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littlewetbeast · 3 years

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you know... sometimes i think i've got jackles figured out, i think i've nailed down why he's so inconsistent about destiel, why he acts so weird about it sometimes and other times not. then some information is flung at me and it's back to square one. why is that man so insane. he just genuinely confuses me.

aw man. this shit is like catnip to my overactive, over-analytical brain.

okay. listen. i’m not gonna lie: the more i try to understand the goings-on behind spn with any degree of nuance, the more my head threatens to melt. HOWEVER. while i joke about jensen ackles being an enigma, i don’t... actually think he is.

[disclaimer: the following points include speculation. i don’t know these people and will never claim to. this is just my take on it. never bring this up to the actors in question.]

the quick and dirty: i believe jensen is likely queer himself. i believe that he strongly identifies with dean, that he feeds off of the environment around him, and that how he feels he can act around destiel and dean’s sexuality depends on 1) his support network, 2) the immediate social environment, and 3) his work environment, all of which have evolved throughout the years BUT can also vary day to day. increased confidence and securer social environment has helped him decrease the need to perform and lessens the likelihood of acting out from insecurity, but doesn’t completely eliminate it. point is: the environment matters. the more insecure you are, the more it will affect your behaviour.

that’s it. not trying to excuse any shitty behaviour, just saying that’s what it is.

the NOT so quick and dirty: so - my point is, as a queer guy in this industry, he has obviously learned to put up a front to protect himself. (even misha does this to some extent!) it’s douchey, and it’s stupid, but i understand it. think of the drastic difference of how he behaves around misha vs j*red, or even in a large group setting. i’m not saying he’s not friends with j*red, but i DO immediately see the difference of ‘front switched on’ and ‘front switched off’.

firstly - just because jensen has matured a lot over the past 15 years and is far more relaxed about himself today than he was back then, doesn’t mean he can’t still have moments of uncertainty that can occasionally push him back to his old, bad habits. basically, for someone who has grown up in a toxic heteronormative environment (being taught by his dad that drinking through straws was gay) - and in an industry that is very unfriendly to queerness and queer narratives until VERY recently (and even now is still pretty toxic) - utilizing his stupid douchey dudebro front during moments of anxiety has probably been his go-to coping method for the majority of his life.

secondly - we all know he’s insanely close to dean as a character. dean is a part of him. he slips in and out of character effortlessly. he cares about dean and dean’s happiness. but dean was never intended to be a queer character. jensen has played queer characters before, but that’s the difference - he is ‘playing’ a queer character. he wasn’t supposed to be ‘playing’ dean as a queer character. readings of dean as queer makes, well. readings of him as queer. that’s it. for someone who puts up such a front, i can imagine he’d be shitting himself at people picking this up from him when he’s NOT in a supportive environment for it. (yes the ‘jackles acting choices’ are a Thing, but they most likely happened within more supportive environments and during times of confidence - and, let’s face it, i think sometimes jacting choices just naturally bleed in because he’s a good actor who makes good intuitive acting choices. that was likely the primary reason for it, especially early on.)

basically - queer readings of dean are taken as queer readings of him. therefore, his reaction to destiel has also varied depending on the environment and his work circumstances. think of there being like... a constantly shifting scale of how supportive his social environment and work environment are of queer readings of the character he plays. the further back we go, the less supportive all of these factors are; the closer to the present, the more supportive these factors are.

“but rosa! why hasn’t he just shrugged and said it’s up to audience interpretation what dean’s sexuality is, like he has recently?”

because of *points to all of the above*.

let’s illustrate what i mean.

exhibit A) it’s fairly early days of “destiel”, maybe season 6 or so. an audience member brings up dean’s reaction to dr sexy and asks why he can react like this yet destiel is not possible. jensen says dismissively because “destiel doesn’t exist” and that dean is simply a fan of the show, to an audience that cheers.

(work environment (spn): not supportive. immediate environment (audience): not supportive. social environment (j*red): less supportive*.) *I am not claiming j*red is homophobic; however, jensen HAS felt the need to perform around him aside from the last 1-2 years.

exhibit B) it’s 2019. jensen gets straddled by misha on stage and gets a [redacted] which j*red notices and covertly jokes about in front of a large audience. he visibly becomes upset and is in a vulnerable state. misha points out a ‘destiel is real’ t-shirt (the very fact that misha did this suggests he’s far more used to a jensen who is relaxed and supportive). jensen gets defensive and asks ‘where is destiel real?’

(work environment (spn): uncertain. immediate environment (audience): uncertain. social environment (j*red and misha): mixed*.) *do i think jensen would have reacted 10x better if j*red had not been there? yes. yes, i do. do i think he would he have reacted better if he hadn’t had a [redacted] that j*red made fun of? yes. yes, i do.

exhibit C) it’s 2019. jensen and j*red are in front of an audience which, given today’s times, are likely more used to queer narratives. it’s highly possible the queer storyline for cas has been confirmed at this point. jensen is calm and in control, and is not feeling the need to act up his front. someone brings up ‘samstiel’ and j*red gags. jensen, unprompted, shows support for destiel.

(work environment (spn): given the timing, likely supportive. immediate environment (audience): likely supportive. social environment: (at home) supportive, j*red: supportive or mixed.)

we know that he has progressively felt less of a need to use his ‘front’ and has become more relaxed over the years, which i believe is likely hugely due to the positive influences of danneel and misha (and maybe others). i don’t think that has been the case for ONLY the last two years. i think jensen during exhibit B was miles away from jensen in exhibit A. jensen is not miles away between exhibit B and exhibit C. those two are differences of environments where he feels confident, in control, and is supported by the narrative he’s meant to play (C), vs an environment he felt less supported and less in control of (B). i won’t get into it in depth here, but it’s worth noting that the past ten years have also seen huge changes in fandom culture, how actors and fandom interact, and how the film industry and corporations at large handle queer narrative and fans. that certainly affects this dynamic.

and that’s it, really. jensen is a sensitive person who feeds heavily off the people and environments he’s in. he’s matured a lot over the years and i truly don’t think it’s a stretch to say that, in environments that would have supported it, he likely has been very positive about queer narratives in spn. source: his stark difference around misha, his willingness to flirt and joke about dean and cas with him, his occasional calmer and balanced reactions to destiel in more private settings.

aaand that’s how i see it, really. even if you don’t subscribe to truthing - or even jensen being queer - all of these things apply just as strongly to men who feel the need to perform. what can i say, toxic masculinity and homophobia sucks a lot and i’m glad society is shifting slowly in the right direction, and that jensen feels safer and more secure than he once did. shame the cw is unwilling to get with the times. EDIT: for some additional, vital context, i refer you to these two additional posts, which cover his upbringing, how speculations about his sexuality has hounded him his whole career, and his first intro to shipping on supernatural being j2/wincest, which included some real ugly shit.

#ask #rosa answers #analysis #jensen ackles #destiel #deancas #jenmish #cockles #gunshots #i am terminally incapable of giving short answers!!! sorry!!!!#YES i can and WILL indulge in speculations around dumb celebrities within the safety and comfort of my tumblr nest

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orionsangel86 · 4 years

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I’ve been thinking a LOT this morning about this comparison that keeps getting drawn between what meta writers are saying now about 15x20 and Destiel and the JohnLock Conspiracy(TM) and aside from just linking you all back to THIS POST by @winchestersingerautorepair which explains it all perfectly anyway, I do feel the need to stress some very clear and very glaringly different points that basically prove outright that this situation is Not That.

1. We already have confirmed Canon Destiel. The romantic feelings are confirmed in text. Destiel is canon. Arguably currently textually unrequited canon (yeah right) but it IS canon. It’s also Word of God canon. Basically, where we currently are is actually more canon than even Aziraphale and Crowley ever were. You can NOT say the same for JohnLock.

2. The JohnLock Conspiracy was all about how the actual final episode of the show was a “fake” bad finale, and how they would release a secret finale which would fix everything and make JohnLock canon a few weeks later. There was zero actual evidence of this anywhere. (Sorry JohnLock shippers, I feel for you I really do, but I just couldn’t ever see any evidence that the secret good finale was ever gonna happen.)

In contrast, we haven’t seen the Supernatural finale yet. It actually is next week. This is FACT. 15x20 is not a figment of Destiel shippers imaginations. We really do have one episode left which hopefully will give us everything we wish for.

3. All of this comparison has come out of meta writers saying 15x19 was written like a finale. We are calling it a finale and that’s why for some reason we are being mocked and compared to the JohnLock conspiracy... but... did those people who mock us not watch 15x19?!? (or at least get a plot summary and watch the final 10 minutes like me).

I can’t speak for my own opinion on the episode being bad, as I haven’t watched it. I have seen reactions both saying it was bad, and others saying it was good, or funny, or “so bad it’s good” but like, whatever. The point is, it WAS a finale. It was the episode that wrapped up the mytharc plot, had a callback montage to brother best moments and had them driving off into the sunset together now they are finally free. Like??? Call it whatever you want, but that was a finale.

Which is WHHHYYYY its SO WEIRD that there is still one episode left. What could POSSIBLY BE OUTSTANDING?

4. So yes. the FACTS are that UNLIKE Sherlock, Supernatural DOES have two finales. This isn’t some conspiracy. It’s a fact. We can joke that 15x19 was the “bronly” finale, but however you wanna see it, that was a finale. 15x20 can only be the long epilogue. The episode that wraps up the entire show. The episode JohnLock shippers dreamed about.

I really don’t mean to rub salt in the wound either. I don’t wanna insult anyone who believed in the conspiracy at the time, because hope is a funny thing that can have devastating effects - believe me, I know. But mocking us and trying to say the two are the same thing is just... wrong.

We don’t know how 15x20 will play out. But we do know the following FACTS:

Chuck is defeated. The big bad is gone.

There are no raised stakes anymore

the brothers are free (textually they confirmed this)

Jack as the new God, has fulfilled Castiel’s prophecy that he would bring about peace and balance to the universe. It’s done.

There is no story left concerning any of these big plot points.

BUT

Castiel is still in the Empty

Sam didn’t reunite with Eileen

Dean hasn’t said a damn thing about Castiel’s textually explicity confession of homosexual love for him

These are literally the ONLY things left to wrap up. There is NO WAY that the finale is going to be just a brothers road trip, growing old together, meeting random women, having kids and saying “Castiel Adam Jack Winchester you are named after the bravest men I know” kind of ending! It would be UNTHINKABLE for Dabb to do that.

I am seriously rubbing my temples on this whole thing because there are still so many naysayers that are pissing me off - particularly certain wannabe SPN writer BBFs who steal meta from Tumblr and pawn it off as their own “journalism” spewing crap all over Twitter about the matter because they have super secret insider knowledge from people who worked on the show that confirmed Misha isn’t back.

Oh Misha’s not back you say? Fuck you. Seriously. Fuck you. Everyone knows he went back to filming. He confirmed it himself over and over again until the CW finally panicked and told him to shut his damn mouth and change his story. These are the same people who have been feeding rumours into fandom for years to misdirect us. The same people who probably convinced KNOWN DESTIEL SHIPPER and SPN writer Meghan Fiztmartin to laugh at, deny, and mock Destiel shippers on Twitter literally only a few weeks before IT WENT CANON. They are doing everything in their power to put us off the scent. They don’t want us to know Cas is back because the ENTIRE ENDING RESTS ON CAS COMING BACK AND IF WE ALL KNEW IT WOULD BE SPOILED. DESTIEL IS THE ENDGAME THEY DON’T WANT SPOILED.

This is not anything like the JohnLock conspiracy because we have actual facts to back it up. We have all the evidence, we have all the logic, the narrative is BEGGING for the love story to be wrapped up. Dean MUST use his words and tell Castiel he loves him. Even the General Audience at this point can see that. So I beg you, stop mocking us for something you don’t know anything about.

If there is ONE THING you should trust right now. It’s the meta writers. We are the ones who have been telling you for YEARS that Destiel is a thing. That there was writer intent. Hell, we even predicted Jack would become God in the end (like seriously anyone with any understanding of literary analysis could see it was going that way). Mocking us after we have already been validated by canon confirmation of the DeanCas romance is just idiotic at this point.

#breaths #okay that became a rant #destiel #supernatural #spn endgame #15x20 #15x19 #the johnlock conspiracy #wank for ts #fucking twitter #im not even on it right now and im still getting drip fed

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winchestersingerautorepair · 5 years

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A Rift Between

A Brief(-ish) History of Dean, Cas, & Rifts

Let’s talk about rifts for a moment. And when I say rifts, I don’t mean their personal disagreements -- if I were to be discussing that, this post would be less of a brief history and more of a thesis paper.

No, I’m talking about rift rifts. As in, actual, literal tears in the spacetime continuum. They are littered across the whole run of this show, and we’ve recently had two whole seasons devoted to them. So, the sudden reappearance of rift-adjacent plotlines carries with it a weighty load of textual relevance.

Dean and Castiel’s relationship arc, a fan favorite, began when Leviathans, the notorious fan-unfavorite, came into the picture.

No, Maeve! Dean and Castiel’s relationship arc began in season 4, not 7! Cas was barely even in season 7!

Well, let me explain. Season 7, the age of Sera Gamble, was a total show reset. Was it uncomfortable? Yes. Did we all hate it? Yes. But like with muscle, you’ve got to tear through the old before you can develop something new, and Season 7 did this job quite effectively. An identity crisis at that scale means either a massive change of pace or a creative death, and as the show is still on, number one it is.

So, while we can most reliably chart the beginning of an intentional, substantive romantic undercurrent to Season 8, it is the waiting that allowed it to come to fruition-- Season 7 was a void, an unsustainable period of creative drought, a long cold winter in which seeds fell and laid dormant. And like the winter, it was necessary for rebirth.

This brings me to the first DeanCas rift:

The Purgatory Spell

Episode: 7x01

This tear in spacetime was the culmination of Castiel’s Season 6 character arc. It was the final, greatest betrayal, the irredeemable course of action which struck his relationship with the Winchesters a fatal blow-- and though his last act was to attempt to right his wrongs, the emergence of this rift meant estrangement and death for the relationship (and for Castiel.)

This incident is established as far more significant for Dean than it is for Sam, so I won’t spend much time justifying my classification of this rift as primarily DeanCas. It’s made pretty damn clear through Dean’s behavior throughout Season 7.

Castiel’s departure catalyzed the emergence of Leviathans. As the lore promised, they brought death and destruction to the whole ecosystem, purging the show and readying it for reincarnation; but I’ve already made this point.

As Destiel 1.0 dies, Destiel 2.0 is born.

~~~

The Purgatory Portal

Episode: 8x07

Let us journey back to "A Little Slice of Kevin"-- the gayest thing to happen to Supernatural up to that point. Suddenly, Dean and Cas’s ambiguity is no longer a joke. It’s no longer flippantly referenced, but Built Into The Narrative In A Noticeable Way. After Season 7, Season 8 shocked the system, earning Purgatory celebrity status as the Destiel fandom exploded back to life.

But, more important things. The events surrounding this portal not only codified romantic subtext, but reshaped their relationship by putting it in grave peril. Lovers trapped in separate worlds. There’s only like ten thousand examples of this in other fictional, romantic(-ally coded) relationships. Sigh.

As Destiel 2.0 dies, Destiel 3.0 is born.

~~~

Seasons 9, 10, and 11 are filled with near misses. Divisions between worlds/fates test and change their bond -- Heaven and Hell exert tremendous force on both, and the gates of Heaven and the Darkness’s breach of barriers flirt pretty openly with the rift theme -- but there isn’t anything that fits the profile cut and dry, so let us leap to Season 12. Five long years of glacial shifts, five long years of a slow, steady amping up of queer subtext. An argument can be made that it had graduated from subtext in some places, but both fandom and GA were frog-boiled enough in their interpretations for this argument to be an aside.

Destiel 3.0 reaches a transitional stage, and becomes Destiel 3.0+.

Now, It’s season 12. And like goddamned CLOCKWORK, six years after Season 6, another unstable tear in spacetime appears, and terminates Castiel’s character arc.

Rift? Check. Cas dead? Check. We’ve seen this pattern. Time for shit to CHANGE. And boy, did it.

~~~

The Rift

Episode: 12x23

Oh, boy. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. Castiel’s death in the Season 12 finale was a magnum opus of SPN’s romantically coded imagery. I could elaborate, but if you’ve read this far into this post you likely already know what I’m talking about. My point is, a hall of mirrors is the chosen space in which Destiel 3.0+ is killed.

The relationship death lasts only a short while; their estrangement in separate realms is a five episode-long period of detachment and review. Our characters, as well as the viewers, stride through a hall of mirrors. In solitude, this DeanCas winter becomes a chance to reflect, because there is no better way to get a feel for the importance of something than to eliminate it. The crucial elements of Dean and Cas’s relationship, what they mean to each other, becomes clearer than ever before because, look! This is Dean without Cas! This is the show without Cas! Don’t you hate it?

I mean, guys. Mirrors. Cas spoke to a reflection of himself in the Empty. Literally. He addressed his greatest fears about relationships with himself. He was forced to rewatch his greatest mistakes, and what gets featured? Our first two DeanCas rifts. F*ck this show.

DreamHunter parallel! 13x10 reenacted this scene for us with Claire and Kaia.

Then, 13x05 changes the whole game once more. You know, the episode titled Thanatology. The study of Death. Fuck this show.

As Destiel 3.0+ dies, Destiel 4.0 is born.

~~~

The intensity of the queer narrative amps up continually. Things are getting harder to write off.

Rifts between worlds, crossover and confinement, and estrangement, and the blurring of lines, and the breaking of old taboos/breach of old barriers dominates the remainder of Season 13 and Season 14. We hold this broad focus for a long time, and Dean and Castiel become the emotional equivalent of the plot arc, always there, brewing, but taking a backseat to the Big Stuff. A wall rises, and solidifies. Silver Pole of Communication Barriers, anyone?

Then? Season 15 kicks us in the Destiel balls.

Full disclosure: I didn’t see this next part coming. I dared not ask season 15 for anything this significant, so the last scene of 15x08 just about took my life.

~~~

The Purgatory Rift

Episode(s): 15x08, 15x09

Dun dun DUN!!

This twist was my favorite Christmas present, because it communicated to me that the writers have an understanding of Dean and Cas’s history to match our own. Not only are they actively writing them utilizing the Destiel playbook, they obviously care immensely about the destiny of their relationship. I am speaking too soon to say this definitively, but this mission has all the hallmarks of a plot device designed to serve many purposes in respect to Dean and Castiel. They’ve got ALL the ingredients. There are so many things tied in here that it gets pretty damn near fanfiction territory.

Please read my reaction to the purgatory twist if you need context, as I don’t feel much like regurgitating it. This post is long enough, lol. (A bloom that grows only in one place? Fuck you, writers. You’re going to KILL me.)

~~~

So, to recap: In a universe defined by barriers and guidelines, a relationship that refuses to be defined will be under constant siege. Dean and Castiel suffer from the sheer reality of walking lines between two designated states of being-- friends and lovers, angel and human, take your pick. The current order isn’t friendly to beings who don’t fit a category. Until the barriers are stripped away, they cannot exist as they are, and rifts will continue to rip them apart.

The Purgatory Rift of 15x08 is such a big deal because it fuses themes. The rifts of the Dabb era have merged with the gateways of the Carver era. Not only are our long-standing almost-lovers returning to their relationship’s place of origin, they are doing so by breaching physical barriers designed to keep them apart; and all the while, the most dangerous, important rift is not the one in the fabric of reality, but the one in their relationship.

I expect this major rift to end no differently than it has in the past. Dean and Cas will be separated, and Cas will be out of reach. And then, they’ll be reunited. But, where will that take us? What will the next reincarnation look like?

As Destiel 4.0 dies, something will be born.

#who sucks at tags? me #spn meta #spotting patterns #symbolism #destiel #purgatory #spn s7 #spn s8 #spn s12 #spn s15 #theme: rebirth #endgame speculation #15x09 #15x09 speculation #rifts #mine

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incarnateirony · 5 years

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i think there’s a distinction that needs to be made. i think those with power over dabb & co are the ones who are exuding more habits of queerbaiting, while dabb and co aren’t. and because those execs are more or less invisible, the blame/fault is put on dabb as he’s the perceived figurehead of everything in the show when he’s not. anything he may want to put in the show can be easily vetoed by a higher exec so

Okay so I said I wouldn’t touch related issues facing wanky-side, but while this runs the line this is such a genuine, and valid thought process it feels worth addressing.

