Platonic Writing Romantic Reading / Live-Action TV

Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading in Live-Action TV.

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• The 100: The creators have said that Clarke and Bellamy are Just Friends, but many fans see it otherwise. The two have a plethora of moments that could be seen as Ship Tease and good on-screen chemistry. They develop an incredibly close and strong bond to the point that they’re willing to die for each other without a second thought and prioritize saving one another over far more rational goals. Overall, the entire relationship comes off more as Unresolved Sexual Tension than two close friends. It doesn't help that their actors ended up getting married in real life.
• 9-1-1 Series creator and showrunner Tim Minear wonders how people ship Buck and Eddie (or "Buddie") from as early as 2x01, Eddie's introduction episode, and the show's co-showrunner Kristen Reidel mentiones how they're best friends. Fans are quick to note, however, that Eddie's introduction scene (him wearing shirt in slow motion while "Whatta Man" plays in the background) suits more as love interest's introduction rather than a rival that threatens someone's heartthrob status within a group and things go downhill (depending on how one sees it) from there. From Buck's great agony over the possibility of Eddie getting hurt or dying, Eddie trusting Buck with Christopher, his son, more than anyone else which culminates in him writing Buck as Christopher's legal guardian IN HIS WILL, Eddie and Christopher calling Buck first whenever they fear something happen to each other despite having a family member living in the same city ^note Eddie calls Buck in 4x08 after he realizes Christopher goes missing during his date and Christopher calls Buck in 5x13 when Eddie locks himself in his bedroom to have a mental breakdown over his dead comrade instead of calling Eddie's aunt, Buck easily taking Eddie's parental role when the latter was in hospital in 4x14^note Keep in mind that Ana, Eddie's girlfriend at the time, has PhD in children development and has experience working with children with disabilities. Based on that alone, writing her to take care of Christopher who has cerebral palsy should have been the most logical scenario and 5x14 when Eddie spends some of his time in therapy over his breakdown^note Also keep in mind that Eddie and Christopher has Carla as a very capable home caretaker introduced by Buck early in Season 2. While she's present when Eddie was hospitalized, she's strangely absent during this arc, lingering gazes that suggest interest between them not stopping even after they date other people, this talk in the kitchen that's quickly filled with homoerotic subtext as it goes on, their lack of personal spaces with each other in earlier seasons, Buck's lack of protest when people assume he's into men, Eddie's freak out over Anna being called Christopher's mother which resembles more of a "gay panic" rather than fear of having a ready-made family too soon after Shannon's death and the subsequent breakup that can easily look like a closeted man breaking up with his beard, the creators' shout outs to shippers during Season 2 that don't help things (Santa elf assuming Christopher is both of their son, about which Buck doesn't correct, and Instagram live comments that squeal about them possibility being couple in the finale)... The two have been given stereotypical will-they-won't-they plotlines with each other that resembles a slow burn romance more than platonic work partners to the point that Jennifer Love Hewitt, the one playing Buck's sister Maddie who teases Buck the most about his relationship with Eddie during Season 2 and 3, outwardly says she sees why people ship them together and would like for Buck and Eddie to become a couple and Oliver Stark, Buck's actor, himself showing signs that he's quite invested in Buck's relationship with Eddie.
• Abbott Elementary: Barbara and Melissa are supposed to be simply friends (especially since Barbara is married), but a lot of fans see their dynamic as romantic. They are the closest of any of the teachers due to knowing each other for years, with Melissa saying that she would kill for Barbara, and their friendship leads to a lot of Les Yay. One episode has Barbara feeling self-conscious about growing older, with Melissa comforting Barbara by telling her that she's only "gotten better with age". Another episode has Barbara accidentally insult Melissa due to her criminal connections before making it up to her by "shaking down someone" for her. This is not helped by the fact that their canon love interests aren't featured much in the show.
• American Horror Story: Coven: According to show creator Ryan Murphy and Cordelia's actress Sarah Paulson, Cordelia and Misty Day have a mother-daughter relationship. However, they are a popular ship within the fandom. Misty's quick hero-worship of Cordelia comes across more like a student who has a crush on her teacher. While Cordelia teaches Misty magic, she even tells her husband to get out so she can do so, making Misty stay when she tries to leave and acts like someone mad that their ex is interrupting their date. Cordelia also quickly grows attached to Misty and is crushed by her death, which haunts her for years, and which she takes harder than the death of her husband. When Misty is eventually revived in Apocalypse, Cordelia is overjoyed at seeing her again and says that despite knowing her for such a short time, she's missed her forever. The last we see of either is after Mallory brings Misty back, with the two embracing each other. Paulson and Lily Rabe (who plays Misty) also have a natural chemistry which makes the two come off a lot closer than they should be in the story.
• American Housewife: Cooper Bradford gets this in two instances:
  • Cooper is Oliver Otto's best friend and the two spend a lot of time together— and room together when Cooper moves in eventually, so much so to the point that jokes about the two being in a romantic relationship became frequent despite the two being straight—each only ever dating girls—and a strong Fan-Preferred Couple vibe coming from the fans wanting the two together. The writers were insistent on the two just being more like brothers though as the show also shut it down at every turn too—with it also being hammered in how Cooper viewed Oliver's family as his own too.
  • Bits where Cooper interacted with Oliver's sister Taylor came off as Ship Tease despite Taylor already having a boyfriend in the form of Trip Windsor. One specific example is in Season 2 where Cooper responds to Oliver taking the blame for wrongdoing by wanting to share the blame with him as it's also in proportion to taking the blame away from Taylor who was the responsible one for a change. Another is Season 4 with Taylor in the background singing a romantic song while Cooper's trying to give his girlfriend a Love Confession. Probably the most prominent and notable though is Season 3 when during a song sequence, Taylor and Cooper exchange happy looks that could come off flirtatious while Cooper also at one point puts his arm around her while at another taking her hand. Whether intentional on the part of the writers or not, their interactions were dialed back significantly in the fifth and final season.
