I DIDNT COME TO THE STEREK VIDEO TO GET REMINDED OF THE DESTIEL CONFESSION

"your dad had a complicated relationship with that jeep" there's no way that wasn't on purpose oh Jeff Davis is not seeing the pearly gates 😭

adding to sterek being a perfect storm of early 2010s trends - the post twilight supernatural teen media formula was “socially awkward human in love with a dark brooding supernatural creature”. like, subconsciously something sterek-esque was The Way the core audience was taught to engage in stories like teen wolf

"joblessly doing push-ups" took me out

I remember once reading that fandom makes content for what they think the show lacks. I think half the lifeblood of Sterek is how much the audience wanted Derek's traumatic backstory to be taken seriously lmao. Like he is explicitly sexually assaulted as a teen by an adult woman who uses him to murder his entire family. And the show neeeeever seems to consider how his hostile behavior, his weird relationship with teens, and his obsession with forming a pack could have sprung from his history. If there's one thing the Sterek fandom does, it's try to take care of Derek emotionally lmao. And who better to take care of him than the goofy fan favorite boy who has protected him in canon, has a fun dynamic with him, and also has lost family and been taken advantage of to harm people around him. whump.

Derek is so unintentionally hilarious, he’s always just lurking around High schools and the shadows, he never seems to be doing any sort of job and it’s implied he just hangs around in his burnt down house whenever he’s not creeping around the halls of a high school😭😭😭

let me tell you how absolutely gobsmacked I was when I found out Stiles and Derek weren’t the main characters. I had no idea that Scott McCall even existed. to quote Keke Palmer, “Sorry to this man.”

Real missed opportunity for "the epic highs and lows of high school lacrosse" smh 😔

BRUTHA. i think it’s insane that this is how i find out that derek canonically dies in the end.

came for the sterek nostalgia, stayed for the shockingly astute insight that stiles is the female audience surrogate. now to apply this lens to supernatural

As a straight man, I find these takes on Stiles interesting. I saw him as my self insert as well, he is the embodiment of male insecurities and the perfect analog for the awkward picked on kid that I was in high school. I'm glad other folks could identify with him in their own way. He's definitely the most interesting character on the show, well, to me anyway, and he always felt like the proxy for the audience in a show full of unrealistic archetypes.

i’m so glad that destiel election night confession has made its way into the teen. Wolf saga discussion.

I’m sorry, the “a little lost boyfriend, with no one to love” while his picture just shrinks on screen absolutely took me out. that is the funniest thing, I am still giggling like an idiot. I have never even watched teen wolf. 😭 this is just so entertaining.

something that gets me about sterek in the teen wolf movie is just the mpreg implications that eli hale's existence brings up

jane mulcahy, you do not know the monster you have just reawakened in me

"But I digress..." Or Degrass, even.

describing stiles as narratively androgynous is EXACTLY right - i had never thought of it in those terms but you hit the nail on the head

I wrote a 600k sterek fanfic at 16 and I wanted to forget. To this day I am so sad we were baited for that many seasons.

Stiles is also the only like actually fleshed out characters that stays a human so of course most of the human population would gravitate towards him first.

the damon/derek parallel is something i'd never even considered but holy crap jane you're so RIGHT

It's the middle of 2024 and we're STILL having sterek discourse ON KZfaq. This ship that never sailed (except it did, Jeff sailed it and pretends he didn't) will never die.

One more thing: I remember in another review of the terrible movie, the KZfaqr openly wondered where Derek's son came from, and one commenter jokingly replied "Stiles mpreg" which... I mean, A) The kid is Stiles-coded down to the last detail, B) there is not even the barest hint of who the mother might be, if she even exists and C) most of the funeral is devoted to telling Eli how much Derek cared about Stiles' jeep, as if the fucking car is Stiles-by-proxy. Like, I feel deranged for even bringing it up but... Jeff Davis, what other conclusions would you have us draw? Why are you encouraging us to even entertain this? We will never be free of the psychic damage.

