#came into the cinema waiting to queerbaited and got so much worse

[its-haughty]

venom 3 when i catch you venom 3 when i get catch you when i c

[jemariel]

Sherlock, Supernatural, and How I Am Trying to Take Shipping Less Seriously

I want to tell my story. 

(tl;dr: I have a lot more fun with shipping when I don’t worry about whether or not it will ever be canon. OR: Never put that much faith in the hands of showrunners. It always ends BAD.gif)

I wrote most of this post months ago and it’s been rotting away in my drafts since maybe March? It seemed like a good time to actually post it. This is my own personal perspective, where I’m coming from on this. Obviously everyone’s feelings and opinions are 100% their own and I respect that. We’re all coming from somewhere.

Soooo. I’ve been lurking in various fandoms for a long time. I started in 2001, when I was 14. I’ve seen a lot of changes in fandom and the internet and how we interact with our favorite media. Now seemed like a good time for me to sort through this.

My first OTP was in Highlander. It was, for all intents and purposes, a dead fandom when I arrived. The show had been cancelled 5 years before I even discovered that other people wrote and posted their fanfiction, and one half of my pairing was dead for the final series. The pair I read about maybe shared half an hour of screen time through the whole three seasons they were both in the show? They had very little plot interaction at least.

I didn’t care. It didn’t stop me from reading about them. Didn’t stop me from wanting to put them in the same room and see what happened – usually them getting on like a house on fire.

The point is that we were under absolutely no impression that they would ever become canon. There was literally no possibility for it. But that didn’t matter. We could do what we wanted. We were just having fun.

After Highlander came Harry Potter. Sirius Black and Remus Lupin. I don’t remember if I started shipping them before or after the 4th book but it was definitely long before the 5th book. This was the first time I had the inkling that maybe, possibly, JK Rowling might have actually intended them to be read that way. This is where I read my first meta, before it was called that – someone who went through the books and pulled out excerpts that made a person think. Wow that eye contact really did linger, I thought. Maybe that embrace wasn’t strictly brotherly, I said to myself.

At the time, queerbaiting was not even a word in the vernacular. So when the 6th book came out and Tonks and Remus became the most eyebrow-raising pairing I’ve ever encountered, I just shrugged and went on with my life. Sirius was dead anyway so this really changed nothing. I liked Remus the gay uncle werewolf, but bisexual was fine too. I mostly wrote and read about them during their school days anyway. So this was fine.

Eventually I moved on, and where I landed after that was in the grand daddy of all slash pairings, the first fandom in our current fanfiction zeitgeist: Star Trek, the Original Series. Kirk and Spock. This was still a couple of years before the 2009 reboot movies, so all I had was a cheesy 60s TV show with a venerable back catalogue of fanfic. What’s better, this ship could never be sunk! Of course they couldn’t ever be canon, it was the 60s. Times were different. I could ship them with fervor and never be disappointed because of course it was just our interpretation. … Wasn’t it?

Oh, Gene Roddenberry. You idealistic sonuvabitch. You created the Vulcan word “t’hy’la” specifically for Spock to use for Kirk, and you made it mean friend, brother, and lover? Was that really necessary or were you trying to tell us something?

Here I found more fledgling meta, and I went through the novelizations of the movies with a highlighter devouring every piece of evidence I could find. But while this ship was unsinkable, it would also never fly. Even if Roddenberry had intended this, or supported it after the fact, prejudice surely had kept his intentions in the background. Subtext was our friend. We could work with subtext. The subtext wove a gay love story the likes of which we haven’t seen since the ancient Greeks. I was happy with that.

But then.

2010. Sherlock.

I knew going into it that Holmes and Watson were the greatest love story never told. I figured it would be a fun pairing for a while. But oh. I was not prepared. And oh, be still my beating heart, the Angelo’s scene! If I recall correctly I actually sat up straighter in my chair at “so you’ve got a boyfriend then”/”No.” Could they… could he? Did they actually…? Was this written for… me? For us? Could we, the weird little corner of the fandom be right for once?? The slash shippers, the queer kids, the ones who had been peering between the lines for decades to try and catch glimpses of ourselves in our favorite stories?