• The Borgias: Cesare and Lucrezia really seem like they're being intentionally ship teased from day one. But — reportedly — they weren't. Cesare's actor, François Arnaud, tells the story of rehearsing their very first scene together and being scolded by the showrunner for playing it too USTy. Both actors were baffled to hear that the scene wasn't intended be that way. In the long run the chemistry won out, and it was canonized in season 3, but reportedly the showrunner as still unhappy about it.
  Interview: When we first got to Budapest, my first rehearsal was with Holly. It was for our very first scene together. We were lying in the garden and Neil kept insisting that we had too many innuendos or it was too romantic or too sexual. And we both argued that it was already all over his writing. It was like there was nothing else to do. So we kept asking, "Do you want us to play against it?" Instinctively that's what came to us, and that's what worked. We had arguments, really big discussions about it in the first year.
• Discussed in-universe in Brooklyn Nine-Nine; when discussing the UST between Detectives Peralta and Santiago, Detective Boyle recounts an example from his past where he and a girl he had UST with tried being Just Friends but eventually succumbed to their lust... while starring in a high-school production of Annie.
  Boyle: We were supposed to hug, on stage. And at first, that seemed like nothing too. But by opening night, we were full-on making out.
  Santiago: As Annie and Daddy Warbucks?
  Boyle: Mmm-hmmm... the audience was not on board. Playwright sued the school.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • The writers realized they were writing way too much Belligerent Sexual Tension into Cordelia and Xander's interactions, so they just went with it and made them a couple.
    Cordelia: I'd rather be worm food than look at your pathetic face!
    Xander: Then go! I'm not stopping you!
    Cordelia: I bet you wouldn't! I bet you'd let a girl go off to her doom all by herself!
    Xander: Not just any girl. You're special.
    Cordelia: I can't believe that I'm stuck spending what will probably be my last few moments on Earth here — with you!
    Xander: I hope these are my last few moments! Three more seconds with you, and I'm gonna...
    Cordelia: 'I'm gonna' what? Coward!
    Xander: Moron!
    Cordelia: I hate you!
    Xander: I hate you!
    [They kiss for the first time — hard]
  • Also in season 4; Riley Finn is introduced alongside his two fellow military buddies, Forrest and Graham. Forrest, however, seems to be inordinately fixated on Riley's romantic relationship with Buffy and openly dislikes her as soon as Riley shows any interest in her. Though the writers only intended Forrest to be a concerned friend who was in too deep in the Initiative, more often than not he came across as a jealous, scorned admirer who hated that Buffy stole his man. Even Marc Blucas himself has joked in interviews that he was pretty sure Forrest was in love with Riley.
• Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: In 2x08, the Mandrake tries to get Ambrose to show it affection by oddly flirting with him and asking if it can sit on his lap, which visibly throws him off. Ambrose later mentions to Sabrina that the Mandrake's thoughts, feelings, and desires are all the same as her own, which implies (likely by accident) that Sabrina might have some sort of crush on him. This does not dovetail well with the fact that they are family and basically treat each other like siblings.
• On Chuck, Chuck's interaction with Sarah is constantly shown as being platonic, but the way Chuck and his sister Ellie interact around each other is flat-out "friends who want to be lovers" writing. He even does the falling-over-himself and stuttering bits that you expect from a TV show's portrayal of geek romancing. It turns out that Chuck was originally intended to have a love interest in his civilian life, but when it was decided that complicated matters too much, she was dropped... and many of her lines given to Ellie. The writers caught this subtext after the first season aired, and then started taking corrective measures.
• Dexter:
  • Season 6 has a guy named Travis, who has a rather close relationship with his sister. A few lingering glances, asking her to stay home from work, and the Big Bad talking about Travis wanting to "play house" with her makes their relationship seem... off-kilter.
  • The series had a lot of tension between the title character and his adoptive sister Debra. It wasn't helped by the fact that their actors Michael C. Hall and Jennifer Carpenter did date and get married to each other in real life for a while and still remain good friends even after breaking up. In Season 6, the writers actually did acknowledge it by having Debra fall in love with Dexter (though she never acted on it).
• Doctor Who:
  • The original series is firmly No Hugging, No Kissing, but numerous Doctor/companion relationships have an element of romance to them, deliberately or otherwise, most notably with 4 and Sarah Jane Smith, a point that would later be revisited between her and 10.
  • There's a preposterous amount of sexual tension between Richard the Lionheart and his sister Joanna in "The Crusade". The original script did have them as an incestuous couple until William Hartnell objected.
  • Whatever was going on between Steven and Dodo. In some stories, they get Ship Tease (like "The Ark", "The Gunfighters" and "The Savages"), which is fine... except that "The Massacre" has Steven imply he thinks she may be his own descendant (he guesses she is the descendant of Anne Chaplet, but a 17th Century French woman wouldn't give her surname to her children unless she'd had them out of wedlock and there'd be no specific reason for him to expect that, unless...). It's possible the implication of her descent from him was simply an oversight, or Steven being mistaken — it's also possible that Dodo and Steven's relationship was more familial as the Will They or Won't They? seems to exist mostly in other peoples' heads and Dodo's strange behaviour in "The Gunfighters" can be explained by her being strange anyway — but it's unlikely that both of these were supposed to be true at the same time.