So in short: Yes. But no. But yes. But no. But we’ll see.

What do I mean by that? I’m going to put this behind a cut. But first of all I want to thank this Nonnie for at least trying to critically think about where the problems lead to. This is FAR BETTER CRITICAL THINKING than I see in this discussion most of the time and this. More like this. Nuance, discussion, idea trade, history. Let’s do it.

Okay, so.

How can it be yes no yes no maybe eenie meenie miney mo?

Because it really depends on what part of this 15 year legacy show we’re talking about.

What I’m about to say isn’t going to be popular, but I’ve said it before, I just can’t find the ancient ass post discussing it.

We’re going to rewind. Like, a fucking lot. A lot, a lot. This is going to be a history ride, and you’re probably going to wonder how it connects to the conversation at first, but bear with me.

Ignoring any personal frustrations I have with the casting of season 4 – frankly a chapter of this FUCKING show that haunts me somewhere in the ballpark of, “If my friend wasn’t dismissed as not white enough and got the role, would we have Misha, Destiel, any of this, would the show be on, would she have been chased off as the other actresses?” – and frankly these are the things people don’t even fucking *think* about.

TLDR a bajillion years ago CW made a casting call and we got this super cute character named Anna that Dean was slated to bend over in two seconds flat, as old canon used to be before modernly growing. The actress expressed discomfort, and frankly went over with the audience about as well as wet cardboard. And like, while I agree that a lot of women were hated for misogynistic reasons in this show, she really was about as interesting as a plank of plywood to me once she got past her first performance or two.

At the same time, this handsome bastard named Misha Collins auditioned for a bit role originally intended for 3 episodes and quickly extended to 6. But, identified as lightning in a bottle and with on-fire chemistry, while Anna waffled for *several* reasons, summarily, their story ends swapped. That’s… not like *exactly* what happened but it’s *basically* what happened. Anna became the herald and contagonist instead of Cas, and Cas quite frankly took on the role of the goddess.

With Lisa already entered before Anna, there’s no evidence whatsoever she was intended as endgame. Story flip. Thank you for everything last night on earth fall by angel banishing almost like this was foreshadowed woohoo! But… don’t lend towards a relationship. No point. Given, they made a few jokes on set at that point, but it wasn’t really an idea *they thought anyone took seriously*.

Coming from a phase where most of the leads were introduced to “slash fandom” by Wincest, which they literally used to torture and prank each other, the idea of this being anything serious really wasn’t on their radar. The one I remember most was Misha choosing to sit on Dean’s side of the bed as Cas in the famous “What were you dreaming about?” and Sgriccia being like “that’s kinda gay” “nah keep it”

I mean, is that… queerbait at that point? I don’t think it’s fair to really call it that. They respectfully tried to scrub out the leading romantic edges from what would have been Anna’s story, but ultimately, the human psyche kind of recognizes 8000 years of storytelling history subconsciously when using the Hero’s Journey narrative, so it was resonant. Nobody was crazy for seeing it. That didn’t mean it was right, that didn’t mean it’s what they were consciously leading anyone for.

Hell, Jensen didn’t even know what the fuck Destiel WAS until season 7 (”Deathstiel?”) due to the way cons, circuits, and fansites kept the conversation force-muted at that point. Anything they had floated somewhere in the area of “hah that is kinda gay I guess”, and even that there’s no evidence of being frequent.

Kripke left, the show petered, social media was new, and summarily, Sera Gamble was a dumbass and listened to the wrong crowd that seemed super big back when big accounts were a whole 10K followers and you had 50 asshats screaming as a coordinated group about Ruining The Show™. Ratings tanked, somewhere between Misha being fired and the show turning into a parody of itself with dick jokes that made it seem like Gamble was trying to target 11 year old boys for her audience, and like, that’s it, that was the season.

Until that nosedive spiral essentially turned into a shorthand apology reversal, a panicked and roughly written script that was *SO GAY* that *EVEN MISHA FUCKING COLLINS* couldn’t seriously choke out the dialogue. It was cheap, it was out of character, and as Jensen put it, the dialogue might as well have had him petting and sobbing into Castiel’s coat while essentially being like I SLEEP WITH YOUR COAT EVERY NIGHT TO REMEMBER YOUR SCENT UWU and shit that just LITERALLY vaulted from alien fascinated staring into desperate teenage gay drama in the body of a 30 year old man.

So yeah. Did I consider it reasonable to change that? Fuck yes I did.

Was what Sera Gamble did queerbait? Yes, actually. And she did it again in the Magicians. You see, Gamble had fucked over an audience, and then tried to exploit that audience in reverse when she realized she fucked over the *wrong* audience, but had zero intent of fulfillment.

And then magically, Sera Gamble didn’t fucking work there anymore after a whole like, year and a half as showrunner.

Now, at the same time, Dawn Ostroff was leaving the CW. Jensen’s had some pretty fierce words about Dawn Ostroff not understanding the show and how to manage it, but whatever. Bye, Dawn. Hello… MARK FUCKING PEDOWITZ. But at the same time, WELCOME BACK CARVER and most of all HOWDY DO NETFLIX, so nice to make a guaranteed deal with you (that ended as of this year due to a CBS merchandising meltdown).

When Carver came back, he said a lot of things. He… very tactfully called Gamble’s era trash by phasing it like “:) Watching the show :) since I left :) I realized :) a lot of our mythology :) has been difficult to follow :) so I went :) back to basics :) please help”, and others, like mentioning he had a three year plan on his desk. So 3. Season 8, 9, 10. He had notes for his S10 finale in mind and everything! Great stuff.

Now the fandom, at this point, generally didn’t pay attention to the network or production. In fact, the actor worship around here is some other kind of wild and I don’t know how after 15 years people haven’t figured out that it isn’t how to go about paying attention. Either way – plot switches, showrunner switches, author switches, and NETWORK LEADERSHIP SWITCHES.

Now, this little part here is speculation – but I am 99% sure that when Carver was pulling SPN out of the cancellation toilet, he had bigger things to inform the new execs about than “btw I might make it gay.” Like “Hey, since CW just got its netflix deal, if you give us another year we can import fresh demographic while bringing back Collins’ old fanbase by setting him back as a regular.” SURE, SOUND GREAT, MAKE MONEY, THX.

Cool. Cool. Make sense so far, you still with me?

Because at this point, S8 into early S9, fandom had gotten itself into all kinds of a stir. It was about to go canon, rite nao, said a bunch of bloggers, who at that point WERE pretty much chasing wallpapers and Tshirts and making the most bizarre uncorroborated parallel interpretations like “IF U PARALLEL IT TO MOBY DICK-” WHAT WHY WHERE– ??? BUT cAS = fISH

Okay, my fucking annoyance at what counted as lit crit in those days aside, we’ll get back on track. Everybody started vibrating for this shit because, you know what, S8 did resonate pretty strong, almost like authors were toying with ideas. I’m not gonna get into stuff about Robbie, I THINK fandom knows the statements he’s made and I don’t just mean the whole Destiel being canon tweet both antis and bitters descended on him to eviscerate him about. About what? Calling it queerbait!

So here we go, the great advent. About a year after a dramatic network shift, a CW exec was like :))))))))) I’D LIKE TO LEARN ABOUT THIS FANDOM THAT IS SUDDENLY MAKING ME MONEY!! WHAT SHOULD I DO??? TO TWITTER! HASHTAG TALK TO THEM!

[logs in]

Beep boop. “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” “Destiel?” the FUCK is a Destiel? Wait what no I don’t know what you’re talking about representation isn’t our intention with these characters. “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT” “QUEERBAIT”

And then the network exec got so slammed he deleted twitter entirely and everybody popped confetti and felt accomplished and did NOT realize how fucking BAD that was. And frankly, anyone that did kinda didn’t want to admit it, because taking responsibility for that tire fire was… not… attractive. In fact, several folks are still around to this day, bitter blogging or making weirdass meta or accusing other people of wallpapers and Tshirts because that’s what they did so *YAY, PROJECTION!*

My own frustrated bitterness aside, I’m going to place some questions down, and not so much answer them as, now that the reader has really taken history in, let them decide:

At this point… is this queerbait?

Because this is when the queerbait yelling began. It’s when every fan with even a moderate platform or site blasted it out there.

It’s when the fandom made DeanCas a big problem.

And it’s also literally the same time Carver left his very first recorded, known direction with a romantic tilt, “The note I got from Jeremy Carver was to play it like a jilted lover, so that’s what we played there,” on LGBT author Bobo berens’ very first episode. Everyone runs circles around that modernly, or goes “SEE??? QUEERBAIT!” without realizing what the FUCK just happened here.

So, SPN went from cancel rating line to their most successful show between 7 and 9. Suddenly corporate sees their successful product *ON FUCKING FIRE* so do you know what happens?

Fuck it this IS one line I’ll break: Corporate panicked. They changed their press packets. If you noticed a bunch of media-adjacent people and their friends suddenly get bitter as FUCK in season 10 after still surviving the S9 mess, here’s fucking why. Because now that everybody spent the last YEAR trying to burn down the product yelling about shit that corporate had been literally blindsided by, they added temporarily a new section to the packet that included sexuality. They were, at that moment, suddenly listed collectively as heterosexual men. SEE, WE AREN’T QUEERBAITING IF WE TELL YOU THEY’RE STRAIGHT *will smith pose*

Congrats fandom, you have now officially made Destiel A Huge Problem™ to the corporate behemoth behind the shiny pictures. The iron curtain dropped. This is what you could call “Protect the Product Mode” if you will.

Now again, at this point: Is it queerbait?

Because at this point, S9-10 was rolling out. We all know it, Cain, Collette, *gestures off into infinity* But let’s fall back to Carver’s statement. 3 years. 8, 9, 10. You know what else happened season 10?

A bunch of shit, including shit Carver *wrote himself for the season 10 finale* got filmed, then cut. Coincidentally, it was all very gay shit. Things that pulled forward the Crowley/Abaddon Cas/Colette Sam/Abel parallels, arguing over who was who’s boyfriend, Rowena mentioning about them both being shattered at the Altar of Winchester (15.3 is calling), the secret admirer dream, I could go on. I mean, this shit literally would have shifted the entire storytelling arc to full-frontal taking that parallel and addressing it right up in your face. First you’ll kill your mistress but you’ll get it done, and then you’ll kill your wife. He’s your boyfriend no he’s YOUR boyfriend. You’ve BOTH been shattered at the Altar of Winchester. Really, this is what you dream about? Your secret admirer Cas?

K? K. K?

Is it queerbait for Carver to have entered with a plan? Is it queerbait for Carver to have been interrupted on that plan despite attempting to pursue it? And is it queerbait for the network to still lock down on that plan so close after the event?

You see why this conversation gets increasingly complex.

S11 rolled around, Carver was half in half out, Dabb was stepping in, big gay heart songs, take what you will out of that entire mess, and by S12 Dabb entirely took over and we started entering the era we are in today.

So let’s address where we’re at today.

Now :) I can’t say anything for sure :) because anybody that’s been to or worked on marketing stuff definitely has an NDA :) but let’s play for a minute. Let’s say with the stone wall up, a set of creators still wanted to actually *go somewhere* with this story.

“But!” remembered the network, “Remember the tire fire?! And all the people that hated the gay?! What about our profit?!”

“No,” a creator might say, “Tides have changed.”

“We’ll see,” a network might say, “Take it to market testing.” At which point, one would enter a few years of polling how the general audience reacts to this.

Now, if they were seeing promising numbers, they might be given a bit of rope. Why, let’s … just pretend. Totally. Totally pretending. That Dabb pitched this idea to take up Carver’s mantle. Let’s say that started S12ish when he took over. Let’s say they ran through hiatus. And then… authors might be given a little bit of a line. “Looks good, but we’re not sure,” said a network quite fond of its split conservative/liberal demographic, “Try it out a bit and see how it goes.”

And so an author room that would be full of LGBT creators fed out good faith groundwork. They might even be like YALL ITS NEVER TOO LAAAAAATE TO START ALL OVER AGAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN and just throw their whole boy howdy cowboy into that shit and get great ratings.

What if even if the results came back positive leaning, the network ho’ed and hummed and stayed noncommital? Might the creators scale it back while still writing it lowkey just in case they got flashed a greenlight? I know I sure would, woudn’t you?! Or I guess would you prefer we drop the whole thing cold and stop writing anything vaguely in the direction?

Difficult question, in reality, isn’t it?

So in this TOTALLY HYPOTHETICAL SITUATION, this leaves the authors holding the bag, waiting for a sign, and being held with limitations. And just in case anybody thinks “BUT AUTHORS CAN DO WHATEVER THEY WANT!! AND!! OTHER SHOWS!!!”

K have we come down to reality yet? So, sure kids, try the gay, we’re interested, but you can’t like, go Full Gay Frontal with it. You gotta imply the gay. Wouldn’t want to offend conservative america! Besides! We’re totally exploiting marketing making this LGBT content for you over here! *jingles a carrot on a stick* LOOK AT HOW MUCH WE’RE FLEECING ADVERTISING PROMOTING ALL THIS GAY STUFF FOR YOU AREN’T THE RAINBOWS GREAT?

Some creator of limited LGBT content: How’s the marketing looking?

Some network: EH! We’ll see!

Some creator of limited LGBT content: K guys we’ll scale it back to not upset them but don’t drop it.maybe we can have them hold hands at the end or if we’re lucky maybe they’ll say we can do the whole thing

Some LGBT creators: K

Making sense still? STILL WITH ME?

So at this point… is this queerbait, or is this business?

Put aside the emotional reaction. Realize this really only hit scale in S9, hit front line S10, and hit potential corporate discussion in this TOTALLY theoretic universe around S11-12. We’re talking 3-4 years. Not 10. And we’re talking only a few of it really being tested.

So again I ask, history minded: Is this queerbait, or is this business?

That’s where the nuance and complication comes in, and let it be said I am in no way defending the CW. I fucking hate the network. They have literally personally screwed over real friends of mine and I hope they choke on a whole bag of dicks with their bullshit, but honestly, the shit I have seen and heard would make people stick their heads in the sand like scared and ashamed ostriches for every time they trumpet “BUT OTHER SHOWS” – you don’t know what’s going on in those shows. You don’t know how they’re getting hardballed on budget decisions, you don’t know what that show’s marketed demographic is about, you don’t know what they demand cast how, you literally don’t have a fucking idea unless you’re up in that disaster zone.

And even IF you’re in that disaster zone, unless you’re truly in the upper echelon, you only know so much.

Now let’s pretend, again, totally metaphorically, and absolutely not inspired by a real person at all, that someone worked with the crew for a while and, because they saw support inside creeping upward siiiiince mmmm gosh we’ll say season 12 since that’s our advent and totally not when anybody specific started working there and telling fandom ladder fans what they thought they saw going on, only to get sad and bitter and angry and eventually leave, and all those friends, still abiding old bitterness from S9~, now get angrier because of somebody else’s burnout on their ITK level and perspective, even if that was *probably* aggravated by other work stress conditions as well, but hey! WHO KNOWS!?!?! :)))) What a weird hypothetical though and I’m getting weirdly super specific on it aren’t I so LET’S MOVE ON.

We’re in S12-13 discussion category now.

So my question is, from this perspective… when do you call queerbait? When not swept up in misguided hysteria… at what point do you say “Yeah, you know what, yup, that’s all queerbait”?

So we’re gonna take a bit of a break here for a second and really process all of that hypothetical world, where a creator pitched going for it, and got it put into market testing, and was given enough rope to hang themselves on if the network changed its mind.

After only a few years of conscious thought on it… do you even think the network is truly consciously misguiding specifically those fans, or do they see it as giving the fans something they want while testing the idea of possibly truly giving it to them?

Because here’s what fandom misses – the corporate perspective. And again, I’m utterly not fucking justifying the CW as a whole, but people look at this from the angle of fans, and then argue what they think is representative dialogue from the angle of fans, often while missing all of this history. All that history up till S9? That’s all very real. But looking at history in perspective… who are you going to blame for that? Is it fair to hold S4-9 to that five year stretch of queerbait when that was… pretty much fandom manufactured from blissful ignorance to begin with? I mean if you want to go yell at Sera Gamble Specifically okay (please don’t) but beyond that like– that shit? Is that anybody’s fault? Do you blame a company for actually shutting DOWN the talk of it on a press angle? Can we call that and S10 queerbait then? Was Carver’s attempt at writing through it queerbait? Was trying to continue the story in S11 after theoretic shutdown queerbait? These are all genuine questions that are not asked enough. Most people don’t even realize they need to be asked.

So back to Totally Theoretic Land, where S12ish market testing would have been going on to see if people really thought it was Gay N Shit. Like a lot of people in an overwhelming majority after the amount of apprehension the straight old dude running the network has ever since the goddamn tornado of horse shit that happened like a year after he took over. Probably not the fondest fucking memory for him either. Probably also why he dismissively called most of that demographic “casual fans”, because in Smug White Guy Brain, “tru” fans would have all known, I guess, exactly the shit I’m telling you in history backtrack so, look at the silly girls wanting the gay shit :) Ahhhh girlllllls

Okay so, my impression of douchebags aside, let’s give it 12-13 hiatus to give the first test rope lead and 13-14 hiatus for the next, only to have at best noncommital and uncertain numbers and authors, theoretically, cautiously pulling back while writing it as generally established and implicit, as if it might, I don’t know, go from BIG GAY DRAMA to DEADASS DOMESTIC all of a sudden despite ITS NEVER TOO LATE TO START ALL OVER AGAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIN cuz get it, they started over, after he came in his room and played him. *elbows* You all get it right?

K. So maybe numbers changed. Maybe they don’t. Maybe I’m not comfortable talking in this hypothetical, maybe I don’t have access to this hypothetical AU’s current marketing data as of this year, I just don’t know! We don’t know where those cards fell.

But if, at this point, after 2-3 years of market testing, and leading authors on, and giving them enough rope to hang themselves with to get themselves accused of queerbait just for trying to lay good faith groundwork for a cohesive narrative, because fans don’t care that 2 open closet LGBT authors are on deck or that there’s totally theoretically probably and in no way fingering anyone at least one closeted author on deck, or at least publicly so, their coworkers would probably know. But I mean. That’s just. :) statistics. Right?

K whatever moving on. If at this point they’ve been boggley bounced around… you know, I gotta say. At this point… I might actually call queerbait if the network stonewalls it. At this point, they’ve had a few years to really get their shit together, and if they’ve just used it to play yo yo with LGBT creators trying to make content then yeah, go suck a whole bag of dicks.

The problem being with the lack of nuance in this conversation, you’re right, Dabb and co would catch it rather than the guilty party, which is why I HATE faux activism culture. If you’re going to be an activist pay the fuck attention to what you’re being an activist in, don’t bite the hand that’s feeding you just because it was a PBJ and not filet mignon, go after the bastard 1%’er that’s eating all the goddamn filet mignon. But nobody will. It never works like that. And then everybody wonders why this continues – be it in this show, or on other networks.

But hey. Maybe this theoretic network got enough material to change their mind. Maybe another executive got promoted that might help one of the other creators argue it to corporate with their new shiny title. Maybe they can convince someone. Convince them of what and to what level, who knows. Maybe just continue telling the established story, give them a divorce, mention marriage, divorce, dead wives, breakups every 0.2 seconds while they go through a classically framed dark point in the romance everybody with brains and eyes understands because, again, historic storytelling we literally all recognize, but pretend we don’t when stomping about personal representation lines? Or hey! Maybe it’ll go further. (Don’t hold your breath.) Throw in some other shit that even a straight guy would look at and be like “two dicks one chick that shit’s gay bro” because WE LITERALLY ALL FUCKING KNOW WHAT IT MEANS EVEN IF IT’S IMPLIED BECAUSE THE NETWORK IS A BUNCH OF PUSSIES.

…*stops, breathes*

If you can’t tell this is a very long term topic of frustration to me, because nobody, absolutely nobody, wants to introspect and think, you know, maybe it wasn’t queerbait back then, maybe we SHOULDN’T have set a corporate exec on fire about it, that might have been fucking bad.

There are other ways to be an activist than to scream queerbait into the void at whoever is unfortunate enough to cross your paths. One of the best examples I can remember is Exorcising Emily collecting demographics on fandom, and testimonials from LGBT fans about resonating with the content – no fanfic, no fanart, no attacks – and sent copies of this to several powerful creative names.

