The Blerg

The Glorious Mess of ‘Destiel is Canon’ – Part Two: The Show That Dragged Me To Hell

As should be clear by now, Destiel fans have had a long and embattled relationship with the creators of the show. For years and years (and years) there have been arguments over queerbaiting and how much the creators actually care about the characters and whether or not the storylines are stunted by a constant refusal to own up to the idea that yeah, maybe some people accidentally wrote a queer character. And while people in and outside of fandom will tell you that the majority of fans are women, it should also be noted that the majority of fans of SPN of this early era were queer women, or would someday realize they were queer women, or would just have a general aura of queerness about their person. Fans now are also probably very queer but I don’t have as much data, anecdotal or otherwise, to speak on that behalf. So yeah, this stuff went deep. Emotions flew high. Everyone involved took it very, very personally.

So let me set the stage here: it’s Thursday, Nov 5th, 2020. The US election had been two days prior and because the US has an outsized influence on the politics of the rest of the world, it seems like all of twitter across the globe is constantly refreshing and refreshing, desperate for any sort of update. What’s going on in Georgia? Will Nevada ever get back to us? Why is Gritty asking us to fuck around and find out? (we know why) And then very slowly, around 9 PM, a few tweets start to trickle in. The latest episode of Supernatural just ended and the only fandom friend on your feed who still watches the show is going on about the big thing that happened. And then more tweets start popping up as people hear the news. 

By 9:15 your feed is completely flooded by people screaming about how Castiel said a tearful ‘I love you’ to Dean Winchester, and then died immediately. 

The reason that this development is so immediately funny is the long history of the Bury Your Gays trope. Throughout all of media, queer people are always the ones more likely to die first, die often, and die most violently or tragically. As though being queer is a portent of doom for those who dare to not live their life according to the rules of heterosexuality. A main character who professes his love for another man and within seconds gets sucked into the worst kind of afterlife imaginable? Hilarious.

It stung (or was unconscionably hilarious) particularly because it came from Supernatural. It feels like both a gift and a slap in the face from the writers. Supernatural, after fifteen years on air, has a reputation. It’s always been a lightning rod of fandom, a pillar of the Livejournal and tumblr community as one of the biggest and most popular telefantasy shows. But the fandom is a volatile one, especially prone to in-fighting, flaming, all sorts of controversies either with the creators or with other fans. The wreckage of the early years of SPN still feels relevant in these moments because so many were involved and it took so much of our emotional capacities. I’m not even joking. People (including me!) felt so deeply for the characters and the storylines that arguing about it was difficult and occasionally hurtful work. People felt pain that Destiel wasn’t canon, that their favorite characters were fundamentally unhappy or denying an important part of themselves, and you can blame them for living in a “fantasy world” all you want, but it doesn’t negate the amount of effort and time put into something that you love that you can never take back. All that stuff, that level of emotion, is locked in forever, even if you eventually move on to other, saner things. We talk about fandom, particularly SPN fandom, as though it was a war. We experience flashbacks to a time in our lives when this was the most important thing to be happening and make sarcastic comparisons to ‘Nam.

What it really all made me think of is the role of fandom in our lives (that’s a lie, I’m always thinking about this) and why Supernatural in particular has such a fucked up, hardcore history that makes people absolutely freakin’ lose it whenever something hilarious like this happens. I think the answer in this particular case is twofold:

1. The act of being a fan to the degree of fandom in general has a particular nature to it. You may or may not participate in fandom culture, but the devotion and need to “protect” or “defend” the show is fairly universal to this type of fan. I find that when I feel pulled toward a fandom, it’s not because I’m identifying with a particular character or storyline or artistic style of a show but with the whole show itself. While shows can’t represent all of a person, and it’s incredibly difficult to communicate to another person all of yourself, certain shows can make it easier. It can be a way of saying “this is a concrete, observable part of me. How I feel, how I think, how I act. This show, whether it wanted to or not, is now carrying some burden of representing me as a person, because I love it and understand it so deeply.” You may eventually move on from the show, but like a tattoo, it remains emblematic of a time in your life, of who you were and the things you cared about. You start to regard the show not just as an hour of entertainment a week but as a part of yourself. And if you’ve incorporated this show into your sense of self, someone criticizing the show sounds like a criticism of you. (This is a very collapsed version of self-identification, obviously there are a lot of complexities and nuances that come along with being in a fandom and people have many different kinds of experiences and relationships to their shows.) I think part of why people get so passionate about the direction a show is taking and the choices being made is because they essentially don’t want to have to break up with themselves. But they also don’t want the show to represent them falsely. Impossible balance, clearly.

