Lady Whistledown couldn’t come up with this much drama herself
Gentle readers & the market of sapphic love.
Perceptio is usually one voice. This essay is not. Meet Elio Manva — the visual identity behind this publication, on Substack and on Instagram, and more relevantly, exactly the audience this essay and the new season of Bridgerton is about. We wrote this together.
***
First Kill. A League of Their Own. Vida. The L Word: Generation Q.
One season. One season. Cancelled. Cancelled.
The list is long enough that queer women have a reflex for it now. Find the show, love it fast, grieve efficiently. Don’t get too attached to the renewal.
There’s a name for the industry convention that made this inevitable. “Bury your gays” the unwritten rule, enforced long enough to become the norm, that queer characters don’t get happy endings. They die, they lose everything, they end up alone. It wasn’t subtext or personal bias. It was policy, baked into network standards, into what writers were told was permissible, into decades of stories where queer love was allowed to exist only as tragedy.
The escape from it felt like oxygen. Heartstopper, Red, White & Royal Blue, Heated Rivalry. Audiences lost their minds not because the stories were radical but because the endings were. The relief was the point. But look at the list. All of them are about men. Gay male love got its reprieve. The “bury your gays” era ended for one gender. Sapphic stories are still mostly dying. Or being cancelled before they get to an ending at all.
In 2022, Netflix cancelled First Kill, a lesbian vampire show starring a dark-skinned Black lead, two months after release. In its first full week, the show pulled 48.8 million hours viewed in a week, peaking at number three globally, sitting behind only Stranger Things and Peaky Blinders. It flirted with 100 million total hours in its first month. Heartstopper, which was renewed for two additional seasons, pulled 14.5 million hours in its first week. Less than a third of First Kill‘s numbers. The official explanation cited completion rates and cost. While First Kill had strong initial viewership, it did not have the "staying power" of other hits and failed to meet internal thresholds for completion rates. Reports indicated that only 43-44% of viewers who started the first episode finished the entire season, a key metric for Netflix renewals.
The successful shows didn’t just get investment. They arrived pre-validated. Heartstopper was a graphic novel with a massive devoted readership before a single frame was shot. Red, White & Royal Blue was a bestselling novel. Heated Rivalry had a passionate book audience that de-risked every commercial decision before the writers’ room opened. The studios didn’t take a leap of faith. They followed a paper trail of demonstrated demand.
The industry does not apply the same logic to sapphic stories. It never has.
Then, Netflix announced that Bridgerton season five will centre Francesca and Michaela, a sapphic love story inside one of the most expensive, most watched romance franchises on the planet. The conversation that followed was framed as fan outrage, adaptation betrayal (Michaela is Michael in the book), culture war cosplay.
That framing is a distraction.
The actual story is simpler and more damning: sapphic love has never been properly invested in at this scale. And the industry has spent decades mistaking its own disinvestment for a market signal.
The logic is circular and it has always been circular.
Lesbian stories are niche, so they get small budgets. Small budgets mean limited reach. Limited reach confirms the niche assumption. The assumption never gets tested because the test would require spending money the industry decided in advance it wouldn’t spend. The cancellations get logged as data.
Heated Rivalry is the clearest example of what actual investment looks like, the full production, the full press tour, the full algorithmic push. Straight women built shrines to Shane and Ilya. The show crossed over because it was built to cross over. It didn’t find a mainstream audience. It intentionally created one.
Sapphic shows have not been built with so much intention.
As a strategist, I have been in the rooms where people talk about target audiences and in many cases heard “the audience for this or that is too small” said with total confidence, by people who had never run the campaign, never given the idea a real budget. My co-author Elio on this essay is that audience, the one the room decided, without evidence, was insufficient. We came to this argument from different positions. We arrived at the same conclusion: the industry didn’t measure the appetite for sapphic love. It assumed it. Then it built a system that confirmed the assumption and called it the market.
— Kima
Historians will say they were best friends.
Eloise this, Eloise that. Mourning this, grieving that, so many excuses for the online rejection of the unreleased, unedited and still-filming season 5 of Bridgerton. Michaela Sterling was introduced on season 3 of the show, not as an immediate love interest for Francesca, but as a wink, a callback, a taste of something new. The writers are brewing a beautiful sapphic love story, and in response we are seeing the most thinly veiled, excused homophobia online.