Now… if with this history… if, from season 9 to 12… one of those names became a creator. If, by some FLUKE of imagination… he still had that book around… and even gave it to his freshly joined new employees like 2 weeks after they started working there–

oh wait and i oop

The mentions would be much as you expect, antis screaming and demanding her job (QUICK, somebody tell Andrew Dabb that she’s READING ANDREW DABB’S OWN BOOKS THAT HE CHOSE TO KEEP AROUND FOR THREE YEARS).

Has Dabb’s era seemed… more plugged in? More resonant? Better and stronger in its storytelling? More hooked into fandom?

See, that’s what well thought activism can do. Well thought activism can structure an entire movement. Poorly thought rioting thinking itself as activism can cause the literal opposite effect of what it wanted. That is how these things contrast each other. And that is something fandom needs to DEEPLY consider.

…but is it queerbait for him to try to continue the story? Even if, say, we drop the marketing talk, because TOTALLY nobody can ACTUALLY know because AGAIN anyone that DOES would have an NDA so we DEFINITELY can’t say anybody knows anything for sure, because anyone that said jack shit would probably get sued so hard their descendents down in whatever homo superior evolution 1000 years into the future would feel it, so you know. We’ll put aside this totes theoretical shit and ask

…If he just was told no– would you prefer to just drop the storyline entirely at this point?

Again. Genuine question. And difficult. And something poorly thought queerbait screaming can actually cause, too.

So here we are in the land of the final season. Whether you consider it network queerbait or not – again, they can choke on the whole bag of dicks at a network level for all I care for ANY number of reasons, even well beyond the domain of Supernatural, and may all their bacon burn from here into the next life – it’s a lot more complicated than fandom has ever let it on to be, because letting it on to be what it really is, in full perspective, also demands a lot of introspection and acceptance, and we all know nobody in this fandom can ever make a mistake ever and they’re all fucking perfect darlings.

It’s a complicated answer to a simple idea… and unfortunately I don’t think this fandom will ever really sit here. They’ll yell “VICTIM BLAMING” because it’s buzzy, they’ll yell “HIDING YOUR GAYS” which I mean, yeah, but let’s talk about what led us here. They’ll yell a lot of things. But they will rarely quietly think, and study, and hone down to what’s going on in the world out there beyond what they have, at this point, become obsessively hotlocked on.

Supernatural, as of 15.7, has already taken several steps further than it ever is before. No, that’s not a signal of me saying [Your Personal Goalpost] is going to happen. But it’s a sign that if they have a line, they’re testing it with every strength they have.

Going back onto the Fateful Advent: Cain. The mentor– who was never going to stop; I can’t stop samuel; he was never going to stop; I will never stop; Rowena, the mentor, never going to stop, shattered, at the altar of Winchester. Long ago, when Cas was human, Dean sealed him away, and now, he’s doing the same to him. So Shirt Of Bad Decisions Deanmon basically karaokes with his friend like the Crowley days, REPEATING the Crowley dialogue but infinitely harder to dodge, as if some sort of calculated method of cat’s cradle of How To Write The Gay was discussed. Man, whoever wrote that kind of shit would probably even publicly thank whatever big gay mastermind helped them map out THAT level of stuff. Wouldn’t it be funny if most of that shit had been written by a gay dude that’s still around and it’s still popping back up in the show louder and harder to dodge than before? That’d be fuckin’ wild, man. Oh, fucking WAIT.

And this is why I hate the way shipping culture thinks it’s doing activism. Most of the time it’s cosplaying as an activist and at this point it’s become more of a furry convention than it has any kind of organized rights movement. Nobody’s out here fighting for the rights of these LGBT authors this year, nobody’s helping them get a voice, and in fact, often scream at them or bury what voice they’ve had as not enough.

And I want to fix it.

Desperately.

And frankly, I don’t know how anymore.

But what we’re not talking about is some 3-5 year show that came in early and started intentionally fucking at you. We’re looking at happy coincidences, so let’s check with our gay king, the father of Wayward that everybody coincidentally accepted as canon with far less because of a (meaningful) third party line DeanCas had elsewhere but hey it didn’t have antis so suddenly it counts; let’s check with him about that.

That’s my king. That’s my king that wrote the first recorded episode to be intentionally directed as jilted lovers. My king that gav eus Colette. My king that gave us the mixtape. My king that gave us the PR framed breakup. My king that gave us Cas leaving Dean. That’s my King. That’s my gay king who has been fighting his ass off, only to be hung out to dry by a fandom that doesn’t even care to look where or how to scream, or maybe consider that perhaps screaming isn’t the option.

Is he yours yet? Have I broken through to a single soul on this?

That’s my king who wrote about the necessary evils in 2003, before the youngest in this fandom were born and while many were still in diapers or kindergarten; about the unfortunate necessary evils that he loathes and acknowledges about moderate queer content gaining exponential amounts of platform compared to whatever is considered hardline aggressive at the time, about how that incrementalization is what helped our media landscape evolve to this day.

And he isn’t wrong.

And he’s getting roasted for doing just that.

And I really wish I could just psychically make everyone fucking stop.

But I will say one thing.

“It’s network queerbait!” I mean

Yeah

That

Because… realistically? like 99% of modern queer content is queerbait, even stuff with canon queer content.

ESPECIALLY on the CW.

If you’ve noticed CW panicking the last year and trying to slap rainbows and DARE TO DEFY on everything, it’s because their entire fucking ecosystem just got fucked over by CBS wanting 100% merchandising profit like it already took 100% digital profit and Netflix was basically like “miss us with your bullshit” and broke the CW contract which was *HOW PEDOWITZ BANKROLLED MOST OF HIS NETWORK*. Now? Now CW has to carve a niche. So LOOK AT ALL THE FUCKING PRIDE COLORS ON– OUR– STRAIGHT–CHARACTERS??? BUT WE HAVE GAY ONES LIKE LEGENDS OF TOMORROW AND *flips notes* THAT SIDE CHARACTER LESBIAN ON SPN.

*gets a whisper* What they killed her? Shit. Maybe bring her back. AND THERE’S THIS PERSON OVER ON JANE THE VIRGIN oh that just got cancelled uhhh VAMPIRE DI-wait fuck. Well we’ll just make one of the chicks in this shitty charmed reboot CBS just forced down our throat and killed Wayward over, that’ll fix it *jazz hands*

TV is a business. Businesses make money. The entire LGBT battle is basically us industriously proving we can make money. It’s about rights and visibility on our end, but on their end it is *always* about money and I really don’t think anybody really groks what that really means.

So “it’s the network! Queerbait!”

…yeahhhhh.

…welcome to working in television. Now you just have to sit and think about how many other times this has completely missed your radar.

The network will never get a shit about you, they give a shit about your money, and that’s just the reality of capitalist america whether we like it or not. When it’s 2143 and bernie sanders’ floating head in a jar is president and andrew yang’s base income shit is in effect and we’re all a socialist country and the world has figured out how to run high cost businesses like TV on the power of unicorn farts, they might actually give a shit. But they don’t. There may be a few advocates WITHIN the company that do, but as a whole body, the network will never give a shit. They don’t care if you’re black, white, straight, gay, disabled, male, female, beyond what, explicitly, that totals to in dollar signs depending how they feed you, when and where.

So it’s not like... *just* a queer rights issue, it’s an “Anything Trump’s America may consider offensive on their television” issue. It’s businesses weighing who they think pays their bills while making it and beyond that who they think is the safest investment to make the most money.

As a side note: Personally, I’d consider it dumb as fuck to not do it. SPN will taper within a few years down to just trekkie-esque addicts unless they find a way to get a new burst of viewership and boy howdie do I hope so, but how much Pedowitz overvalues the conservative US demographic, or certain international markets, I don’t know. I’m not in his head and I don’t have this year’s marketing numbers beyond basic live, +3 and +7 ratings, and digital calls. And just general nielsen released demo. But how he’s added that all up? Can’t say. And I sure ain’t gonna bank on him not being a dumbass, when he’s famous for it, so don’t go get your hopes up either.

#supernatural #representation #queerbait #intersectionality #business #corporate #marketing

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ywhiterain · 4 years

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reading Destiel meta on my breaks

Reading about how Dean/Cas is totally canon/going to be canon has been a hobby of mine for years. Not so much because I want it (I don’t, #teamsassy) or to laugh at it (well sometimes, when I stumble on the wildest shippy theories, but no ship is immune to that). But more so to take a peak at this wildly different show these people are watching.

This isn’t shade. Cas->Dean has always been there on some level. Cas even ended up taking up the spot planned for Anna, who was a Dean love interest, lol. Castiel’s character was created for Dean’s plot/arc and that makes it really easy to create a shippy dynamic.

I’m not buying that it’s been a well crafted love story since season four. No. It’s more like an accident. And that’s fine. Organic and unplanned storytelling gave us the objectively best canon het in the world, Bulma/Vegeta from Dragonball.

But here’s the thing. Dean/Cas, as portrayed in fanon, is like, opposite planet. Dean/Cas as an epic love story spanning fifteen/eleven years is incredibly silly. Well, for mutual Dean/Cas. From Cas’ side, my reaction to his confession was ‘yes, seems legit.’ Once, I was planning an epic spn fic and I’d had Cas -> Dean as, like, there in it. Despite not really caring/liking their relationship much because um. It’s there. The only thing the confession did for me was make it even more undeniable imo.

The story that so much of fandom wants isn’t happening. Because the beating heart of this show is Sam and Dean. I don’t say this as a shipper, I’ve been off that train for awhile. My ideal ending is Sam walking away from Dean and getting a dog and never talking to him again.

But that’s not the story being told. In season five, we were told Sam and Dean’s bloodline has been curated for centuries so that they’d be born as brothers who could carry archangels to kill each other during the apocalypse and. Yeah. That sounds right. Not so much that I think it’s something the writers were planning from day one but like. The theme. The idea. That Sam and Dean have a relationship that’s epic, world destroy, and world saving. Yeah. That’s what this story has been about from day one. Go ahead and make it literal.

The ending note for Dean’s character isn’t going to be him embracing Cas and finding an identity outside of being a hunter who hates himself or whatever. No, his ending is going to be tied to Sam.

This isn’t to say that it’s impossible for canon mutual Destiel. I find it plausible that Cas will return in the series finale. Hell, maybe they’ll have an ambiguous ending so that shippers can write their Dean/Cas fic until the end of time, as God herself intended.

But the last real emotional beat is going to be between Sam and Dean.

Think back to the end of season five. Chuck as proxy for the writers trying to poop out an ending with them having no plausible clue they’d still have a decade of storytelling left to go. Here was the plot to save the day: Sam lets Lucifer in and jumps into hell to save the world.

Here’s what it was about: Dean putting aside the core aspect of his identity in order let Sam sacrifice himself. It was Dean, in spite of all the bad blood between him and Sam, putting his faith in Sam. Sam makes the plan and Dean backs it. Against the odds, against everything Dean wants, against history and destiny and everything in between, Dean gives up his little brother for the greater good. He gives up his brother to let Sam find redemption on his own terms.

For the actual finale, they could take a step forward. Instead of losing Sam so completely, Dean like... let someone else into his heart and creates a healthy life and future with Cas or whatever. The problem with that is that the last shot of season five wasn’t Sam’s sacrifice, it was Sam coming back from hell outside Dean/Lisa/Ben household.

And I’ll bet you anything the series is going to end on a note similar to this. They’re going to share a heaven and be together forever. And I say this as someone who Does Not Want That.

Interpreting a text (or in this case a tv show) allows for a lot of different analysis. You might reasonably disagree with me on what the season five finale meant. But the facts of the matter, Sam sacrificed himself with Dean’s okay and somehow ending up out of hell. That’s not in dispute. That’s what happened.

And I can almost guarantee that the series finale will be the same. It’ll be about Sam and Dean. That’s the text. Where the wiggle room will come from is interpreting what that last plot point means for Sam and Dean, their relationship, and the narrative as a whole.

I am not saying this from a position of, like, high knowledge. It’s just basic understanding of the text in the most fundamental of ways. It’s about Sam and Dean, it’ll always be about Sam and Dean. Everything else is second fiddle to their love story.

Dean/Cas, on the off chance it’s undeniable canon. Even if Dean’s reaction to Cas coming back to life is to stick his tongue down Cas’ mouth or putting a ring on it... the final beats of the story are going to be about Sam and Dean. Any interpretation that ignores the very basic building block of this story (the relationship between Sam and Dean) is just gonna miss the mark.

And I just am ??????

There’s a good chance the last final beat of the show for Cas is his confession. Two episodes before the finale. Because he’s a secondary character and his story can easily wrap up before getting to the true ending of Sam and Dean: literal soul mates.

#supernatural #THIS IS A HOT MESS #SUPERNATURAL IS A HOT MESS #THE ONLY THING THAT'S EVER CONSISITENT IS SAM AND DEAN 4VA #SOBS SAM #YOU POOR FUCK #filed under: what is meta?#how do i have serious spn thoughts in 2020 #oh wait i know #because its 2020 the year of the clown #spn meta

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nellie-elizabeth · 4 years

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Supernatural: Despair (15x18)

I'm having an out of body experience, I cannot believe this. Last night was legitimately one of the weirdest nights of my life, and not just because of *gestures broadly* but also because of *gestures broadly* and myriad other small but still totally bizarre personal things coming at me from all angles... strap in, y'all, I've got some shit to say.

Cons:

We're gonna talk about it. Ohhhh, we're gonna talk about it. But let's start with some other shit before we get there.

So... are we ignoring "Dean was willing to let Jack sacrifice himself" or something? Like there was that moment with Sam and Dean where they talked about it, and Dean apologizes for pulling a gun on Sam, and Sam is like "oh it's okay Dean, no worries." But at the beginning of this episode, Dean seems to be just as worried for Jack, and as protective of him, as the others, with absolutely no acknowledgment of what happened in the last episode. This... should have mattered. There should have been some regrouping and some serious talks about this. Seriously.

The Thanos snap thing... guys, when Infinity War did it in 2018, it was kind of fun and shocking and cool, and we knew the deaths wouldn't be permanent but it was still wild to watch our heroes react to such an immense loss and then leave us all in limbo for a year. This... is not that. The sheer tone-deafness of having this episode contain a moment of domesticity for AU!Charlie and her cool egg-making girlfriend Stevie, only to have Stevie vanish... and then to end the episode with the biggest queer-bait/bury your gays moment imaginable... like...

Okay, sorry, no, saving the Destiel thing until I've sorted out the rest of this nonsense. The point is, seems pretty clear that the deaths in this episode (other than Cas') are temporary, and Supernatural already has the biggest power creep problem of any show I've ever seen... they really couldn't think of another way to up the stakes for the ending, other than doing the thing where everyone gets killed? Didn't... Crowley... already do this to them several seasons back? Am I hallucinating? There's nothing new under the sun with this show.

Why does this show introduce things and resolve them in a single episode? Like, big, huge things? We just figured out Death was trying to double-cross them, and now by the end she's dead? This show either limps along and does nothing, or speeds through plot stuff at lightning-speed. These last two episodes were big and dramatic and full of Plot but in a way where it all feels kind of unreal. Pacing issues like whoa.

And speaking of. Ahem. Okay. Let's... let's do this. I have some things about the Destiel scene that I'm going to put in the "pros" section below, and hopefully as you read on you'll understand why it's really hard for me to be black and white about it. If I had to, if I had to determine whether I am "happy" or "sad" or "grateful" or "angry" I'd say... sad and angry, 97%? Like? Let's dive in, here.

Setting aside the larger context, a couple of smaller notes:

Acting-wise, what the fuck was Jensen doing in this scene? Misha was acting his whole heart out and Jensen gave him nothing to play off of. I don't understand how Jensen accidentally played Dean so obviously in love with Cas all this time, and then in this moment, no-homo'd it so fucking hard. Even the stage directions in the script page that was floating around said that Dean didn't reciprocate. That's dumb, like, in a shipping sense it's disappointing, but also... Dean, what was your face doing while Cas gave his whole monologue about how amazing you are? What a great and loving man you are? Even if he hadn't ended the whole thing by saying "I love you" and then dying right in front of your eyes, surely you would have been feeling some kind of way about the whole situation?

Also, the scene was shot so awkwardly, there was too much space between them, and then Cas pushes Dean out of the way and he just sits there on the floor with Pikachu-face while The Empty opens up and takes Death and Cas away, making these weird shocked noises... Supernatural often has awkward pacing when dramatic things are happening in action scenes, where certain people have to stand still like it's not their turn on the initiative order in a D&D fight or something, and this was one of the more embarrassing and awkward examples of that.

Cas' deal with The Empty has not been brought up practically since it happened. Cas has been sidelined as a character a lot this season, the past couple seasons, really, but we had this hanging over our heads, right? When Cas says "I've figured it out, true happiness isn't in having, it's just in saying it", the moment doesn't really work on a character level, because we didn't get to see Cas do any of that figuring out. We didn't know he was curious about his true happiness, we didn't know it was an internal struggle/debate for him, wondering what it could be. A lot of Destiel people wanted it to be Dean confessing his love to Cas, and that being the true happiness... but of course that would never happen in a million years. Others thought it would be "yay we defeated the big evil, we can all be a happy family together," oh snap, I'm too happy, goodbye. Which would have been... weirdly anticlimactic, but at least would have made some level of narrative sense. This idea that telling Dean how he feels would bring Cas peace is... well, it's okay, it's fine in isolation, but there's no buildup to it, no tension to his moment of "realization."

And now to fry some bigger fish...

Let's forget about the fact that we never thought this would happen to begin with. Is it actually... worse that it did? Seriously, queer angel man confesses his love to stoic human man who stands there without making a single expression, and the act of confessing said love, knowing it's not reciprocated, knowing he won't get to be with Dean or even be near him ever again, is enough to make Castiel so truly happy that he's willing to die peacefully and forever, all in the act of saving Dean's life? Is that not... like... textbook homophobia? People toss around "bury your gays" a lot and I think what they're missing is that the trope doesn't automatically apply just because a queer character dies. It means a queer character dies because of their queerness, or they are revealed to be queer but can't get any measure of happiness and then they die immediately. This is textbook that. The act of confessing his GAY LOVE is what KILLED CAS. It's a one-to-one sequence of events. It's not a coincidence that Cas died right after saying this. Saying this is what made him die. That's... appalling. Truly, in a very real sense, it's appalling.

Another thing I haven't seen people talk about much is the manufactured nature of this sacrifice. We just found out Billie was going to turn on them at the end of the last episode. If Cas was going to die in a sacrifice-y way, did it have to happen now when Billie was basically just knocking on the door trying to get at Dean for a last-minute revenge thing, even though Billie was already at death's door? This was so contrived, like, can Cas not whoosh them away to somewhere else? Keep them running until Billie succumbs? I get that it wouldn't have been easy, and maybe Billie could have caught up to them anyway, but my point is, they manufactured this moment to be "the only way" that Dean could survive, making Cas' sacrifice so noble and necessary or whatever... but I was sitting there thinking there's got to be another way. If they'd wanted to write in another way, there could have been. The inevitability felt so very contrived. And, as mentioned, the impact of dying on this show has lost all meaning, so even Billie trying to kill Dean, squeezing his heart in his chest, did absolutely nothing for me. I knew he'd be fine, because there are two more episodes left. And if Cas hadn't been there to do what he did, Dean would still have been fine because he's Dean. Am I making any sense?

We have two more episodes left. I am... fairly confident Misha won't be in those episodes. All context, both within the show and without, points to that. I truly think that after all this time, he gets the only ending in the whole show that's unambiguously unsalvageable and tragic. We have a world where the afterlife exists and people can hang out there, but The Empty is a different beast, and this means Cas is... gone. Permanently. Like, his consciousness no longer exists, he's caput. They could bring him back from The Empty, in fact, they've already done it once... but if they decide not to, that's just... where we leave things, and that's brutal and unnecessarily grim. The other characters, even if we get an end-of-show TPK (which would be STUPID, more on that later), could at least have canon or implied-canon reunions in the afterlife. If we don't see Eileen again, we can get the implied ending of her coming back to life, or Sam dying and joining her in Heaven. Same with Charlie, with Charlie's new girlfriend, with Bobby, with Donna, with every other character that's died along the way, including Mary Winchester and OG Charlie, OG Bobby, whatever you want. The fact that Cas gets this, after everything, is truly the part I'm the most sad about, setting aside love confessions entirely.