  • Polly doesn't generally appear to have interest in anyone, but she calls the Doctor 'gorgeous' in one throwaway scene in "The Faceless Ones", and when she leaves the TARDIS, the Doctor tells Ben to keep working hard and Polly to look after Ben, implying that they are romantically involved (as well as being alarmingly sexist by modern standards).
  • The Doctor and K-9 were supposed to be Vitriolic Best Buds. Early in K-9's run, Tom Baker plays it more like the Doctor sincerely hates the Robot Dog and is only tolerating him because he's useful. Check out "Underworld", where he outright snarls at K-9's unhelpful comments, and plays the scene where he has to talk about K-9 being his best friend slightly mockingly, as if he's buttering up K-9 for favours.
  • Romana was a very attractive woman (in both of her incarnations) and a Time Lord like the Doctor, thus removing the Interspecies Romance issue entirely. She was his intellectual equal, and thus the usual mentoring overtones of his relationships with most other companions were absent and they came across more as (possibly romantic) partners. Tom Baker and Lalla Ward had a rather volatile real-life romantic relationship during their run on the show adding a large dose of Reality Subtext as well, which resulted in some Relationship Acting Fumble. In some episodes they come across as ridiculously in love and are clearly turning each other on a lot with their presence — and in others they won't even look at each other and stumble through their lines in a contemptuous monotone. Word of God is that one can sometimes tell if the actors had had a falling out by how they interacted on screen.
  • During the Fifth Doctor's run, there was a no touching rule between the Doctor and his female companions, Tegan and Nyssa, to dispel the notion that he could be having a sexual relationship with either of them. However, this did not stop some fans from interpreting the frequent bickering between him and Tegan as Belligerent Sexual Tension and shipping them together. Others thought he was in a relationship with Adric (Season 19) or Turlough (Seasons 20 and 21) the male companions of the time, who weren't subject to the same restrictions on physical contact between the Doctor and themselves as Tegan and Nyssa. Peter Davison noticed this himself during a DVD Commentary, musing that Turlough was created so that the Doctor would have someone he could "put his arm around".
  • The rather 1980s belief that physical contact between the same gender wouldn't be interpreted sexually meant that fans instead latched onto female companions Tegan and Nyssa, two characters who, despite the infinite dimensions of the TARDIS, feel the need to share a bedroom. When Tegan rejoins the crew in "Arc of Infinity", Nyssa gives a whoop of delight and hugs her, while the Doctor looks like he'd rather be somewhere else. Out of sequence recording didn't help: Sarah Sutton and Janet Fielding were asked to tone down their chemistry since they were coming across as very close in only Tegan's second story. So prominent was this accidental subtext that Russell T Davies planned to include a scene in "The End of Time" that revealed the two had become an Official Couple. However, this scene never made it into the final version and, though "Farewell, Sarah Jane" stated that Tegan and Nyssa were "together", this is contradicted in "The Power of the Doctor", where Tegan states that she has had two husbands and there is no mention of Nyssa.
  • The Fifth Doctor and Susan are also widely noted to have looked like they were checking each other out in their scenes together. Possibly a bit hard to play a convincing grandfather-granddaughter relationship with a ten-year age difference in the wrong direction.
  • Steven Moffat loves exploring the murky territory between familial love, sexual love, and different familial roles, usually via time travel. While a small vocal minority still insists that he's in favour of Wife Husbandry, it's usually tasteful, and he's won awards for stories focusing on these themes more than a couple of times (see: "The Girl in the Fireplace", about the Doctor's protection of a little girl as she grew causing her adult self to fall in love with him; and "Listen", where time travel accidents cause Clara to meet her boyfriend's child self, her boyfriend's Identical Grandson, and the child self of the Doctor). But it's very unlikely he would have had the Doctor, Amy and Rory all flirting with each other so much if he'd known where their arc would end up going. Or the parts where River appears to flirt with Amy. Even after he knew exactly what he was doing, he was still pushing the sexual angle between Amy and the Doctor hard, by repeatedly implying for Bait-and-Switch reasons that Amy's baby was the Doctor's.
  • The Doctor and Clara Oswald. As soon as they get together as a team, there's near-constant subtext about their friendship not being in a brotherly-sisterly realm, despite its platonic nature. The Doctor reluctantly (if happily) shows signs of having a chaste crush on Clara, largely because she's given him a new sense of purpose after he was very withdrawn from the world prior to befriending her. This is not helped by Clara, cheeky as she often is, taking him by the shoulder in episodes like "Hide" and "The Crimson Horror" or making him shyly squirm over minor gestures of affection. Jenna Coleman herself noted that Clara had grown to really like him, but it wasn't until his regeneration in "The Time of the Doctor" that she (belatedly) realised she was a little bit in love with him as well. Despite Peter Capaldi begging Steven Moffat not to write the relationship between Clara and his more morose incarnation as romantic (at least, so the claim has been made; this has since been denied), theirs is an intense bond, complete with long anguished looks at each other and a flat-out (if veiled) love declaration. At the end of season 9, the Doctor subjects himself to billions of years of torture to undo her death, shoots another Time Lord (with a gun!!) to escape with her, and then uses tech to lobotomize his memories of her as the only possible way of letting her go.
    Doctor: Clara, I'm not your boyfriend.
    Clara: I never thought you were.
    Doctor: I never said it was your mistake.
• Downton Abbey:
  • Though opinion is divided (as plenty of viewers strongly dislike this pairing), the relationship between Tom and Mary can come across as the two of them acting like a married couple after the deaths of their respective spouses. They're brother and sister-in-law (Tom's late wife Sybil is Mary's sister) and each get new love interests over the course of the show — but Tom and Mary often spend nearly every waking moment together, are able to communicate without words, are the missing mother/father figure to the other's child, and have an understanding of each other that goes beyond what anyone else in the show has. When Tom becomes The Matchmaker to Mary and her latest Love Interest, most of his heartfelt speeches about why Mary should be with Henry are phrased in such a way that some fans feel like Tom is talking about himself (as with this one), viewing it as though it's all part of a desperate attempt to fight his own feelings.
