#and you know I personally celebrated each and every nugget of Drowley subtext they gave us :P

[elizabethrobertajones]

you ever think about how they hired twins to play the triplets that dean and crowley have sex with. I feel like that right there is proof that they're not queerbaiting, because no one could possibly be baited by that because 99 percent of everyone didn't even notice it. They just put it in there cause dean's bi and they write him as bi.

It’s funny, for whatever reason I was thinking last night about how my own personal definition of the way the show may or may not queerbait has changed over the seasons, and it’s not just to do with personal growth but the way the show is written and the way they are handling things. 

My impression of how it all felt in the start of season 10 was utter disbelief that they were so on the nose about Dean and Crowley, and I know not everyone wants to/does think that they hooked up, but there’s some stuff the show pushed there that in some ways it would have no other excuse to do and I went cold on Drowley several times after feeling like the handling was sweeping it under the rug, writing it off as villainous queerness or other ways to distance Dean from it like suggesting he wasn’t in control or roofied by being a demon, that thankfully at least was not how Crowley died on the show, with 12x15 giving us the last example of how that dynamic had matured, and it WAS matured, and at least in terms of respecting that Dean n Crowley had once eloped, was about as good as it could get. And I think owning that the dynamic wasn’t a sense of that time being abusive was important given how much Dean and Crowley interacted and behaved towards each other AFTER, as well as exactly how we were supposed to read whether Dean should feel violated or smug or nostalgic about it all (and he did flash between them depending on the season or episode in the time after). But at the start of season 10 this whole journey was really only just beginning. 

Obviously people had written about the queercoding and Crowley’s seduction before then, but in very careful metaphorical terms, and as much as it was suggestive in season 9, the fact is that without season 10 it could easily remain a metaphorical ~seduction to evil~ where this was written in terms of romantic seduction - except for where it was fatherly or brotherly - but 10x01 smashed that and made it really really clear that you could read that Dean and Crowley had been hooking up, even independent of the twins/triplets subtext. Specifically when Crowley is annoyed Dean and Ann-Marie hooked up in his bed, and Ann-Marie tells him and Dean to get a room, and he’s like, we had one. Of course you can pretend that not everything Crowley says is innuendo (and room = specifically the bed), but that exchange had a lot of jealousy and a lot about his and Dean’s *personal* relationship, as much as the other stuff was about the more wild stuff they shared with others while howling at the moon. Which was part of the longer term emotional game Crowley was playing about their business relationship and Dean being his scary consort and them sort of going exclusive >.> 

And in that context, Crowley mentions they’d done some memorable stuff to triplets together, and on rewatching you catch they’re hanging out with twins in the bar before that, but the wider context was this absolute explosion of queer subtext and borderline text and a dynamic that needed concentrated work to not come to the conclusion they’d been fucking all summer, with and without buddies of whatever gender with them. Focusing on the male twins in the background as a hint that Dean had had sex with men is ignoring where Crowley directly implies they’d been hooking up and now he wanted to go exclusive with Dean as the hugest neon sign that, yes, Dean has been having sex with at least one man, regardless of the gender of the triplets. Like, I know people were like hurr blurr the triplets could have been women, #no homo, sometimes men sleep with triplets together like bros. Which traps us into hyperfocusing on what the triplets were and using them as the definitive proof, when in fact the reason triplets were being banged in the first place was because Dean and Crowley were banging all the time everywhere up and down seedy bars in America, and Dean didn’t want the good times to end, while Crowley wanted the d all for himself now pls. 

And considering that’s the thing under the paper thin surface that you can remotely pretend that Dean only slept with women and he and Crowley were just hanging out the entire time, regardless of no matter how much more subtext the show piled on later, less close to the surface but with more confidence that everyone knew Dean had banged Crowley and the only way any of this worked any more was that that had happened, even just when we only had 10x01 to work with, the whole Dean n Crowley thing was so enormous that you can’t just speculate on what the twins were to approach to what degree was this queerbaiting or not. The twins are a detail that you can pick up on and speculate on if you look deeper, as they know we sometimes do. I’m not saying they’re NOT an aspect of this, but they’re a relatively buried easter egg of subtext compared to, say, Crowley sobbing over his flickr albums in the next episode :P

