I’ll elaborate because I remember when this happened! It was fascinating to witness!
So for a solid period of time, there was no official spelling of Castiel’s nickname. But Castiel himself pretty much exploded all over the fandom from the word go, in a way that was (amusingly) unexpected to the show’s creators (he was only supposed to be in like, three episodes I think? Originally?)
Anyways, fandom needed to spell this dude’s name (obviously) because there were fics and there was meta and Dean almost exclusively refers to Castiel by nickname. So, fans naturally assumed that since it was just a shortening, the way to go would be to cut it off with no extraneous additions. “Cas”.
Flash forward to when Castiel has more or less become an irremovable part of the show, and the official spelling of his nickname comes out as “Cass”.
Not only because this spelling seems counter-intuitive (where does the extra ‘s’ come from?), but also because - by this point - there are fucking tons of fanfics out there that have it spelled “Cas”. Now personally I think if there was a logical reason for it to be spelled “Cass” then there would have been more of a split in the fandom, with some people going back and changing the spelling on their fanworks, and other people not changing the spelling on old works but using the new spelling going forward, and just overall fewer people going ‘we recognize the council has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid-ass decision, we’ve elected to ignore it’.
Instead, however, the situation was that fandom had been writing it “Cas” for a long time, “Cas” was the most logical way to spell it anyhow, and Castiel himself had become a recurring series regular in the first place because the fandom adored him. Without the fandom, he wouldn’t have been part of the show for the length of time it took to reach the point where the show’s creators suddenly decided to try and debunk the standard spelling of his nickname.
It would have been extremely easy and reasonable for the show’s writers to just stop spelling it “Cass” when they realized that the fandom had overwhelmingly decided on “Cas”. It wouldn’t have cost them anything, probably wouldn’t have even been noticeable since nobody even really considered that “Cas” would be an incorrect spelling, and is in fact what the actor who plays Castiel did himself. It would also just plain be a nice thing to do, since it would mean that fans who’d devoted hundreds of hours to writing fanfics or meta or creating comics/art with the single-S spelling wouldn’t have to suddenly consider revising their works. But this isn’t what the show did. Instead they revealed the ‘proper’ spelling to be “Cass”, and adamantly stuck to it.
While it might sound overblown for something to do with the spelling of a nickname, the vibe overall at the time really did feel like it was a quiet middle finger to Castiel’s fans. Nothing huge, but something akin to refusing to move to the side of a sidewalk whilst walking down it, and instead heading straight down the middle, so that everyone else has to step in the mud or onto the road to go around. It would have been easy and courteous to just take one step to the side, so it seemed like a dick move not to, a way of trying to cause everyone else a lot more inconvenience for no good reason.
Fandom did not step into the mud or onto the road. The SPN fandom pretty much just slammed their shoulder against the show’s writers while carrying on down their side of the sidewalk.
Nobody changed how they spelled the name.
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