  • To those viewers whose Shipping Goggles are oriented in a slashier direction, Tom's efforts to set the pair up come across as his having a Matchmaker Crush on Henry. Effectively, the writers have created an Official Couple where both parties have more chemistry with Tom Branson than each other, which is impressive as far as this trope is concerned.
• In-Universe in Father Ted: Ted and Dougal are attempting to write lyrics for an entry for Eurosong. Dougal's first suggestion for lyrics for a song called "My Lovely Horse" is "My lovely horse I want to hold you so tight/ I want to rub my fingers through your tail and love you all night." When Ted points out that the lyrics should be about being best friends with the horse, not about being in love with the horse, Dougal proposes "Take this lump of sugar, baby, you know you want it."
• Flash Forward features a gay couple on their first date discussing getting married, having children, and saying things like 'I'd never leave you'. That doesn't happen the first time you go out for dinner (although, Janis does end up being put-off by the obsessiveness that her date ultimately displays). Furthermore, Janis has more chemistry with Demetri (who has a fiancee, with whom he has not a terrible amount of chemistry) than with the aforementioned date.
• Game of Thrones:
  • Several viewers thought that Tyrion had romantic feelings for Sansa in Season 8, and some felt Sansa may even have reciprocated them to a degree. Tyrion expresses admiration for Sansa and states they "should've stayed married", to which Sansa says it wouldn't work "because of the dragon queen" without giving any other explanation or any indication that she'd have any emotional objections to them staying married. Sansa also makes a point of telling him that of all the men she was betrothed/married to, he was the best. And then there's their emotionally charged moment while they're hiding in the crypts and could be killed at any moment. It doesn't help that Tyrion previously admitted to finding Sansa attractive but refused to act on it on moral principle. However, given Tyrion's later confession that he's fallen in love with Daenerys, the writers apparently didn't intend for him to have romantic interest in Sansa.
  • Jon and Sansa's relationship is also supposed to be a cute sibling one, but some fans saw it as them as Kissing Cousins instead, especially with Jon being extremely protective of Sansa after they reunited and threatening every man who mentions her (Littlefinger, Theon, Tyrion) and only Sansa's presence is able to calm him down during his No-Holds-Barred Beatdown on Ramsay Bolton. Sansa also becomes very close with Jon after not even sharing scenes with him in Season One, taking care to dress him as a Stark, talking about what a great man he is and gently touching his arm or face, etc.
  • Sansa appears to be a magnet for this trope, because Theon's behaviour towards her also smacks of romantic feelings. She is the only person capable of pulling him out of his Reek persona by reminding him of who he was and it's when her life is threatened he finally snaps, kills Myranda and escapes Winterfell with Sansa. Later he returns to fight by Yara's side but she realises what he really wants is to return North and help his adoptive family and gives him her blessing to do so. On his return, Daenerys is clearly expecting Theon to bow to her (since Yara and Theon came to offer an alliance with Dany earlier), instead Theon goes and kneels to Sansa over the dragon queen and tells her he'll fight by her side "if she'll have him" and she's seen smiling warmly at him as they share a meal in Winterfell hall. Sansa is utterly distraught when Theon is killed in the battle and puts her direwolf pin on his body before it burns.
  • Sansa and Margaery big time. Sansa clearly looks up to Margaery a lot, and Margaery, besides being a very touchy-feely friend, has a soft spot for Sansa beyond just some Pet the Dog moments, low-key mentors her about sexuality, offers her roses, casually mentions that some women like "pretty girls" while looking at Sansa, and, as characters put it in-universe, adores Sansa. Also, the two often share prolonged gazes while holding hands an make plans for the future. Definitely not helped by Natalie Dormer having chemistry with about anyone and anything, much less so by Sophie Turner being very supportive of the ship, constantly mentioning in in interviews, suggesting Littlefinger’s aforementioned "Queen Margaery adores Sansa!" line from Season 5, and… this.
• Gilmore Girls:
  • There are those fans who believe that Paris's uncanny ability to insert herself into every facet of Rory's life means she's clearly enamored with her, something that Rory is utterly oblivious to. Some believe Paris displays far more chemistry with Rory than any of her so-called "boyfriends".
• In GoGo Sentai Boukenger, Natsuki has no memory of anything that happened before she met Masumi — her memories were erased to protect her identity as the last survivor of a destroyed civilization. They go everywhere together, do everything together, and Natsuki is explicitly stated to be "the light to Masumi's darkness" and the only one who can pull him out of a state of intense despair. They are one of the most popular ships in the entirety of the franchise, yet they never reached Official Couple status, and the actors stated in interviews that the characters' relationship was akin to that of parent-child or brother-sister.
• Hannah Montana: Miley and Lilly are just supposed to be best friends, but most fans think they have more chemistry together than with their actual love interests. Their relationship is filled with Les Yay, and is often given a lot more focus than their romantic ones. In the first episode, Miley's afraid to tell Lilly she is Hannah, in a way that resembles someone being afraid to tell their childhood crush they like them. The Movie also gives a lot more focus and weight to their fight than to that of Miley with the Boy of the Week, Travis. Lilly eventually gets with Oliver, but the show makes it clear that Miley is her most important relationship, and she chooses to help Miley over Oliver multiple times. When the two do fight it comes off to many fans like an old married couple. There's a good reason most fanfiction about the show interpret them as already dating.
