Reflection #7: the supernatural essay, finally (pt.1)
"Let me tell you something, there are two things I know for certain; one, Bert and Ernie are gay. Two, you are not gonna die a virgin. Not on my watch" - Dean Supernatural
The newsletter you’re about to read is maybe slightly deranged. Truthfully, I have always known that something like this was going to happen, because you can take a girl off of Tumblr, but you can’t take Tumblr off of a girl.
Are you familiar with the CW show Supernatural?
Actually, don’t answer that.
Any answer you may give is too embarrassing for me to face.
Here is all you need to know to understand the context of this post.
In 2005, Supernatural airs for the first time, written by Erik Kripke, partially inspired by On The Road by Jack Keruac (you are encouraged to consider this the first hate crime of the show), and starring two young and hot male leads as the brothers Dean and Sam.
Fast forward three years. It’s the Writer’s strike and the show’s season 3 has to come to an earlier ending, leading to a domino of events that has me sitting in my balcony writing this post. Because, as the deus ex machina to bring back Dean to life, the show introduces Castiel, the gay angel.
What follows is 15 years of queerbaiting and homophobia; actors and writers denying any romance between Dean and Castiel, because the main target of their show was conservative men who like guns and vengeance. What they got instead was a group of queer teens, who were tuning in every week to see what interaction between these two they were going to reblog for the next 7 days while sitting in class.
The ship (yes, I am going full fandom) is not built on thin air, but the actual “proofs” would be too many for me to recount, so I encourage you to watch this beautiful video instead. The thing that matters the most is how their story ended. In 2020, as Biden was winning the election and the world was stuck at home, Castiel saved Dean’s life by confessing his love for him.
Read that, dear reader, and tell me HOW that can be interpreted as a man/angel telling a man/hero that they’re just best of buddies.
That is what has been debated for the past four years.
To be frank, I am tired, which is why I’m writing this. That and something else that happened recently, which possessed me to sit down and talk about Destiel in 2024.
On Friday, April 5th 2024, Evan Buckley from the hit show 9-1-1 was confirmed to be bisexual. This is, of course, a huge win for 9-1-1 Tumblr fans, but a monumental loss for Supernatural Tumblr fans - it is not the first nor will it be the last of such losses.
I know it sounds absolutely bonkers that I - a 25 year old corporate professional - would spend the entire day reblogging jokes about how this was not okay because it should have happened to Dean Wincherster instead. But the truth is that, while I did hit a low point that day, I don’t regret anything I said, because I stand by each and every word.
My bitterness at the injustices of this turn of events has grown even stronger once I decided to finally get over with it and finish Supernatural.
Of course, being a blogger during the 2020-2021 Supernatural renaissance, I knew exactly what was awaiting me.
(Supernatural spoilers ahead): after 15 seasons of defying death, after Castiel’s love confession, the whole purpose of Cas’ sacrifice was made null by the ultimate death of Dean Winchester, a character who the writers decided had to die a hero.
My issue with American heroism and the death of the tragic protagonist warrants a whole separate essay (which will be hitting your inboxes in the next month or so).
But not today, because today we’re going full destiel baby!! And we shall start from queerbaiting.
QUEERBAITING
This is how Wikipedia defines queerbaiting:
“Queerbaiting is a marketing technique for fiction and entertainment in which creators hint at, but do not depict, same-sex romance or other LGBTQ+ representation.The purpose of this method is to attract ("bait") a queer or straight ally audience with the suggestion or possibility of relationships or characters that appeal to them,while not alienating homophobic members of the audience or censors by actually portraying queer relationships”
I am so happy to report that Dean and Cas’ portrayal on Supernatural made it onto Wikipedia’s page as one of the many examples of queerbaiting in TV shows.
Though technically one could argue that it shouldn’t really be considered queerbaiting in that everyone involved in the show made it always abundantly clear that they hated the implication of a queer Dean Winchester, thus perhaps it was never really for marketing reasons, it is undeniable that it probably was what kept the show afloat.
By season 15, they couldn’t escape this conundrum of their own making.
The issue, I believe with complete sincerity, is that the many writers of Supernatural gave Dean Winchester too much depth. They wrote him as a repressed man who was in his 2os at the beginning of the 2000s. Dean Wincherster is presented as someone who will always put everyone’s expectations of him above his happiness, making it impossible for him, throughout the show, to actually discover his true self.