So as I said, two more episodes. I'm worried that Cas dying is gonna get swallowed up with everyone dying and not get its due, thus making the confession completely isolated. Like, here you go, gays, have this one scene, which, in isolation is quite heartfelt from Cas' perspective, but can be carefully boxed up and not touched for the last two hours of the show. If they don't want to touch on how this would affect Dean specifically, they don't have to. He can be generally angsty and sad about Cas, but they could get away with never bringing it up again, and that is some grade-A level bullshit right there, my friends. At minimum, Dean needs to tell Sam about this. He probably won't, but he should, if the show has any sense of integrity left in its bones.

Ahem. Like I said, I have... lots of thoughts. More on Destiel later, but let's turn to the "Pros" section and talk about some other aspects of this incredibly crowded episode.

Pros:

Despite my issues with everything that didn't get resolved re: Dean letting Jack die, I did kind of like the "to somehow" scene, because it was a nice little breather for the brothers, it solidified them as being on the same side to the bitter end, that despite all the crazy shit they've been through, that they've put each other through, they'll have this as a bedrock at the end of the day. I'm not a brothers-only sort of fan, at all, in fact, I think a brothers-only ending betrays most of what's beautiful about this show in its good moments. But they are the stars, they are the protagonists, they should be the center of their own story, and I like it when we get check-ins like this, that shows how unshakable they are underneath all the other crap.

Charlie and Stevie... okay, cute that their names are like that, cute that Charlie said: "I liked the way she handled herself" and that's how they got together... eggs are cute, whatever... and if these deaths are impermanent, which... come on... they have to be, I do like that Charlie gets to have a girlfriend and be happy as a hunter and as someone's partner.

I liked the tense car ride with Sam texting Eileen, with Dean, Jack, and Cas all silent in the car with him... that was a nice moment of solidarity, all of them entirely on the same page about being there for Sam and helping Eileen however they could... even knowing the futility. What were they going to do when they got there? That was a great tension-building moment, in isolation, even though the deaths are likely temporary.

Cas and Jack's talk was good, I'll admit I've definitely been won over by Cas and Sam as Jack's dads... Dean too, once upon a time, but dude needs to do some groveling before he gets to be Dad again, seriously. It's nice that in the midst of all the chaos, there was a check-in moment. Jack is the embodiment of a lot of our end-game themes, here. He had a noble destiny to sacrifice himself, and then it fizzled out and didn't work, and now he's just left in the aftermath, not sure what to do with himself. It was important that Cas tell him that Jack is worthy of love and family, even if he's not "useful" in the way he thought he could be. Definitely nice to have that nailed in.

If we're following the Infinity War/Endgame line, the last two episodes will be majority Sam, Dean, and Jack, but at the last moment there will be a way to reverse it, and everyone else will come back in a moment of triumph. But probably not so much Castiel, which... well... see above complaints. The point is, seeing Charlie, Bobby, Donna, Eileen, etc. all burst forth for one final moment of glory could be really cool, if they manage to stick the landing with it. It'll be an incredibly manufactured sense of triumph and nostalgia, but it will probably work on me because it's been... guys, I don't know if you know this, but it's been kind of an emotional year. :)

I will say, working under the assumption that the dead characters will come back, I'm actually oddly... not mad about Donna dying. It was actually a legitimately shocking twist. A rule was set up: if a person had died before and been resurrected, or if a person was from another universe, they could be Thanos snapped by Billie. Makes sense. Sam and Dean are in danger because of all their deaths, Jack and Cas aren't safe for the same reason. Charlie, Bobby, Eileen... sure. But Donna should have been safe, given the parameters we started with.

And then Dean and Cas are confronting Billie, she says she's not killing anyone, we realize it must be Chuck... and then Donna, who isn't from another world, who has never died... GONE. I gasped.

And the hits kept coming... Billie is dying because Dean killed her with that small wound, and didn't even know it. That's another excellent twist. The past two episodes, back to back, have kept me on my toes about who to ultimately be afraid of. Chuck? Billie? The Empty? It's so much better than this slow march to Chuck vs. Sam and Dean that we've been getting all season, even if we do loop around to Chuck again as the final Big Bad.

The Empty is actually quite a complex, interesting idea for a villain, this entity that doesn't get involved in petty squabbles, doesn't have personal vendettas, but actually just wants to sleep and be left alone. Having Meg be the Empty's face here at the end is also a nice touch. I wish we could have had more of this, truthfully, and I'm curious how The Empty will play a role in how things shake out, if at all.

So... I want to go back to something I've been saying these past couple episodes, about how if this show has a grimdark ending, it will be a betrayal of everything they've set up. It will be so stupid that my anger will manifest in yet another round of hysterical giggles. What I suspect is that we'll get something peaceful, something where trauma will linger but people will get to start anew. Maybe Jack creates a new world outside of Chuck's power. Maybe Sam and Dean take over as God and the Darkness, as some people suggested, and Jack is the new Death. Maybe maybe maybe. Bottom line, I could be satisfied with the majority of this ending, and I can even (obliquely, reluctantly) understand that they wanted one final perma-death to really make the stakes feel higher. If they aren't killing off the Winchesters, that leaves Castiel. So what I'm saying in this paragraph is basically that I'm not guaranteed to despise the ending of this show yet. They could still get it right.

God, that sounds pretty bleak, doesn't it?

Before I end this, I want to talk about, as promised, the few Destiel-related points that I'd classify as "pros", albeit with a big asterisk.

First off, Misha clearly found the moment very cathartic, and he pulled out all the stops, and, in isolation, the confession was hella romantic and quite poignant. Without context, just reading these lines? "The one thing I want, it's something I know I can't have" and "because you cared, I cared. I cared about you, I cared about Sam, I cared about Jack, I cared about the whole world because of you..." like, that's some premium content, I won't lie. I also kind of enjoy the idea that Cas finds happiness in saying the words out loud, in being true to who he is. I hate a lot about what happened to Cas here, but if Cas' arc, in its totality, is about embracing humanity, and Dean is the anchor to that, this really does come full circle. He pulled Dean out of Hell, he saved him, he loved him, he'll die for him, and in accepting that love, that human love, he is finally at peace with who he is. Now, mind my comments above, I'm still not happy, but I can see how in one sense, this is narratively poignant. And if others are satisfied with it, I'm happy for them.

(Added bonus, while Jensen's acting was WACK for the majority of that scene, I did like the ending shot, the silence, him not answering Sam's call, crying silently into his hands. That was very nicely shot and acted, I thought.)

Secondly, and this isn't actually praise for the show, it's more a... meta experience? I have to say, the idea that Destiel became sort of canon, but in the most homophobic way possible, in the year 2020, while we're all still waiting for election results to come in is... one of the wildest, most hilarious things to ever have happened to me. I mean it, last night sitting alone in my house I kept cackling loudly to myself, in complete and utter disbelief. I saw Tumblr explode in a way that hasn't happened in years. I was transported back in time nearly a full decade, to the person I was when I started writing these reviews, or even before that, when I was new to Supernatural, new to the whole concept of being truly involved in a fandom.

Here's the thing... I never. Ever. EVER. Thought we would get any sort of textual confirmation. I thought at most, if they went for a happy ending for everyone, we'd get Dean and Cas as hunting partners, and we could all fill in the post-canon gaps. I once told my sister that I'd be happy with a one-sided love confession from Cas to Dean, because that part was practically canon before last night, and in a way, I am happy. I'm happy that this crazy thing actually happened, and if nothing else, all of those clowns can put away their makeup. I was never with them. I never believed, and there's this sliver of me that's happy to have been wrong. It's completely bogus how it happened, but the fact that we live in a reality where it happened is still kind of tripping me out in a major way. So I'm happy, I'm... flabbergasted, but I'm experiencing a very unique, unprecedented soup of emotions this morning and I never would have felt like this if Cas had died with a no homo parting.

And that's the thing, they let it be unambiguously about Dean, not just in that one moment, but all along, and that's really satisfying in a meta narrative sense that when everyone was reading it as "Castiel is in love with Dean," they were... correct. It doesn't really matter when they decided this, in last night's episode they made it crystal-clear that it wasn't a whim, wasn't a recent development, in-universe. This has been Cas' truth from very, very early on, his entire experience since meeting Dean has been shaped by him, he's loved him all this time. That... I don't know, it's absolutely bonkers that this is all we're going to get, but it does mean something, if you want to let it.

Welcome back to 2012, Tumblr. Last night was a wild ride, I won't deny.

I'm giving the episode a bad score, but I just want to say the Destiel scene gets a simultaneous infinity-out-of-ten and also zero-out-of-ten, imploding the multiverse instantly. That's where I'm at, folks. Insert gif of Chidi dropping Peeps into a big pot of chili. I'm gonna go take a nap.

6/10

#review #supernatural #supernatural review #spn #spn 15x18 #destiel #i'm experiencing actual shock #i keep laughing #but like #you know how sometimes people laugh or smile inappropriately at funerals?#it feels like that

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adrunkgiraffe · 4 years

Text

I have been through this journey before, so I get to be actually frustrated about it.

IUnder a read more because im not subjecting y’all to this. Also: I should caveat I haven’t watched the episode cause I’m waiting till its on Netflix but I have watched way too many other episodes of Supernatural so I have a right to say these things.

TL;DR: I mean you all knew Cas’ confession was fucking bullshit and that SPN is...hm. But I’d like to actually express my genuine frustration, for a moment? I’m going to say things you already know, but I have too much knowledge of this show and too much stupid meta in my brain about a series I haven’t genuinely enjoyed for at least 5 years which makes this not just blandly bad but disgustingly insulting to me not even as a gay just as like. A writer?

Or, even shorter: Cas’ confession is just a Charlie Bradbury Speedrun

So. As some of you may know if, for some reason, you followed me back in 2013 (and till...okay fine 2015), I used to be, uh. Really into SPN. Really, I was into Destiel. Like, as in, I slogged through seasons 1-3 to get to Cas and am also really vulnerable to the Sunk Cost Fallacy and projecting onto characters. (I was in 8th grade in 2013, okay? Get off my back)

Also, because I monopolised use of the TV, I kind of...also got my parents into it? In a “this is silly but fun” kind of way.

Over time, critiques of the show from viewers, learning what queerbaiting is at all, fatigue with how long it was going, and also fatigue from how characters I enjoyed, like Rufus, or Crowley, or Ellen, or Jo, or Kevin, or Charlie, or Cas a few times, kept getting killed off. As time went on, it didn’t escape my notice that, aside from Cas, all of these characters fit one or more of the following criteria:

They were a woman

They were a person of color

Were Queer or Queer-coded in some way (listen Crowley was bad rep but at least Mark Sheppard actually kissed a man on screen)

I also just...generally got tired of the way the show treats women and sidelines people of color.

The final straw really came with Charlie’s death. It got us all excited, because she hadn’t been back in a bit! And it was interesting to see how reuniting with her dark side from Oz had changed her! (yeah remember the fucking Wizard of Oz storyline? The writers sure don’t!) And maybe she’d get developed! Because at this point, Charlie and the fairly good writing of her character was a major upside for the series! Charlie was cool, fun, gay, and morally complex in a way...none of the female characters had been before her, in large part because by definition, her relationship with the boys would always be platonic.

And then. Offscreen. She is violently murdered. For no damn good reason. Like, literally, her being brought back in this episode after fucking off to europe after having returned from fucking off to Oz seems to have filled two purposes in total.

The codex is solved (but Sam doesn’t know till next episode)

Charlie is dead, which means Dean can be angry, specifically at Sam, and kill more people because he’s the big bad this season.

That’s it. Two things. Twooooo whole reasons to do this episode. Whoopee.

But you didn’t come here for this, you came here for me to rip this reveal to shreds. Don’t worry, I’ll get there. What I want in your minds is that Supernatural already had a really good anddynamic queer character. And then they killed her off to make Dean angry. No, it doesn’t matter that they brought her back in season 13 or whatever. They made that decision.

After the rage this incited, I started realizing general flaws in the writing (I had probably already noticed them but now I was angry enough to complain.) Every conflict is born of Sam and Dean not communicating/taking on burdens and Dean being angry at Cas for reasons that ranged from good to ridiculous, but in a way that always went way too fucking long, (which...yes, does make the “you do it for love” gifs fucking hilarious). It didn’t help that seasons 11 and 12 were next, which meant Demon Dean and GOD’S FUCKING SISTER, plus the decision to resurrect Mary, which, while I do like her later scenes, as a season 12 finale it...well I’ll be honest it kinda sucked. It undercut the majority of the Winchester’s’ arcs and their slow and painful journey out of their father’s toxic vengeance quest and knowing Mary as a person when it’s too late to know her was one of the last semi-compelling grounders of the narrative.

By this point it was a hate-watch for my parents and I.

So then, I’m at college, and I’m not watching anymore cause I don’t have the motivation or access to Hulu to continue, and SPN is bad. I watch the Scooby Doo crossover when it comes out and my friend and I make fun of it, and we also continue making jokes about Dean and Cas and queerbaiting because we’re queer, but I don’t keep up. My Dad does though, so when I return, I watch some with the fam and lads. It’s even more tiring without context.

So flash forward to Quarantine, my sister, the only one with taste, has left, and we have run out of netflix to watch. So we return to the well, and seasons 13-14 are. I’m gonna say it. Bad. Really fucking bad. The cycle of bad communication continues, season 14 has like seven antagonists and the way it’s structured makes it so I literally cannot remember the timeline of a season I watched 3 months ago. Oh also, they have a queer coded cannibal snake monster for...well I guess Jack’s snake bud was cool but like. Huh wow it’s almost like these writers don’t handle queers well.

Our one saving grace is Cas, but he’s barely in any episodes, though I did note that his deal with the empty, being happy completely for one moment killing him, that struck me as “this has potential and I know they’re gonna half-ass it somehow.” Also Jack and Mary, but then oh...plot….The most compelling it gets is literally the finale.

But then, 3 days later, the first half of season 15 comes out on Netflix and it’s...actually kind of acceptable. The new character they give Jack’s actor is fun to watch him play until they make him evil. Exploring just how toxic Chuck can be gave the series direction again. The alternate future was genuinely scarring, and Eileen’s return was genuinely moving. Most of all, though, Cas got the opportunity to tell Dean no, that Dean was being unfair to him, had always been unfair to him, and he was sick of it. I had no illusions, I knew Destiel was never gonna happen, and Cas was gonna die, but giving him that bit of agency, letting Cas grow and be self-sufficient, and be angry with Dean not for existential reasons but interpersonal ones, was such a good sign for me, and Dean grew too! Dean fucking apologized for being horrible and Jensen Ackles had a...yknow what, ill give it to him, he had a good acting moment.

But the thing. About. The “I love you.”

Let’s take it in parts.

What was good: I’m gonna admit it, lads, “Wanting what I can’t have” - AS A LINE - is good, and, structurally, there is something to the Empty Deal that could have been an interesting aspect of Cas’ arc when it comes to self actualization and being on even footing with Dean. The problem is, this is Supernatural, and that arc only comes up when I bring it up because character study, even in bad media, is fun for me.

What was bad:

I mean. Like. All of it? All of it.

Okay. Fine. I’ll be specific.

Cas dies immediately when - possibly because- he is revealed as having feelings for Dean. They kill him as they queer him, that’s a Bury Your Gays Speedrun right there.

Like the least they could have done is have him mention it to someone in another scene or something to establish some romantic feelings on the part of canon a full episode beforehand. That would have been the literal bare minimum.

When Cas starts praising Dean, for some reason both the writing and Misha’s acting take a bit of a downswing (from...where it already was). Cas, whose most powerful moment this season was acknowledging that Dean’s anger at him is cruel and unfair, flatly praises him for doing everything out of love and it reads with a misunderstanding of both Dean as a character and Cas’ understanding of Dean. Dean is angry! VERY ANGRY! And it’s a problem he needs to work on and rarely does.

Talking out of my ass, a better speech would have been about how Dean is angry because of his love for Sam, family, and the people around him, how, for better or for worse, he can’t help but be angry on behalf of others, and that his journey of moving that tendency towards the better is what made Cas care so much. Guys this alteration to the metaphor took 2 minutes to write tops I am an Art History student and these are TV WRITERS WITH YEARS OF EXPERIENCE CAN YOU TELL THEYRE NOT TRYING YET?

A better speech would, of course, have come out of a better series. My point: this part was half-assed. Poorly written. Wow it’s almost like the series is also poorly written.

Also, Misha is the better actor of the three(***OF THE THREE), but his choices in that scene are jarringly out of character which. Makes the bad writing worse. It doesn’t help that they cut to the same fucking shot of Dean 3 times. The chemistry in that scene makes it feel so fucking hackneyed. Because it is.

This combines lead me to the point: (wait there was a point to this?)

As someone who does not have the luxury of watching this capsized ship fall into boiling seas from a distance, it is less insulting to me that they did this so last minute and then sent Cas to the Void than it is how they did it. They had ingredients for something that could have been compelling enough to me as a former fan of the show to think that they had put effort into it, that they had decided months, perhaps even years ago to do this, and had crafted a storyline around it. That this was an intentional decision they cared about. It wasn’t. It was barely even pandering, because it’s almost insultingly blatant.

SPN kinda proved to me that it didn’t care about queers when Charlie was killed off. It proved it to me again when Cas, not only died in confessing his love for Dean but did it in the weakest result of what could have been a surprisingly strong story.

#destiel #i don't fucking care im tagging it #bury your gays #queerbaiting #homophobia #also: i should say there are a lot of moments where i refer to aspects of the writing as good #this either means i was 14 when I watched it #or #it's something that i find compelling #that #IN ANOTHER SHOW #OR IN A HYPOTHETICAL WHERE THE WRITING ISNT LADEN WITH HOMOPHOBIA #could be fun to explore #like there are these structural motifs #and themes #which could have made the show good #could have made that confession...passable #but they didn't even write it well by supernatural standards #is my point #My other point is i get to actually be mad about this because I actually watched and put emotional energy towards this show #i shouldnt have but i did #so now I get to write about it #and if you reply we been knew to this post #youre correct #but also #wow do you maybe think I was already aware of that?

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naruhearts · 5 years

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OKAY SO I've just spent the best part of an hour scrolling through your blog and reading a bunch of your destiel meta and I HAD to message you... I was one of the many people who STRONGLY believed destiel had a chance of being canon after season 8 (more like season gr8 am i right), but throughout the years I slowly lost all hope. However, S14 has made me 110% invested in the show again and YOUR META IS GIVING ME HOPE FOR DESTIEL, which is TERRIFYING. Your writing is wonderful and I'm STRESSED.

Got back from Washington late last night!

Oh my gosh @alovelikecas, your message really made my day and I’m SO glad you enjoy my meta xox (even when most of my meta looks like, to me, sloppy-ass writing, haha! I’ll probably make an end-season meta post after 14x20 — if I have the time — that touches upon SPN’s current and repeating themes since Season New Beginnings S12/Dabb Era, not to mention I have, like, some more unfinished meta in my drafts >.>)

Yeah I mean, I didn’t join Destiel land until Summer 2016, and before that, I was late to the Season 11 party, so I basically had no narrative context for anything, and I’ll copy-paste what I said here:

Looking back, one significant thing I recall? S11 gave me a sense of Destiel’s true narrative validity (as not a ‘fanon’ ship but organically developed in the canon) when I perceived it as a season that was ‘missing something’. Keep in mind I had no idea about Destiel yet while watching S11 at the time.

I was literally asking myself — repeatedly — why Dean/Amara seemed to contain odd narrative holes, considering A. Dean explicitly said that the non-consensual attraction he felt for Amara was NOT love and “it scares him”, B. Amara told Dean that ‘something stops you - keeps you from having it all’, C. Djinn!Amara stated that she can: ‘feel the love [Dean] feels, except it’s cloaked in shame,’ and D. Mildred’s iconic ‘You’re pining for someone’ —> which did not logically correlate with A and C, meaning: since Dean doesn’t freely love Amara and thus isn’t possibly pining for her — with female love interests as currently non-existent (I remember crossing off the dead/gone girls on a piece of paper lol) — who the hell was he pining for, then?

Originally posted by elizabethrobertajones

Obviously, without writing long-ass paragraphs of meta about it again in this post, S11 made sense as soon as I watched it within the Destiel context (especially after I read up on some grandiose pieces of Destiel meta (@charlie-minion was the very first person who inspired me to write meta; I followed her once I joined the fandom Oh my god, here we go, holy crap this subtext – I’m invested in this godforsaken ship because they’re in love with each other and I’m not getting off any time soon. The rest is history.

