#i love that moffat got to s9 and just said fuck it

[warlenys]

4.5 billion is so excessive. i love how excessive it is. if it was 4.5 million we’d be like fucking hell man that is crazy crazy love but 4.5 billion?? Billion????? BILLION??????? for no reason. insane

[awed-frog]

Hi! I've just gotten back into the fandom after a few years break. I've watched SPN since it aired in 2005, but I've left four times, each time for at least a year, because I keep feeling like we're being queerbaited w/Destiel and it really upsets me. In short, I feel like investing so much time, and so many emotions, into this pairing is a waste of time because it will only leave me disappointed in the end. So my question for you is, what keeps you positive enough about this pairing to stay?

Hey, sorry for getting back to you so late. I wrote and erased several answers to this, because, I don’t know, on some days I was trying to be clever and go all meta-stuff but it always sounded pretentious and stupid, and then on other days I felt dramatic and angry and got all upset and it would generally read as too much or not nearly enough, so. And today I really think I left this unanswered for way too long and that if you asked me, then you wanted my opinion on the matter and this is what I should be trying to do - just to say what i think, without too many frills.

So, first of all - I’m a weird person, and sometimes I get too worked up about stuff, and I obsess a lot, and thank God I’ve got people in my life who keep me grounded and remind me about what really matters. And the truth is, Supernatural doesn’t. It’s a good show, and we all love it, and sure, like all popular works of fiction it probably changed someone’s mind and had an impact on someone’s life, but at the end of the day, you come first. As I said, I had periods in my life where I was putting too much energy on the wrong things, and a TV show is definitely the wrong thing, especially if it leaves you frustrated and upset and angry. I say this with a lot of respect, because I know we all love Supernatural and everything, but let’s be honest - it’s a TV show. It’s not real. If it makes you cry for the wrong reasons, get away from it and good riddance. What truly matters in this life is to find a way to love yourself and to be there for other people - to be kind, and to be strong, and to maybe make our world a little better. So if a story helps you do that, embrace it; and if it doesn’t, let it go. It’s just a story.

For me, personally, I had a very emotional time with Destiel (you can read about it here), because I felt cheated and let down and pretty much what you describe - I knew I’d invested so much of myself in the show, and that they’d let me down for stupid reasons. And it was really bleak for a while, so I get where you’re coming from. Back in S9, I spent many days feeling listless and depressed, and quite a few nights ranting and raging and even crying about it, and when I snapped out of it I realized that sure, they were being cunts and cheaters but there was something wrong with me, as well - because, as I just told you, it’s just a show, and it shouldn’t have dominated my feelings in such a way. So I tried to be objective and rational and I thought about it and I realized it was a bunch of things - I was stressed in school, and my grandparents were sick - all I’d wanted was to take a big step back from reality and as a result I’d fallen too deep into the show and that’s why when it let me down, it really felt like a physical blow. And since not getting lost in fiction, my own or other people’s, is not an option for me, I’m learning to deal with real life stuff better so I can tell apart what really matters from what doesn’t. I know I’ve made some progress there because I was really invested in Sherlock and Johnlock, and yet after the series finale I was - normal. I was upset and angry, of course, because it sucked balls, but it didn’t ruin my whole week or anything. My general mood was more a sort of, It’s not real and I can’t change it, so fuck them. 

(I think this is what happens with everything, by the way - most sport fans get so invested in their teams because it’s a sort of victory by proxy and it compensates for those things that are wrong in their lives. So, really - I don’t know you, and I don’t want to tell anyone how they should live their lives, but if this kind of ‘external’ things such as TV shows and movies make you so unhappy, my advice is to get to know yourself and understand why you feel that way. If there is something in your own life you’re not dealing with, the best thing is really to try and be brave and go at it head-on, because life is unfair and bad feelings and bad situations - that’s not something that goes away on its own. And it’s your life - you deserve to live it fully.)

