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.