A story that’s not just interracial same-sex love, but true to the show’s brand. Bridgerton thrives on diversity, every flavor of relationship drama, desire, intimacy, the exploration of female sexuality and overall, gossip. This fits perfectly.
The real shock is that the loudest haters are straight women. The same audience that can “hey girl hey” their way through five seasons of Heartstopper is now saying “ew girl no” to a sapphic Bridgerton storyline. A storyline that is, for the record, completely on brand. Bridgerton has always been about desire in all its forms — intimacy, scandal, the exploration of female sexuality, the thrill of wanting what you’re not supposed to want. A queer love story at its centre isn’t a departure. It’s an arrival.
And the homophobia isn’t even clean. It hides behind Eloise, behind book canon, behind concern for Francesca’s character integrity, a character they apparently loved so much they never noticed she’d spent three seasons being profoundly uninterested in men until she wasn’t. Loving a quiet, introverted woman who takes time to discover herself and then assuming that self must be straight is not literary loyalty. It’s a failure of imagination.
Queer suffering sells. It always has. The industry learned this long before it learned anything else about queer stories. That tragedy travels, that grief gets reviewed, that audiences will stream a queer love story right up until the moment it asks them to simply want the happy ending. Suffering gives the mainstream viewer an exit. The bury your gays rule wasn’t just policy. It was a business model. And even now that the explicit rule is gone, the emotional logic of it persists in which queer stories that earn cultural prestige are almost always the ones where someone pays a price. Brokeback Mountain. Carol. Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Beautiful. Devastating. Safe, in the way that loss is always safe, it asks nothing of you except feeling.
Joy is a different ask. Joy just requires you to want these two women to have each other. No lesson, no permission, no tragedy to process from a comfortable distance. Just wanting it the way you’ve wanted it for every Bridgerton before. That’s what makes some people so uncomfortable. Not the love story. The unambiguous happiness of it.
Here’s what I know from the inside of that audience: we show up. We have always shown up, for scraps, for subtext, for the one episode where something almost happened. Give us a full season, a real budget, the Bridgerton treatment and we will burn the internet down in the best possible way.
Straight women love inserting themselves into gay men’s love stories. The Heated Rivalry TikTok edits have billions of views. So the question isn’t whether there’s an appetite for watching women love women. The question is whether anyone is ready to admit that appetite exists beyond the queer community that it was always there, waiting for someone to actually make the thing.
Bridgerton is making the thing.
— Elio
There is one more layer the industry’s risk model has never accounted for. Michaela Stirling is a dark-skinned Black woman. The love story being asked to sell is not just sapphic, it is sapphic and interracial and centred on a Black queer woman as the object of desire, as the romantic lead in a lavish period drama that has historically reserved that role for a very specific kind of body. This combination has never been given this much platform. And it is worth saying plainly: First Kill was also cancelled, despite its numbers, with a dark-skinned Black lesbian lead at its centre. Bridgerton season five is, among other things, a second test of something the industry failed the first time.
Season five will be watched. Massively, undeniably, historically watched. For the first time, a sapphic love story arrives with every advantage those successful gay male adaptations had. A proven franchise, a global platform, a showrunner with creative control, and an audience that has already demonstrated, four times over, that it will show up for this world. The excuse the industry has used for decades, no proof of demand, too niche, not enough data, is gone. Bridgerton is the proof of concept the industry asked for and never funded.
The numbers will come in. And the industry will face the question it has avoided by starving sapphic stories before they could prove anything: what do you do when the market you said didn’t exist turns out to be the biggest story of the year?
Whether it finally reads the data. Or finds a new way to call the evidence a niche.
— Kima & Elio
Perceptio is now also on Instagram in case you want to follow: @perceptio.substack
If you want to join Perceptio Office Hours to discuss some of the topics live together, consider upgrading your subscription. All posts will remain open and free regardless.
Loved co-writing this!
Bridgerton is giving female queer media a real chance and it’s already breaking the internet. Best part is these characters won’t be forever victims of their own queerness and are guaranteed to have a happy ending. Can’t wait for season 5. 💌
First Kill pulling 48 million hours in its first week vs. Heartstopper's 14 million...roughly 3x the numbers...and still getting canceled. That's all the evidence you need that the "niche" label was never based on data. Really great read, y'all.