#to 1.) queercode dean (and cas) but a LOT dean and 2.) make destiel explicitly canon. market research HELLO

[angelsdean]

they literally had him dance with a lamp. A LAMP. when light fixtures have been symbolically used to represent angel halos thru out the show. when they could've just had dean dance with garth or some random anonymous lady or literally any other inanimate object. i can't find the original post but the dance is based off a scene from an old film and in it i think they use a broom or mop. but for dean they chose *lamp* !!!!!!!! these are deliberate choices that mean things dude !!!!! LAMP !!!!! [screams incoherently into pillow]

[sahrayliathefaelia]

on destiel, fandom, stories, and love

i initially discovered supernatural in september 2011, almost a decade ago. there wasn’t a whole lot in the way of queer representation then, and much of what did exist was sorely lacking. all i personally had at that point was glee, which would unfortunately become notorious for its complex queerphobia despite its verifiable rainbow of explicitly queer characters. so when i learned about supernatural and the mountains of homoerotic subtext that purportedly existed between two of its main characters on a quite literally cosmic level, i mainlined that shit so fast you would’ve thought i was actively dying of thirst. i started watching supernatural EXCLUSIVELY because of seeing destiel all over my dash. i clung to dean and cas--as individual queer characters and as a queer romantic relationship--like a life preserver. i didn't realize it fully then, but i was watching queer media history in the making. dean: a deeply traumatized, emotionally repressed, and faithless bisexual man with a heart of gold on fire; and cas: an immensely powerful, impossibly naive, eldritch gay angel without a soul but with ice blue grace in his veins, would genuinely fall in love with each other in the most epic of slow burn romances, against ALL fucking odds, defying narrative constraints both in-fiction and in the real world. i had never seen a love story (and it WAS a love story) told like theirs before, much less an inherently queer love story, unfolding over the course of more than a decade of television.

and this was entirely by accident! i cannot stress enough that the people making supernatural never ever intended for destiel to actually happen; they just kind of tripped and fell into it through a series of increasingly unfathomable circumstances, including the writer’s guild of america strike and misha collins’ general existence. once the supernatural creators realized that this baton had dropped from the sky and into their hands and they actually started trying to run with it, they ended up writing a truly UNBELIEVABLE amount of text and subtext between dean and cas that oops, became so intrinsically interwoven with the larger narrative, it stopped being queerbaiting and unintentionally veered into queercoding before barrelling straight into: oh shit, i guess we’re actually doing this thing now. yes, supernatural inadvertently stumbled into the greatest love story ever told by pure fucking chance. and boy howdy, their sheer ineptitude in handling this story with the care and nuance it so richly deserved was astoundingly astronomical.

we were viciously and maliciously queerbaited with destiel for TWELVE ENTIRE YEARS, straight up fuckin gaslit for more than a decade by the proverbial powers that be, who told us time and time again that we were somehow delusional for deigning to read dean and cas’ relationship as romantic, when THEY were the ones repeatedly writing their dynamic with undeniably romantic overtones DIRECTLY IN THE TEXT. i was deep in the supernatural fandom for just over two years, but i eventually jumped ship in october 2013, a handful of episodes into season 9 airing, because by that point i KNEW i was bisexual, and i KNEW that queer fans of supernatural who saw destiel for what it was were being deliberately lied to and manipulated, and i’d had enough. up until november 5th, 20 fucking 20, i hadn't been anywhere NEAR supernatural. if i were to time travel to october 2013 and tell my 21-year-old self that in ten years 1) destiel would become canon the same night that donald fuckening trump would be voted out of office as president of the united states of america, and 2) i would become so hyperfixated on supernatural again in the ensuing months that i would experience an unprecedented creativity renaissance and be more active in fandom than ever before, i would’ve punched me in the fucking face. the fact that i’m writing this post at all is utterly bonkers. and yet, here we are.

it’s hilariously astounding to me how the supernatural bigwigs are STILL doing their damndest to gaslight fans into believing that destiel never existed, placing literal actual fucking gag orders on their actors which prevent them from being able to talk about their characters or destiel in any meaningful way that acknowledges what happened in their own show. THEIR OWN FUCKING SHOW. when like. they did that. THEY did. them. they planned, wrote, filmed, and aired that. fucking.

