#to clarify: i don't actually think dean would hurt sam. i think that the amy conflict is poorly written esp surrounding dean's responses | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

elizabethrobertajones · 6 years

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With how things are going, I have to wonder - did TPTB give us the Huevas as a 'there, we don't hate gay people' token and were we wrong in reading it as a subtext-to-Destiel thing? Lizbob, I'm getting desperate. The 'so introduce me' line was so - it's what you say to kids, right? And the UST is completely gone... :(

Hi there!

Is this because of this post from the other day where the line about “twice the worries about being ganked” was put under some destiel stuff to show that Dean had in fact doubled his worries about getting ganked? And also explains why he keeps telling Cas not to do anything stupid, because he’s worried, and not because he thinks Cas is actually stupid… Buckleming dialogue or not it’s calling back to 12x10 where Dean had to clarify this for Cas and admit he can say stuff like that when he’s worried. I’m not saying it’s very nice to keep on heckling Cas instead of just saying he’s worried, although I do feel the choice of writer really waters down the nuance in how that scene could have gone which would show Dean actually learned anything from 12x10. And while Cas shouldn’t have to expect to deal with Dean caring about him this way, at least we’ve already covered this in the text :P

But anyway, to me personally I just don’t write about Destiel that I see in the show with expectations that it will go canon, not because I’m negative or wanky about it (although, usual disclaimer, of course I’m very opinionated on if it SHOULD and the obligation the show has to do what they are constantly teasing, I just separate out these two things to write about the present moment of the show and the future, one of which takes a lot of explaining and one of which is extremely one note obvious of “make it gay, you cowards”), but just that I don’t want to engage in the cycle of optimism/despair that having Destiel hopes causes, specifically because I’m a popular meta blog that writes about Destiel in the text, and also because of people like you who get their hopes up and then get hurt.

I will probably merge expectations with demands when the show is actually definitively heading towards the end and we all know it is and it’s out there on the table. In the mean time, I’m happy to let this all carry on as it’s carrying on without feeling like there is a deadline or set moment for any one thing to pay off for us. The show takes its sweet time to address things which seem OBVIOUS, for example looking at the way side characters disappear and return sometimes like 3 or 9 or 13 years after we last saw them to get some closure on something or other. And it takes them years to chase down a main arc idea and pin it successfully. And some of the reason character development stuff links so well back to season 1 is because the progress Sam or Dean has made on it since season 1 has been in a series of recursive loops which seem to get somewhere only to be pulled back without reaching actualisation and either start again immediately or crop back up in the text much later as a character arc, starting over again as if it never really reached its conclusion.

Dabb era has been good about excavating some of these more ridiculous concepts and putting them on some no-going-back type arcs, for example for better or worse the issues they have with Mary have *utterly* shifted ground and can never go back to the same background noise they used to be. Mary is no longer a childhood memory and enshrined as the family martyr, and as I talked about a lot over the last hiatus doing rewatches, the attempts to make her deeper/tie her into the mythology, never actually addressed a change in the way they felt about her, maybe not even realising it wasn’t healthy for them to feel that way about her for the rest of their lives in the difference between normal mourning and revenge quests etc and how that meant they could never leave her behind and move on. I mean there’s a LOT of work to be doing with them if there’s any sort of happy ending to come, but since Carver era the writing has spent so much time trying to understand why they feel bad and putting them through hell for it, and especially in Dabb era now doing work to make them recover and to explore ways they can change, that it seems really depressing to waste the good work by killing them off. So that’s a sort of broad optimism about what they’re doing :P

But that broad optimism is really as far as I’ll dare to venture about endgame, so talking about Destiel is mostly about what I see in the text and how it relates to their character arcs and how I see that informing them and therefore hopefully if there is a happy ending, the intrinsic way this relationship matters to Dean and Cas will get happy pay off as well, because of all the aspects being explored in their character arcs, their relationship ties is all together so nicely and what they would benefit from each other would cement a happy ending for them.