2. Supernatural, in particular, is a show all about family. The point of the show seems to be that family is the most important thing in the world. It’s more important that your dad or your brother live than yourself. No matter how twisted, complex, or downright abusive family can be, the thing that matters most is showing up and not letting anyone else fuck with it. (I never said it was a good lesson.) You stick with family through thick and thin, never, ever leave them behind, and hell to the person who tries to separate you. Now apply that lesson to the thousands of fans who see the show as part of themselves. The show itself becomes family and we know very, very well how family is treated. In its working class, Americana style, SPN has taught its fans that it’s okay to argue and bicker and treat each other like crap under the guise of a love that’s so fierce that it could anger the devil and defeat God.

People don’t really just walk away from a fandom like that.

So when news about a major development in the show’s history breaks, and it’s clearly been handled so bizzarely and poorly that people are making memes about the actors filming the scene at gunpoint, you feel that drag of 2012 fandom culture start to beckon you back. It’s hilarious becuase you thought you could escape this, it’s hilarious because you thought the writers couldn’t possibly fuck you over again, it’s absolutely hilarious because everyone around you feels the same way.

Supernatural as a show was my entire life for a good four and a half years, from the day the pilot aired. Every Thursday at 8 PM it was time for the rest of my family to shut up and leave me alone for two hours so I could get my weekly doses of SPN and Smallville. I would also make sure to record the episodes on VHS so that I could catch stuff I missed later or if, horror upon horror, I had to be somewhere at 8 PM that wasn’t in front of the TV (if I watched it the night of it still counted as live). One time, during season five, my VHS didn’t record the episode properly and I missed a live episode for the first time ever and I cried. While I wasn’t as enthusiastic about the addition of Castiel or the fifth season, it still held a substantial place in my heart as a rare palatable horror show with mood, feeling, characters I adored, and a really amazing mythology. I didn’t dump the show like a lot of my friends who got frustrated with the relationship with the creators or the lack of gayness. I still retained my happy associations of earlier years as my interest in watching it week to week slowly faded as the storyline got more boring and convoluted. It was still important to my idea of myself as a teenager though. I’ve been lucky enough to have two friends be cool, impressive Deans to my nerdy, academic Sam. As much as SPN was a horror show (literally and figuratively) most of my friends who I talk to today stem from that time period and fandom space.

My feed lighting up with mentions of Destiel brought me so much laughter not because of the show but because of the people who have been affected by the show. Which in turn makes it about the show again, and what an awful job they did, and how is this happening in 2020. The continual feedback loop of brokenness and love is ever flowing. This enough would have been a special moment for me, as a sort of SPN renassaince took over my feed and reinvigorated long dead debates. But then the Supernatural moment became a fandom moment, casting a far wider net and impact than could possibly be expected. We’ll get to that bit next time.

The Glorious Mess of ‘Destiel is Canon’ – Part One

You may have noticed I didn’t make a post last week and you may have guessed why.

As I’m American, there wasn’t really much else I wanted to talk about Monday night (or Tuesday night, or Wednesday, etc. etc.) and looking back to the past week of viewing didn’t really appeal to me as an activity. It’s not that I don’t want to be political (Trump is a fascist) but that I don’t want that to be the blog. Writing about shows weekly is my happy little reflection pool of what’s going on in my head and while politics and culture can’t and shouldn’t be separated, I’m not all that interested in talking about the news.

All that said, last week something amazing happened. Something incontrovertible and beyond question. A decision was made that would shape the world for years to come.

Destiel is canon.

I’ve been having a hard time wrapping my head around writing this post up, getting myself to finally sit down and do it. Not because of having to explain so many things about the ship and the show and the exact timing of this event that caused an entire 9/10ths of the fandom, for years dormant and forever salty, to essentially explode with yelling and memes and more yelling. No, not because of any of that. I’m hesitant to write this post because I don’t think it’s even possible to convey how hysterically funny it is. How perfect and complete a shitpost it is that it’s hardly farfetched to call it real, true art. This new twenty second clip of a fifteen year old show two episodes from being off the air forever proved that old habits and character obsessions die hard and nothing is as good as dramatically and needlessly dying than the characters on Supernatural.