It was exactly how I found out Henry Kissinger died actually

55:50 i mean as someone who is aroace and likes shipping/fanfiction, part of the appeal is that it's not real and i'm not involved lol

The writers not making this ship canon is a classic example of sterek hindrance (i promise this is funny if you know organic chemistry you're just gonna have to trust me)

I think that queer shippers of sterek and other popular tumblr ships of the era between two men also are seeking the representation of a complex, ever changing, slow-burn dynamic that was not often an option for on-screen queer couples within the genre of network teen television. It is very rare to see the sort of rollarcoaster-ish complicated relationship format that straight fictional teens would experience with on-screen queer couples. These pairings often had quite cut and dry relationship storylines - to put it simply they were boring. So it makes sense that queer teens looking for an engaging relationship storyline in a genre geared towards them would grasp at straws to create their own.

i've been saying for years how unfortunate it is that the show heavily implied derek was like 19 in the pilot episode and only launched the idea of him being in his mid twenties AFTER a bunch of queer kids got insanely attached to the ship 😭 by that point, the ship (no pun intended) had already sailed

Also Derek is definitely Angel from Buffy. Dark and broody morally ambiguous guy with a tragic backstory who is also a deeply strange awkward man with no job or purpose beyond kind of skulking around a high school? Angel to a T.

jeff davis's mind would not be able to comprehend this video, it's too powerful. also speaking of jeff davis, interesting that he created both spencer reid and stiles stilinski, characters that are basically variations on the same character, and one was supposed to be bi, but got shut down and the other is stiles lmao, like there is something there maybe.

24:15 "Don't do this, Cas" *gunshot* "After doing this, Castiel-" made me laugh until my stomach hurt

the video of the two actors on a ship caused me actual pain!!! lmao! like it hurt to watch

I was a young gay boy and Sterek is my Twilight equivalent! Boys want to be loved brooding supernatural older men too, not just girls!

I know you hit this in the video, but the actors portraying the characters being adults was a HUGE part of why Sterek shippers didn’t really care about the age gap. Couple that with how inconsistent the timeline of the show was… you’ve got a golden ship. Literally no one cared what Derek’s “final” age was supposed to be in the context of the ship. When you’re watching a show, it’s really easy to overlook the characters’ ages when the actors are adults themselves and look like it, especially if you’re around their age or younger than them. Dylan and Tyler H. are much closer in age than their characters, even more so than the actors who played Scott and Alison were when the show started. Characters are meant to represent humans but they aren’t literally human, you know? So, in a roundabout way, it feels like people were actually shipping Dylan and Tyler, just with the sandbox of a werewolf story to springboard fanfic and fanart off of. That probably explains why so much Sterek fanfiction is highly transformative and tends to gloss over their canonical ages (like, there are sooo many college and adult life Sterek au’s I can’t even count). There have been a lot of criticisms and downright hate floating around with people saying that shipping fictional characters with a questionable age gap implies predatory tendencies or harmful intentions toward actual minors and I don’t think that’s a fair argument. Engaging with fiction doesn’t necessarily reflect one’s beliefs or desires in real life, especially in cases like this where the actors representing the characters in the ship are adults and so close in age. Having said that, I was a Sterek shipper as an older teen/young adult, and the ship still holds a huge spot in my heart, but I can definitely see both sides and understand why some people might not have shipped it at the time due to the age gap. It’s still super interesting though how hard the showrunners leaned into the ship baiting despite it, though. Even the actors have said in hindsight that they were open to it and also acknowledged the ship baiting, probably because the timeline was so ambiguous and time jumps weren’t out of the question, so the ship being canon wasn’t an insane possibility (if you take out all the corporate nonsense that makes it hard to have canonically gay/bi main characters). Man… Sterek. What a time that was to be on Tumblr 😮‍💨

“i think i remember when this hit tumblr” summarizes most of my fondest teen wolf nostalgia 💀

I knew about sterek before I'd even watched Teen Wolf. Like it was always coming up for broad search terms on ao3, and I remember seeing one fanvid for tumblr fandoms around 2013 that referenced it. To the point where I assumed that Stiles and Derek were the two main characters of the show, and so when I actually watched Teen Wolf, and Scott came on screen, I went "who is that?" Shipping culture is wild (affectionate).

i'm so glad you mentioned the transness aspect- a lot of cis people really underestimate how many hardcore straight female fans of m/m ships turn out to be gay or bi trans men later on

Something I find fascinating is that the show implies homosexuality in most of its male (and a few female) characters. I always wondered why the discussion around Teen Wolf and queerbaiting never mention that the moments that gaybait the most aren't sterek, they're with like every male character. Scott especially. I think this video really explains why it was Sterek that caught people's attention and not Sciles or Idk, Danny x Scott