To what degree Drowley was queerbaiting is the real question, and since Crowley is now consigned to the show’s history books, we have the full story in a way. In the context of what we have now, I don’t think overall, all comments included, the show ever pretended, even when distancing Dean from it, even when painting it as abusive or Dean having diminished responsibility, that Dean and Crowley did *not* bang. I think there are multiple comments which as long as you are permissive that Dean would have could have probably did, that in seasons 11 and 12 pretty clearly indicate a memory of having slept together one point or another, especially 11x23 and 12x15 with overt references to sexual things from Crowley to Dean, or 11x07 and the implication that over a year later Dean still has Crowley’s answerphone messages from howling at the moon, and knows and remembers details of his personal life fondly. (I don’t think that’s the only time Bobo wrote them like that but that’s the one that springs to mind :P)

Buuut they never showed them on screen in such a way that could be seen from the moon as them together, like actually showing them IN a sexual relationship while Dean was a demon, or having Dean confirm Crowley’s innuendo with more than the usual reactions where he gets plausible deniability to any gay stuff going on. And SOME of that I think MAY be to do with the problems with the villainous queerness slant, and the way it was at times framed as abusive/Dean lacking control. Because they would not commit to exploring the aftermath of that relationship SERIOUSLY, i.e. making it clear they had slept together when Dean was a demon, and him on-screen dealing with how that made him feel and how he felt about Crowley, and even, god forbid, his own sexuality, the best they could do to resolve it was to establish eventually a sort of civil exes dynamic, both aware of their history, but not harping on it, even if Crowley remained somewhat to entirely besotted by Dean for the rest of his time on the show. The lack of handling it seriously means it stays as a somewhat jokey subtext later on, and they can play it off as no harm no foul by the end of season 11 and through season 12. 

I think in that vein it also eventually contributed to Crowley being sidelined and eventual downfall, because he was trapped in the subtext of being Dean’s ex and all the enormous complications that made between them and for his personal life, again without being able to explore it or leave a lasting, openly discussed impact on him. He no longer directly antagonised them, but he couldn’t cross any lines which made him human or part of the team for more than passing moments because the longer he was around Dean the more awkward it got and the more it would beg them to explore what, exactly, were Dean and Crowley now, and the obvious issues that would have/could have arisen if we discussed this like adults and we were allowed to just textually state in a frank and open way that Dean had been seduced by Crowley that one time. 

And I think in terms of where that puts us, it means that Drowley was very much a stifled relationship, officially over and no chance of getting it back, which in some ways is as large as or larger then Destiel in the weight it puts on the show when it comes to answering queerbaiting charges, because it could never be addressed openly while Crowley was alive, still ISN’T acknowledged, and Dean is as closeted as he was before, despite in his actual living human memory, knowing what it’s like to bang Crowley on the side for 3 months of his life with no direct personal growth (that is: now banging Cas, happily, or even banging other random guys, no angst, just for fun hook ups, equivalent to the textual times he picks up women) to show for this wild college experimentation metaphor phase of his life. 

At this point you really can only change the final judgement on it by making Dean canonically bi and then giving him the character growth, acknowledging the role Crowley had played in it, and allowing him to live what had just been subtext as a textual part of his character. In all other respects, I think the fact that Dean subtextually has hooked up with Crowley, and presumably other men probably other than the male implied triplets we saw on screen as well, but it’s relegated to this one particular part of his story and locked up in the subtext box, is going to look absolutely like one of the show’s worst sins of queerbaiting if we get to the end and that box is never opened again. And not to say it all looks rosy while we wait until the hypothetical what if of textualising Dean’s bisexuality and trying to live a positive life of hoping that will happen. As it stands, the handling in the text is depressing, and speaks of how far the show will currently allow any queer relationship for Dean to go. Meaning a worst case scenario is that his borderline subtextual marriage to Cas may never move beyond a similar point if this remains the high water mark of the show’s willingness to show Dean in a genuine, sexual relationship with a man. And that’s something you have to at least think about, in terms of how it looks now, and how it might look one day, no matter how positive you are about the endgame of the show, when it comes to being realistic about the show’s queerbaiting, or at least perceived queerbaiting if you don’t believe they are. That’s what other people are seeing, both with Drowley and Destiel. 

I mean, that deleted scene in 10x14 says it best: Cas and Crowley trapped together, frustrated and living in angry despair in their competition over Dean, where he is busy not picking either of them, while they vie for his attention and consider each other his boyfriend in all but name, and yet he will not commit to either of them in the way they desire. And this is the same frustrated wall that Cas is still stuck bouncing up against, even when his romantic rival is *utterly* vanquished and removed from the narrative, and hadn’t even really been competing for Dean for like 2 seasons before that.