I can’t be completely responsible for the impression people get about what I want from canon in the stuff I reblog but I’m really hesitant to go past lines like nervously laughing and doubting what’s going on in canon as a joke about how Destiel it all looks, while trying to avoid posts that talk about how inevitable it is without some very good reasoned discussion that I agree with. I try very very hard to make this blog always toe a line of enjoying what I enjoy without trying to sell too much or sound like I’m promising something. I like a lot of stuff like re-exploring old seasons or what I did this summer over my rewatch, looking back on old canon and looking at how it has all the unwitting groundwork for the story that ended up being told, and where all the character arcs start and how they’re used in later canon etc.

I agree a theme the last few years has been digging up this character stuff and making it extremely clear or textually stating things for the first time, and especially this year coupled with themes of misinterpretation or not reading the picture correctly or working on misinformed intel. Dramatic irony has never had that much importance in telling the story either. This season has been really intelligent about these themes and last season did a LOT of stuff with characterisation to show how they understood them and old character stuff they were resolving or exploring for the sake of improving the characters. Cas got a final build up for his depression arc to lead him to the worst possible point, and he’s now on the other side of that so the only way is up. Performing!Dean got completely dragged in some episodes, especially 12x11 which did it kindly and gently, and 12x22 which just used a grenade launcher to do it :P

There’s a lot going on but I don’t really like saying it all inevitably ends up pointing to canon reveals about Destiel, especially when that’s the most contentious thing and really hurts a lot of people to build up expectations like that, and it makes people angry or makes them fall out of love with the story because they lose objectivity and start making angry demands about when they get their emotional pay off, even though the story is still unfolding. Stuff which is happening along the way for later character pay off is seen as trashing the character and everything they previously stood for, and it becomes miserable for everyone. I’ve seen this happen in every single faction of the fandom and it’s nothing to do with the quality of the writing or actual treatment of the character/relationship, and an awful lot to do with poorly managed emotional investment and said investment being a finite resource. It’s UTTERLY depressing to watch a fandom friend melt down and begin to hate everything you once loved and I think watching that process has a lot of toxic fall out for everyone else around them who also loves the thing, because we sympathise and we’ve been watching it in slow mo and probably agreeing with a lot of the initial problems they have before it escalates. I HATE watching that happen. I will try as hard as I can to never be responsible for causing it in other Destiel shippers, so I try to make my jokes and comments stay as much as possible on the side of not trying to imply the show has any huge Destiel plan that we’re seeing the early stages of and patience will make it bear out. Because that’s not even how I see the show anyway but sometimes things like Dean giving Cas a mixtape create a *lot* of hyperbole and I’m not emotionally responsible for you all, technically, so I am allowed to have some fun :P

All this is to say, I’m really sorry you’re feeling desperate and have been reading everything as signs we’re definitely getting Destiel, because there are no signs we’re definitely getting it, but there’s also no signs we’re definitely NOT getting it, and a whole bunch of murky grey area including an entire show worth of supportive subtext, character interaction, main text and plot arcs which back up the *existence* of Dean and Cas being madly in love with each other. The wank comes when you spend all your time harping on one or the other extreme, assuming everything is signs or proof/not proof.

I think the recent storytelling has been extremely positive towards Destiel and put an awful lot of it into the text, to extremes which have never really happened before: season 7 with dead Cas used that to get some understandable angst out of Dean, but it constantly emphasised how everything sucked, Cas had of course betrayed Dean and caused all their problems, both personal and mytharc, and so resentment and anger were mixed with grief, and for the most part as much as stuff was happening to them emotionally, the episodes weren’t intrinsically structured around showing what the grief had done to Dean, or that he stopped functioning without it. Compare the kid gloves about what Dean does in 7x03 killing Amy, and how it tentatively links back to Cas but only when Dean admits that he’s had a hard time trusting anyone after Cas, to Dean vs Jack culminating in Dean screaming in Sam’s face about how Cas’s death has hurt him and he can’t unsee it on Jack.

And then of course the whiplash on getting Cas back, which Dean never had in season 7, and at best 8x08 was that episode - like a year after Cas was alive again and a whole fresh round of death and guilt and Cas coming back later so in a completely different context. And still nowhere near as good as what happened in 13x06 because there was still a lot of tentative TFW rebuilding to do in 8x08, while by now it’s completely accepted they’re a family unit and it’s been textually stated several times and 12x12 especially was tuned to showing how absolutely final that statement is. There’s no need to be tentative when Cas comes back now - Dean can just let go and enjoy himself for as long as that lasts.