ANYWAY.

twelve years later, destiel is canon. homophobically, but like, it happened. and no matter how vehemently the powers that be are trying to sweep it under the rug, it HAPPENED.

the best, most beautiful thing to take away from all of this, is that destiel (and everything else that was great about supernatural) has always transcended the limitations of the established narrative and created its own unique narrative, and that narrative has always belonged to supernatural fans, particularly so now that the show is over. destiel belongs to us. we know that dean and cas are very much alive and well and happy together, and so are the rest of their family and friends, as they all deserved to be. we’ve come together to take charge of the narrative and tell the story of supernatural as it was meant to be told: with love. because, at its core, that is what supernatural is truly about. after all, love is stronger than death.

[mittensmorgul]

1/2 I think the endgame issue is so difficult because the feelings about it often come from two different mindsets. People want to see what a relationship would look like between Dean and Cas, but also see a same sex couple represented. Also, people are gun-shy from past experiences where there's been the same kind of subtextual story only for there to be no resolution or confirmation. Or just flat out queerbaiting. People are tired of largely subtextual queer relationships.

2/2 This is taking destiel to a very general, bigger, more complicated conversation about queer representation and media. But on a smaller scale, focusing just on SPN, the show is just going by the formula and format they want to go by. Why are they waiting until endgame? Because they just are. Yet it's often spoken about on that larger scale when the actual issue is about SPN specifically and how they're choosing to do this. It's not always about grander scale, sometimes it's individual.(same anon) Not that i'm invalidating the people who's issues about destiel revolve around the much weightier "queer representation in media" thing. It's just that sometimes you gotta look at the specific, individual show and what it's doing and not necessarily "it's doing the same things those other shows did so it must mean (whatever)." It's tough. And we just don't know and won't know until we know.

Hi there, first off. :D And yeah, it is one of those “zoomed into the specific context of this one show and how they’re telling this story” versus the “zoomed all the way out to a very specific issue in the larger scope of media representation.” The frustrating thing is when the two are conflated specifically for the purposes of generating wank about one specific show and how they are seemingly progressing toward what could potentially be an unprecedented and absolutely unique sort of representation that’s practically impossible to even begin in this exact way in this day and age.

A while back (and I can’t remember who wrote it, so apologies...) I read a spectacular assessment of this exact situation. When Supernatural began, nearly thirteen years ago, the environment was very, very different from how it is today. The way queer stories were told in general was very, very different. Hollywood was only barely beginning the shift away from clinging to the Hays Code with regard to how non-straight characters and relationships were handled on tv, and we were only about seven years post-Ellen coming out (which essentially ended up sinking her sitcom). Queer characters were almost universally tragic characters, and they didn’t get happy endings, if they could even be portrayed as canonically queer and not only subtextually so.

And when Supernatural started, even in 2005 it was very much rooted in themes of the past-- everything from the ‘67 Impala to classic rock to the Winchester Brothers living in the eternal shadow of the tragedy that had touched their family in 1983. The entire concept of “Star Wars in truckstop America” evokes a very specific and gritty flavor of the past. This is what the show was built on-- classic horror tropes and uncovering the truth about urban legends and monsters. Even the “On The Road” references from Dean and Sam’s names to the concept of Sam’s “magical qualities” being paralleled to Dean’s more subtle queercoding right from the pilot episode have long been meta’d into the ground.

The thing is, Supernatural has now been running long enough for the general media culture to have made substantial inroads into progressively more honest queer representation. At any point, Supernatural could’ve made a genuine leap into canonizing Dean’s sexuality as something other than perfectly heterodudebro straight. Because if that’s what the subtext has actually been implying all these years (which from the pov of “queer reading” and “queercoding” of the past-- again, see the Hays Code-- it’s obvious they have been), then why are they hesitating in this modern era where shows are not only actively portraying queer characters more and more frequently, but are receiving critical acclaim and public praise for doing so? I mean, it sounds logical that if they actually intended to “take the story there,” then they should just go ahead and make it so. Right?

