily and Alison deserve to be made completely canon on the show.

Let’s dive right into it. The best place to go to check out fan interpretations for this pairing is the “Emison” tag on the social blogging site Tumblr. Tumblr is a major hub for fan interpretations and analyses as well as fanfiction, fan art, and the outlet for letting out emotions of all sorts about the newest episodes. We checked out fan art and fanfiction last week, with Teen Wolf: but today we’re checking out fan emotions and reactions.

I organized the tag by current popularity, and clicked search to dive right into it. The first post to come up is this gif from the Pretty Little Liars official Tumblr page.

Caption: “the #Emison feels are real”

This is interesting because this is the official show blog making these comments: yet Emily and Alison are not a couple in the show’s canon. This is starting to lead toward the idea of queer-baiting I discussed briefly at the end of Monday’s post.

Queer-baiting, essentially, is when showrunners and the television show’s official social media “tease” the idea of an LGBT couple to get the fanbase building and invested, only to continue holding it above their heads like the proverbial carrot in front of the donkey. These relationships incite a massive amount of rage in LGBT fans watching the show who wish to see characters and relationships represented that reflect their lives.

A few posts later, one from the user “emisonisxendgame”. (Endgame is a term which means the couple that will be together at the end of the series: a couple that will, eventually, be together forever. Some endgame couples: Ross and Rachel from Friends and Kurt and Blaine from Glee.) It’s a screenshot from Twitter, a tweet from the show’s creator:

With the caption: “TWO YEARS LATER AND WE’RE STILL WAITING…..”

Another post in the tag is a series of gifs created by the user takeanempanada on Tumblr that captures a moment from this video.

In it, Shay Mitchell (the actress who plays Emily) is taking a lie detector test and is asked which girl she liked to make out with the most. When she answers, Sasha Pieterse (the actress who plays Alison) declares that the fans are going to love the answer. The actors on the show know how badly the fans want the relationship to happen: perhaps that affects the way in which they portray these characters, as they hold hands, comfort each other, and touch physically which delights user after user with each interaction.

(Lindsey Shaw is the actress who plays Paige, BTW.)

It’s really interesting to watch the actors reactions and knowledge of the fans’ love of the couple compared to what the fans wish to happen. Hoping for two years that a couple will get together is a remarkably long time to wait: and they’ve been rewarded with little bits of hope toward a “ship”. Scenes with holding hands, two kisses, and a heated makeout scene that suggested something more occurred have kept the fans waiting not-so-patiently.

But there’s no guarantee that it’s ever going to happen. If the writers are queer-baiting the pairing, then they will drift their separate ways and leave a group of enraged fans in their wake. The actors and writers know about the relationship. The actors are on board. The writers have teased little bits and pieces of it. But will it ever move into something confirmed, a part of the canon?

(Gif by heathersapples on Tumblr.)

Hopefully, it will. Why do fans latch onto LGBT ships with such vigor in the first place? I think it stems off of a lack of representation in so many shows. To have a female-driven show for teens is becoming the normal in 2016. So many shows are dominating with their female casts, and PLL is no exception. To have a show like Pretty Little Liars with a relationship that’s been teased at since the first season, one that’s lasted longer than Paige leaving Emily to escape Rosewood or Maya being brutally murdered, and to have that relationship not happen would be an example of the writers not listening to what their audience desires and needs out of their media.

And for that, I would love to see Emily and Alison as an endgame couple.

Next week, despite it being Reading Week for us at Brock, I’ll be coming back to the blog on Wednesday with a special single post for the week. We’ll be taking a trip down memory lane with a look back at one of the first mainstream LGBT representing shows: Glee.