I’m aware that I do come off as positive (and I’m still Destiel-positive; whatever happens in 14x20 this week may or may not change that), but I hope you don’t mind if I use your lovely ask as an additional opportunity to clarify my meta standpoint: no one’s saying Destiel WILL become text.

The general Destiel meta community (all subfactions: Destiel-positive, -negative, -neutral, and in-between) is not the Most Holy Canon Word, and we aren’t SPN writers, and again, we can’t actually speak to the veracity of Destiel as guaranteed-gonna-go-textual, but we — a diverse pool of critical thinkers from all walks of life: particularly those who have some degree of experience in literary academia/English literature studies (fun fact: I was actually pursuing a Minor’s in English until I changed my mind - my first love’s Health Science/Biology, which I stuck with, but here I am doing lit-crit analysis on the side *wink*) — can speak to the veracity of Destiel as a real, palpable, and ever-substantial long-running romance narrative aka the love story between Dean and Cas IS THERE. I see it. We all see it. We didn’t pluck it out of the random ether one day. It naturally evolved across the show’s overarching narrative like some vast spiderweb, linked together by numerous character arc amalgamations of Dean Winchester and Castiel as separate individuals who were then brought together — who brought themselves together, by the sheer force of free will and choice — and are now inherent parts of the other’s story (and respective character progression).

I say this too many times to count: the entire point of writing meta? Personally, it enables me to appreciate the literary gorgeousness of Dean and Cas’ relationship as, first and foremost, a tentative alliance offset by the very moment Cas raised Dean from perdition (it’s a poetic beginning). Their alliance then inevitably proliferated into a rocky — at times, necessarily turbulent — friendship, then a deep profound bond…one that crossed platonic boundaries since S7/8 and is, ultimately, indelibly rooted in romance. Together, Dean and Cas build up each other’s strengths, complement each other’s flaws, and narratively motivate the other to self-introspect — to become the best version of themselves that they were always meant to be: self-actualized entities who let go of their painful, horrifying, psychologically/emotionally destitute pasts.

These above reasons and more are why I think Destiel belongs right up there on the shelf of Ye Olde Classics, similar to epics by John Milton, Shakespearian tragic dramas, Homeric characteristic cruxes, and the great Odyssey journey: a legendary journey, fraught with circumstance, that finally ended with Odysseus (now an enlightened man) returning to Penelope, the love of his life.

Channeling the scope of Homer’s Odyssey, Destiel is an incredible storytelling feat of obstacles, both internal and external, romance tropes, mirroring, foreshadowing, and visual cadence/emotion, enhancing SPN’s already character-driven main plot in that Dean and Cas try to make it back to one another; like Penelope, their love holds true despite everything. If Destiel were an M/F couple, we all know their love story would be absolutely undeniable to the GA.

I do understand the bitterness S14’s fostered in some viewers, though. I do understand that Dean and Cas seem distant (and yeah, it’s a noticeable difference compared to S12/S13), but I believe the Destiel subtext is still heavy and holds steady.

Right now, at this point, there remains multiple personal issues for the characters to solve, you know? Dean and Cas aren’t talking properly; their love languages stay mistranslated, although we’re persistently shown that they still understand each other on a certain level that no one else can, and the visual narrative keeps framing them as on-the-nose solid counterparts: a domestic-spousal romantic unit independent of Sam.

Originally posted by incatastrophicmind

They want to be there for the other. They need to quash the final remnants of their respective internal loathing (Dean’s self-worthiness, Cas’ self-expendability) before they’re able to give the other 100% of their time, efforts, attention, and love (as flawed and complicated but compellingly beautiful as it can possibly be). During the times Dean and Cas do try to talk shit out, extraneous issues continue to get between them.

As other friends/meta pals discussed with me, S14 is like S10 in that it’s confusing the cast/audiences. And exactly: S8, besides S11/S12/early S13, also belongs in the close-to-canon serious Destiel narrative transition! I can discuss the showrunning/writer problem of SBL (Singer + Bucklemming; @occamshipper hits the nail on the head) that tugs subtext – especially subtext linked to Destiel – back and forth, sometimes in the weirdest nonsensical ways, but I won’t go too far into it here. I agree, however, with the recent idea that Jensen does seem a bit confused as to where he should bring Dean emotionally this season (don’t get me wrong, I do NOT believe Dean is OOC; OOC is a completely different concept vs expected character behaviour). And if Dean’s consistently romance-coded past interactions with Cas are any indication, Jensen would also — in the same vein as all of us — want Dean and Cas to start getting their shit together. Long-running fictional characters like Dean and Cas, conceived over 10 years, are so well-written to the point where you, the author, can predict what they’ll do even if you just plop both of them inside a room and give them no direction, and I personally feel that nowadays Jensen is prevented from achieving Dean’s further internal growth/unsure how to act in the moment because of some dumb SBL scripts saying one thing while his character’s heart says another. Wank aside—

Season 15 should hopefully convey a much more logical subtextual perspective e.g. unbelievably amazingly cohesive Season Destiel 11 that aired after choppy S10. Not all hope is lost!! I also want to clarify that I personally LOVED Season 14 in general. It’s been mostly Emotion-centric constant, with Yockey, Berens, Perez, and Dabb usually making my top-rank SPN writer list.

Currently the narrative’s still allowing pretty significant (imho) wiggle room for the lovers to fracture apart and get back together, where their miscommunication comes to a dramatic head. We just saw Dean and Cas argue over Jack’s well-being in 14x18 and 19. Dean — besides putting Cas at the top of his You’re-Dead-to-Me-Because-You-Lied-but-I-Still-Love-You-Goddammit hitlist (for clear spousal-coded reasons) and taking Cas’ actions to heart (he’s the person he trusted the most who lied to him) — no doubt blamed himself for what happened, and Sam was, like I said, the mouthpiece of truth. TFW were all culpable. They all failed Jack in some way, shape, or form.

I’m not expecting anything for 14x20, but I’m nervous either way! Thanks for sticking with my long answer

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elizabethrobertajones · 6 years

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How after the mixtape are Dean and Cas' romantic feelings not considered canon? That shit was not subtext and even if you disregard the Mary and John Led Zepplin connection, mixtapes are almost exclusively romantic in fiction not to mention the whole returning one as a break up and framing of the scene. I just don't understand how even to the GA that was ambiguous. Honestly these moving goalposts are very confusing to me. Aside from PR not mentioning it I don't get what more the show needs (1/2)

to do, to establish that yes it’s written as romantic but that they are not in the being together stage. We don’t know what will happen in the future but to me 12x19 pretty clearly showed that at least at that point in their relationship, that’s where they were at. I wondered if you had any thoughts on it because it’s been nagging at me for a while? (2/2)

I mean, yeah, I have a LOT of thoughts about it because it was a sea change in the way Destiel presented, for me. There’s been MULTIPLE moments which took it up another notch, at pretty regularly spaced intervals through the show. I know my personal limit, when bingewatching 4-6 for the first time after an unintentional break from the show, was 6x20. Everyone who got into the ship without being prompted has a a moment along the way, whether it was considering all the ship teasing seriously, or thinking something about the narrative, or whatever, got to that moment where they actually hit the goalposts and started taking it seriously.

I think several of the past moments that I find really important are also statements of intent - 9x18 for me was when I went from casual viewer and while I believed in Destiel I also saw it entirely as a subtextual creation that was not sort of… for serious consideration as a narrative tool/character endgame the show would ever even nod towards at the end of the day… to definitely thinking they were at the very least intentionally building their story with these blocks, and that it was worth investigating and exploring… That was Metatron asking us to consider the subtext and how it was a part of the story. That it wasn’t something that passes by like that but that there is an awareness and that it can and will give the story meaning. The episode being so full of strong Destiel subtext, it put me firmly where I am now in meta fandom with an overnight transformation >.>

And 10x05 was the other one where there was a serious goalpost, where “Destiel” was said in text and a pseudo Destiel depiction happened on screen… To whatever degree it was jokey or wish fulfilment or could be interpreted this way and that as a statement to how Destiel stood in the text, it gave it a weight and presence it hadn’t had before. Even though fans had had a name for it all along, there’s something very important about naming the thing within the story and even having Sam sound out different versions of the name with pedantic detail. Between that and “I’ll just wait here then” it really established Destiel in the subtextual building blocks of the show in a fascinatingly meta way.

Then for all the random canon events of maybe extreme shippiness, it was 12x19 that for me was a real SHIFT when it came to perceptions and presentation in the story, because of course even on the surface level it’s an extremely romantic trope to give a mixtape, and ignoring all the other analysis of the scene which only makes it worse, it betrays an enormous amount of emotion and care between Dean and Cas, in a way that’s coded strongly to our cultural perceptions as a romantic gesture having passed between them. Which means it’s another goal scored when it comes to… upping the ante of not-quite-canon-ness?

I sort of feel like Cas’s death and return and all the connected stuff from the moment he’s stabbed through Dean saying “I do” and hugging him under the romeo+juliet glowing neon cross was either a further upping of the ante, or just showing us how to play in the rules which now exist post-mixtape, where this is the level of implied canon it’s at now…

I mean I honestly keep saying and I mean it that pretty much since the mixtape or 12x23 I’ve been quite lost about how to handle Destiel in the sense that these were goalposts I didn’t even know I would expect the show to meet, or that if they did it would be the implied canon ending of the show where it gives us an equivalent gesture and leaves us to wonder what it was about. Instead it happens at this point and we’ve got over a season of Dean n Cas portrayed as exasperated husbands and all my interest and expertise in lawyering subtext to prove how gay it is has been left behind in its wake, so I’m just here to enjoy myself and see how it pans out now, because I set my own personal goalposts of what I assumed the show would do much lower than what Dabb set? Like, the reverse problem of people who keep moving them rather than examine the subtext and see what it says fairly without trying to lawyer their way out of what all these implications are instead. :P

But at least the mixtape made it very clear to me that you can now sort out the people who will NEVER accept something as good enough proof that the show even has romantic subtext for Dean n Cas and refuse to understand why people see it or ship it. To discount that entire conversation and the clearly expressed feelings of concern for each other, regardless of shipping, in order to claim that they don’t mean that much to each other and it’s ooc to suggest otherwise, means they’re doing the harder work when it comes to interpretation and THAT is a flipping of the stances from pre-mixtape where plausible deniability and doubt and stuff all mixed together to make it at least an awkward sell to people who hadn’t thought of it that way yet, and empowered people who wilfully didn’t want to see it.

The Cas death arc just gave us more fodder for where shippers do less work than people who actively want to deny that Dean cares.

But for general audiences, I think it’s quite easy to get stuck at the stage where I was pre-9x18 where Dean n Cas might even seem to be somewhat a ~confirmed couple~ except that people will lend it no credit to intent or their importance to each other in the emotional endgame, just for reasons of it not being done, or not thinking it’s possible, or in general not putting in the attention and time to piece together the relationship that a definitive canon statement would cause them to do a double take on. And that even if they then say they knew it all along, because many of these goalposts are unmissable in some senses, the credibility lent to the ship is fully missable without knowing to give it. Which is the whole problem, really.

I’ve known the show long enough to feel its old school bones pretty deeply so I feel like that affects my personal perspective on… owedness of canon or where I started to take it seriously, and how much of the old gods of TV vs new gods possibility I would casually see in its genetic makeup. So 12x19 - being written by the new gods of TV - took the show a step further as Dabb seems to be the first showrunner of that generation of TV writers vs the ones who would play the subtext game forever - and that’s really unsettling to me. In the sense that there’s some sort of storytelling subversion thing going on here and my understanding is still kinda maybe rooted in an older postmodern take than what might end up being labelled something entirely new by future scholars… And a lot of that to me is in expectations and tropes no longer being what they were and I end up thinking of all the factors from the mass-saturation of media vs everything having to be new and individual to be considered worthy, to the effect of the internet, and the political climate in America, and the world the younger millennial writers grew up in (and we can see that literally warring with Buckleming’s old school writing in the show), and not just storytelling but representation of all walks of marginalised life coming into it, and it’s all a bunch of stuff that probably soon there’ll be a bunch of interesting scholarship on, but in the mean time we’re all riding the wave and in my personal experience I feel like we don’t even know what our surfboards are any more.

I mean 12x23 seriously knocked me into orbit when it came to my understanding of the show, and I haven’t recovered yet. And since I spend a lot of time over-thinking as a matter of course, this is a tiny percentage of the ridiculous musings I have on it all and why I can’t just get mad at it for goalpost issues, and why I feel people lag behind and stuff. I feel like WE are lagging behind, even the people who claim to know everything about the show and analyse it all the time, and the best we can do is take it as it comes and see… But this is very much an utter fascination with watching Dabb era shed Carver era’s subtext cocoon and start testing its bizarre, mirrored, fractal wings.

#Asks #dabb vs cars #top 13 zepp traxx #riverboat gambling #12x19 #destiel

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mittensmorgul · 7 years

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My boyfriend admitted yesterday after finally watching 13.1 that Dean and Cas DO love each other. He has no doubt in his mind that if Cas were female, Destiel would have happened. BUT he sees Dean as straight and doesn't believe anything could happen with Cas in Jimmy's body. I told him that this is heteronormative bi erasure and that as a bisexual, I find it offensive that he makes that assumption. What if these sorts of casual viewer opinions keep Destiel from ever happening? I'm losing hope.

Hi there! And congrats to your boyfriend for seeing the love there. :D

First off, no offense to straight dudes, but the straight dude I’ve been married to for 20 years has absolutely no sense of bifi. Or gaydar. I mean, if he sees two dudes kissing at Pride he’d pick up on it (and there are a few famous people who came out that he wasn’t surprised at all about– George Michael, Rob Halford, he was shocked that anyone was shocked…), but when it comes to closeted bisexuals who deliberately do not want to be detected, especially the way Dean performs dudebro heterosexuality as well as Dean does especially in early seasons, he just has no clue.

*insert that gif of Sam telling Dean he’s overcompensating*

The things about Dean that have been screamingly obvious because I relate to them from personal experience just don’t register to a straight dude who has never once questioned his sexuality (like Sam, for instance). To a person who has experienced it first-hand, a lot of Dean’s behavior reads as signal flares as bright as day. If it were only used for the occasional joke, or rare random things that didn’t fit into a much larger pattern, or if it were just enough to make me sit up and notice once or twice a season, I’d assume it was just a coincidence. But… it’s not a rare random occurrence. It’s something we see in nearly every episode, more and more blatantly as the seasons progress.

I tell everyone to read this:

http://destielhiseyesopened.tumblr.com/post/102023741956/slash-and-subtext-series

It’s a lot to read, yes, but it’s incredibly thorough and the sort of thing your neck will be sore from nodding along in agreement the entire time. :P

As for whether or not the show will go there, which NONE of us can say for sure, the one thing I can say for sure is that it will not be casual viewer opinions that will influence Dabb’s storytelling. He’s said it multiple times, that he’s going to tell this story his way, whatever that might mean in the end. Dude’s not telling. I mean, look at him:

So while it’s great to have hope, because we DESERVE representation in blatant and clear terms, there is no guarantee that we will actually GET it. I mean, that is a very real possibility. It’s why I personally don’t watch the show with any expectation for ANYTHING, you know? Then every new hint that they are taking this somewhere is a pleasant surprise. For me, watching from the standpoint that I EXPECT a certain outcome is just not an enjoyable way to live. It’s just too much to stress about.

And as I’ve said over and over again, just like Dabb, I personally couldn’t give a flying fuck with the mysterious “general audience” sees when they watch the show. I watch because of what *I* see in the show, because I like analyzing the story, writing meta (with the friendly reminder that “meta” has exactly zero to do with predicting the future of the story… that’s speculation, and aside from being able to read obvious twists and turns in near-future plot points, or understanding general character development arcs and where they could potentially be headed in vague general ways, I DO NOT ENJOY SPECULATION, especially when it involves the sort of detail that a lot of more casual fans seem to expect of meta writers. I AM TIRED OF FOLKS HAVING THE IMPRESSION THAT SPECULATION AND POSITIVITY FOR THE FUTURE OF THE SERIES AND CHARACTERS IS “”””META”””” BECAUSE IT ABSOLUTELY IS NOT.

Sorry for yelling, I needed to put that out there. Comments of “I love your meta!” when referring to headcanons and speculation about endgame destiel is just… missing the entire point. The meta is the long academic character analysis, the comparisons with the current arc to past canon, the examination of episodes THAT ARE ALREADY PART OF CANON. Looking to the future to make guesses about what COULD happen in the future is SPECULATION. NOT META.

I’m so tired of people who do not understand that giving meta writers hate and dismissing EVERYTHING we’ve written because a “prediction” didn’t come true on the show exactly as someone wrote it… A guess of what will happen in the future that doesn’t quite pan out doesn’t invalidate all the ACTUAL meta we’ve all written over the years. Because just like pr is not showrunning, speculation isn’t meta.

*even when the speculation is attached to the bottom of a really long meta post. The speculation bit isn’t the tl;dr of the post. it’s the interesting and fun little bonus bit after you’ve consumed the factual part of the analysis. It’s the little blop of whipped cream on top of the pie that is the actual important content. It’s mostly decorative and just a bit of fun.*

Thanks, this has been a meta writer PSA.)

The point of all that is that none of us have a crystal ball, none of us have some secret insider information into Andrew Dabb’s brain. Despite the fact that we’ve been watching his storytelling over the last 8+ years (yes, he’s been writing for the show since s4, and has written more episodes of Supernatural than any other writer, so we have A LOT of history to look over, not to mention all of s12 and the back ~third~ at least of s11 after he silently took over the showrunning from Carver to look at when trying to understand his pet themes and how he writes), the best we can do is make educated guesses.

I’m not basing my hope for canon on some ability to read the future, I’m basing it on MY ability to look at the entirety of extant canon and be objectively logical about where the story started, where the story is NOW, and as far as individual character development arcs based on having watched them all evolve over twelve plus seasons already…

Well, let’s just say that for *me,* I can see the characters have been on a logical emotional progression over the course of the entire series (that would be the “meta” part of things). As new canon unfolds, and characters continue to develop and interpersonal storylines continue to evolve… here’s a metaphor. The writers are walking the characters down a long hallway with loads of doorways open to potential future development arcs. As they walk past each doorway and don’t veer off course, it’s like they’re closing off logical possibilities to detour into alternate routes. They’re slamming and locking those doors up forever. The closer we get to the end of canon (in whatever nebulous future that the series will reach its end, and NONE of us know when that will be right now), the fewer doorways are left to walk past, and the less logical any detour from what looks (again, from reading the meta and looking back at the entirety of past canon) like the steady progression of development would be.

Does that make sense? I mean, they’re writing themselves into a corner (or into the end of the hallway where there’s only going to be one last exit door to walk through). But again, as long as there’s still hallway ahead of us, they could take an “easier” route or just decide to stop walking altogether and just sort of set up camp at their current point in character development. It wouldn’t really be sensible for the STORY as it stands right now for them to do either of these things, because if they start backtracking looking for a different door the entire narrative falls apart. Whatever they do, they must keep writing forward.

*stops and scrolls up and cries a lil bit at how much I wrote*

Point is, we just don’t know. I’m hopeful, I feel like we DESERVE to be seen and this love story absolutely DESERVES canon acknowledgement for what it is, and that every sign in past canon and every sign the writers are continuing to carry on down this hallway is pointing to it happening at some distant point in the future… but as of right now none of us have any idea what that eventual resolution will look like. What even is canon?

I mean, your boyfriend said he sees that Dean and Cas love each other. Is that canon? What would “qualify” as being legitimately canon? I love @bluestar86′s spec post about how easy it would be to make Dean’s bisexuality textually canon, but I have no idea if we’d ever get an episode stating it so blatantly. We might, though. We did have Dean asking a gay married couple what it was like settling down with another hunter…

The point is, even trying to speculate on what will happen in the future– especially something so unknowable and distant as “endgame,” is honestly impossible. We have no idea what will happen in canon between now and then in specific terms. In the meantime, I’m perfectly content to point and flail at what is actually happening in canon right now and paying exactly zero attention to what “casual viewers” think they’re watching.

I know exactly what I’m watching, and I love it.