But for a show like Supernatural, that’s rooted in this “old school” format, and a narrative consistently told through that same lens, with the same applicable tropes, and the same genre conventions regarding queerness and horror that it was built on back in 2005, this would literally defy the integrity of the narrative.

And therein lies the frustration. This is why people shout queerbaiting. This is why people have quit the show in frustration of feeling like if they really intended to go there, there’s very little reason to hold back at this point.

Well, except for Authorial Integrity.

That’s a big one.

It’s also one I’d hate for the show to compromise on. Because pulling out core subtextual character traits after thirteen years of consistently yet very slowly dragging them into the light, and making them fully textual before the run up to the series end would absolutely compromise the entire structure of the narrative.

As a viewer and a queer person, yes I would LOVE to see a textualization of Dean’s queerness as a “coming out later in life” and “it’s never too late to openly acknowledge who you really are” narrative, because that would be incredibly powerful at this point. The fact that I am actively seeing this happen (albeit in glacial slow motion compared to how it might happen in more “modernly rooted” shows where characters are often textually queer from the word go) and happening within the same narrative conventions that Supernatural has always been written within is more than enough to sustain my interest for now.

I sincerely HOPE that the show will eventually “do the right thing” with this subtext. I HOPE that the eventual endgame will finally textualize this, but it is literally the endgame goal of this series. I don’t know how else to explain that even while newer series will have characters come out and then just carry on under this “new normal” for the character, this is something so completely rooted into Dean’s “endgame character goals” that at this point to make it textual would bring far too much of his own core character development to a premature conclusion.

In writing, when you create a character, you start out by asking questions:

Who is this person?

What essential traits make him who he is?

What does he fear?

What does he love?

What does he hope for?

What is the source of his happiness?

How can I keep him from achieving his goals in a believable way?

How does he hobble himself from achieving his own goals?

What is his ultimate endgame goal?

In tv writing, this is part of what’s known as the “Show Bible,” or the guide to characterization so that the characters and plots and general narrative structure of the series can remain consistent from writer to writer. That’s why we have consistently seen Dean progress from where he was in s1 to where he is now. He’s clearly become more and more comfortable with himself, more and more open about things he loves (think “no chick flick moments” in 1.01 and “you love chick flicks-- yeah I do” in 11.23). But they aren’t going to bring his character’s Major Personal Arc to fruition when the show is still being written without a concrete endpoint in place.

Because that’s being true and honest to the narrative structure and character development of both the genre of the show (classic horror) and the evolution of media in general since Supernatural began.

I know not everyone is comfortable watching the show continue as it always has with no guarantee of paying off more than a decade worth of subtext. Not everyone is willing to remain emotionally invested in a show that may eventually end on a huge queerbaity rug pull. But there’s an increasingly real chance that it won’t, either. I mean... if you can maintain expectations and understand there’s always a potential for disappointment in the end, it’s a lot easier to enjoy the story as it unfolds.

For other folks it’s probably easier to wait and see how everything turns out before emotionally committing to the show, and that’s fine too.

But I’m really tired of the blatantly unfair comparison of Supernatural-- a 13-year-old show being told through the conventions of the traditional horror genre that’s maintained a consistent narrative for thirteen years regarding the character development arcs and the specific way they’ve been telling this story this entire time-- and brand new shows that can essentially set up entirely different characters and write from a different baseline from the start, where a character’s sexual orientation hasn’t been sculpted into what has always been connected with the closing of that character’s narrative arc.

Yes, technically Supernatural could defy genre, defy their own storytelling, and explicitly make this textual right away, but that’s like... the dictionary definition of jumping the shark in this specific case. And that’s not something I want for Supernatural, or for Dean, or for Destiel.