#blonde/brunette dean discourse

[twochildreninamoteldemo]

Yes I think it's more accurate to call Dean blonde because it allows us to draw clearer visual parallels with the women Sam is attracted to (Jess, Bela, and Ruby 1.0 who are all bright green eyed blondes). Yes I also think Sam would prefer bottoming to Dean. We exist.

[supersapphical]

dean can be blonde or brunette. i have no opinions on this because everyone's hair is varying shades of so many wonderful colors. depending on the lighting, he can look like either. he is whatever you feel in your heart he is.

no patience for people who try to tell me gabriel is blonde, though. every time I read a fic and they're like "the short blonde man" i'm like WHOMST are you speaking of

[tiktaalic]

personally i think the main reason bisexual dean is the most popular take is because back when the discourse started, those fans who thought dean was gay didn't think spn would ever admit he was, so they were like "no no we get it he likes women!!! you're sooo right, we just think he kinda likes men a little bit too. he prefers women though!" and before anyone comes for me i know this isn't how any of this works. i think it was just a way to "compromise" or try to trick the showrunners into admitting it. and i am right because it's the same as them being like "fine. the angel is gay. not dean tho"

i think its a multi pronged beast and this was one of the prongs but certainly not all of them. i really DID think they might do destiel for real in season 9 and the path of least resistance to that would have been. bi dean. i think another prong is that i and many other people were 14. i was straight at the time. also it was 2012. cas-sexual got thrown around a lot. straight with an exception was thrown around a lot. Big Yaoi at the time required one homosexual brunette and one bisexual blonde or your yaoi pass got denied. i also think the projection aspect cant be discounted. and i think bisexuals have the numbers in population which means their interpretations r by and large bisexual which gives us. the almighty 100k works of destiel and the ever so humble 300 works of gay dean. gay dean's a reading you really got to work for you say gay dean and people go. hm. elaborate on that. it's not for everyone! but i for one . love a dean who gets lavender married because his brother told him to. and is so so crazy closeted and so crazy about it. this is representation for me, who did crazy crazy things while going im straight. i am straight.

[seasononedean]

ok this might be too niche but does anyone else remember a post from YEARS ago during the blonde dean discourse that was like if you were blonde as a kid and arent anymore you aren't a brunette you are a failed blonde. it may or may not have mentioned jensen ackles? i’m trying to find it and i absolutely cannot anywhere.

[angelsdean]

i love how divisive blonde / brunette dean discourse is. there is only one right answer tho 

[ghostiethelurker]

two minutes. lemme pitch you the new discourse: dean winchester style is he blond is he brunette

[castiellesbian]

Supernatural discourse topics

(these are silly/light-hearted topics so no sexuality discourse etc) (also this list comprises of the destiel fan circle's topics idc about Cas haters or anything)

Impala: burn or keep

Bunker: burn or keep

Cas' trenchcoat: burn or keep

Human!Cas endgame or angel!Cas endgame

Dean: dark blonde or brunette

Metatron: fun Cas-centric villain or annoying twerp

Abaddon: hot or just a redhead

10x05 Fan Fiction: fun tribute to fans or an insult to fans

Miracle: dog <3 or fuckthatdog

Casifer: hot or not

season 11: Amazing or Terrible

Misha's accent work: inspired or he-should-be-fired

Meta episodes: fun and interesting or would-rather-skip

Do Sam and Dean share a Heaven

Which showrunner's era was the best

Mary: compelling or no

Demon!Dean: thoughts?

Dog Dean Afternoon: fun romp or unforgivable-for-the-poodle-joke

If one "fuck" was allowed, who would be the one to say it

Last but not least: Why Lamp?

[angeltiddies]

Enough blonde/brunette dean discourse, does Cas have black hair or dark brown?

this question paralyzed me

[autisticandroids]

not to bring up the blonde dean discourse again...

but my husband, who has seen every episode 3-4 times each, INSISTS that sam is blonde. when i brought up evidence that he is, in fact, a brunette, he just shrugged and said “he’s got a blonde vibe, that still counts.”

anyway, i’m married to a baffling person.