Will they ever make it undeniably obvious and clear in canon? I mean, it is undeniably obvious and clear to *me* but everyone has their own personal biases and wishes and checklists of things they feel must happen, and no matter if the series ends with Dean and Cas getting married there will still always be people who deny it was “enough” to make their relationship obvious, you know? I just… don’t have the energy to deal with that level of denialism. It just stresses me out to worry about what “endgame” might look like specifically when as far as we know, “endgame” isn’t even on the table yet.

So by all means, if you can, take that small step back and try and enjoy the continuing story, and don’t put too much stock in anyone’s opinion of what may or may not happen in the future. But most of all, don’t put much much stock in what random straight dudes in the general audience think. Because Andrew Dabb doesn’t. :P

Wow okay that turned into a treatise…

#spn meta meta #revenge of the subtext #the destiel #destiel #the scheherazade of supernatural #carasauruswrex #this is an andrew dabb appreciation blog (except when it comes to car stuff)#dabb vs cars

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tinkdw · 7 years

Text

The future - and it is showing us this loud and clear

This episode was amazing. After flailing and basically shouting all day I am so happy and so excited that I joined tumblr - the quality of posts today has been excellent, both humorous and inciteful and I LOVE YOU ALL :)

I hope its ok I’m going to tag a few great posts in this to reference as I don't want to go over stuff other people have already meta-d about so excellently!

This episode, titled the future, seems to me to be Dabb basically telling us what he wants for the next part of the show, the “better way” that he wants to take it.

So here are my main bullet points that I will expand on a little below and link those excellent posts to where relevant:

A. Sam

Sam is clearly portrayed again, recurrently as the researcher, the “brains” of the operation (before you say ‘Dean is so clever though!’ I’m just pointing out Sam’s love of the scholarly side of things and how this is where he fits). Sam’s endgame must now be to head up the MoL/hunter network in this respect.

B. Sam and Dean

They work so well as a team here, Sam putting a tracker in Cas’s phone while he’s distracted by Dean, researching v whatever Dean was doing (maybe making a pining mixtape along the lines of “all by myself” and “I miss you” “please come home”, BUT they are shown as different people, with different interests, skills and relationships - with Cas for example, & not codependent. Again hammering this home in this episode. THANK YOU DABB, GLYNN & BERENS.

C. THE RECURRING AND CONSISTENT NARRATIVE OF DESTIEL.

This whole episode is one big love fest. We went from one ‘wow I can't believe they just did that!’ to the next to the next with hardly enough time for us to catch out breath! WHAT WAS THIS EPISODE?!

OK, so we have :

1. My Romeo & Juliet / Gaze up Trope Balcony Meta.

2. The Mixtape Meta, another EXPLICIT romantic trope by @drsilverfish.

3. The Dean “keep it” parallels, the first one that came to my mind was Arwen (another human+ / eternal being who decided to relinquish immortality couple):

Aragon: this belongs to you. Arwen: keep it, it was a gift… it is mine to give to whom I will, like my heart.

But also all the other ‘gift’ tropes, the standard romantic trope that when a couple breaks up you return the gifts.... I think Cas wasn’t sure he was going to be forgiven, after Dean’s outburst in the war room, so he goes to return the cassette, but Dean does forgive him nearly instantaneously, which actually makes it even worse that he has to steal the colt straight after...

5. The difference between Sastiel and Destiel again emphasised, more and more this season. I don't think I even have to detail this, just, basically the whole episode shows this.

6. This magnificent gifset by @magnificent-winged-beast which shows the difference between Dean’s angst at actually watching the colt get destroyed and the potential killing of Cas...

Slight aside - Performing!Dean.

This magnificent gifset that shows Dean’s facade coming down, he doesn't even attempt to make it sound less ‘gay’ when he tells Sam that Cas came to his room, played him and took the colt from his secret hiding place under his pillow, he even looks down before he says it like he KNOWS how it is going to sound but says it anyway.

source: @yourfavoritedirector.

And Sam doesn't even flinch. YES THANK YOU DABB, GLYNN & BERENS!

4. SO...WHY is Dean still doing everything he did for Cas during this episode and still defending him to Sam even though he appeared pissed and Cas repeatedly betrayed him?

Well, in 12x12 Cas said “I love you”, clearly understood by Dean (and Sam to be directed at Dean). There was no real reciprocation though from Dean, other than Dean family-zoning him and Sam’s fantastic “we are doing this for you, Cas”.

So regarding Dean, Cas is hurt and believes it isn't reciprocated. Now Dean is pissed and still using the WE card at every turn, so what is a celestial being to do? Cas assumes this is the end, that there is no hope, he returns the mixed tape. BUT Dean says no keep it, this is NOT the end.

Cas understands that this is therefore not the end, but it is complicated. He explains that he wanted to “come back with a win for you.... for myself”. He wants this for Dean and for himself, this is very important, everything he is doing now and in the future is NOT all about Dean, there is his own agency and morality involved here too.

For Cas, when it comes to it, he wants this reciprocation of his love of course, but right now he has bigger fish to fry and really he wants to protect Sam and Dean and save the world.

Now, going back to the “what the hell is wrong with you man?” followed by an awkward silence.... and where Cas then goes to return the gift. Yes, Cas feels that he has said his piece in 12x12 and is rebuffed, but meanwhile Dean is struggling with what Cas has said and everything else that is going on. He has a lot on his plate, not only Cas but his own personal history, his deep seated issues that he is clearly working on this season (see all the performing!Dean facade crumbling meta going around), his issues around his mother, the BMoL, Lucifer, the nephilim.... I mean that is a lot for an emotionally healthy person let a lone DEAN WINCHESTER.

Dean is trying to say / show how he feels he’s just rubbish at it, but he's getting better!

“We?” “Yes dumbass, WE.” This is his forgiveness. And it is betrayed just moments later. But does this stop him trusting Cas again? NO.

THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT. For their dynamic, to show that they still do ultimately trust each other.

EVEN AFTER EVERYTHING DEAN STILL DEFENDS CAS TO SAM!

Oh, and I just need to add how desperate I am for Sam to turn to Dean soon and just say “No, Dean, this is between you and Cas, stop bringing me into this”. PLEASE I SWEAR I WILL BE GOOD! I mean, how repeated, consistent and out of place it was (I mean, not only to shippers, I think anyone would think it was out of place the way it was portrayed in their personal conversation in Dean’s room) - this has got to be addressed, no?!

5. A better way

So. What does this mean moving forwards?

Well, firstly, I have moved from being 85% sure Destiel would be endgame to about 95% sure. Lets be real. This episode cements this. Whether you like it or not, it’s happening.

So, what is the better way?

Overall, it seems that Dabb wants to move things forwards. And his key points all season are Free Will, breaking from past repressions and negative influences, moving forwards with what the characters choose and want for their endgame and for sure now endgame Destiel.

I have in the past speculated about quite a lot of stuff, some right and some... still to be seen and some not right, but the overall arc speculation that I saw foreshadowed since early season 12 is RIGHT ON TRACK.

Now, the question is will Dabb go backwards and go to the old, standard SPN ways where probably Dean and Cas will be separated, Cas will be wrong again in his trust in the nephilim - it WILL be evil (rehash of s6 and s8) and he will need to be ‘broken’ from the mind control by Dean in a stronger crypt scene etc etc etc.

Or will he move forwards, onto a “better way”? Will we get another s11 ‘happy ending’? Where it appears all good but there is still stuff going on behind the scenes for s13... Or maybe a not so happy ending but that ultimately will be resolved happily?

Maybe the baby has it’s grace removed (so glad this is an option it was driving me insane that they hadn't mentioned it by now!) OR it’s not evil at all! it’s the ANTI-anti-Christ, it chose Cas because he is Lucifer’s mirror in that he LOVES Humanity. I mean, the whole point of the show is agency, free will and not being forced to follow the result of your parentage / past ....especially this season with Sam and Dean’s arcs....

Maybe human!Cas, potential hunter Daddies, Cas staying at home calling Dean while he's out on MOTW hunts with Sam being all “Dean there’s poop everywhere, I’m sorry it got on your favourite shirt, but please please come home this is so hard!” “OK babe, don't worry, we’ll be back tomorrow, the case was a milk run!” when actually Dean nearly died and Sammy saved the day and.... etc because really? what are we supposed to think from that motel scene? With Cas smiling all cute and using the world “righteous” when talking about the kids future guardian?! (and Kelly survives if we are going to be extra nice).

Maybe Lucifer will die / be dealt with and it is the MoL that are the big bad next year.....aiding the overall future arc of TFW as leaders of the MoL/Hunter collaboration (Chuck I hope so).

Or will it be a mix of the two?

Well my money is on that it will be a mix....

DABB IS SHOWING US THE FUTURE Y’ALL. AND THE FUTURE IS BRIGHT.

#spn 12x19 #destiel #the future #supernatural speculation #supernatural meta #episode review #you're killing me 12x19

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awed-frog · 8 years

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It's strange how differently people can watch an episode. Lots ofpeople see gwen and mark as a dean/cas parallel because of the long distance relationship and cas missing heaven. also personally i see dean as the one reaching out to cas and noticing something is wrong with him just from his voice (also after him saying to cas he's family and telling him to come home with them in 12x12) and so i don't really understand cas wanting to work with heaven after they've tortured and brainwashed him.

Concerning Cas, I think it made sense that he went with Kelvin (Kelvin? Kelvin?). I mean, Kelvin makes his pitch right, for bloody once - he stresses how valuable Cas is while not trying to deny Heaven was still pissed at him; he says the current situation is dangerous, and that they could need each other; finally he doesn’t force Cas to choose between the Host and the Winchesters, instead acknowledging that they’re good beans - and that they’re potentially in danger:

Look, I know you’re working with the Winchesters. Sam and Dean - their hearts are in the right place, but wouldn’t it be better to have us waiting in the proverbial wings? All the power of Heaven behind you?

And with his next sentence, he goes in for the kill (You ever miss it? Upstairs? I mean, don’t get me wrong. I love Earth. It’s quirky. It smells like hay. But it’s not home, is it?) - again, he doesn’t say Cas is weird or broken for loving Earth, but he does emphasize something that Cas knows to be true in his heart: that he’s an angel, not a human being, and even if he likes the Winchesters and prefers being on Earth, ‘most of the time’, Heaven is important to him and it matters what his brothers think of him.

No, this is definitely someone who knows what he’s doing, and maybe he’s lying, but maybe not. There must be angels up there who recognize that everything Cas’ done, he’s done for humanity and the greater good, and if Joshua is in charge again - he was sort of level-headed, wasn’t he?

As for the fact Cas wouldn’t tell Dean - putting aside Cas’ crippling case of self-doubt, his dislike of overt confrontation, and his desperate need to prove himself, they’re not exactly being boyfriends, are they? Dean and Sam left Cas alone to deal with what is potentially the biggest threat to Earth right now, we never saw what happened after the I love you revelation, and it seems to me like Cas is the one updating Dean while Dean, as usual, is more focused about the many secrets pervading the human part of his family. So, no - Cas is not going to tell Dean anything until he knows what he’s doing will work, and I can understand why.

(Also, if this is where the narrative is going, Cas picking the Winchesters when they are his only choice doesn’t resonate as much as him walking away even if Heaven is ready to welcome him back. So there’s that as well.)

As for people seeing Cas and Dean in Gwen and Marcus, see below.

We can be optimistic there and simply say Supernatural goes out of its way to write a polysemic show so that everyone is happy and keeps watching, or we can admit that not even I am always right - a fact that shocks me on a daily basis - but the thing is, I think it’s inevitable that we see different things when we look at the world, and we’re generally only one step away from becoming dicks to one other about it. Like, this is exactly why I decided against an academic career - because not only there’s an incredibly limited chance that you’ll become some kind of something, but even if everything goes well and you do - being a professor is basically like being a popular kid on tumblr. People you respect will mostly disagree with everything you say, people you don’t know will openly shout that your entire understanding of the specific subject you’ve been studying for thirty years is complete bullshit, and if you go public enough, you’ll receive death threats in the mail and be called all kinds of names.

(If you think I’m exaggerating, check out what’s going on with Mary Beard, possibly the world’s foremost expert on ancient Rome.

Not that I’m comparing myself to Mary Beard, because she is a Goddes and I’m unworthy.)

So, yeah, I’m not surprised we all saw different things in those mirrors. I actually remember that last season I was going to write an elaborate meta for another episode on how this one character clearly paralleled Dean and whatever, and then I made the mistake of reading someone else’s meta first and they had a completely different idea and it made so much sense and I basically stared at the wall and questioned my entire existence.

On this one, though, I’m not changing my mind. Ideally, a narrative parallel should hold up to every prodding in order to work well, and Gwen and Marcus being Cas and Dean just - doesn’t. Like - does that imply that Cas doesn’t love Dean? That Cas wishes he hadn’t lied to Dean? I don’t think so, on both counts, especially because Gwen shared that realization with Sam, which, unlike Cas, has been deliberately lying to Dean for weeks, and this leads directly to Sam coming clean to Dean - a thing that comes out of nowhere if Gwen is not a mirror for Sam.

Honestly, I think people want to see Dean and Cas in that couple because they heard the word ‘love’ and we tend to get desperate in the Destiel fandom. I understand that. I’m desperate as well. But I also think that not everything is about us, unfortunately.

#ask #spn 12x15 #somewhere between heaven and hell #cas #castiel #sam and dean #narrative parrallels #spn meta #sort of

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orionsangel86 · 7 years

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1) Hey Saz, this is the person from Tink's long-ass 5-parter ask. This is going to be even longer. I'm on anon because of shyness above all things but I am willing to message you off anon if you want me to do so! I saw what you wrote about that ask and I agree.... to the most point. All the 'characteristics' of Destiel that differenciate it from other ships that you listed were actually applicable to some the ships I was talking about, especially Johnlock. -->

--> 2)The other ships, yes, you may be right, but for Johnlock I felt even more wronged intellectually when it crashed to the ground than I think I'll feel if the same thing happens to Destiel. I'm going to sound like a Johnlock shipping troll, but I'm not, I ran away from the mess of a fandom it became post-season 4. So bear with me. I really can't explain what my experience was at the time if you aren't familiar with tjlc and what the pre-season 4 sherlock fandom was like. -->

-->3)But let me assure you that it was extremely alike the spn/destiel fandom right now. I want to point out the similarities of the fandom and the ship but that would basically mean me explaining why Johnlock should have been canon, and I don't think you are here for that. So let me just point out a few things. By the end of the honest-to-god fanfic-y 3rd season, the GA were taking notice of it as well, to the point where, yes, the show is being called the worst queerbait ever even to this day.

--> 4)It frankly deserves it. And it was 2017.... we thought it was due fucking time. Guess it wasn't. When looking ay bibro blogs I can't help but be reminded of Johnlock antis. At least when that was a thing, you know, because you can't be an anti of something when it turns out you were right. We made fun of them, because how the fuck can you see jealousy at weddings, literally killing for the other the day they meet, -->

--> 5) having something secret to say that they can't bring themselves to say even after the other's death, being broken over the other's death TWO YEARS LATER AND ON THE DAY YOU FUCKING PROPOSE TO YOUR GF, prefering the other over your string of girlfriends, counting the texts a woman sent the other, COMING BACK TO LIFE AFTER LITERALLY FLATLINING BECAUSE THE OTHER IS IN DANGER, and, you know, constantly making both of them have shitty relationships and be unsatisfied romantically.... -->

.... and read it all as platonic? The show literally falls apart if you take away Johnlock... sounds familiar. You know, one of the writers for Sherlock is gay. So I believed in him, after all gay writers won't queerbait, how could they? (turns out they could.)......But I digress. I won't blame you if you just glossed over what I ranted above. Actually some of the reasons I'm still holding out hope for Destiel is 1) How atrocious the last season of Sherlock was, worst than Supernatral at its worst. 2) The sense that everything is coming full circle in this season(which we didn't get, btw, in even the last season of Sherlock). 3) Misha fucking Collins. And you know, although i heatedly ranted above in response to your response, I did it only because I wanted to justify what I spent near three years on. I didn't want to leave you thinking that a ship like this didn't exist before, because in my opinion, it did. So sorry. I was being spiteful.About the 'Greatest Love Stoty Ever Told', which was in fact the big fandom tagline for Johnlock as well....... I think I'll wait and see. If it is endgame, then I agree that it really is the greatest love story ever told. And I also agree that the show seems to be going that way

Hi Nonny,

So this is all in relation to this post and I think that the easiest way to answer this is to say to anyone still doubting, including nonny, to just read the various replies and reblogs on that post, because the answers are perfect.

Also nonny I know we have spoken in private already and you said that you were feeling better after reading the responses on that post as well so I won’t go into too much depth here, but I still wanted to post your asks in case there are still people out there feeling the way you do.

This is going to be my opinion on the matter, which, of course, is just that. There are many many people out there who were greatly upset by Sherlock and I feel for you all. Its not fair what happened and what that show put you through. Your feelings and your views on the matter are 100% valid and real and nothing that I say here is trying to contradict that. You saw a love story between those characters. That interpretation, like any interpretation of a text, is real and never let anyone say you were wrong. Johnlock still exists within the text of that show, just because it didn’t end with a kiss or a love confession doesn’t mean that it isn’t a valid reading.

I started watching Sherlock before I ever got into Supernatural. When it came out in 2010 I LOVED it. My film student lizard brain picked up on the Johnlock subtext pretty much straight away and aside from some very brief thoughts of “ooh that would be a different spin on it” I didn’t pay much more attention. I continued to watch Sherlock second season in 2012 and again I noticed the subtext, but at this point recognised that it was all done for humorous purposes. I never thought they would go there. I didn’t “ship” it because I didn’t even know what “shipping” was at the time let alone thought John and Sherlock were more than friends who happen to get mistaken for a couple. That was the gag. It was what made my very typically straight male young brother giggle like an idiot because apparently being mistaken for gay was funny. (It’s not. I hate those jokes. They don’t work outside a Carry On film and I don’t even like Carry On films).

When season 3 came out in Jan 2014 I side eyed the series because I had had enough of the gay jokes. I thought it was getting weird and could see that there was a beautiful bond between the characters that imo was being twisted for cheap laughs. I pondered on whether this Sherlock was in fact in the closet, Were they trying to tell us that he was secretly gay? I didn’t get it because it was never clear enough to me that this was the case and yet they continued to play around with the concept whilst the character of John is off with his fiance. My brother continued to find the whole thing hilarious. It was never taken seriously. My musings on Sherlocks sexuality were pushed aside because it seemed clear to me that the writers were not taking it seriously.

Then over the summer of 2014 I binge watched 9 seasons of SPN. I struggled with seasons 1 and 2, made it through 3, watched 4 and fell in love with an Angel of the Lord. It took me 10 episodes to figure out Cas was gay. It took me a further 2 seasons of umming and ahhing in my own head to conclude that yes, Dean was definitely Bisexual. It took until 6x20 to realise that this was legit something in the text and not my imagination. It took until season 8 for me to believe 100% that they were going there. (I wavered a bit on that belief in seasons 9 and 10 but season 11 pulled me back and I haven’t looked back since.)

In the early seasons, 4, 5 and 6, I recognised the patterns used between Dean and Cas were the same used in Sherlock. I re-watched Sherlock at some point in 2015 and remember thinking damn yeah they really were shoving the subtext in our faces a bit. But I still didn’t ship it, even though I was 100% shipping destiel at that point. I again pondered Sherlock’s sexuality, had a brief thought of “I’d like to see that take on the story” but again discarded any thought that it would actually be textual in a show that imo seemed adamant in keeping it all about the humour. If they weren’t going to take this characters sexuality seriously, then the story was never going to seriously be explored.

See if Destiel had always remained the way it was in seasons 4, 5 and 6, then I wouldn’t have any belief that it was going canon. I would probably still ship it (the sexual tension in season 4 was insane) but the idea that it would go canon would have always been a pipe dream. So many shows use the queer subtext as a source of humour. So many shows tease their characters as queer and use homoeroticism for titillation. It delights my idiot brother to no end. I hate it. I think it desperately needs to stop. I have never ever watched an episode of Sherlock and thought that it was doing anything other than just that. (I didn’t particularly like the 4th season though because nothing made any bloody sense and I think they kind of butchered the characterisations - I did say this would all be my opinion though so please don’t take offence).