So now - now there are shows I watch because I think they’re objectively outstanding, like Westworld, and there are shows I watch as a guilty pleasure and I’m mostly rolling my eyes at the screen but who knows, maybe it’s healthy to cry once a week so whatever (yeah, I’m a Grey’s Anatomy aficionado), and then there’s Supernatural, which is neither. I guess the reason I keep watching is because most of it is well-written, even if I dislike the fact they clearly have no idea as to where they’re going and what the whole thing even means, and I keep watching because I love the characters, and I keep watching because I met a lot of nice people in the fandom and writing about the show is helping me to get better as a writer (I think). The truth is, I’m an unusual Destiel shipper (if there’s such thing as a regular Destiel shipper, that is), because I’m not that interested in romance and even representation - well, it’s very important and stories should be more inclusive, but a good story can work even without being PC, in my opinion (take Reservoir Dogs, for instance). So what I resent the most in this situation is that they got me to care - they clearly wrote the story one way - and then they made me feel like there was something wrong with me for seeing what I was seeing. This is textbook abusive behaviour, and the fact it was targeted directly at the gay community (because, on the whole, they’re more likely to pick up on subtextual clues about sexuality) made it even more horrifying and wrong. 

That said, I don’t think there was a malicious intent there. I’m sure they knew what they were doing, because that’s their job, after all, but they all seem to be pretty decent people, so it’s not clear if they did not realize how significant a love story between Dean and Cas would be, or how attentive their own fandom was - I simply don’t know. Maybe they were going for some old-fashioned ‘alas, that it shall never be’ nonsense - back in the day, it happened very often that you were left with the feeling of things unsaid and you never knew if you were right or not, and also you mostly forgot about it because real-time fangirling over stuff wasn’t a thing. In a way, that’s also what happened with Sherlock, which became a worldwide phenomenon because of the fandom, something Moffat and Gatiss acknowledged without never realizing, apparently, the full implications of.

I think that, to an extent, we’ve always lived in a world of lies and deceit, and that’s just human nature; but as far as I can tell, the spreading of capitalism and consumer culture, on the one hand, and that of democratic societies, on the other, elevated the importance of honesty to a whole other plane. Corporations lie to us as a matter of fact - all advertisement is a lie, after all - and politicians also mostly lie, both to us and to themselves. This was always bound to have disastrous consequences, which we are now starting to witness. For this reason, mostly, I think it’s more important than ever that artists are honest about the stories they tell - they can talk about anything, of course, and decide which kind of story they want to create, but they should stay true to it. I sometimes feel that, like other important concepts, such as freedom of expression, the idea that a story is its reader’s, and not its creator’s, is sometimes perverted beyond recognition. To say that the story belongs to its readers means that we all come to the story with our own experiences, and that we all get from it what we choose to get, to some extent; this is, perhaps, some form of cognitive bias (we see the world as we are, and not as it is: that sort of thing), and a good writer will create a story that is deep enough all of us can recognize ourselves in a part of it. But some modern creators, like current politicians, intend the concept in a very different way. Their method is to deliberately appeal to everyone in order to get money or votes, and they forget, or pretend to ignore, that in so doing they are bound to deceive a significant part of those who believed in them. Just as the centrism in politics is an illusion, a story which tries to make everyone happy is plain dishonest. When push comes to shove, Dean and Cas are either in love or they aren’t, and it’s not my job as a viewer to guess what they really feel - it’s the show’s creators job to tell me.

So, you know - you ask how I stay positive enough to keep watching the show - it sounds weird, since I write metas every week and I write Destiel fanfiction and everything, but personally, I’m trying not to think about Destiel at all. For me, it is real, in the sense that I still see it in the story, but I think that for a variety of reasons, there will be no steady love stories on Supernatural until the very last season. My hope is that, since a convincing gay story is harder to write than a straight one (because, apparently, many people are still unaware of the fact gay people are a thing at all), the Destiel subtext will get stronger quite soon(ish) if Destiel is indeed endgame. I mean, you see it very clearly from that whole Saileen business - in Sam’s case, two episodes are plenty enough to build a believable love story and make us root for Sam and Eileen and daydream about their darling little house and their fluffy future dogs, but, again, when it comes to gay couples - even if Dean and Cas do get together in the very last episode or something, you need to build that up quite openly and not too late, or it will feel forced to a casual viewer. As I said, I try not to think too much about it because there are a lot of ifs, but - if Supernatural has an end date in sight, if this is a coming of age narrative and not a tragedy, if nothing messy happens IRL - then I think that yes, we still have a chance for Destiel to happen textually. That dreadful Sherlock ending, after all, and mostly the outraged and angry response from both critics and the fandom, should serve as a warning to Dabb and his team: planning to go big and then not going big doesn’t endear you to anyone, because people’s hearts are wild, unpredictable, irrational and beautiful things, and even Hotelling’s law has its limits.