Ooo ooh I want to add a little bit re: age gaps in old fandom. I got into slash fanfiction with Kim Possible/Shego fanfic in like 2010, which has a similar age gap + issues to Sterek (I was like. 13.). I also ended up reading a lot of Sterek fanfic after I stopped caring about Supernatural (i was also a Sterek centrist in terms of actual shipping, but the quantity of fanfiction was massive). Like you said, fandom now takes a much more critical eye towards age gaps in relationships. But I would argue that a lot of older fanfiction didn't ignore age gaps, they were just as likely to recognize it and try to fix it in the fanon. Aging characters up/down was way more common in my experience. It didn't impact the plot of a fanfic too much to just say Derek or Shego was 19, and 19-16 and 19-17 are less weird age gaps since they could have been in school together, or they could just age up the HSers into adults. I feel as fandom as evolved that kind of thing is less accepted. Now people discourse about canon ages even though the high school characters don't act or look like HSers. (Not trying to defend one way or the other thats just my observation) Also, I think when people are teens they're more likely to think they are similar to adults. At age 13 I was definitely like "well theres not THAT much difference between 16 and 20" and as a 27 year old I'm like "that is a wild prospect"

Very insightful! As an established teen wolf scholar[tm] myself, i am so fascinated by how the sterek fandom almost started to exist independently of the show. I know anecdotally of people who are fans of sterek without having seen the show, but only reading fanfic and engaging with the fandom. I feel like that has become even more prevalent after the show ended.

Clicking on this video with a sterek fic open in another tab... 😬

one of my biggest tv show takes is that when a character or relationship being gay or seeming gay is played for laughs the joke is really on tptb because they just made it gay for real

ok fine i’ll rewatch teen wolf

Supernatural and Sherlock are usually the big examples used when talking about queerbaiting (and for good reason) but I think I've never experienced a more blatant bait than the boat video

I read the title as - why is Shrek - and now the question won´t leave my mind

I used to be the BIGGEST sterek shipper lol but it still holds a special place in my heart.

My main take is that it was pretty unserious of them to spend so much time hyping up Stiles and Derek as a potential ship when Scott and Isaac were RIGHT THERE. Talk about fumbling a great opportunity.

As a queer make teen I definitely identified with stiles… and understand the appeal of Derek

Oh HUNNEY, the Fanfictions helped the ship sooo much it was inevitable for it to be IMMENSE, cause the Writers were doing the DAMNED thing. The way i NEVER read as much as when i first started reading Sterek fanfics is something that HAS to be studied, and even the bad ones sometimes were better than what JD could come up with. The Girlies truly GIRLED💅🏽💅🏽💅🏽

I also think that many women tend to lean towards mlm ships because they don’t have to identify with any of the characters. Women are always seen as sexual objects who have to look a certain way, so being able to enjoy a romance story without being unconsciously aware of those things can be refreshing. I‘m aroace so I‘m no expert on this matter but I can imagine that having two equals who are no target of permanent judgement (esp in Teen Wolf) gives gives people the freedom to actually focus on the romance.

Damn. I've been shipping Sterek since 2011. It was refreshing to hear such a well put together analysis without tipping so far onto either side. I'm still not over Tyler Hoechlin saying that he cast his son for the movie because the boy reminded him of Stiles in auditions. There's always been such an odd push and pull, where the actors seemed interested and thankful that fans were so hype, but TPTB seemed half interested, half annoyed like 24/7, and it created a huge mess.

the whole 'inevitability of sterek' section was SO SO good. i'm obsessed w ur theories here

i think one reason showrunners/TBTB have a habit of getting spiteful about ships like this is because they are incapable of understanding the very concept of shipping on the coolboy intellectual level you've achieved here. they don't get that shipping can be completely detached from canon and it's not an indictment on their writing/worldbuilding, its just something some fans are going to do while engaging with the material!! half the time fans don't really care whether something ends up canon as long as they can make their sexually charged gifsets. TBTB are best off ignoring it completely, letting fan reactions influence the direction of the show in any way always makes for disaster imo. great video

Jane, I’ve never even seen teen wolf, but i will watch every single one of these videos as long as you put them out

the repeated cuts to the andrew/jesse collage really took me OUT i was not prepared to see that again

My only experience with teen wolf was seeing mutuals reblog sterek content and honestly I just assumed the entire series was just those two

I never really understood this ship when the show was airing and even now, looking back the ship didn't really have a solid foundation unlike let's say the Buddie ship does(buck and eddie from 911). HOWEVER the fanfics that came out during the Teenwolf era, Sterek mostly, were very good - almost novel worthy. I dropped the show around season 2 but still read the fanfics because some of these writers cooked. Even now years later, i sometimes still go back to Ao3 and pull up some of my favorite Sterek fics.