So yeah, I’m hesitant to write about it because there’s no possible way that I could ever do the beauty and grace of this moment justice with my words. But hell if that ever stopped anyone at any time writing for Supernatural so let’s just fucking go.

We can start with the most obvious bits. With the disclaimer that I have not watched this show in ten years, here is what I understand to have happened on the show proper. Supernatural (SPN) is about two brothers road tripping across America, fighting demons and urban legends, having emotional conversations on the hood of their ‘67 Impala and getting saved from hell by angels. This last part is how Season 4 started, and while there were a good number of people who had primarily been interested up to that point in the drama between the brothers, Season 4 brought a whole new perspective on human/angel relations. The human being named Dean, the angel being named Castiel. 

As fandom convention would have it in the mid-aughts and later, this pairing in fanfic and other fandom spaces was referred to as DeanCas, Dean/Cas, and Destiel. Destiel fans were passionate, they were intense, they were unafraid to ask incredibly probing and aggressive questions of the actors during conventions, they are the single most populous force on Archive of Our Own.  (This is not to say that fans of other ships in Supernatural are any less intense – indeed, ALL of SPN fandom is crazy bonkers insane times, especially when engaged in ship wars, and should be avoided whenever and however possible.) Naturally, because faith in yourself and your family beyond reason is, you know, maybe a central tenet of the show or something, Destiel fans very quickly believed that the relationship would become real on the show. 

While slightly more believable than the idea of the two brothers hooking up (this was pre-GOT and certainly not allowed to be as edgy as prestige TV), the likelihood of Dean coming out as bisexual seemed low. Or was it? Because for the eleven years the various writers and producers, who by necessity were very aware of fans and their activities, had to toe the fine line of maintaining the right closeness between the characters to make the plot work and not fully giving into unabashed romance. It’s a precise highwire act that only the best in the business would be able to maintain – so obviously, they failed. All the time. Either leaning very hard into the Dean/Cas relationship without making it explicit (it’s clear that there were some showrunners who weren’t entirely opposed to the idea in concept but maybe in logistics) or backing so far away from anything queer-related that homophobia is a reasonable, and even necessary, term to use. So basically, the term queerbaiting seems to have been invented specifically for this series. 

Cut to last Thursday. It is two weeks before very last episode of Supernatural  ever airs, after COVID delays pushed back the series finale from March to November. Some other things are happening in the nation and people are on edge and waiting to hear something, anything, substantial. I want to say in the last scene of the episode (although I honestly do not know again I have not seen anything since season 6 at the very latest) Dean and Castiel are in a room somewhere and Castiel the angel decides that now is the time, now is the very moment, to tell Dean that he loves him. Right now, not a second to lose. Why? Well, because Castiel has made a deal with a black oozing entity called The Empty in which he will get sent to a place worse-than-hell that is where angels and demons go to die, no like really die, they’re dead this time guys. The deal involves Castiel being taken by The Empty after experiencing a moment of true happiness. (Hmmm. This sounds familiar, you might be saying, except it doesn’t involve the ancient paranormal creature having sex with a sixteen-year-old.) 

That’s right folks. Castiel tells Dean his true feelings and immediately gets sucked into super hell by a black pile of goo. 

Naturally, there was some reaction to this.

Now, let me be clear. I have never cared about Destiel. In fact the reason I had stopped watching the show was because a) I lost interest in Sam after I realized that no, Lena, there is no acting ability here and b) Castiel became a main character and constant annoying presence. This is nothing to do about whether or not Dean and Castiel actually had legs as a pairing or the acting ability/chemistry of either, but more to do with, say, me being a dumb teen fervent in her beliefs that if Castiel would just gtfo then Sam would have better storylines. So Destiel wasn’t exactly top of my interests, especially not well past the time I had stopped paying attention to the show. Except for last Thursday when the magical moment happened, and I found myself only and forever thinking about Destiel. 

This post is plenty long enough and tough (maybe?) to digest so I’m going to cut it here for now and come back with more of what exactly was happening Thursday night (with tweets!), why it happened, and, most importantly, my personal journal of SPN fandom.