Does this sound like something a queer kid could latch on to?
To make matters worse, they made his best friend an actual angel who states, multiple times in the course of the story, that if he rebelled, it was only because Dean taught him how to feel, and he couldn’t bear to just be a soldier anymore.
And the two shared incredibly intimate moments from their very first scene together. For a 2008 queer audience, it was not hard to read in between the lines. Their bloody fights became our version of a kiss, the kneeling down prayers our own personal confessions of love.
We had been shown what Dean looked like when in love, and it did not look that different to whatever THAT was.
I don’t think the authors knew what they were doing until it was too late, because in their heteronormative/psuedo-conservative view of the world, no one could have ever come up with something as unwanted as a queer reading of the macho hero.
Now, while I am confident they honestly had no intention to pander to our queer desires, they ended up facing two problems:
It was impossible to deny the significance of Dean’s bond to Castiel. Perhaps because Dean was never allowed to have a friend outside of his brother Sam unless it was a (female) love interest, perhaps it was because it did just simply make the show more compelling. Acting choices (jacting joices for the connoisseurs) and directing choices were made.
Homophobic jokes were fun to early 2000s audiences, so the authors never shied from calling one of their beloved characters a queen, a sissy, straight-up gay. This helped the writers sort of say out loud that Dean was a heterosexual man and that the snarky remarks at his expense, and the expense of his relationship to Castiel, were just comic relief, which also helped them gain plausible deniability when questioned about hints of homosexual subtext in the show.
2. THE HOMOPHOBIC NATURE OF SPN QUEERBAITING
That last point could have worked if the show ended in 2010, as it was intended. Alas, they dragged its dead corpse across the decades, tied to the carriage of humility and dignity.
That means that by November 2020, when the show ended, it was impossible to accept that the gay jokes were just gay jokes.
Here's where 9-1-1 comes in. One of the only pieces of news I didn’t hate receiving was reading what the actor, who plays recently bisexual Buck, had to say about the new storyline.
He talks of “sticking to the story”, a concept that I believe is the single most defining characteristic of a TV show and what sets it apart from other media, especially long-running cable network shows. Unlike movies, unlike books, perhaps even unlike mini series, TV shows are allowed to evolve as the story does, grow with their audiences and with their characters.
Think Barney and Robin, who the writers couldn’t keep because of footage shot before the show became what it was; Monica and Chandler, who became essential to the story and who no one could have seen coming.
Now, you can add 9-1-1 to the list too, because they were smart enough to realize that 7 seasons is enough for a character to go through a process and change. And they were even bolder.
I got quite hung up on another statement the 9-1-1 actor made on the April 4th episode, he said:
Not only, then, did they trust the story… they trusted what the fans had been seeing throughout their viewing journeys, parts of a character’s personality that they could perhaps recognise in themselves. The dynamicity of this choice is not just a sign of good writing, because it opens for a whole new set of conflicts and resolutions, it’s a sign of a good understanding of how humans work.
Maybe it is through the other that we can recognise things about ourselves.
The latest 9-1-1 episode certainly sets a precedent for shows like Supernatural, who have a massive following of shippers, known for experiencing media in a very unique way. It says that a series should not be considered to be queerbaiting until the story is over, because things can always change!
But it takes a whole different set of writers, less egomaniac ones, to recognise that that is a possibility.
In the end, Dean Winchester was forced to remain crystallized for 15 years. He could not change, could not become a more grown, more comfortable version of him. By the end of the series, it was impossible to see him with a wife and kids, his brother’s destiny, because Castiel had been his biggest emotional connection for 2/3rds of the show, and we had already seen the grief Dean had to inhabit every time Cas was written off the show (we have multiple “widower arcs” in the fandom).
Because it was unthinkable to give him the end that had been written for him in 2005, the heteronormative white picket fence life, but it was also unthinkable to have a queer main character, the show had no other choice but to kill him. We only see him be content in Heaven, where his father figure tells him they had been waiting for him. Who the fuck would like to hear that?
9-1-1 was never queerbaiting, because they were just seeing where the story took them; Supernatural would have rather have had two dead protagonists than a queer one.
In conclusion,