I’ve been answering asks about the UST being gone since I’ve been in fandom, like, season 10, and I do kinda think that the heyday is ONLY seasons 4-6, after which Cas and Dean actually like each other and their relationship moves to more comfortable ground, and romantic tension and coding is way more the order of the day from Carver era onwards. There’s a few things like the boner scene or Dean in the car in 9x06. TBH 13x06 was the first time in ages I thought we’d actually had a scene where the two of them were having sexual chemistry, in the obvious mirror scene to the car in 9x06 bit, but also the entire underlying joke about Dean’s ‘cowboy fetish’ that Cas knew about from season 6, his entire reaction to it, including complaining that Dean made him wear the hat but then voluntarily playing along *for Dean* on their way into the crime scene, his FACE while doing that, and Dean’s reactions to Cas through all this. For the most part they’re considerably softer and more hesitant with each other and that involves much less interaction right up in each others’ faces and much less frustration which then translates to UST quite easily as well as being regular old tension.

In addition to that, the “i do” and that hug scene apparently convinced people in living rooms across the world that Dean and Cas had been about to kiss and that it was horrifically romantic, and a fake out which genuinely shook people into seeing something going on there who had not previously seen it and even actively disbelieved their shipper friends and family. Of course that’s all down to how Dean and Cas look at each other as they come in for the hug, so their magnetic attraction to each others’ faces is still an ongoing issue :P

Their interactions are being told in a pretty different way these days, which includes a lot of romantic stuff which is far more overt, and in making their relationship intrinsic to the plot and to each others’ own feelings, all of which I’ve written about so much lately because, well, it’s the main thing going on around here :P I actually feel like this is an extremely good time for if you care about their relationship, to get it in the story as a powerful force and important piece of the story. Things like the issue of clarification - I vs we, and need vs want - are coming back around as themes and that means the issues they’ve caused between Dean and Cas are being addressed or examined again, hopefully to some permanent end. And if not, at least so there’s a fresh examination in recent canon, although as I was saying Dabb era has been changing things in ways it’s hard to back off from later, like that Dean has repeatedly clarified to Sam that his feelings about Cas are the cause of his behavioural changes, even if he doesn’t say what those feelings are, it’s clear that they are affecting him. I mean there’s a part of me that has to read it that Dean hasn’t even realised exactly why he feels differently about Cas than Sam does, he just does… :P

Anyway I really just didn’t want to reassure you without addressing the fact I hate reassuring people things without trying to avoid causing more problems later. I don’t want people to feel strung along either by the show or by ~meta writer promises~ … which, aside from a few people who really were doing it for attention, generally seem to be from people actually just reading the text and being hopeful themselves, not trying to make a cult gathering or get attention or even just try to hurt people. I really urgently would like people to be more credible about where their hopes are coming from and how to feel about it.

Not to say that you should stop believing everything you hear meta writers say, by a long shot, but to evaluate how likely you feel the speculation that comes from that can be, and how much you do and don’t agree with the analysis they make. And if you agree with the analysis and do see that all the Destiel stuff people point out IS in the show, then you can see that it’s there or not, and decide how you feel about what the show is doing with it as a separate thought. I’d rather not get caught up in pt.2 of it because it’s just frustrating and depressing at this stage of the game, but pt.1 is fascinating to me, it doesn’t detract for me personally to have it not unambiguously stated, and whether Destiel does become unambiguously stated or not I don’t think *any* of the Destiel analysis I agree with/have made is *wrong* because that reading is freely available to make, in large print text and accompanying audiobook >.>

#Asks #if you're starting to feel like canon doesn't have any of what you used to love it in then honestly taking a break is not a bad idea #watch Shadowhunters or Black Sails or something else with representation to varying degrees of subtlety #(i mean those are the extreme degrees :P)#and then come back later to Supernatural when you feel a bit less on edge about what it can give you #there's a gay couple in the new star trek!#hmmm #anyway #I know how much it would mean for this specific ship to go canon BELIEVE me #but I love dean and cas's interaction still and think that it's lost nothing #so I think expectations are just running high #please don't burn out and start to hate it :(#riverboat gambling #wank for ts

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