#we have supernatural actors who met because of the show announcing their upcoming gay wedding

[ladyluscinia]

You know what... I do appreciate the genuine "my bad", the sun is shining, I have an unexpectedly light evening, and Supernatural is trending due to actors getting gay married. I think I will say some nice things about Destiel today.

Introduction: Supernatural is the longest running American Sci fi / Fantasy show (and pretty much only beat in length overall by Doctor Who - which is kind of a unique case) with 327 episodes over 15 seasons. It ran from September 2005 - November 2020. Destiel, the main ship of the spn fandom, appeared in the S4 premiere on September 18, 2008 with the introduction of Castiel, the angel who quite literally pulled Dean out of hell and resurrected him. (Fun fact: the first Destiel fanfic was posted that day.) Castiel had enough compelling character work and wild chemistry with Dean in their first season to inspire the writers to change their planned arc of killing him off after 3 episodes to keeping him around and (infamously) adapting the conceived allied-angel plot of a different new character, Anna, that was going to be a potential love interest for Dean into Castiel's story instead. So at the end of S4 he turned on all of Heaven after Dean Winchester looked him in the eye and asked him to, and the next 11+ years were history.

Now I can quite literally babble on about in-universe Destiel forever, but the stuff I've actually been observing / joking about / commenting on while all this ship bracket posting has been going is the more meta-level negative perception of the ship, show, and fandom, so I think I'm actually going to just overview that.

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So like... broad strokes, Destiel is almost more meme than ship at this point. And it's not a generally positive meme. Part of that is our fault as a fandom - we do love our joking about queerbait and homophobia and being annoying and how much we lose, and the show finale was genuinely terrible - but also there is whole running joke of people who actually finally do watch spn and then go "oh my god there is actually Destiel in this show" because people assume they know about spn from the general fandom consciousness and straight up do not believe us when we say it shouldn't be dismissed as homophobic queerbait. Because it's not.

If anything, Destiel is a unique and fascinating case study of the blurry line and interactions between homophobia, queercoding, queerbaiting, and telling a canonically romantic story - one that could only have been produced in its timeframe.

Since we're coming from the Sulemio poll, there have been a lot of mentions of the legality of gay marriage. This is particularly ironic, because gay marriage is legal in the USA, yes, but that court decision came down in 2015. When spn premiered it was legal in exactly one state and explicitly banned in nearly half the country. By the end of 2008 (start of Destiel era) that becomes two legal states and explicitly banned in over two thirds. Supernatural as a show and Destiel as a ship literally straddle pretty much the entire process of gay marriage legalization across the country, which ended in the summer of 2015 between S10 and S11 when the Supreme Court legalized it nationwide, including in the 14 holdout states that hadn't done so yet. And this shows. It's intrinsic to understanding Destiel.

Because you also have to understand that a lot of people worked on spn over a lot of years, and our fandom loves to know those people by name. In the writers room alone you have 4 separate showrunners and about 15 additional writers of significance (so more than one-off episode writers) who all contributed their own efforts and perspectives. Plus directors, actors, the network / producers, other crew... Supernatural as a show has no coherent stance on Destiel at any point in its run because the people making it have so many different stances - which is how we get the final 3 episodes dropping a canonical romantic love confession and then trying to ignore they did so, burying their confirmed gay angel (the famous superhell meme) and then un-burying him in the finale with an offscreen mention while they studiously avoid drawing attention to post-canon Destiel possibilities, and very likely accidentally giving a translation team a script / transcript from before they cut the verbal reciprocation to said love confession that they insist did not exist despite the translation team seemingly receiving it (y yo a ti / canon in spanish memes).

Early years Destiel was a lot of homophobic jokes + queerbait and the show was mostly homophobic about it, but at the same time we have Ben Edlund, beloved writer from S2-S8, talking on twitter recently about how he was definitely aware of and intentionally exploring queercoded possibilities with Destiel well before that could be anything but queercoding on a network tv show. And he wasn't alone! Meanwhile in the late Destiel era we have Bobo Berens, a gay writer who joined the show in S9 (still pre-national gay marriage!) and would steadily gain importance until he wrote Cas's love confession and worked insanely hard with showrunner Dabb and actor Misha Collins to get it in the show. Yet some of the homophobic people from the early years are still around through all of that!