You say that the show falls apart if you take away the romantic love story and make it platonic. I guess if I was to watch it again I could try to consider that reading, but my own experience watching seasons 1-3 is certainly not from a romantic view point and it all made sense to me. Season 4 didn’t make sense at all, and by the time that was on I was deep in destiel fandom and frequently writing meta, so I DID see the romantic reading in the text and yet still didn’t understand the story. (Again, I stress this is my opinion and is in no way trying to invalidate your own). However, with Destiel, the last three and a bit seasons narratively don’t work without it. I have tried to watch them and ignore every romantic moment, or hint at a romantic love between them, and in doing so, it confuses the fucking plot. I need to sit down and catalogue all the ways seasons 10 to 13 don’t work without destiel to evidence this but it would be a pretty epic job because there are ALOT.

I understand that you feel that Johnlock and Destiel are similar ships, but my opinion is that they drastically diverted course from each other when SPN went into its eighth season. Since then, there has been nothing quite like destiel in terms of build up and story structure - unless you start comparing it to the straight ships.

Where we are right now, destiel is deeply ingrained into the narrative of the show, and it is never used as a gag. It is never poked fun of in a way that reduces Dean and Cas’s relationship. Something that I believe Sherlock did right up until its last episode. I also 100% believe that the SPN creators and cast have a much greater respect and love for their fans than the Sherlock writers and cast ever did. (I’m not much of a fan of Bendydick Cucumberpatch and I have never been comfortable with Steve Moffat... dunno why the guy just gives me the creeps (then again so does Bob Singer)). They have been so positive towards Destiel recently that I am constantly stunned whenever new media or PR comes out. I am also of the belief that someone as wonderful as Misha Collins who is a champion for the LGBT community and cares deeply about making the world a better place would never ever involve himself in something that if it didn’t happen, would be considered the biggest queerbait in TV history. Breaking the hearts and severely angering millions of fans all over the world. Misha is a very smart man. He knows exactly how much this means to us and what it will do to us if it doesn’t happen. He doesn’t exactly look worried though. He doesn’t ever look like he is guilty over encouraging this ship? He looks like a fucker who knows whats up and can’t wait til we finally get to be in on the joke so he can tweet about it 24/7.

If destiel doesn’t happen, then Misha, of all people.... well... I’d have to rethink my entire opinion of him... the idea is so unfathomable for me, so impossible, it hurts my head to even consider. Did you ever feel this way about BC or Martin Freeman?

I just can’t believe that the people behind SPN would do that to us, but the people behind Sherlock? Well it didn’t exactly surprise me when it didn’t go canon. The BBC isn’t exactly known for being progressive. It’s known for playing it safe. If Sherlock was on Channel 4 I reckon they would have gone there. The Channel 4 execs probably would have encouraged it from the start. They would have considered it ‘edgy’.

I know that the CW isn’t exactly the most progressive network either, but its a young network, with a younger demo compared to the grumpy old pensioners who sit and watch BBC every night and complain that their tax payer money shouldn’t be going towards anything other than gardening shows and Eastenders. Soooo I think that has something to do with it too. The CW has a greater chance of pulling something like this off.

I’m so so sorry that Sherlock burned you. But don’t give up hope on destiel just yet, the factors are all currently in our favour. No two ships are alike, and in my opinion, Destiel is the motherfucking Symphony of the Seas compared to all others. It’s bigger, better, and hopefully, due for launch in Spring 2018.

#yeah i'm still on a cruise buzz #im sorry if i havent explained this well #but this is purely my opinion #destiel #johnlock #personal opinions #ask #anon #Anonymous

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elizabethrobertajones · 7 years

Text

13x03 watching notes

The Saga Of Dean’s Fluctuating Grief Scruff

Berens has made me cry exponentially more in each of his episodes for a while. At this rate I will cry 6-9 times in this episode, so I really hope we break the streak.

I'm so pumped for this episode.

Hahaha me 10 seconds ago: fuk u berens don't make me cry

recap: how about we paste "goodbye Cas" over the shot of Dean kneeling by dead Cas?

I have returned with my stuffed toy umbreon "taako from eevee" and I have hugs

OH NO Jack recap, pasting Lucifer over him in awful flashes and trying to sell his dark side even though he is a squishy.

WELP they're going right there with the Sam drinking blood parallel with Dean saying when has anything ever gone right for us. Is Jack going to Fuck Up today? Or is that just emotional backstory?

Awww Missouri's BFF. I love her already.

I guess this guy is the wraith. I think I remember him from the promos.

Hey, here's the tarot cards. They're for the MotW

The wraith was in the mirror that's behind them but it didn't show his face all wraith-y. Pfft.

Uhoh, Dean's music is different... Brb need to get a Mittens on the line.

The only word I caught was wall and then we cut to no music and Jack marvelling at the brickwork.

Okay, Mittens told me the song and I looked it up and yeah it's the Rolling Stones and completely romantically neutral.

This is the bit we got:

Mama says yes, Papa says no, Make up you mind 'cause I gotta go. Gonna raise hell at the Union Hall, Drive myself right over the wall.

I almost think it was chosen just because Jack was pawing at the wall.

Jack being fascinated with the bricks in both 13x01 when Sam was ASKING him about the portals between universes, and now when he's just pawing at the bricks reeeally makes me feel like Jack has a fascination with the brick and mortar pattern, like these lines between the solid planes are somehow tickling at whatever deep down cosmic part of himself knows about the portals. If he's still figuring it out or something.

Oh no here's the awful promo that nearly made me cry last night.

I am so sad that Jack's been hiding in his room.

It is adorable how he looks at the data stick, like, getting it's important but totally baffled about HOW and what to DO with it. Sam's starting to take for granted that Jack is a bit more... well, together, than he actually is. The real question is does Sam know he was stabbing himself? That's such a hard thing for Dean to tell Sam, and not betray empathy to Jack - unless he grumpily delivers the news and legs it :P

But yeah, anyway. Sam expecting Jack to be able to do things he can't, maybe starting to take Jack's fast learning for granted when it comes to how he's managed to adapt to burgers and reading and stuff. He's still a 4-5 day old person, and he's never done this before... Sam hands him the USB stick without even stopping to think at first that Jack might not be capable of using it...

*stares at Sam staring at Jack* I think he's feeling deeply sympathetic - I reblogged some meta about how they have a shared experience here but Jack's getting so much more than Sam ever did. Ironically, I was gonna make a parallel to Home, without stopping to think that Missouri is here but let's call it a real meta parallel then - Mary saying even 3 words to Sam in Home was the most Sam had ever seen of her in his entire life and the most words he could remember her saying to him, ever. Of course Mary and Kelly were/are paralleled as mothers, and Kelly to Jack will be a much more pure image because she never did anything dark or made any deals - he's born because she had no idea she was sleeping with Lucifer, so even though Mary was put in an AWFUL place she made the deal with enough accountability she is held responsible for it, and FEELS responsible for it. Since Jack's powers are already being textually paralleled to Sam and his demon blood I think this is an interesting thing to put a pin in.

MIIIISSOURI HELLO

She sounds and looks almost exactly the same. It's been THIRTEEN YEARS what the hell

She looked older in 1x09

maybe it's just the different colour schemes and lighting these days :P

Oh no and we're back to Kelly

Her words are so important in a kind of free will exposition way. She's so proud of him!!!

"YOU HAVE AN ANGEL WATCHING OVER YOU"

I know I sobbed about that in 12x23 a bit but just... the reminder, right now. In this episode where we have been teased that Cas is going to be around again (I miss him so much)... I think it's interesting because Kelly tells Jack that no one can tell him who he can be (which I think may be a problem long term that Sam is interested in moulding him so even TFW aren't a completely safe bet to hang out with for Jack to gain a sense of personhood - he'll have to fly the nest eventually) but then she reminds Jack that an angel is watching over him. Obviously she is a Good Person in the show's narrative, and angels in her perspective are good (because Cas was kind to her) and Cas specifically is AWESOME and this is the reminder that Cas is Jack's father now apparently and all... but it's also setting him aside in a way. I think perhaps Jack needs to come to terms with what Cas is that isn't exactly his FATHER per se but also isn't just the angel on his shoulder, in the exact same way Dean needs to realise Cas isn't his BROTHER per se but also not just the angel on his shoulder. It's that grey area. In Jack's case, it's because a reckoning with Lucifer and understanding the potential darkness in him, or his legacy as being Lucifer's son, can't be ignored. Cas can't be pasted on top of it for his deep down personal understanding, and Kelly mentions the father and Castiel as separate entities. The father doesn't define what Jack is... Cas has a more neutral position, a guiding one... But I think some wires may be crossed with Jack, too, that has given Cas absolute fatherhood in such a way that it's going to be GREAT for Jack to set his moral compass by such a well-meaning good character who seems to want the best for Jack, but it can't be his entire understanding of himself.

...

Sorry for just throwing a Destiel parallel into all that but it fascinates me that tbh Sam is like the only one who doesn't have a complicated relationship with Cas. I guess also Mary got to grips with him around 12x09, but then also didn't have a whole bunch of contact with him... On the other hand in my Christmas fic I haven't even got the remotest idea what it will be about yet but will feature all the current living characters in a fluffy Christmas scenario, I'm pretty much ready for Cas and Mary to be the chillest friends :P

LOL Sam and Dean talking about how long since they saw Missouri "what has it been a decade?" "MORE" Yeah you FUCKS she said to stay in touch. DON'T BE STRANGERS.

That is a cold sweat moment for Dean, like... fuck I haven't ever even sent her a CHRISTMAS CARD

Maybe he sees her name in John's journal sometimes and does send her one.

Awww and Sam was talking to Jody off-screen, which I love because that is my JAM

*badum tish*

Dean is alarmed that Sam handed off the case to her, because he wanted to leave the freaking house and get awaaay from Jack

He's not that concerned about Jody.

I mean, rationally, he knows Jody is the Toughest Cookie they've ever met. She went up against Leviathan WITH AN APPENDECTOMY

But in the immediate here and now? He is PISSED that Sam wants to keep them sequestered away in the Bunker with the one thing he can hardly bear to co-exist with in the same universe.

His stomping off is an End Of moment... Reminded of 9x06 because Berens, but also because in the start of that episode Dean takes the lead from Cas and legs it from researching with Sam and Kevin, and it's like a horrible reverse motivation. Cas is dead and he can't bear to be around that horror and guilt and confusion. He needs the distraction, so off he goes on a solo case, leaving Sam behind. His angry "you got me" when he skips out on research and Kevin thinks he has it all sussed out why Dean is leaving is again a reverse of Dean's self-professed anger at the situation when he knows that Jody will be FINE and of course she's part of their competent hunter network who can handle things probably a hell of a lot better than them, being an actual cop and all. But it makes one hell of an excuse to go. And Dean was in a pissy mood then as well but it was his own fuck up about Gadreel bothering him and his guilt about what he'd done to Cas. So external motivators help him leave. This time it's all internal motivators where he WANTS to leave. So he makes it all happen by getting irrationally angry at Sam.

CORN FIELD AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

I know it was most likely just There but hey we have a Turducken slammer poster in the background and corn syrup blah blah, and corn = Cain

Theeeemes, as Mittens says.

JODY JODY JODY

Missouri drops some heeeavy hints about not having family around any more.

She always did love that car. A reminder she's known them basically their entire lives, since The Fire, and she knew the car as both John and Dean's.

Also a handy way to make her a trusted ally and as Mittens says, the car is Dean's soul and Missouri has seen inside him.

HE JUST WANTS HUGS

He heard Missouri and Jody were in the same place and was like FUCK YOU SAM I AM GOING TO COLLECT MY HUGS

But seriously even if he's kinda putting it all on a bit because he's miserable, these people are genuinely cheering him up just to see and he's getting physical comfort from two parental figures to him.

(he's so weird about Jody being a mom figure)

LOL Missouri did the thing

The thing literally every single person said they wanted her to do

he should have hugged Jody first

Is it just me or did she hesitate on "loss" and then add the "es" after a moment of uncertainty? Please tell me one is not drowning out the other I will die.

Although of course, Missouri is a HUGE reminder of the Mary stuff because she comes connected to their home and Dean is having to re-re-confront that and OF COURSE he does it when he's lost Mary AGAIN. And pfft I spent yesterday writing about Jody re-losing her son in 5x15 and having the problem of fresh loss after getting someone back you didn't think you'd ever HAVE back.

I love that we're seeing Missouri's process. She's reaaally spelling out the exposition. But in this case I can trust that that's just because the actual method and knowing that it's a wraith and his MO is just a random detail to all the more important emotional stuff. That this is just some necessary building blocks to get to the good stuff and this is the fastest way to get us there.

Sam immediately starts getting into choppy water and I'm one line into the next scene. He's bringing up training Jack... Sam, we've spent the last 2 weeks talking about how it's not a great idea for you to try and harness him for your own reasons because it will make you look bad to him. Jack needs to trust you!

I'm worried he'll end up thinking that Sam giving him the connection with his mom was just a way to soften him up a bit more to Sam. Like yeah on the surface level it's lovely and shows Sam has been careful and paid attention and collected all the evidence from the house to check if anything will be important for Jack (not the 100s of diapers)... And then found this thing and immediately decided Jack should have it because it would mean so much to him. it's great that he cares so much he did this!!

But yeah putting the scenes back to back is a little uncomfortable because Sam does have motives, and like I said last time out, if Sam HADN'T just lost Mary through a rift Nougat unknowingly opened, he would 100% definitely treat Jack with the exact same care because he is a sweet guy.

But looks bad.

Sam is waving a pencil. He looks like a lecturer.

This is a different part of the Bunker or the library from an angle we never see and this is a new table with a different lamp and I am so horrified, as the Table Meta person, to have a bunch of new stuff to work out and write about :P

This is the Yoda Table for the time being

I suppose it's a new place for a fresh start and, like, virgin territory for meta meaning. Whether it's the store room or the library the important thing is it's DIFFERENT and it's a sort of secluded corner than right out in the middle of the war room or something. It's a sort of private nook kind of feeling. Sam is trying to make a comfortable environment for Jack.

Jack glances at Sam.

Thing is, Asmodeus got him to open a portal to hell by cajoling him, and Sam's asking him to get control of basic things like moving a pencil around. It SEEMS safe and like a good exercise to try and get to grips with his powers and learn finesse and control, and for Jack's sake too. But... Idk, still looks dodgy Sam. I mean I can absolutely and 100% see a surface level where this is adorable and great and Sam has a new friend/nephew, and for the time being I'm enjoying it as it is. But I have this worried feeling that Sam is not going to help Jack emotionally, even if this works in the short term, because Jack has room to be suspicious of what Sam wants, and even if Sam doesn't ask for a while, he has a motivation for Jack to learn to control his powers beyond JUST wanting to help him. I think their dynamic is great and fascinating, but I am worried that from Jack's perspective he won't get the nuance of Sam - Sam needs to open up to him for one thing about his own fuck ups and what Azazel - another yellow eyed demon - did to him.

And Jack glancing at Sam who is watching him so intently is the tension here - can Jack trust Sam when Sam may be just as interested in Jack as Asmodeus was? How can a 5 day old TELL?

James has a super nice house.

Also Missouri is "not supposed to call" but they used a recent calls screen on her phone instead of a contacts list, and James was on it, which means that she HAS been in contact with him recently, and therefore prop department messed it up. The CGI in this episode has made 2 errors already >.>

OH NO JAMES DOESN'T BELIEVE

"it's coming for you and pa-" nooo

WHERE IS PATIENCE

I wanna see her on screeeeeeeeeeeeen

WHAT DID MISSOURI DO TO JAMES?

She was a John parallel in 1x09 and allied with him and withholding epic amounts of plot info that only she knew what could have been everything up to and including end of season 2 reveal stuff. Her powers make her kind of a disaster friend tbh. Like, great at a party but if you don't believe your mother has visions and is, idk, hysterical or something, then OH BOY that makes for some family trauma. We'll see how this shakes out but right now James at least is successful and rich and has nooothing to do with his mother even though he may potentially be psychic and repressed about it himself, since the wraith will be coming for him and Patience, and we know SHE is.

I kinda don't wanna make a parallel where she's the bad parent and fucked up her son who has repressed his powers because oh boy he's got like a Dean Smith level apartment and this is a can of worms I can't be bothered to delve into when Patience might be on screen soon.

Dean "yes ma'am"'d Missouri because everything is awful, because he'd "yes sir" John and oh god. Ow.

Jody is watching like "what the hell sort of dynamic have I missed here?"

She has been taking notes on these boys for years and she still doesn't know anything about them. I was thinking the other day watching 5x15 that when she meets them they're in Fed get up and they bluster at her like they're the authorities when she first challenges them, until she calls Bobby and sees through it and calls their crap. But something something defensive retreat into surface level clam shell around Jody, re: she had no idea Dean went to Purgatory, was a demon, or that Mary had come back to life, just for STARTERS.

I wonder if Missouri commenting on the car was a tie back to John as well specifically in her alignment. This season is all about fathers and without an actual John for Dean to deal with, bringing Missouri back as a John figure... eep

Meanwhile Jack is still squinting at a pencil and calling himself useless, so I think Sam is about to climb on his back and make him run through a swamp while beating him with a stick

(dear god I hope every single one of you has watched Empire Strikes Back)

Jack's catchphrase is "I don't -" he just doesn't understand. He doesn't KNOW.

Asmodeus was "in his head"

Holy shit and then Sam suggests Jack try that and Jack snaps back at him because HOLY SHIT SAM CAN YOU HEAR HOW BAD THIS SOUNDS?

You really can't, because you think you are doing a good thing but USB STICK, SAM. USB STICK.

Asmodeus was a master manipulator who made Jack want to do a thing so badly and used all the right words to make him do exactly what he wanted. Sam is nice enough not to brainwash Jack like see the pencil, be the pencil dramatics... But asking Jack to remember one of his many traumatic experiences? Noooo don't do it.

This is a very bad plan, Sam.

Anyway also Jack confirms how Asmodeus manipulated him and shows his innocence and also his feelings on what happened - how horrible it was for him to go through it, and, well, he was 3 days old and he got tricked and he has no emotional touchstones to handle this sort of thing :(

And Sam is just being way too rigorous - we take a break, he gets some food, then he'll come back and we try again? Nooo Sam.

(btw I have to say I have been saying over and over that Berens writes my favourite Sam, and this is indeed Berens making Sam absolutely fascinating, although I have to repeat, as a totally flawed and messed up person. No one was ever there for Sam to guide him through what he could do. He didn't even know how he moved that wardrobe the one time he did telekinesis... He's completely lost and trying to handle this alone and with a lot to prove because Dean's snapped at him and stormed off, and he wants Mary back... He's being like Dean - angry and taking it out on Jack - but in Sam's chill, deep under the surface way, and of course like Dean can spare smiles and hugs for Jody and Missouri, he still can have a kind and well-meaning surface layer just like Dean can have a happy one. But bring on the frustration and he slips and says the wrong things and now he's acting like a strict teacher....)

Jack's face that was cast to be both perfectly scowly and perfectly cute is now being used to be very scary and scowly.

OH NO MISSOURI!!!

She was badass and defiant to the end but it's still sad and we knew it was coming because, well... I swear there was spoiler chatter that Patience and Missouri would meet, but I suppose it's more like Patience is going to find out about her grandma and have to learn about her that way...

I mean the whole point of Wayward Sisters so far has been Jody collecting orphaned girls and she has a living father and until this point Missouri, so she has to end up in a way where Jody is now the only guiding light she has

but bleeeeeeeh.

ANYWAY like passing the baton, we get the last scene of Missouri (making a stand) and move to Patience.

HELLO NEW MAIN CHARACTER

She's a neeeerd

I love her

She is good at volleyball because she's psychic

heee wonder woman comparison. Blah blah meta from when Dean owned being wonder woman.

Her athletic friend looks nerdy and she describes her as being a bookworm athlete because Patience looks cool and athletic (she's very tall or her friend is short...) so there's 2 false binaries here: the nerd and athlete one where you can only be one or another. Her friend with the massive glasses and fringe (bangs?) is nerd-coded. And Patience carrying around her files but secretly being good at sports is the direct opposite... I like this imagery, no prizes for guessing where else I apply it :P

All the lights are flickering... It would be hilarious if SHE was causing it, just because monsters don't do that...

I think she is having a vision.