I buried the thought for a few years, devouring Johnlock fanfic like it was my job, my civic duty, my vocation. I waited patiently for each new series. But I never actually expected anything to come of my hopes until after season 3.

Bet you guessed it. TJLC had caught me like a spark in dry grass. The few analyses I’d read before were NOTHING compared to this. Suddenly it all seemed so possible. So real. After The Abominable Bride it seemed like there was nowhere else to go, nowhere to go but up. We were right. WE WERE RIGHT! For a whole year, we got to relish the thought that it might actually happen.

…………….. Season 4 was… tough. It felt like a slap in the face, all of our hopes thrown back at us with ignorance at best, cruelty and direct malice at worst. If it had been a good season on its own without canon Johnlock I might have been okay, but as it is….. It was not the first time I’ve had my heart broken by a TV show, and probably only seems like the worst by virtue of being recent. But I would very much like it to be the last.

A few months before diving head-first into the pre season-4 gear-up, I watched a few seasons of Supernatural. Just enough to meet Castiel and lay the groundwork for a Destiel obsession as a contingency plan for if season 4 of Sherlock went all pear shaped. I’m glad I did or I don’t know where I would have found my refuge.

But I started to notice something. From my earliest wading in the Destiel end of the tumblr pond, I shied away quickly from any discussion of evidence, subtextual clues used to make predictions, or whether or not Destiel could or should or will be canon. I still take all meta and spec I read with a healthy pinch of salt. I am trying very hard not to care about whether or not it becomes canon, because honestly? I miss the days when whether or not a ship was canon or had a snowball’s chance of ever becoming so had absolutely nothing to do with whether or not I shipped it.

Fandom is just one of many echo chambers that the internet has molded around every one of us. It is so easy to become convinced that our way is right and everyone else’s way is wrong, because we only hear our own voices and those of people we agree with reflected back at us.

We are not the arbiters of what happens in canon. The showrunners are NOT obligated to listen to us. Not everyone can be right, and the showrunners cannot listen to everyone. Nor should they. They are, for better or for worse, creating their own story. Not ours.

We can always write the story the way we want to, over and over in countless different ways. These days I see a show almost more as a set of toys to play with than as its own impermeable whole. I can believe that Dean and Castiel have been slowly falling in love over the course of the last decade. I can decide when and where I want them to have first admitted it, to themselves or each other. What’s more – I can change my mind. Some days I like believing that they’ve been together since Cas’s hand print was still fresh on Dean’s shoulder. Some days I’d rather believe that they’re still pining and in various states of denial. Or anything in between – it’s all equally valid. Once it’s said and stated in canon, that’s it. That’s the show. That’s how it happened. I like the freedom I have when my ship is not explicitly canon. The best is when they are clearly aware of it and give us moments like the mixtape or the Fanfiction Gap of 9x06 – new toys to play with – but let us shape what’s actually going on. As I say in my tags sometimes: They clearly love us and want us to have nice things.

All of this is NOT to say that up-and-coming queer kids do not richly need and deserve representation. God, not at all. I beat myself up about this a lot, for what feels like a terribly selfish desire to just enjoy it and not worry about whether or not the up and coming queer youth could have it better than I did. They can and they should and I still believe that season 4 of Sherlock was the biggest missed opportunity in queer cinema history.

I just can’t take it so personally anymore. For the sake of my favorite hobby, I cannot stake my enjoyment of a pairing and a show on whether or not the showrunners want to take the risk. I cannot let them dangle me on that particular string. I cannot give them that power over me. 

So this is my manifesto, for me personally. If Destiel becomes canon? I will be over the moon. But I will not go hunting for it. I won’t expect it. I will cherish every gift that the showrunners give to us because they’re not obligated to give us a damn thing, so I can’t take what they do give us for granted. I will live my headcanons, write my fics, and I will love the show for what it is, warts and all. I will ship my ship, enthusiastically and with my whole heart, because it brings me joy to do so. Canon or no canon. @starsinursa @daughter-of-the-rain-and-snow