Like - gay marriage is legalized in 2015. S11 airs (with a lot of Destiel subtext which is standard by this point) and behind the scenes showrunner Jeremy Carver is passing the reigns to final showrunner Andrew Dabb. S12 is Dabb's first season as showrunner and he immediately has Destiel market researched. The network presumably says no, so S13 they open with a five episode bit we call the widower arc where Cas is temporarily dead and Dean is literally a widower about it, ending with a Cas resurrection and Destiel reunion with set decor referencing the Romeo + Juliet movie from 1996 and camerawork showing Cas's return putting the light back on Dean's face after he just tried to kill himself for real because nothing mattered anymore.

You can't make this shit up.

At several points we will never be able to fully pin down (see: varying stances across cast and crew), Destiel became a thing that a significant number of the creators were pushing for in some shape or form. That's not queerbaiting anymore. That's queercoding in a canon romance when you aren't allowed to break the "plausible deniability" rules - no kissing, no "I love you" that doesn't get immediately maybe-platonic-zoned, no gay stuff that couldn't maybe be the warrior's bond or a joke (and ideally leaves the audience to fill in the punchline). You can actually do a lot inside those rules. See: the entire history of queer media.

And they did it. For years. Until the needle on "how taboo the idea of your male lead being gay is" had moved just enough to pull the trigger and film it becoming canon right before a worldwide pandemic paused production and gave homophobic executives a huge block of time, required rewrites, and the perfect cover story for basically anything they chose to do. (The spn finale lore is way too complicated to get into here - just know it's undeniable shenanigans happened.)

So we have a heavily queercoded ship that's not really "open to interpretation" despite the party line - as in written in arcs where one guy is filling the role of love interest in everything but name and the two characters function like a common law married couple in between getting paralleled to about every romantic relationship they meet - that manages to become canon despite being native to a pre-gay rights era show that has a huge historical impact on fandom culture. And then we have a broad fandom perception of it among people who have not watched the show as being a cringe queerbait that the creators hated and never took seriously which should only be known for how homophobic it was to it's fandom while we leave it in the past (where it belongs) and embrace real canon ships that were made with effort by people who wrote them with intent to tell a gay love story.

...now maybe you see where I was coming from with this meme:

Oh, and in this timeframe spn fans have also put over 116k Destiel fanfics on AO3 - that's around 45k more than 2nd place Sherlock/John Watson last I checked - and yet the prevailing meme opinion is that it's just another white guy ship between two people who barely come across as friends and most people only still like it for the meme anyway. It's not like Destiel is actually has value or is worth shipping in 2024 with so many better options out there.

It's cool to hate now, and people loudly and enthusiastically hate it in order to be cool. Which is why we laugh amongst ourselves through losing polls and also laugh at the random wildly uneducated Destiel opinions that get treated as absolute fact because some meme voter said them and doesn't everyone know Destiel was queerbait?

Anyway if I really wanted to throw some stones in these glass houses I'd ask where the beautiful canon yuri ship advancing us beyond the era of barbarous queerbait - the one that got officially married in their blessed canon - is keeping their official kissing gifs.

They have those, right? One of the perks of being real canon and married (since Destiel canon doesn't count).

...oh.

Oh?!?

You mean they didn't show an official canon kiss on screen despite making it super blatant that there was a non-platonic relationship going on here??? And then the anime studio after making it super gay by doing a political marriage plot from ep 1 tried to walk it back to being "open to interpretation" by downplaying the relationship in the final episodes and editing out parts of interviews that said they were married post-canon?????? As in your fandom had a brief QUEERBAITING SCANDAL due to NETWORK CENSORSHIP?????????