Hi Elle, I have been shipping Cockles for a year now. It is the first RPS i have ever shipped. I was just curious as to how people begun shipping it. Like when did this all start and how? Thanks.
Interestingly, it took a while for more than just a handful of people to ship it, a couple years I think. Like yknow the clip of Alona asking Misha if he’d ever kissed jensen and Misha getting very flustered? That video was just out there floating around for months, iirc, before anyone (me? i don’t remember lol) pointed it out and was like hey, hey what, that’s gay, look at this what the hell is this. At least that I saw and experienced on lj. Early on, I think there were more mishalecki shippers. Mostly as a joke? But maybe some serious ones. And cockles wasn’t really seriously shipped or tinhatted by anyone for a while.
Cockles didn’t even have a name until a year into Misha being on the show. It’s naming was prompted by the first ring business. There just wasn’t much interaction between them that we got to see early on. Here’s a playlist of essentially everything cockles from 2009 (there wasn’t much of anything in 2008) (Here’s 2010). I’d say the first ring jensen gave misha was probably integral in a lot of people’s cockles-ification, even if everyone just joked about it at first. And seeing more of their interactions, the way they talked about each other, destiel getting more and more popular, their talking about how jensen flirts with misha to get him to break. I think there was always something there, something obvious, we just didn’t get to see them together much for a while, at least not outside of Dean and Cas.
Also interestingly, I think so integral in cockles becoming what it is today was 1) j/2 tinhatting being what it was-- toxic, misogynistic, kind of a good example of what not to do, and 2) misha fandom being what is was on lj, especially on mishaland, cause the whole gag was a polygamist cult where everyone is married to misha and vicki is wife #1, aka just “#1.″ It was a crack capslock comm based on the theme of orgies (hi endverse cas) and wife love and yknow tentacles and stuff, and while the tentacles have featured more in canon, the other stuff, the free love vibes relayed themselves very nicely into making cockles fandom what it is along with 3) vicki’s book itself. While Mishaland came before anyone knew about the threesome handbook, vicki’s book and the concepts in it, did ofc get read and passed around misha fandom, and those ideas, that someone can fall in love with more than one person and make it work, that polyamory is cool actually, have engrained themselves very deeply in cockles fandom in a special way for an rps ship that’s been around since 2009.
Cockles fandom is really special to me because of the way we treat their wives, and genuinely who knows how things would have gone in that respect without those three factors. I think a lot of people didn’t really want to ship them because of how j/2 fandom was and other rps shippers (still true today i think), but cockles is gonna cockles, so it was pretty inevitable that they were gonna get shipped.
