Why do some Byler fans feel the need to like.. shit down the throat of Destiel shippers who are trying to relate to them over the queerbait they went through?
I’ve seen a lot of the sentiment that “they don’t really get it” and that Destiel wasn’t queerbaited near as hard. Yes, I know that particular queerbait was done differently than Byler, that’s expected given when it came out, but if you haven’t actually watched the show I would genuinely advise just watching a compilation of those moments to get where they’re coming from.
If you’re someone who’s under the impression Destiel was “just misread looks and jokes” because that’s what you’ve heard online, I get it, I do but you don’t have the whole picture.
I’ve also seen people saying there were no hints of Dean being queer (wrong) as though he didn’t spend half the show having his own subconscious and other characters calling him “daddy’s little girl” and implying his relationship with other men besides Cas, and a scene where he admits to liking wearing a pair of pink silk panties.
Dean knew what the gay bar Purgatory was and where it was by name alone. A siren who becomes whatever someone desires to lure them in becomes a man for Dean, who he styles his hair all cute for before going out for drinks with him, and it works. This monster hunter is CLUELESS.
He gets so flustered when men flirt with him that he stutters and walks into tables, and pouts when he finds out the man only flirted with him for information and wasn’t actually into him.
In a companion journal, it’s revealed that Dean spent his seventeenth birthday on the first monster hunt his father ever made him do alone— he sent him to an asylum to destroy the spirits of two lesbian nuns who died for their love. Yep. You did read that correctly.
Now for Cas, fun fact, our possessive little bastard angel carved a message into Dean’s *ribcage* that essentially translates to “if any of you fuckers EVER, and I mean EVER, touch this shining beautiful human, I will use all my heavenly wrath to turn you into a molecular stain”.
He abandons heaven for Dean. Develops the ability to *feel* and *care* and *love* because of Dean (which he says verbatim himself).
“Not for nothing, Cas, but the last person who looked at me like that… I got laid.” is something they have Dean say, only for Castiel to visually double down on staring harder.
Dean is asked to call for Castiel. “It’s not like Cas lives in my ass,” Cas immediately shows up, “Cas get outta my ass.” Castiel’s response is to start saying he was never in Dean’s ass out of confusion, then trails off mid sentence like he rethought it. This is never elaborated on.
Sam prays for months to Castiel and gets no response. Dean prays once and Castiel shows up two seconds later, despite being in the middle of a war. When Sam confronts him about it, his reason is that “him and Dean share a more profound bond”.
They suffered purgatory together, and when Castiel stayed behind there, Dean hallucinated him on the side of the road and in the trees because of missing him so badly. This directly parallels Sam’s relationship with Jess, his dead ex girlfriend, who he hallucinated on street corners due to guilt over her death. Jess is repeatedly said to be Sam’s soulmate in the show, because he still thinks about her fifteen years later. Dean completely rewrote the narrative of what happened in his head to blame himself for abandoning Cas, because the idea that Castiel chose to stay behind without him was so mentally unbearable.
When Cas returns and gets cleaned up and looks like himself, Dean gets tongue tied, shuffles in his chair, covers his lap and shifts his legs like he’s trying to hide a physical reaction to the sight of him alone.
Castiel lost his memory, and married an identical clone of Dean in woman form named Daphne, who Dean was immediately suspicious of and pissy toward upon meeting.
Cas shows up naked on Dean’s car covered in honeybees during his crazy phase.
When Castiel gets angel lobotomized and turned into a machine that’s been trained to kill Dean no matter what, who’s been trained on thousands of perfect copies of Dean, all it takes to break him out of it is a bleeding real Dean on his knees begging Cas that “I need you” (originally written as ‘I love you’ in the script).
The king of hell mocks Castiel because his jacket smells like Dean’s car.
A high ranking angel says to Dean (after not warding against Angels despite being in danger from them, simply because he hoped Castiel would come home to him), “the moment Castiel laid a hand on you in hell, he was lost”.
Another angel calls Cas “the angel in a dirty trenchcoat who’s in love with you.”
Castiel’s ‘canonical’ love interest, Meg, says to Dean “I don’t know, he was your boyfriend first.”
When Cas dies one of his various deaths, we get an entire WIDOW arc for Dean, scene by scene playing out the trope to perfection. This isn’t even the first time, he also carried Cas’ coat around in his trunk for a year after another death.
Dean makes a mixtape for Cas of Led Zepplin songs that his parents fell in love to.
And the thing is? That’s barely the surface. That’s just what I remember off the top of my head, after a decade. That didn’t include the cast, the stuff said at conventions, the visual parallels with other canon couples, the visual choices or cinematography decisions.
Maybe they get it in a different way, but they get it. We’re all in the same boat, and if we want queer media to be better, we need to stick together and not fight about who was baited “the worst” and focus our anger on the people doing the baiting.
Hopping off my soapbox lol.