I’ve never watch Teen Wolf but after this video I am a Sterek Stan.

i just want to tell everyone here that when i watched teen wolf, it was with my 40 year old canadian french carpenter stepdad when i was 16 and even that man supported sterek

Brilliant content as always. After u mentioned the trans masc article I typed 'teen wolf' into my unis online library and wowzer did not know that teen wolf academia was taking place

I literally gasped when i saw this notification lmao

that shakira line really got me LMAO. great vid!

I don't doubt that a large part of the Sterek fandom were teenagers as Teen Wolf was starting (I was around 17 myself), but the quality of Sterek fanfiction alone speaks of a certain maturity within the fandom that I've only ever found in older fandoms like Harry Potter or Supernatural. Most writers are also concerned about the age gap and make sure to wait until everybody is over 18 before any lines are crossed, and that's something teenagers back then just didn't care about. Even at 29, I still stand by the fact that fiction is fiction, and while teenager/adult relationships are disgusting in real life, I couldn't care less about what happens in fiction as long as it's entertaining and well thought out. My mentality is something that a lot of teen-early 20s people nowadays already find controversial, but I promise you, the status quo was a LOT worse in 2012. From what I remember, only people who shipped something else with these characters and were antagonistic towards Sterek cared about their age gap. In my case, Sterek was appealing because it seemed to be promising us a canonical queer relationship in a story that wasn't centered around romance. All I wanted was the normalization of LGBT+ characters and relationships, instead of having all of them be about the Dannys of the world (namely, tertiary characters that never matter and that barely make any appearance), or tragic protagonists in Bury Your Gays type dramas. Going into season 3 and finding out that they seemed to have replaced most of the Sterek interactions with a love interest for Derek that felt like a watered-down female version of Stiles (Jenniffer was clumsy, awkward, smart, and had some scenes with Derek that were suspiciously similar to Sterek scenes in S1, like a wounded Derek jumping in front of her car and her almost running him over) was heartbreaking. And also the fact that they hinted at Stiles being bisexual over and over again and then never mentioned it again... I remember being so excited over a canonically bisexual character that wasn't promiscuous or evil, and I just. My teenaged little queer heart just wanted some representation.

I've recently just rewatched Teen Wolf and I have to admit that I've fallen right back down the Sterek rabbit hole. I was instantly reminded of why this ship was/is/has been so popular. You listed it all really well. It's a great analysis. I guess the world in 2011 just wasn't ready for a character who would blur the lines of gender and sexuality in such an organic, natural way. I've never really thought about that being a part of why Stiles was everyone's favorite character, but subconsciously, it must have been. He was the perfect self insert character for people of all genders and sexualities. btw, have you ever heard of The 100? Because that show was just a clusterfuck of ship wars, baiting and audience gaslighting. That show had two major ships and it managed to fuck over the fans of both of them in equally cruel ways. It's a show that deserves to be studied in that regard.

i never got past the first 3 episodes of teen wolf, but i have read some spectacular sterek fanfiction back in the day. sterek shippers are so good at making a mountain out of the mole hill

"If you clicked on this you know what it is" me, clueless, laughing.

this video is sort of exactly the type of fandom analysis i love. sorta hate how you have to do disclaimers about the ship bc the sterek question is not really a yes/no one, but alas we're on the internet. also the damon derek comparison is so true i never thought of it like that

a very loaded question, jane mulcahy

Sterek shipper here. The age gap thing is like def weird. I always say that scripts are the best source of info so I think that Derek should have been canonically 19. Most shippers now agree Sterek is fine when they are adults bc a 3 year age gap isn't too horrible. I just get angry when Stere-antis throw out random ass ages for Derek and then justify their point. I had someone try to convince me Derek was 21 when he met Kate.

Why is there always a destiel confession moment in sterek videos? Like i did not come here to witness my beloved angel go to superhell. I came to simp over sterek

This is SUCH a good analysis of queer shipping in fandom culture! You have outdone yourself!

