When The Subtext Moves to Main Text and How Season 11 Changed The Game
It’s such a weird thing to be part of the Destiel fandom because everyone is pointing out tiny moments and blowing them up. In a weird we’re all pointing at the subtext and saying, look! There it is! It’s REAL!! And everyone else is nodding in agreement. And some people take it with a grain of salt and some people build shrines around it.
But what I’ve found on more than one occasion is that when you watch the show as a whole those tiny moments aren’t as prominent as the rest of the story. So even though they are there and they are valid, there’s always so much more going on. Case in point this moment
Dean and Cas’s conversation here is very short and quickly forgotten as they get back to more serious matters. But a lot of brilliant meta has been written about this scene, not to mention the tons of gifs made that make the moment seem longer than it actually was. This scene might not have been part of the bigger picture of the episode, but it was a pretty big part of the the story the subtext told in Season 9.
It’s kind of hard to look at it objectively once you’ve read or written “meta” about this kind of subtext too. Because even if you watch any given episode again with the intention of not reading too much into it you’ll start to notice just how much the writers use polysemy. And then you’re in an entirely different hole. Because what previously seemed like an innocent conversation suddenly has new meaning and applies to a multitude of situations or characters. That’s been my experience more than once, and let me tell you, try as I might I cannot separate myself from my biased views at this point.
But I will say I started watching Supernatural very casually at first (I was living abroad and re-runs ran in the middle of the night) and although I had seen mention of “the gay angel” on tumblr once or twice, I could see that Dean was queer right away.
One of the first episodes I watched was Slash Fiction and that whole scene where Dean quotes Dirty Dancing and sings “All Out Of Love” definitely caught my attention. I missed a whole bunch episodes from then until A Little Slice Of Kevin and well I guess I was screwed from then on because I only caught the ending scene where Castiel tells Dean he chose to stay in purgatory. My interest in Destiel was piqued but I had asked someone who had seen more of the show what they thought about the ship and they said it wasn’t a thing and that the cast has said they didn’t like that kind of shipping. So I let it go. But then I watch Everybody Hates Hitler and there’s no way to pray away the gay in that episode. To have Dean turn down Ellie (who is a mega babe) in the next episode sealed the deal for me and I haven’t been able to watch the show without picking up gay vibes from Dean left and right ever since. Bi!Dean is already seared in to my head and there’s more than enough evidence to back it up.
Season 11 has been such a weird season because it’s took all these tiny moments of subtext that may have been sandwiched between bigger issues in the past and made them them the focus. Multiple episodes opened and ended with Dean worrying over Cas. We saw Dean worrying about him openly for once, unlike in the past where we got these kind of gems where Dean bottled up his feelings:
So yeah, this season has been weird. The subtext we’re used to is moving toward the main text and it’s almost too good to be true. It make you wonder if they’ll really go there. And I think that’s exactly what’s going on.
How else do you explain this:
And of course the finale where we have Dean finally telling Cas how important his is and validating the sacrifice he made in letting Lucifer use him as a vessel.
What’s powerful about that scene is that there is a lot of emotion there and it’s right in the audience’s face. There’s no denying what was said, because even on a surface level it was a powerful confession. Dean has never put anyone else on Sam’s level. And now here he is validating Cas’s role in his family and telling him that he loves him just as much as his own brother: the person he has built his life around.
The subtext has become obvious enough that the writers will have a hard time backtracking should they change their mind. There’s no way for them to erase the relationship that’s been building consistently between Dean and Castiel at this point.
I mean, Castiel reciprocated Dean’s feeling by offering to die with him.
You can’t pretend that’s nothing. It’s huge, a game changer for sure.
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