OH it was a dream, cool. (We're really expanding what psychics can do all of a sudden, because we're about to send 2 of them off into Wayward Sisters. If Kaia and Patience can hang out in dreams, that would be AWESOME. I bet visiting Patience's dream landscape once she has her powers under control would be amazing, if 8x08 and Fred's inner mind is anything to go off of :P)

Also OH NO poor Missouri. She's used her death as an omen for Patience, like, basically just because her father won't talk to her. I mean talk about spite, she's right in the John Winchester model of family, like, well guess I'll just DIE then, and get Patience to deal with this for me :P

Getting back to those flashing lights, also, even though it was just a dream, I do think it was interesting because Jack blew all those lights. I think it's a sign of losing control as much as a display of power - if we go from 4x01 and Cas doing it, it was just because raw power on display. In 13x01 for Jack it's both that and loss of control. For Patience it's the sign of the supernatural creeping up on her but also she loses control of her dream environment and Missouri invades it to send her the warning...

James has something on his screen about crude oil. He's probably like a stocks and shares guy or something. This house is ridiculous. Patience is going to be the rich kid on the team, and probably adjusting to the gross gritty life of being a hunter :P

Ooh she did recognise Missouri - so the contact wasn't broken off THAT long ago.... I say remembering how I thought she hadn't changed at all since season 1 :P

James doesn't give anything away about her phoning like, yesterday. He looks baaad about it.

Don't lie to kids about their powers and heritage...

I say side-eyeing Sam for not getting into the exact thing with Lucifer I was blah-ing on about at the top of this episode. Which is probably not helping Jack understand and control his powers

Oh noooo Dean at a Gas n Sip

hearing about the murder on the TV OH NO

I got to ask why it's night at the fortune teller's and day where Dean is.

Singer directed this and I'm up to 3 boo boos of the wraith not being in the mirror, the phone breaking the story, and the wrong time of day in the footage on TV so I'm just gonna side eye and move on. Maybe he's having an off week when he made this or something because when he's not directing Eugenie's scripts he's normally competent.

Knock Knock hello James

Wait, Dean has got massively more scruffy between scenes.

HE HAS - I WENT BACK AND LOOKED

Is this a continuity about them driving all night?

I am loving the look. Gimme more of the season 9 look Dean.

They are kinda treating James like he knows and cares about monsters, when really he's a stock guy with a fancy house. Wrong approach, but telling the absolute truth. Dean, again, not sugar coating it. Jody has to step in and help with comforting sounding words about the truth. She, also, doesn't even mention she's a cop and is acting very much as Dean's partner on the hunt rather than a cop.

Patieeence. At school with her friend, who is badgering her about hot boys. Patience relucantly says okay fine he's hot. *wonders exactly how gay she is* Probably not with a huuuge crush on her friend but we'll see :P No one can be that "ugh" about the entire concept.

Patiiiience. She's been ACTIVATED.

The fact she had a couple of pencils sticking out of something in her locker just makes me think that over on the other side of the story Sam is trying to activate Jack's powers via a pencil.

AAAH

HAHAHAHA She's awesome!!!

And she snaps the gross wraith spike off with like 0% of the fuss Dean made.

I LOVE the shot of Dean rushing down the stairs to follow the wraith... I also love that Jody is now united with Patience, and she's gonna glom onto her and drag her into her spiiiiin offffffffff

After all the fuss I'm making that better get picked up or I'm rioting.

Dean nearly gets hit by a blue van - hey, monsters in blue vans? 8x18, that time when Dean was like "what, my feelings????" when Sam asked him how he was, and then there was that creepy Metatron sweater dude being a terrible stand-in father for Krissy in like the dark timeline version of what Wayward Sisters is promising to become.

Bah Dean shaved again... Get the continuity together!!

Ohh no Patience thinks Missouri doesn't caaare... She ditched her after her mom died? heeeey-o John parallels where he emotionally ditched them after Mary died. Only this leads to Patience growing up with no idea about her powers... Except she has been unnerved enough by her deja vu to sound like she's researched it on wikipedia and reassured herself that hey this happens to everyone...

Well if she's not queer she's certainly having one hell of a metaphor journey :P

HOLY SHIT SAM. He put Jack in that table because there's a SECRET CAMERA

you know what Sam has done? Once he knew the BMOL put cameras in the bunker, he's gone and found their wifi and he's got into it with undefined magic hacking powers they all have and he's using Ketch's surveillance for his own purposes now.

Look. You mean well. You're reading the sort of parenting book for psychic kids you never had yourself (love it) but this is creepy! You shouldn't be spying on Jack!!!!

Sam has boundary issues with his magic nephew, more news at 10

I know I know he's just concerned and worried and wants to do the right thing but he's not got any frame of reference for how to emotionally nurture someone. It's a MIRACLE and testament to his nature that he's come out anything like as sweet as he did. But oh boy this is bad. You can't just come running in yelling because Jack moved out of sight because now Sam has betrayed that he was watching Jack or WHY WOULD HE COME RUNNING IN IN SUCH A PANIC?

Jack's starting to sound done with everything and I love my Nougat child who likes sitting in dark corners.

He's not sitting cross-legged this time, it's much more like how Sam found him in 12x23

I think Jack seeks out dark shadowy places to lurk

His voice has literally changed to be more gravelly

OH NO JACK NOOOOOOOOO

HOW DARE YOU THINK YOU'RE EVIL, YOU PRECIOUS CHILD

But Dean thinks he'll be evil and Sam has surveillance set up on him...

Oh dear god let this be the Berens Speech of the episode that makes me weep openly

OH NO NOUGAT

He's got all his comparisons to live up to but he doesn't have his angel watching over him!!!

I said earlier that's a bad comparison for Jack to treat him as his father AND that phrase needs to be hauled out and torn to shreds, but I think some short term guardian angeling will probably be good for Jack and maybe even Cas depending on how he feels when he gets back... I almost trust this season to treat that relationship slowly and carefully since they're being so absolutely on the nose with character development stuff being spelled out.

Sam's doing the "listen" thing and sitting down... Can you get to Jack?

SAY THE THING

Oh gosh he apologised for pressuring Jack

I didn't think that would work

I should yell at the screen more

HE WANTS TO FIND A BETTER WAY

AND THEN HE TOOK JACK'S HAND AND HAULED HIM TO HIS FEET

OH YEAH HERE IT IS "I know what it feels like -" THAT WAS PART 2 OF "SAY THE THING"

AHAHA STOP MAKING SAM CRY, BERENS, YOU MONSTER

It makes me cry

"Dean, Cas - my family helped me through" NOOOOOOOOOOOOPE FUCK OFF BERENS

"you're not evil, Jack" THANKS SAM, THOUGH

Meanwhile: Jody and Dean awkwardly stand next to each other while Patience has a Family Moment.

Dean's connection to Missouri goes so far back that Patience has to mean something to him in the sense that omg this is Missouri's family... However she treated Dean (and kinda scared him i think :P) he has an investment in them because Missouri was there at a bloody awful time for him, and she was helpful and good to them (and he has no idea she was lying about John the whole time - tbh the fact that she can see stuff that happened in a scene pretty much just confirms to me that what we DIDN'T see was that the first time John met her he took her to the nursery and BAM she sees the scene from 2x21 that Azazel showed Sam of the demon blood and she's like... ah.)

(pls refer to my pre-wayward sisters watching notes for actual thoughts on that :P I got super rambly and i'm not going over it AGAIN)

OH NO James grew up having total faith in her powers and then she said what James wanted to hear and told him the better news either making a mistake or doing EXACTLY WHAT WE SAW HER DO in her introductory seconds... Temporary help to alleviate pain but in the end - well, that guy's wife was still banging the gardener whether he knew it or not and one way or another he might find out...)

UGH Missouri what did you do.

OH NO JAMES HAS DEAN'S BACKSTORY OF HIS PARENT ON THE ROAD HUNTING MONSTERS

Remember when I said I hated the Dean Smith life he made for himself? I HATE IT SO MUCH

I went to vent at Mittens about this and she told me she has been comparing Patience to Kev and James to Linda and that's another extremely awful way to look at all this :D

"I didn't want that life for you" I think it's interesting that James managed to put it all behind him SO effectively, especially if he's somewhat psychic himself (I BET IT HELPS WITH TRADING SHARES, IF IT HELPS WITH VOLLEYBALL. JUST SAYING)... He's basically done what both John and Mary repeatedly said especially in the context of Sam and just letting him go to school and live a life. Patience has got that - so far - but lo and behold it all catches up.

Aaaand James chooses to run again.

Like, it sucks, but "use her as bait and kill the wraith" is generally the better tactic when it comes to just confronting your problems. And the horror genre is ALWAYS about confronting those inner problems. In this case the wraith going specifically after the psychics in the family is blatantly a metaphor for this catching up and James no longer being able to pretend this isn't what his family is all about. I would say it's targeted at his decisions and Patience's awakening - a vision is one thing, an attack BECAUSE she had it seals the deal and makes it impossible to ignore.

And if James runs again, he only puts the problem behind them, to try and live normally but... Patience has already been changed by this encounter and Missouri's awakening.

Awwwwwwww nooooooooo flashback.

She's so SMOL.

This is all the perfect sort of emotional manipulation to get me completely attached to her.

I'm trying not to meta too much between The Man Pain and Patience's story (she's the POV character of WS I think? I mean I desperately want her to be, as the new character to the dynamic aside from Kaia who's being introduced later as a part of Claire's story - and I think I saw one comment somewhere in the PR and completely latched onto it) but there is something about James saying that Missouri's influence is poison and Patience learning to be psychic is something he desperately wants to avoid, and the parallel story with Jack also discovering his powers. Patience thankfully only seems to have Sam-like visions and will probably have Missouri's skill set (i mean sheesh this might not be a memory but a vision but in this case it's almost impossible to tell apart for Patience except that maybe this is literally the clarity of what she's remembering on screen :P) - I think it works better in the present day, that the adults are all here to weigh in on what Patience can be.

I think Missouri appearing in flashes mirrors Kelly to Jack, since he's not getting anything from Cas at the moment, so she's the beacon of someone who truly believes in Patience, and there was a sort of powers birth transfer awakening thing in the way Missouri dies and Patience gets her first strong vision that she can't shake off as deja vu.

Dean said that Missouri reads objects so Patience is probably getting this vision off the brooch, tbh.

This hazy memory is probably actually circa like... season 2 or something, if Patience is supposed to be school aged NOW and the show is THIRTEEN YEARS OLD so if she's like... 5... that's season 1 or 2, if she's roughly supposed to be 18

I am not good at maths btw feel free to call this out

That kid REALLY looks like young Patience, in that creepy SPN casting directors way

OH GOSH the vision parallels not just to Kelly but Missouri will always look out for her, and that's very much like Angels Are Watching Over You

AAAAAH HE GRABBED PATIENCE

put it back.jpg

Is James going to use his own secrit powers he's been repressing the entire time and find her?

HE'S GONNA USE HIS PSYCHIC POWERS TO FIND PATIENCE

Bless this entire metaphor of repression being overcome and accessing the true parts of yourself.

Is this the same creepy set that Cas once stabbed a demon in that time when he was looking for something or other? I can't even remember if that was season 10 or 11 or what he was looking for, but a gif of him wandering around doing The Eyebrow is common enough on my dash I don't forget that it happened :P

Oh great he basically has super wraith powers because he drinks people with super powers.

Stupid creepy wraith

Leave her alone!!!!!!!!!

LOL

"first: gross" I love her.

NOOOOO JAMES

You were just starting to be cool

Wait is she having a vision, because Jody should probably not be dead right now if she has a spin off to be playing around in:P

I bet Dean's about to killed too

Yep

owie, that was embarrassing for him

He's super off his game if he lets himself get killed THAT EASILY

This was super metaphoric on so many levels though - once I know what happens with James I should get back to that, but Jody symbolically being killed and she's moving on to another property with her flock of girls, and DEAN, getting symbolically super killed like stabby stabby stabby, make it look good for the next time they have to recap how often they all die on this show.. :P But yeah, even just showing him dying is fascinating, especially with the context of how he's feeling.

And oh no Mittens pointed out he's not just off his game but if he saw Jody being dead, that's all his worst fears, and ANOTHER dead friend on his hands, and he did specifically come here to protect her, in his words. :<

I love the 2nd version of this. The new fight coordinator guy is really showing off. I type in the instant Dean grabs the rope because improvised weapons are a thing now :P

I should probably dig up that meta about veils between worlds because even if Dean didn't die he just got shoved through like 100 hanging sheets and that is ridiculously symbolic.

Nice one, Dean.

LOL his face. "welp, killed that guy"

I feel like there was a Moment there. Like maybe he thought hunting would make him feel something but -

oh no

HE'S SCRUFFY AGAIN

I feel attacked by the bad continuity but the fact that the bad continuity is because Dean's apparently due some grief scruff

"You handled that wraith! Guess you still got it!!"

*dean pauses* *stares into the nihilistic dark void consuming his soul*

"guess so"

I hate this

PATIENCE

Snuggly hoodie is snuggly. I wanna hug her

"Thank you, for everything" that phraaase nooo

James thinks she should put her gift away and get back to normal... But she has a spin off to go to.

NOO DEAN DO NOT DO A IN THIS LIFE SPEECH

I HAAATE THIS

elizabethrobertajones WHAT THE FUCK HE'S SCRUFFY AGAIN I'm phoning the continuity guy how do I find his number Dean's scruff has been coming and going all episode :P

mittensmorgul wait where are you?

elizabethrobertajones Dean's broken pls help him this must be the scene they wanted the scruff for and he showed up on day 1 of filming clean shaven and they were like... Jensen... no

mittensmorgul HAHAHA

elizabethrobertajones Dean's gotta talk about how everything sucks and he wants to just go live on the beach in a house made of sticks and you need at least 5mm of scruff for that speech

mittensmorgul oh no...

Anyway Dean and James agree - Patience should go live in her house and they should exploit their skills only for shares and volleyball. Dean is utterly, utterly defeated and he hates the job and it's the worst and everyone you love will die and you just have to kill monsters all day and it's not even FUN...

please help him

YAY JODY

"you don't have to listen to him" because guess who is NOT THE BOSS OF US ON THE WAYWARD SISTERS SHOW?

That's right, The Man Pain(TM)

Jody you absolute beacon of sunshine and love and accepting yourself. She can see Dean's broken and spoke out of turn to what Patience might need in his own grief (and I think that must parallel to Sam's treatment of Jack somewhat although thankfully they resolved it back to a functioning relationship already) so she offers her an alternative.

OH NO and she refers to Claire as a sort of daughter

haaalp

And she's so sad she couldn't keep Claire safe against her nature to be a hunter.

And Jody OBLITERATES repression completely. Go be gay with the Wayward Sisters. :D

"You try to force it down to make someone else happy, you will only make yourself miserable"

I love you Berens.

And Jody recruits another avenger :D

*glares at my tables tag* Sam is sitting alone in the dark at the war room table, exactly like the end of 9x06. Sometimes being right about the sneaky imagery the show uses feels so pointless because, well, I'm right, but to what purpose does this serve? The tables tag will never bring me glory in battle :P

Mittens just warned me to squish Taako for the rest of this scene so I'm in hug mode.

"How's the kid, did he go darkside yet?" "nooope."

I mean I'm using Sam's line as a reaction gif forever but OW.

Is Sam gonna call Dean out on what he's been saying about Jack? I scared.

"He's messed up because of you"

... uuh. Again. I'm gonna stop asking Berens for the next line of dialogue because i feel like I'm in that gameshow where they are trying to finish a phrase and I'm just asking for all the right letters while thinking I know what the phrase is and I am scared about what that phrase is.

And Sam is playing with the rings on the table, which Lucifer once did, and Sam did a few times in season 12 when things were HAIRY.

He fidgets when he is upset with his family.

"You think you can USE this freak"

I'm SHAKING. DEAN, NO. STOP TALKING IMMMMMMEDIATELY RIGHT NOW.

I stand by that Sam has a dodgy approach to Jack but fuck that entire concept that Dean just aired, we're getting into Open Warfare in the fandom between the Sam n Dean factions, I can tell. Like... the only question is is this going to be worse than Sam Hit A Dog or In The Same Situation I Wouldn't, or both on top of each other?

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO JACK IS THERE

Dean is wearing a black henley and Jack is wearing a white one I HATE IT

"I didn't end bad" OH WE ARE GOING THERE

WE ARE SO GOING THERE

Sam's been going there since Dean said "freak" because i have recently rewatched enough of season 1-4 to screeech when Dean said it.

And here's the season 2 thing back again

OH SHIT

Dean no

NO.

He's saying ALL THE THINGS AND HE SHOULD NOT BE SAYING THEEEEM

(I mean... healthy communication and the truth? But like... not doing it at top volume in front of the kid??)

NO THE CAS THING

THIS IS THE SAME FACE AS 9x22 WHEN DEAN SAID IT WAS A DICTATORSHIP

CAAAASSSSSS

HI BABE

Wakey wakey

Okay I had to go to dinner and I took my laptop down and made my mum extremely sad

I noticed a couple of other things on the next pass through, mostly sneaky dialogue repeats that I can't remember

but pass 2 through that last argument anyway because I was rushing it

Oh teardrops in the bead curtain at Dede's place, because grief. More passing through veils too.

The 9x06 parallel because Sam has a pencil for Jack, and it's a different room in the Bunker but weird shades of them keeping Crowley there, at least on the negative side of how they're treating Jack. Not a true parallel - different room and they're not asking him to write anything down, and Jack is doubling as Kevin.

Thinking of doubles - Patience framed as having 2 consciences about whether she becomes a wayward sister or not in Dean vs Jody - very much like Jack having dual father issues. Jody says "don't listen to him" for the negative example and wafts it away with love and she's gonna keep Patience :3

Also I thought of like 18 more reasons why I love Patience while I was watching

So, 3rd pass through this argument... WHY AM I DOING THIS TO MYSELF

Sam confronting Dean is again something where the episode establishes a mixed sort of approach but overall he has a GOOD approach to Jack and the best he's getting at the moment. Dean calling out Sam for using Jack THAT loudly and angrily instead of gently critiquing his methods and asking Sam if he'd care if Jack couldn't get Mary back - that's something Jack can't overhear right now but super needs to.

Of course, Dean is the Worst Parent but he hasn't signed up for that role. He still has an influence over Jack and is too super pissed off to see Jack - and Jack is behind a wall, which takes us to Berens and 12x22 and the wall between Dean and Mary. Dean can't see Jack for what he is and that means he's saying all the wrong things and not even able to reach out to parent him.

Jack basically wakes Cas up to get him back so he can have a non-yelling parent who will be uncomplicatedly good and the angel who watches over him.

(More on that dynamic once they interact a bit)

The fact Sam summons the spectre of John to tell Dean that he told him to put a bullet in Sam... Of course Dean can refute what John said and that Sam deserves to be saved which is lovely but you know. Awful argument. Not really the time for that sentiment :P Dean can see Sam - knows and trusts him like no one else in the universe; even Cas in some respects, because Cas is complicated and it's always so messy, that he keeps on giving Cas trust but Cas leaves or does stuff Dean doesn't approve of, and Sam is generally easier for him to deal with...

(Also the complicated feelings about Cas)

Sam goes and demolishes that this is about Mary. That Dean might be SAD about her and losing her but that he knows as well as Sam that she's gone because she went into that fight willingly, to protect them.

Cas, on the other hand, Dean absolutely can't see past. Dean's *entire* problem with Jack is because he lost Cas. Because he looks at Jack and sees dead Cas. Sam can explain how Mary chose to punch Lucifer right in the face (hehe) in some easy steps, but Dean then spells out his perception on what happened to Cas because of Jack.

I am so not over how the only time I've seen Dean this angry with Sam is in 9x22 and he yells right in his face and - GAH. I mean he's been angry with him before but it was a cold, sad or defeated anger, usually with tears involved. This is wide eyed, crazed, Mark of Cain Dean, who then walked around the corner and flipped back to a smooshy smile because Cas was there.

And this fight is taking place in almost the same space of turf as that argument, because heeey war room where the wars take place.

At this point, after "you might be able to forget about that, but I can't", I am pretty sure that Destiel has just gone horrifically canon in like the worst possible way, that Dean calls out the difference in their feelings about Cas.

It's literally putting on the table "is sam a dick or does dean just love cas in a special kind of way"

and dear god, Sam is not a dick.

Sam is amazing.

But not as much as Misha Collins who got a special card with his name on and "starring" above it, just for opening his eyes and sitting up.

#my stuff #13x03 #season 13 spoilers #i'm just saying if you have to google 'does everyone feel like this' about something you're probably gay #even if it's a metaphor and you don't have a clue if deja vu works like that #reblog if you're gay and get deja vu a lot

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