I was in the fandom and definitely a sterek shipper. "Only a few years older" (few generally meaning 3-5), coupled with no job definitely had me thinking 19 at most for Derek. Allison's aunt definitely seemed older than derek so that was the age gap that flagged for me at the time. As far as canon backing: they just seemed to have more respect for each other than they did for the others. But, really, for me: they were the parents of the group in the early season. The pairing seemed natural

I agree that shipping Sterek, Destiel etc. often has nothing to do with the fetishization of gay men. However, as someone who typically enjoys female characters and wlw ships, I do think a lot of it is the result of fandom misogyny and the utter refusal to engage with female characters the way fans do with male characters.

i’ve never watched an episode of teen wolf in my life, never had friends who were into it, i know nothing about it. i am LOCKED IN.

jane i NEED to hear you talk about buddie and 911 bc from the moment eddie showed up on that show the powers that be have been wink wink nudge nudging that ship

i feel like one reason sterek was so popular despite the age gap (speaking as someone who unironically loved sterek during my brief time in the teen wolf fandom around the time season 4 was coming out) is because none of those actors looked like teenagers, so it didnt *feel* like an age gap. like. especially before derek grew some facial hair, if you put derek and stiles next to each other they look like theyre the same age, or at least close enough that it didnt matter

That comment about being attracted to stiles while relating to him, and the relatability playing into the attraction, i felt really targeted lmao 😅 great video as always ! I'm kinda sad that this is probably going to be the last of the teen wolf series tbh

This is one of the smartest and most insightful retrospectives on fandom I have seen in a long time. Another stone-cold Jane classic 😎

i think in terms of why they made derek be weirdly fond of the jeep in the movie, they just wanted eli to have the jeep for the spin off show they so badly wanted, so by giving him the emotional relationship with it through derek it makes more sense then him just having it. but the result is soooo.....

I still love Sterek to this day, it’s a ship I can always fall back on when I need a good read. It’s sometimes hard to find a fandom with strong writers but they never disappoint here. It never gets old. I’ve been reading fanfiction for 20 years and Sterek writers are some of the best I’ve come across. Also just an add on, in Supernaturals early days J2 had some pretty good writers on livejournal. I never could get into Destiel though, supernatural was never about that for me. It was more about family.

Swear to god my pea brain keeps reading Sterek as Shrek

thank you zelda williams, for lisa frankenstein and for the bisexual (?) stiles scene in season 3

Werewolf-adjacent fandom analysis video essays might be my favorite niche of video essays now

I'm so glad you talked about Stiles being hc'd as transmasc! I haven't seen the show, only your videos, but just from them alone I was like yeah he's superrrrr trans coded. I'm a trans guy and I stg I've worn so many of his exact outfits it's embarrassing 😭

I have never watched a single episode of Teen Wolf but I still come running whenever I see an overly long video essay about Sterek. It's just part of fandom history as a whole.

The best way I've seen the psychological reason for women enjoying gay ships described is something you touched on in this video, which is that it is a fantasy that separates the female viewer from the scene. See the famous quote by Margaret Atwood regarding the inescapability of the male gaze, and how women employ it on themselves: "You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur." Imagining two men together, whether you're placing yourself in the role of one of the characters or only seeing it from the outside, allows you to experience romantic/sexual fantasies without the weight of the male gaze following you like a shadow. Additionally, for people who are on the aro/ace spectrum (like myself), shipping can be a way to explore feelings and situations we don't have or necessarily want to explore in the real world. Great video!! The sterek nostalgia really hit me hard. They just don't make queerbaiting like they used it.

I had Destielgate buried deep in my brain and your section on it brought back all the depressing hilarity of it. It is as funny as it is absolutely insane.

When I 1st started watching in 2012 at 13 I never read all the sterek subtext lmaoo I literally just thought Dylan was hot, went to look up Stiles content and got indoctrinated. I never really thought the actual characters were written romantically though. I just liked the fanfiction (lowkey thought they were more interesting than the actual plot lines in the show)

just binged your other two Teen Wolf videos and I love the reoccurring gag of the Derek Hale power stance png and Tyler Posey being absolutely out of pocket at any given chance