HELLO???

[deandelreys]

they banned brunette and blonde? they wanted to put an end to dean’s hair color discourse

[variousqueerthings]

some thoughts on queerness in narrative (using cobra kai as a main point)

1. intro

It’s interesting getting to engage with pop culture right now versus even five years ago, where there was something kinda sordid and undercover about queer reads of text and even just talking about being into stuff very passionately while being queer in spaces that included creators was considered somehow icky (supernatural is always a good example, but definitely was just the most visible of these types of interactions between fans and cast/creators). Obviously that’s where a lot of modern definitions about queerbaiting and bury your gays comes from.

A lot of this kind of drama centred on queer ships rather than queer characters in their own right (dean/castiel, merlin/arthur, derek/styles and maaaan just a lot of white brunette/blond pairings, which is another post and I acknowledge that Lawrusso is also literally that... the irony)

But also this isn’t so much about “shipping.”

2.

There’s a danger of flattening out the ways in which we create a dialogue with text when it becomes just about whether or not our ships become canon (in general the way fandom discourse revolves around ships can be incredibly unhelpful for engaging critically with text) – for context I am queer and I’m queer through my transness and aromanticness and asexuality, and I also write a fair bit of shippy fanfiction and analysis, but personally am not (always) thaaat bothered about how the connections with queer-coded people are realised in text, as long as those connections are acknowledged in a queer way. How that works varies from text to text.  There is no one-size fits all proper queer representation.

An example: SE Hinton (because I just read The Outsiders/watched the movie) being really dismissive of people reading her characters as gay on twitter (why do we ever try to do this sort of deep textual analysis on twitter, why do creators – like Hinton – think that they ought to espouse opinions on twitter, why twitter folx?)

I wrote – kinda for the void, because I write a lot and I like posting some of that on tumblr, but I don’t expect people to engage necessarily – about how The Outsiders is absolutely a queer text, whether or not the creator intended for it to be. Long story short, queerness has been – and often still is – illegal and/or frowned upon in canon text, so a semiotics was created to make something queer if you knew how to read it. The fact that cis-straight creators play with and use those semiotics without knowing doesn’t negate the fact that that language is there and was deliberately created for that purpose.

That also doesn’t make it queerbaiting. Maybe cis-straight dumbassery, idk (wouldn’t be if you just went “huh, didn’t think about that, cool read”)

Intentionally playing with and acknowledging those semiotics also isn’t necessarily queerbaiting.

Definitely queercoding though.

3.

Anyway this is all a bit murky territory, so let’s talk about Cobra Kai, my current little obsession, and about Star Trek, my always-obsession. Time-was you could get sued for your Star Trek fanfiction. Nowadays that fanfiction can get turned into a for-fun zoom play and read out loud by the two actors who played the original characters (Alexander Siddig and Andy Robinson). This is very fun, new territory for a lot of us.

Meanwhile Hayden Schlossberg and the other writers of Cobra Kai are openly aware of the fact that lots of people read their lead characters – Daniel LaRusso and Johnny Lawrence - as probably bisexual (and probably as in love) and are on good terms with several active members of fandom and fic-writing. This is… so fucking fun. And it doesn’t have that weird overtone of shit like Teen Wolf (“We’re on a ship” winky-face, followed by that about heel-turn “just think it’s weird and strange” or however tf it was described later on - that shit: definitely queerbaiting).

In Star Trek there’s a slim-to-none chance that these characters will ever become canonically queer in the main text, but the acknowledgement and the light-hearted open engagement with it makes such a massive difference (not that Siddig and Robinson weren’t talking openly about it as far back as the 90s).