• Heroes: Peter and Claire are uncle and niece, with Claire being Peter's Long-Lost Relative who was conceived from a fling his older brother Nathan had with Claire's mother in the past. Before The Reveal that they were related, their first meeting could've easily been seen as a sweet little Meet Cute mixed with a Rescue Romance setup, as Peter saved Claire from being killed by Sylar, and them being relatively young and attractive characters with shared angst over their powers gave even more grounds for fans to ship them together. Even after their blood relation was revealed, they still seem to be closer than one would expect of an uncle and niece, especially of the "long lost relative" variety. It says something that the Abandon Shipping for this pairing was pretty minuscule compared to other ships that went through similar revelations. Not helping was that both characters' subsequent Love Interests were generally disliked or were considered underwhelming by the fans, nor the actors' chemistry, as Milo Ventimiglia and Hayden Panettiere briefly dated in real life.
• House:
  • The friendship between House and Wilson had such intense Ho Yay overtones that writer Doris Egan couldn't resist writing just a bit more of it each episode. This earned her the nickname "Saint Doris" among fans, but the other writers weren't quite on board and kept downgrading Egan's Relationship Upgrade moments again. Showrunner David Shore had to Word of God nix the canon likelihood of House and Wilson becoming a couple in a semi-famous interview with TV critic Mo Ryan, after Doris Egan's writing on the "Amber" Story Arc made the subtext nearly text. This was not the first, the last, or even the most blatant hint for the two.
  • The Unresolved Sexual Tension and the surprising resemblance between House and Cameron was written effectively enough, and Hugh Laurie and Jennifer Morrison had chemistry enough, that even after the two of them were paired off with different people, they could scarcely be in the same room for more than ten seconds without making many fans wonder how they hadn't already jumped each other's bones. It's possible that Cameron was written off the show in order to put an end to any possibilities between them once and for all.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia:
  • Happens in-universe and played for laughs in the episode "The Nightman Cometh". Charlie intends the protagonist of the eponymous play to be a man in love with a princess who has his soul corrupted by the Nightman, a demon he battles against. However, he's initially named the Little Boy and certainly doesn't look or act like he's meant to be a grown man, adding an unintended pedophilic undertone to the princess's duet with him. On top of this, while intended as nonsexual, the Nightman taking his soul is laden with Homoerotic Subtext; the scene features a Fade to Black as the Nightman creeps under his covers, and Frank's character keeps mispronouncing "boy's soul" as "boy's hole" — even the actors involved thought they were staging a rape scene. (It's heavily implied as well that the story is inspired by Charlie having been molested by his Creepy Uncle.) Naturally, Charlie is incensed at all of this and insists that there are no undertones whatsoever.
    Mac: Ummm... I think we have to be very careful about how we do the rape scene.
    Frank: Yeah.
    Charlie: Wh-what in God's name are you talking about? There's no "rape scene".
    (Mac and Frank give Charlie a confused look)
    Mac: ...Well, sure. I pay the Troll Toll and then I rape Dennis—
    Charlie: No! You don't rape him! You become him! You do not rape him!
    Frank: He doesn't?
  • A similar thing happens in the Gang's attempts at Lethal Weapon fan films. They're intended to have Riggs and Murtagh's daughter be the Official Couple, but the film is so laden with so many male Fanservice scenes and intimate moments with Riggs and Murtagh (up to and including playful shower wrestling) that most people upon viewing the film assume it to be a porno. They throw in a scene of the two visiting a strip club while talking about how not-gay they are in an attempt to cover this. It doesn't help that the wedding scene has both Riggs and Murtagh's daughter visibly flinching away from the Big Damn Kiss (as a result of their actors hating each other).
• In Life with Derek, the titular character and his step-sister Casey are supposed to have an antagonistic Sibling Rivalry relationship with one another but come across more like they have Belligerent Sexual Tension than anything else, and thus, feel like a pair of Flirty Stepsiblings in deep denial of their attraction to each other. Not helping is that Word of God states that Derek and Casey "care for each other more than anyone", nor that their actors Michael Seater and Ashley Leggat very openly ship the Derek/Casey pairing and (due to them having briefly dated and staying good close friends after breaking up in real life) had great on-screen chemistry.
• The Mentalist has Jane and Lisbon, who the writers insist have a platonic version of Belligerent Sexual Tension. Fans didn't buy it, and in later seasons it seems as if the writers just ran with it. As of season 5 Lisbon has begun to fall in love with Jane. Even Jane's hallucination of his daughter ships them.
  Jane: He does love you... how could he not?
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The nature of relationship between Galadriel and Sauron is one of wild mass guess, and it doesn't help that the creators don't make any clear statement about them. Producer Gennifer Hutchison cowrote the famous We Can Rule Together scene between Galadriel and Sauron and declared that "it was really about trying to balance his genuine pitch and her feelings of, 'This is the person I've been looking for, but this is also the person I've become closest to over this last amount of time.'" There is also Morfydd Clark's comment on Galadriel and Sauron which still muddles the waters: “I don’t think it was necessarily romantic,” she says. “But whatever connection they had was enormous. Whether it was power, friendship, whether it was romance, it was just completely beyond what they felt before. And it shows with people shipping them.” And the third party, Charlie Vickers completely denies anything romantic between Galadriel and Sauron, and doubts that Sauron meant proposing marriage to Galadriel, because he is evil and evil loves only itself. He interpreted their relationship as Sauron just deceiving Galadriel the whole time, and in later interviews he calls what the characters felt as "a cosmic connection". A lot of fans didn't buy any declaration about Sauron/Galadriel and believe the Foe Romance Subtext was intentional from everyone involved, otherwise they wouldn't have had Charlie and Morfydd test three times to make sure the actors have chemistry, nor have the characters drawn holding hands in the official concept art or have Sauron getting angry in the moment some nobody taunts him about Galadriel.