i have to completely honest, when i watched teen wolf as a teenager, i really only registered a semblance of sterek possibility in teen wolf while watching season 6b, mainly because the idea of the two ‘missing’ characters turning up together, who barely interacted in previous season, at the end to basically surprise and help the protagonist, scott, was a silly concept to me that i thought it would be fun/funny if it happened. wasn’t until later i checked the sterek tag on ao3 that i discovered how popular the ship is. now that you mention how this show presented these two characters, i completely get why young fans were so down bad for this ship, and maybe i would’ve shipped it myself if we had a clearer rendering of derek’s age and role in the show. as you mentioned, derek is portrayed so enigmatically that he could essentially be a fill-in for any character who has to do a necessary but less important and/or ‘boring’ action that would move along to plot to support the protagonist. i’ve always been a little annoyed with how obscure some moments in teen wolf were, but i was especially annoyed with the show’s handling of derek because no matter how much personality tyler hoechlin put in to the character, i could never get a read on what exactly type of actions derek would do. i just registered him as one of the two main ‘weird guys’ on the show because of his ambiguous morality at times, secrecy, etc. the other main character that i assigned the token label ‘weird guy’ was, not surprisingly, stiles. in that regard, i think your point of how neither derek and stiles had an explicit love interest for a lot of the show, beyond fleeting and/or out-of-reach romantic interests was especially interesting, because to me, despite how different their personalities were, they still ended up in the same ‘weird guy’ metaphorical boat more often than not in my brain. even though derek was a supernatural creature like the majority of main characters, he was still out of place because of how ambiguous he was (not an all-knowing werewolf, not an average human, not young, not old, not a high schooler, not an adult, not a ‘good guy,’ not a ‘bad guy,’ etc.) so of course people flocked to put the ‘othered’ werewolf with the only human. not only was stiles such a good canvas for people of all backgrounds to project themselves onto, as you mentioned, but derek was a great blank slate for people to project their ideal traits in a romantic partner onto him because of how ‘undefined’ he was. arguably, derek hale could reasonably be portrayed to do almost anything because of how undefined he was. both derek and stiles were out-of-place ‘weird guys’ with contrasting personalities but both of them also had a similar level of morbidity, albeit in nearly opposite directions, that made them have an interesting dynamic that the fans would, of course, run with. overall i really wish the show had refined derek’s character a little more because he had so much potential, but the show itself really was fun overall even if it needed a LOT of fine tuning. i have a feeling that if this show was rebooted (and god i hope it never will be tbh, with love), and derek’s age was explicitly defined as the same as stiles, and their dynamic was kept as close to the s1-s2 goofy dynamic as possible (+ the weird teen wolf movie moments ig), people would start picking this ship up again and SPRINTING with it.

this was a great analysis! i feel like i always recognized the sort of inherent androgyny of stiles but providing evidence with the psychosexual aspects of horror was excellent and really thought provoking actually!

That boat video elicits such a negative reaction to my subconscious that I kept flinching every time you put a clip in that I had to get away from my phone Of course I still like the whole sterek ship but man that video makes me uncomfortable

For me, Sterek continues to be one of the Ships that has had the greatest impact on me (every week I looked forward to seeing the next episode with enthusiasm). I remember reading those first fanfics and how excited I was to be able to read about that couple that caught my attention despite not interacting that much in the show. I knew of AO3 and Tumblr for a while and I stalked the #Sterek like a hawk XDDD. Even now after so many years I still enjoy those artists who continue to make fanarts and continue to write fanfics about the two of them. And for that Thank you. Thank you for keeping alive this couple that has given me so much.

I get it now. I don't SHIP it, but I GET it.

Destiel confession, I was prepared for, but the johnlock conspiracy?! 😂 I had fan-war flashbacks. The finale was a horrible night for optimistic queer teenage fans everywhere, and I wasn’t even on the frontlines. But this video truly was like time-traveling back to my teenage years, and I really enjoyed this deep dive! It’s funny how it was such a big show at the time and now that it’s been so many years since the finale, we just don’t talk about it very much. Also, that show intro should’ve won an award for how cool it was.

