You didn't ship Destiel until S13!? That really took me by surprise! In that case, thank you for defending the ship even if you didn't ship it, that's really nice and your meta made it easier to deal with the antis. And welcome to the Destiel side of the force! :)
Yeah, several people -- @dotthings off the top of my head, I really donโt remember who else -- literally witnessed the screaming fall into the dumpster.
Again, I really donโt know if I still consider what I do ~shipping.~ I have no specific demands for how their relationship continues from here, I just acknowledge it within the work. The difference that hit in S13 was welcoming that content instead of guarding myself against it because we got slammed with several consecutive bookends that completed an entire romantic arc and punctuated it with a far more impacting mirror of an endgame that didnโt even have said romantic arc to begin with, in Swan Song, so like??? what am I supposed to do? Just ignore it? Act like I canโt understand what just happened in front of me?
To put some perspective, Iโve been running SPN games for... a while. My most recent one was on a discord server thatโs niche, but my prior one was on a giant multifandom server. I covered for Cas to keep his power levels in check to the story balance without like, making the humans irrelevant. My Dean at the time was hardcore shipping trash. His name was Chris, he was a bisexual dude in Chile, psychologist, good dude. But like??? it deadass annoyed me? How up Casโ ass his writing was? The shippers that came in actually kinda annoyed me with trying to matchmaker them in game??? Like. I saw it, but I guess itโs the oldย โThatโs not what the show is aboutโ (which unlike how fandom whips it around, doesnโt mean it canโt exist at all, itโs the obsessive tunnel visioned focus that pissed me off because it kept railroading scenes)
But despite that, during and before it, I was yeah, defending it. Just because I wasnโt an active ~shipper~ didnโt mean I was cool with people stomping on people for very reasonably seeing the stuff my last post mentioned. I just kinda kept myself from investing because I know this old media song and dance too well and didnโt expect it to break, say, S10 levels. And then 11 happened. And then 12. And then--
Because no matter what this fandom says, Castielโs alien mystified staring at Dean, while great chemistry in old seasons, does not actually compare to things like frequent lunch dates, need and love yous, mixtapes, Eileen being Samโs Cas in 15.09 and so on. In the actual, not-head-up-ass-about-old-rewritten-content-metaโed-15-times-over often fused to really bad hot takes on what people call queer coding. But I could respect that, say, the ramifications of swapping Cas and Anna roles to keep Misha around while Julie was bouncing out and getting uncomfortable naturally landed Cas in the heroโs journey goddess role, ala princess Leia if you will, the distressing warrior nondamsel rebelling against the empire and whatnot. But that doesnโt start or end at star wars, thatโs thousands of years of human writing.
So while yes, the show heavily stripped the actual content that would have traditionally structured it romantic, people like seeing that x their chemistry early on-- not crazy.
And I defended it for years /to my wife/ despite my server vexations. On this giant dozens-of-thousands-of-users multifandom server not connected to any core fandom spaces and hosting innumerable fandoms and walks of life, I was the oddball out -- me. As a nonshipper annoyed by the crowd, often having 20-30 people logged into my channel at a time playing everything from early Cain to Benny to TFW to Wayward to *throws dart at board* whatever, of the hundreds of names that drifted through the game in sum (including player rotations, OCs and audience that just came to watch/read like a fic), you know how many antis we had?
Three.
One was my wife. so removing her, two.
Do you know how many shippers there were?ย
Yeah neither do I, just,ย โpretty much all of them.โ a few hung inย โsee it, donโt care, moderately annoyedโ like I did. But this idea that the GA is a bunch of het-guzzling bozos that canโt do the same basic math all of you fucking did before you got here, just because some other dead-ass irrelevant ship composed entirely on leftfield interpretations to validate niche fandom ships -- that shitโs so far fucking divorced from goddamn reality.
As for my wife, yes. She was an anti. In fact long before I wandered into fandom social media (I think I actually jumped in around S12 bc I saw Dabb taking over and Bobo getting promoted and was interested in Yockey-- Yockey was the first person I tweeted at), I was on these servers, running these games, having these ARGUMENTS with my wife to be quite honest, because like, look, I get it, Destiel fandom can be weird and needy and over the top but theyโre not crazy for what they see out of it. By Carver era it was classic subtext.
But she had followed Winbros for years not realizing itโs literally run by the real world becky and her BFFs that have tasteful POVs likeย โMisha Collins is cancerโย โDabb is a diseaseโ and whatever else on their personals that proxy through their posts and motivations. She attended it on Facebook, which is THE goddamn conservative magafarm asshole platform and yeah, read a lot of shitty arguments. Yes, she picked up sayings likeย โit ruins the showโ. Yes, she hated it. No, that didnโt mean I felt anyone deserved more than mild frustration for their behaviors at the time just because they were stuck in fanfic-shipping-fiction-over-romanticised-land and not canon-divergent-show-genre-complex-interpersonal-relationships fiction.ย
She, too, cracked about the same time I did. I was more receptive sure, I saw it more sure, but after a mix of addressing some personal problems, making an OC that completely changed how her perception filtered Dean and Castiel working together, whatever-- and yes, 12.19->13.5. The night of 13.5, the final shot, as the screen went dark, she stared over her phone and, with tonal distaste, saidย โOh. So theyโre going there.โ
Yes, itโs that fucking obvious. No, she didnโt admit thatโs what did her in. Not until the end of the season, when she admitted she had been bullshitting arguments since early season 13 because, literally, and I quote,ย โotherwise Min wins.โ -- which, if that comes by way of my own wife, I can only stare into the fandom camera at other people that have turned this show into a decade long money sink and have been divorced from the actual canon path for like minimum 3 years, maybe 6, yelling about it being wrong all the time, etc. Because on the internet, people convince themselves they have ownership and power, that their opinion of what the piece should be overrides even the creators, et cetera. Yeah. Thereโs a lot of disingenuous horse shit.
TLDR my wife fell into the dumpster and, as the flag of the end of our weird spats, and a birthday present, I made her this, since she IDs as Dean (OLD vid, has hiccup issues newer ones donโt)
So, yup, dat me.
To this day I still donโt read fanfics or browse fanart or any of that. Iโve never cared about that face of the fandom. Iโve never cared about making up rando ships, Iโve never cared about exactly how any given relationship plays itself out, I just enjoy the ride and address it as it does indeed play out. Most shipping culture still pisses me the fuck off with its dialogue, as Iโve made very clear. But because Iโm acknowledging the text instead of denying what keeps happening more centrally and critically every year on screen, Iโd be called a shipper. Because Iโm tired of watching people spew logic even most children could pick apart in an endless roundabout of negativity, because I have no tolerance for absolute horse shit and fandom whining so I just lay out counters to bad talking points, Iโd be called a shipper.
But 13.5ish is when I finally let myself start emotionally receiving the content rather than barring it off in a distant wall of exhausted old gay that knows their media too well. Why? Because it already completed and went above and beyond every element of the original way they painted the original goddamn endgame and I guess because I wonโt set unfair bars against queer relationships and set them at Extra Hard Difficulty, Iโm a shipper. IDK. This fandom fucking exhausts me. Fandom culture in general exhausts me.
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