• Merlin:
  • Arthur and Morgana behave like Flirty Step Siblings, with lots of Belligerent Sexual Tension. During series 1, it really does seem like intentional Ship Tease. In series 2, the writers immediately backed off, leery about Brother–Sister Incest implications and the need to justify the increasingly marginalized Gwen by upgrading her to love interest for Arthur. But the third season has The Reveal that Morgana is Uther's biological daughter and Arthur's half-sister, throwing past Arthur/Morgana interactions into a whole new light. In the most of the well-known versions of Arthurian legend, Mordred is their son, not a kid who they rescue together, and in all of those they're usually brother and sister. (Mordred generally turns out to be a Bastard Bastard and attempts to get revenge on Arthur as a morality tale against out-of-wedlock relationships and incest.)
  • In the first season of the show, before Arthur got roped into a for-life Official Couple, most of the fans thought that Arthur/Merlin was a legitimate thing, what with the long poignant gazes, the Belligerent Sexual Tension, and the Slash Dragon saying things like "A half cannot truly hate that which makes it whole" every two seconds. Consider the following dialogue between Merlin and his mother:
    Hunith: He must care for you a great deal.
    Merlin: Arthur'd do the same for any village. That's just the way he is.
    Hunith: It's more than that. He's here for you.
    Merlin: I'm just his servant.
    Hunith: Give him more credit than that. He likes you.
• Monk: The relationship between Adrian Monk and his two attractive female assistants was certainly not an out-of-the-box relationship type. In spite of the obvious opportunities for sexual tension, there is virtually none of it, and the show is all the better for that. Overall, Sharona and Natalie are shown as feeling devotion and even love toward Monk, but in an utterly platonic, somewhat motherly way. Monk, for his part, was always dedicated to the memory of his late wife. However:
  • In "Mr. Monk Gets Married," when Monk and Sharona have to impersonate a married couple to investigate a man who's married Randy's mother, there is an eyebrow-raising tender moment where Sharona thanks Monk for letting her wear Trudy's ring to carry off the ruse.
  • With Natalie, there were a few isolated incidents where she really seemed to be coming onto him. Such as several scenes in "Mr. Monk Goes to the Bank" where she fawns over how handsome he looks in a security guard uniform, or the downright bizarre stake-out scene in "Mr. Monk and the Genius," where Patrick Kloster spots her and Monk spying on him and Natalie inadvertently blurts, "We should kiss!"
• In Neighbours, Libby Kennedy and Stephanie Scully are meant to be 100% heterosexual. Their actors... do not portray them as 100% heterosexual. (The writers added fuel to the fire when, after Libby had left the show, Steph suddenly started dating women.)
• Although Odd Squad has plenty of Ship Tease across the board, many fans have latched on to Oona and Ocean just from the three times they've been paired up together (which, for this show, is quite a lot). Of note, "Oona and the Oonabots" has Ocean telling Oona that he likes her after her Oonabot manages to turn a rampaging dinosaur into stone, followed by Oona replying, "I like me, too." The episode "A Case of the Sillies" also has the Squanzo Bonzo refer to Oona as Ocean's "lady friend" at one point, which was most likely an attempt to avoid saying the word "girlfriend" straight out.
• Once Upon a Time:
  • Emma and Regina's interactions often come off more romantic than the simple friendship the creators intended it to be. Season 4 has one episode being devoted entirely to Emma attempting to rebuild her friendship with her. One scene shows the two have eaten lunch together enough that Emma knows Regina's dieting routine. Emma's devotion to Regina is also startlingly like that of a lover, especially in the Season 4 finale, where she sacrifices herself to save Regina. While the creators have claimed it was her saving the town, the Season 5 premiere has multiple characters, including Emma's actual love interest Hook, refer to it as her sacrificing herself for Regina. When Emma needs someone to hold onto the dagger that can control and kill her, she trusts Regina with it over her parents or Hook. Some fans have also interpreted Regina's constant insulting of Hook as jealousy over his being with Emma. Both are also devoted mothers to Henry, so Emma and Regina's relationship to each other can appear romantic. This was not helped when the Official Couple of Season 7, Henry and Jacinda, had many elements that fans thought were borrowed from Emma and Regina's.
  • It's probably down to Jennifer Morrison having chemistry with half the male guest stars on the show, but Emma and August certainly seemed as if something was about to go on. Most of August's early scenes consisted of him flirting shamelessly with her and yet nothing came of it. It almost seems as if the writers retconned into a platonic thing, as August was Put on a Bus in Season 2 and Emma was then given two more canon love interests. August's Season 4 return at least acknowledges this somewhat — with Killian getting a little jealous at their conversations.
  • As noted here, the chemistry between Snow White and Red Riding Hood and the way their scenes are shot look very couple-y. Although Red is a Shipper on Deck for Snow and Charming, there's no denying the sheer amount of Les Yay Snow and Red have.
  • Despite Aurora being married to Philip, he's out of sight for most of Season 2 and she shares more screen time with Mulan. Writers seemed to pick up on this one and subvert the trope by revealing that Mulan actually is in love with Aurora.
  • Emma and Lily have this in spades. Lily first appears in a flashback as a special friend that Emma once had. Their scenes are shot, lit and scored in a way that made fans wonder if Lily was really Ambiguously Gay. If the character had been a boy, it would have immediately been interpreted as a love story. Naturally when Lily was brought back, the Les Yay aspect was played up in their scenes even more.
  • Despite Ariel's introduction episode being all about her trying to win Eric's heart, she shares only one scene with him. And yet she makes more of an emotional connection with Snow. The friendship between them is given far more development and screen time than Ariel's crush on Eric.