All I can say is thank you. As a huge Sterek fan who still appreciates the movement to this day, I really found my identity as a gay man in this pairing during my middle school years, so it holds a really special place in my heart. Anytime anyone would mention Teen Wolf or make an analysis video on it, I just couldn't help myself by saying for *years* that I felt like the show blatantly queerbaited fans, and from the amount of attention my comments would always get on other Teen Wolf videos, on Tumblr, and on the official wikia when I used to contribute to it, I knew there were a lot of other Sterek shippers who felt the same way. This video is a perfect compilation of all of the things that the showrunners, script and cast did that, looking back on it now, remind me why this pairing seemed like it could have really happened at one point and why it is still one of the most nostalgic, heartbreaking and frustrating TV experiences I've ever had. To this day, I *still* love the dynamic between Stiles and Sterek as one of my favorite TV character pairings of all time, just because of how funny and fun they were together. The "opposites attract" trope of the plucky, comical sarcastic teen with the dark, brooding hunk with the hidden heart of gold, and them constantly proving their hidden care for each other by saving each others' lives, is what my teenage inner fanboy romantic could only dream of. All of this is to say, I will go down with this ship until the day I die 😂 #SterekForever

I truly loved this moment and I laughed so hard when you scolded the imagined critics of m/m shipping for not being current with the relevant literature

This is a fun trip down memory lane! I was into teen wolf as a teen myself and definitely saw the potential in sterek, despite generally being uncomfortable with teen/adult relationships in media. I think another differentiating factor for me was that there wasn't a blatant power imbalance in the idea of sterek. Like, obviously Derek was an adult, but he had very little power or control over Stiles (beyond physical manhandling, which everyone did to Stiles). He wasn't his Alpha or his teacher or even an adult that seemed to have any sway or social capital in Beacon Hills. Kind of like the joke in the Barbie movie - "I'm a man with no power, does that make me a woman?", Derek was an adult with few adult signifiers and no direct power over Stiles, so narratively he wasn't that different from a teenager. At best, he pulled off "someone's cranky older brother who technically graduated high school but clearly hasn't Grown Up yet". That plus Stiles being framed as more self possessed and self-sufficient than the average teen, and you kinda see where they can meet in the middle as characters in a fictional setting.

I usually don't leave comments like this, but yay, I'm early. So hyped for some 2010s gay werewolf ship analysis.

as someone who was obsessed with teen wolf in its golden days, and who didn’t necessarily ship Sterek but definitely read Stiles as bi/queer; this video is awfully well made. It also made me headcanon Derek as asexual, which may not have been the point but I’ll take what I can get ✋ the more sexualized the character, the more asexual I will make him 🤝

thank you so much for the section breaking down why m/m shipping isn't as much of a "nasty gay-fetishising straight girls" thing as people try to portray it as, especially for mentioning the transmasculine stuff. as a trans guy who likes guys, i have this deep-seated fear and hatred of myself secretly being an evil homophobic fetishising fujoshi, which is insane because what cishet fujoshi is disturbed and upset by having boobs? or being perceived as a girl in general? but the shitty nasty part of my brain is like "well. you read fanfiction about boys making out. pretty gross and homophobic of you." like, no shit a community that encourages teen "girls" to identify with queer male sexuality would attract closeted transmascs ! no shit that was the first actually comfortable way you found to process your own sexuality, being allowed to imagine yourself as a dude kissing hot werewolf dudes, when it always felt so weird and uncomfortable to idk, watch the vampire diaries and try to identify with a girl kissing hot vampire dudes. before you even brought up that paper on transmasc teen wolf fandom, i was thinking "y'know, stiles has a kind of soft face. a bad-but-clearly-masculine-haircut. terrible posture. baggy clothes. a weird name that sounds based on his surname. this boy is trans as fuck." so i felt very vindicated at that point in the video lol. idk if this perception is shaped by my own specific engagement and identification, but i feel like another big slash ship that gained this sort of transmasc fandom was reddie (richie + eddie), from the movie adaptation of stephen king's IT? people seemed to identify with both characters there, but i always found the fact that eddie's main arc was about standing up to an abusive parent who lies to him and tries to tell him he is delicate and weak and not allowed to make his own decisions... i strongly relate that to the way TERFs talk about transmascs. as stupid baby girls who need to be protected from the evil transfems who are going to trick us into ruining our bodies. we can't be trusted to make our own decisions about our medical care! and eddie's mom also kinda treats him this way, giving him fake placebo pills for disorders he doesn't have to convince him to be afraid and stay home all the time. its not 1-to-1, but i still identify with the character for that reason (among others). this is such a long rant. this whole topic has caused me a lot of unnecessary anguish, self-doubt and self-hatred so... i feel strongly about it. this was a great in-depth video, and at least my unhinged ravings might boost it in the algorithm lol.