#i don't want this in the tracked tag lol i'll get rotten vegetables thrown at me

[thegeminisage]

I'm curious: in your personal reading of Cas as ace, do you also consider him another orientation (romantic or sexual)? For me personally, I consider him gay and ace, or sometimes gay-oriented aroace.

this is a good question actually lol. most of me wants to say that cas is gay and ace because he did canonically fall in love w/ another man and it means a lot to people to call him the gay angel even though i think he’s the ace angel so like gay ace is a v good compromise i think. ace angel handshake emoji gay angel you know!

however (unpopular opinion warning) i do have a little trouble with meg. with every other woman cas is around he either doesn’t have any chemistry (hannah, daphne), it’s CLEARLY a platonic relationship (kelly), or it’s clearly some kind of comphet weirdness (the orgies in 5.04, the reaper in s9 which also counts as rape in my book). w/ meg though his affection seemed both genuine and...i know but... ??? borderline romantic ??? hard to say. it definitely doesn’t negate or cancel out the obvious and canonical feelings he had for dean, but he liked her! he was dtf! in a way that was very different from his thing with the reaper in cursed season 9.

so like: ??? ace and gay and willing to bang a lady anyway maybe? like because when you’re ace you’re not physically attracted to ANYBODY, so it’s impossible to be physically attracted to whoever you’re banging - ace people have sex for other reasons - emotional intimacy, because it feels good, w/e. so he could have been ace and gay and still willing to nonromantically bang his lady friend just as a form of affection. “biromantic” def feels like the wrong label for cas, even if you slap a “demi-” in front of it - if anything, i’d call him unoriented. 

by unoriented i mean: i myself don’t use the split attraction model bc i don’t like it. that doesn’t mean i think it’s bad in general or bad for other people, it’s just not what i like. so when i say i’m asexual that’s the whole label. my romantic orientation isn’t “aro” or “gay” or “bi” or whatever it’s that i just don’t have one. subtle but distinct difference. so i could see something like that for cas, bc what is he there for if not to project on. he fell in love w/ dean because dean is dean (and in “like” w/ meg because meg is meg) and his orientation or lack thereof had nothing to do with it, you know?

this is NOT EVEN GETTING INTO the secret essay i have on how angel sexuality is totally different than human sexuality - because the taboo is to be attracted to humans, and gender has nothing to do with it - this is ALSO because angel gender is probably totally different than human gender, and human gender is totally fucking made up anyway - male seahorses have the babies, you know? it’s not that defining sexuality and gender is bad (labels are good because they help people be comfortable with themselves and find other people with similar experiences!) but we put the label on the experience, we don’t try to make the experience fit the label.

anyway, the point of all this to say that sexuality is weird and complicated (even moreso when you’re talking about the aro and ace spectrum, even MORE SO when you remember that the way we classify it seems to be somewhat arbitrarily based on gender, which again is kind of a fake concept that we made up), and it seems a liiiittle pointless to try and like, qualify cas’s romantic orientation when the sum total of his romantic feelings (except for MAYBE the .1% of genuine connection he had w/ meg) are just wholly devoted to and laser-focused on dean. like, CANONICALLY, castiel loves dean winchester to the total exclusion of other people. what else really matters, yk

that said, dean happens to be male and cas happens to be in a male vessel, so yes, technically the factual thing to say is that he’s gay and ace because that fits canon, it makes the people who him being gay has meaning for happy, and it also keeps exclusionists on tumblr from calling you homophobic. (apparently headcanoning a gay character as being aspec is homophobic even though the two are not at all mutually exclusive and being aspec isn’t code for being straight because aces ARE queer?? bro don’t even get me started lol)

sorry anon this answer got way longer than intended! but yeah i do think cas is queer like twice over - firstly because he loves a human (angel queer), and secondly because he loves one of his own gender (human queer). you might also say he’s some kind of genderqueer too based on your interpretation of angel genders (???) vs the gender cas became when he decided to stick around in jimmy (male, ostensibly, but many other headcanons work for that too). he’s like queer squared. and i love him. my rainbow angel <3

[spn masterpost]