#lead to me having some kinda epiphany abt the shift in preceptions of queerbaiting by fandom audiences happening bc of fandom audiences

[22degreehalo]

I’m have thoughts. About Supernatural. And queerbaiting. In 2022.

But. Consider this:

* People who get really really into fandom and ships are inordinately likely to be queer. But also are inordinately likely to be autistic.

* Supernatural has a specific reason to be appealing to autistic fans due to Castiel being heavily autistic coded, an interpretation which was explicitly supported by Misha Collins.

* But also Supernatural, being a long-running serialised speculative fiction show with heavy latent continuity, is also just inherently very appealing to fandomy autistics.

* Supernatural heavily heavily blends lines between fandom and canon in ways that heavily encourage those fandomy behaviours - that’s one of the reasons it got so popular among that crowd!

* But also like. Supernatural would REALLY encourage those behaviours. Like, they literally had a twitter account for the set design crew!! Who’d tweet stuff like ‘can anyone tell us what previous episode this wallpaper came from?’ to enforce to the fandom that they were paying attention to this stuff and that it could be important!!

* The backlash against Supernatural largely became ‘stupid delusional fangirls convinced they’re seeing something that was never there (when good represetation is right over here)’.

* Said backlash coincided chronologically with the mainstreaming of fandom and the rise in more neurotypical-normative fandom.

* All of this allowed Supernatural to wash its hand of any part in any of this because lol, people were literally saying Destiel would be canon because of the colour of the lights on the wall!! That is obviously Insane obsessive shut-in behaviour!!

Put all together: in queerbaiting their queer audience by putting in hints that they never intended to follow up on, were they also exploiting a largely autistic audience?

As someone who never intended to buy into Supernatural... I have literally never encountered any place as absolutely batshit for autistic brains as it. People would literally write tens of thousands of words speculating on the implications of a one-off line of dialogue about an in-universe AU and what it means for the person who wrote that in-universe AU!! And I ate it all up!! I gorged myself on that shit!!! It was some kind of actual drug for pattern-seeking autistics and I felt half manic the entire time!!!

And when I think on it. I doubt the Supernatural creators, like, actually fully understood what they were doing, there. But they were obviously aware they had a legion of ‘obsessive fangirls’ who’d read that kinda stuff into it.

And did they... take advantage of that? Feeding those hints in, and encouraging fans to care about them in language they’d understand? Knowing fully well that to non-fans - or even to other kinds of fans - who can’t imagine the mentality, that this would all seem totally bonkers?

(And like, fyi: Castiel being autistic never got any kind of like official word, either. Stretching the term in ways I don’t necessarily agree with, that could be considered ‘neurodivergentbaiting’, too. But I’ve noticed fandom extremely eager to denounce any meaning in autistic representation unless representation more personal to them is also met - see someone on reddit yesterday who was really angry about Newt Scamander being autistic because he’s just ‘the classic super smart straight white guy’ as though characters like that are in any remote way common, anyway. Or Overwatch fans totally overlooking Symmetra, an Autistic dark-skinned Indian woman, because nothing means anything until the game introduces a [neurotypical?] black woman.)

Either way I think this pretty much sums up why the backlash to Supernatural fans pisses me off so much. It wasn’t ~fans being crazy~. I mean, the fans were right, in the end - Castiel was in love with Dean all along. But because the relationship was foreseen and enjoyed through largely autistic perspectives, it was seen as invalid. Meanwhile, queer representation that offers little for autistics - that is very mundane and straightforward, with Normal-acting ‘realistic’ characters, which match their idea of what ‘ordinary queer people’ act like, are heralded as the only correct form of representation.

In saying all this, perhaps discussions of queer rep in fandom have leaned too heavily autistic-normative in the past - it’s true that neurotypical fans are much less likely to look up information about the characters and so hear author’s words about their sexualities, for example. But I don’t think this total shift the other way is good, either.