• Rizzoli & Isles: Jane and Maura are intended to be Heterosexual Life-Partners, but unless one of them is literally in bed with someone else it's very easy to just pretend that they're married. Given the amount of time Jane spends are Maura's house, it wouldn't be difficult for a casual viewer to mistake them as living together. There has been no shortage of subtext, including multiple instances of falling asleep in the same bed, undressing in front of one another, Maura being the only non-family member present at Rizzoli family events (many of which Maura hosts), heart-to-hearts between both Maura and Jane and Maura and Jane's mother, and long, significant glances and meaningful lines, as well as several probably unintentional but still rather poignant parallels. It's firmly established that Jane cares for Maura just as much as her brothers, and Jane is implied to be the first close friend Maura has ever had. The writers have tried to temper this by introducing a revolving door of increasingly "perfect" love interests for both characters and putting more and more emphasis on their love lives with other people, but to no avail. The end of season four has a scene where Maura starts crying after she finds out that Jane might get engaged (she doesn't).
• Scrubs has J.D/Dr.Cox as the most popular ship in the fandom and part of the reason for this is because J.D's Hero Worship of Dr. Cox comes off like a serious crush. J.D is one of the very few people who gets to see Dr. Cox's more vulnerable side, he often insists on being touchy-feely with Dr. Cox, even when he gets viciously rebuffed, calls him "Perry" in later seasons and records his voice so he can play it back to him later. They even treat a Nerves of Steel woman who has a Nervous Wreck of a husband and J.D comments they remind him of himself and Dr. Cox, who doesn't deny it. Dr. Cox meanwhile calls J.D "newbie" or some variety of girl's names and refers to him as "my intern/attending", plus he drags J.D to a bar with him in the middle of the night, while J.D is in his pyjamas, because he doesn't want to drink alone. It doesn't help J.D/Elliot was supposed to have been sunk in Season Three by them becoming increasingly dysfunctional and they only got together again very late in the show when Bill Lawrence caved under fan pressure, while Jordan was only supposed to be a Oneshot Character before she gets made into a recurring one and she's basically just a Distaff Counterpart to Dr. Cox.
• Smallville: Chloe and Clark, non-stop. The producers tried to sink it via Word of God multiple times, but the way they write their relationship, they just like torturing viewers. More than one article covering the special "Justice" made the mistaken assumption that Clark's jealous guarding of Chloe from The Flash—er, Impulse was on his own behalf rather than Jimmy Olsen's. Given that this behavior has been happening all the way up to and including Season 8, it's difficult to blame people for the Chlois theory when they keep doing this.
• On So Weird, the writers devoted a lot of screen time to the close relationship between Carey and Molly, for whatever reason. The writer's admit that Carey came off as too mature for it to have a mother/son vibe, and could easily be seen as a May–December Romance.
• Elizabeth Weir and John Sheppard of Stargate Atlantis. They're written like they're the show's blooming romance, and actors Torri Higginson and Joe Flanigan certainly play it like they're a couple. In spite of the relationship's popularity, the writers completely deny any such thing.
• Star Trek:
  • The Deep Space Nine writers famously stopped giving Bashir and Garak so many scenes together when they found out the characters had a huge shipping following. It didn't help that the Bashir and Garak subtext was (according to Andrew Robinson, Ron Moore, and Robert Hewitt Wolfe) put there deliberately with the expectation that nobody would really notice. The same thing happened shortly thereafter with Bashir and O'Brien, but this time the writers realised the slashers were gonna slash anyway, so they continued to emphasize that friendship.
  • Star Trek: The Original Series: Kirk and Spock are either in love with each other, or this trope. It's possible they started out as the latter, but the writers were certainly aware of the former interpretation by the time The Motion Picture was filmed—the novelisation reveals that there are rumours about the relationship even in their universe. Instead of attempting to de-slash the relationship, the movies seem to take the subtext and run with it, to the point that the two of them can arguably be read as a married couple. "The noblest half of myself", anyone?
  • Star Trek: Voyager actually managed this with a breakup: Kes dumps Neelix while possessed in "Warlord", yet everyone treated this as though it was a genuine end to the relationship and both were free to move on. They also managed enough Ho Yay to kill a slashficcer on contact, culminating in a Strangled by the Red String relationship between Seven and Chakotay, both of whom had had more romantic chemistry with Janeway than they had with each other.
• In Suburgatory, Tessa and her father George sometimes act more like a couple than a father and daughter. In particular, Tessa has a tendency to refer to George by his first name, instead of calling him "Dad" or "Father". The show even lampshades this when George's friend Noah calls their relationship disgusting.
• Supernatural:
  • Sam and Dean are unusually co-dependent (to the point of it being unhealthy) for just being brothers. They risk their lives for one another countless times, and both of them readily admit they are each others' greatest weakness. In the early seasons especially, the brothers were very touchy-feely with each other, especially Dean towards Sam (though Sam gave as good as he got in Seasons 3 and 4, when he was pretty well permanently terrified that Dean was going to die). Throw in more emotional scenes, brotherly-devotion speeches, and Died In Your Arms weepery, and they definitely stretched the idea of how "normal" brothers interact. In later seasons this seems to have calmed down, but the brothers have also finally learned how to hug. Eric Kripke, the creator, has admitted that he can see why so many fangirls see the Homoerotic Subtext between the brothers, lampshading it several times during the series, and one of the Exec Producers herself has been known to refer to the show as The Epic Love Story of Sam and Dean.