In Cobra Kai there is no obligation to make Johnny or Daniel canonically bi because there’s been no promise to do so – there is, in my opinion, an obligation to create a world in which queerness exists and not just on the sidelines. In the same way as there’s an obligation to generally create a world that accurately depicts what LA looks like in multiple other ways (cough, not mainly white, cough). If a part of that were through exploring how 80s era toxic heteronormative masculinity could throw people deep into the closet for most of their lives, hey, that’d be a neat storyline (such a neat fucking storyline), but it’s not the only way to do it.

While I do like canonically queer couples in stories, I also think it’d really limit what queerness can do for a text if that were the only way it was represented - sure I ship Lawrusso, but I find the above-mentioned analysis of toxic masculinity’s effects on the characters-as-queer-coded to go much deeper than whether or not they get together. 

I also would love trans and/or other-gender characters - we all know Johnny needs his “gender-what?” ignorance challenged and the potential for characters like that to fit into a narrative around trauma, loneliness, and misfit-families is kinda perfect (and when I say characters, I mean that plural, we’re not a one-size fits all).

Lastly I think there is also an obligation to do exactly what the showrunners are doing - what didn’t happen with Hinton or SPN or Teen Wolf or Star Trek of yore or so much other popular fiction: say, oh yeah, that language is absolutely there, we recognise it, we can read it and it’s not weird or sordid or something to be judged. So that’s already a massive thumbs up/promising start.

4. some final thoughts:

Idk where all this’ll go. I’m still missing a lot of canonically queer representation - and when I say representation I mean more than just shoving in a queer character into a scene and not thinking about how that affects the world that’s been established. But I’m feeling a lot better about queerness and story than I used to.

I’m hoping that whatever comes moving forwards in culture in general it’ll have some thought put into it. I’m hoping that queerness and queer allegory and coding will be recognised more and more as important reads of text and will go into informing how something is made (Hannibal, Black Sails, Sense8, Pose). I’m just hoping this’ll mean some interesting, intelligent, wildly varied narratives.

Just very excited.

[arkania]

you know when the supernatural fandom is back on our bullshit when we have discourse about dean and bela being blonde or brunette on dean and cas’ one month wedding anniversary which just happens to be pi day

[mishastoesies]

Hair discourse (kinda): 5 & 7

5. Dean: dark blonde or brunette

1) he’s a brunette 2) i did NOT realize this was controversial!! he’s literally a brunette look at your screen. 

7. Abaddon: hot or just a redhead

listen im a lesbian with bad taste so i think she’s actually hot but like... hot in like a very basic way. the same way that instagram influencers are hot. 

[absinthedean]

I am once again trying to tell you that jensen ackles is ginger actually, try to tell me otherwise, fuck the blonde/brunette discourse, dean is a redheaded whore

[makeup-cas]

blonde vs. brunette discourse fascinating because my natural hair is pretty much exactly the same shade as dean and bela’s

[castiels-pussy]

for the supernatural discourse topics: 3. 4. 5. 7. 10. 19.& 20 :)

ooh ty!

3. Cas' trenchcoat: burn or keep

i think the first trenchcoat was good but after that he shouldve been allowed to wear cute sweaters. like changing out the coat couldve been such a cool symbol for how cas’ body is becoming more his own as he drops the trenchcoat in s9. so yeah keep the first one but BURN the s10-11 one it did nothing for him

4. Human!Cas endgame or angel!Cas endgame

HUMAN CAS HUMAN CAS HUMAN CAS it makes sooooo much sense! i cant believe it didnt happen! 

5. Dean: dark blonde or brunette

i mean realistically he is a brunette but im so attached to the idea of dark blonde dean i pretend i do not see it

7. Abaddon: hot or just a redhead

i mean she IS hot. as a character she doesn’t compel me but like. she is hot. 

10. Casifer: hot or not

i think misha went off with THEE most gay and homophobic portrayal of a character of all time give that man a glaad award give him two. but he is deeply unsettling to me i have to watch most of s11 through my fingers

19. If one "fuck" was allowed, who would be the one to say it

i think claire should be allowed to say fuck as many times as she wants

20. Last but not least: Why Lamp?

literally why lamp.... i just don’t know............