  • Dean and Castiel got so many emotionally intense scenes highlighting their "profound bond", like Dean becoming a depressed mess after Castiel's supposed death and carrying around his trenchcoat as a keepsake and Castiel repeatedly prioritizing Dean's life over his own, Heaven, and the safety of the entire world, that some fans honestly thought that the show was setting them up to be a romantic couple. Like with the above Sam and Dean example, later seasons tried to dial back the Ho Yay between them and emphasize that their bond was a friendly/family-like one, but that didn't stop the shippers. Interestingly, the final season confirmed that Castiel really did love Dean romantically, so either the showrunners eventually decided to just partly roll with this Relationship Writing Fumble or the fans weren't all that far from the mark after all.
• Allegedly, the writers of Tin Man were going to ship DG and Cain, but Neal McDonough refuses to film love scenes of any kind. As such in the miniseries, fans are split down the middle as to whether there was an attraction — or more of a father/daughter relationship. The fact that Cain believes his wife to be alive for half the story muddies the issue even further.
• The Vampire Diaries Universe:
  • The Vampire Diaries: Damon is in love with Elena, but some fans are convinced that he and Bonnie are into each other in later seasons. When they are stuck in the prison world, Bonnie and Damon form a deep bond, with Damon routinely making her breakfast and the two coming off like an old married couple, which even Kai calls them out on. Damon also gets annoyed at Kai flirting with Bonnie, which many saw as him being jealous. He also saves Bonnie from Kai, despite knowing that doing so would mean he wouldn't be able to see Elena again for a while, and spends a good portion of the following season trying to reconnect with her like a guy trying to win a girl back. Ian Somerhalder and Kat Graham's close friendship also leads to Damon and Bonnie having far more chemistry than Bonnie does with actual love interest Enzo.
  • Legacies: The writers and characters In-Universe have repeatedly stated that Hope and Josie are never going to get together, with their crushes on each other being very much in the past. However, a lot of fans feel that they still have far better chemistry than Hope and Landon. In the first season, Hope and Josie have a scene where they argue in the park that is framed and shot similar to a Belligerent Sexual Tension scene from a high school Rom Com. In another universe, their counterparts are paired together for the sake of a joke (which comes off as far more tender than they meant it to). The second season tries to paint Josie/Landon/Hope as a love triangle, but it makes Josie come off like a kid with a crush, who doesn't know how to deal with it. When everyone's memories of Hope return, Hope refuses to return if it will hurt Josie (which leads to Josie telling her to stay while holding hands, as a soft romance song plays in the background). When Josie turns evil, Hope tries to desperately bring her back (even trapping someone who suggests killing her in a simulation), before jumping into Josie's subconscious where Josie's good half (disguised as a talking pig) tells Hope to try kissing her sleeping form to wake her up like out of a fairy tale. The chemistry between them is so noticeable that several of the show's actors, including Danielle Rose Russell (Hope) and Kaylee Bryant (Josie), have admitted to shipping them as well.
• Wednesday: Even though Wednesday and Enid are just supposed to be best friends, many fans walked away thinking that they were romantically interested in each other. Their growing bond is one of the biggest threads of the first season and Enid is constantly trying to win Wednesday's affection. Wednesday also starts to treat Thing nicer just because Enid tells her to. When they have a fight and Enid moves out, not only is it one of the few times Wednesday is visibly saddened, but it comes off to many as seeming like a break up. In the final episode, not only does Enid finally "wolf out" and take on a Hyde to save Wednesday, but their climatic hug is considered by many fans to be far more romantic than any their moments with their canon love interests.
• The writers of Wizards of Waverly Place seem to have given Justin and Alex, who are brother and sister, an almost Belligerent Sexual Tension-like dynamic. It stems, just like the example from Chuck, from the fact that Justin was intended to be a next-door neighbour only for it to be switched late on in pre-production. It doesn't help that one episode featured Alex accidentally wishing that everyone forgot Justin was her brother, causing their own mother to comment that they'd make a cute couple. They try to remedy this by giving them both relationships, and the Justin/Juliet one almost works. Then they got rid of Juliet, when they made her an eternal mummy slave and didn't bring her back until near the end of the series. And right after Juliet left, Alex came and comforted Justin, giving him a big, consoling hug.
• Mulder and Scully of The X-Files are a classic example. The idea that the characters would have an intense platonic relationship but not be sexually or romantically interested in one another was firmly established in the original idea for the series, and the writers repeated it in interviews for years. But by around Season 5 or so the characters seemed to have different ideas, and eventually the writers went with it. It's an interesting case of a Relationship Writing Fumble becoming a canon relationship.
• Zero Chill:
  • Sky is supposed to be in an Official Couple with lead character Mac, with his sister Kayla being her best friend, and they do have a solid amount of Ship Tease and build-up. However, once Sky and Mac actually get their Relationship Upgrade, the Les Yay that was already present between her and Kayla gets even more prominent. There's a climactic moment in the middle of the show where Sky has to choose between skating with Kayla and going on a date with Mac that seems a bit more charged than a normal Friend Versus Lover situation, and after she finds out that Sky and Mac have gotten together, Kayla reacts with more jealousy than what would be expected. The triumphant emotional scene of the first season's finale is Sky choosing to skate with Kayla at her big skating competition even though this would disqualify her from competing and lose the respect of Kayla's instructor. It's also easy to forget that Sky and Mac are supposed to be together, given that they act more like good friends rather than a couple.
  • To a lesser extent, there's also Mac and Ava. He helps her be a part of the team and see one of their hockey games by suggesting that she disguise herself as the team's mascot, and once it's revealed that Ava gave the team's strategies to an opposing team, Mac is the only person to stand up for her, even though he was blamed for it and ostracized by the rest of the team as a result. It all comes across as Ship Tease rather than just Mac helping/defending a friend.