of course you stan kripke era and have boringbad takes on castiel
Ahhhh is this my first spn anon hatemail on this account!?!?! I think it is!! Awww, bestie, you shouldn't have!!! <3 <3 <3
Believe it or not (my followers will definitely believe it), I have a pretty long reply to this barely-a-sentence, intentionally-incendiary post that's meant to make me, like, feel bad and shut up.
Let's get into it! :)
For Background
For anyone else bothering to read this, you might be thinking anon is responding to this post I made today.
I actually thought so, too, when I first saw this ask earlier. Before I realized I hadn't actually even posted that yet, and it was still in the drafts. So OP must've been responding to THIS post I made... a whole 5 days ago, lol.
(It's possible that anon got literally no further than my pinned post, where I talk about liking the kripke era but not particularly enjoying Cas/Destiel much. Even as I say I have friends who like Destiel, and that if this is not the blog for them I bear them no ill will. ((Lol, at the idea that this be The Take alone that would have set someone off so badly that they'd feel the need to send anon hate over it.))
Or maybe they... just didn't like that I said that Sam is interesting, in that other post? Or something else that's idk, liking-Sam adjacent? Or something about the way I've talked about Dean in the past few days?
But then... why is this ask about Cas, yknow? That just wouldn't make sense. And surely, anon is trying to accurately convey something vaguely in the ballpark of what they're actually upset about.
Since anon referenced my opinions about Cas specifically, it's still probably a good bet they were upset by the post about how I imagine canon!era Dean's attractions would work. Not the pinned post or anything else.
And likely it's not (or at least not just) my ideas of Cas that really bothered anon, but in fact my opinions about Cas AND Dean and their potential together, aka destiel? I think it's a decent assumption that there is some shipwar/destiel-adjacent thing happening here.
If not in name, than in context and spirit.
Bad Fandom Neighbors & Destiel Fans
I'd just like to point this out as a really good example of exactly what I mean when I say that Cas-fans/Destiel fans are, and have been for literally 15 years, bad fandom neighbors.
But before we get to that, we have to talk a little bit about reach, influence, and power within fandoms. Specifically MY power (or lack thereof), within THIS fandom:
Let's Talk about My Blog For a Sec
Without having anything else to tie it to, we'd have to acknowledge a couple of things as true:
I have had this blog for about a year now.
I have said very openly I don't really like destiel and castiel and won't be discussing it a whole lot. In my pinned post! In a way that wasn't incendiary or controversial.
I have posted almost nothing at all to do with Cas (much less destiel) at all - negative, neutral, or not. In almost the entire year.
A few days ago, I make a post in which I talk about why I personally do not see how destiel could have really been an in-character match for Dean. Not even like, in general! Just with the way they wrote his arc in the show canon.
Even as I acknowledge that I can see how it would've worked if they'd given Dean more character growth, and acknowledge that it makes sense people would enjoy exploring it in fan work.
I tagged the post in question "anti destiel" to make sure people who want to see nothing at all negative about this pairing would be able to avoid it if they use filters, made sure to use the / when mentioning the popular ship name within the body of the post just in case, & did not tag Cas in it at all since the post isn't really about him. I tagged Dean just so my followers who might not want to look at Dean stuff, or who do want to see all of my Dean meta, could filter for it when following/searching my blog.
The post itself got very little engagement. It's sitting at a whopping 11 notes as I type this.
I am not a massive blog, by any stretch of the imagination, and certainly not for this fandom. I have an incredibly lovely engaged follower group, but the number of followers I have as of this post is literally less than 100:
Which is very easy to guess if you took literally two seconds to look at the number of notes on my average post. Even what counts as a "banger" post for me would be considered a flop by a lot of tumblr standards, if we're trying to measure my current reach and influence.
If you took a few minutes to even skim my pinned post, you'd realize most of my opinions aren't like, super popular or completely in line with any one particular faction within this fandom. Making it even LESS likely that most of my posts, or the perspectives I share within them, will ever have a huge amount of sway.
And within days of posting my really real first post ever analyzing why destiel doesn't work for me?
Hatemail :) :) :)
SPN Fandom Power Dynamics, Destiel, & Anon
SPN is a massive juggernaut fandom, so big and influential it likely would still be an unusually large one even if Castiel had never been written onto the show.
It is literally one of the biggest fandoms in all of ao3, and would still be so even if you removed all Cas-centric fics.
Even so, Cas/Destiel fans are THE biggest, and certainly the loudest, portion of an already massive fandom.
To the point that many people, even people without any knowledge of the source material, associate the ship with the fandom.
And not only that, they associate the ship with particular fandom spaces. Forex, tumblr fannish culture.
Even half a decade after the show's end, it still has a massive active fandom, a large, loud portion of which is Cas/Destiel fans.
What we can conclude from the above info is that there's simply NO way that I am any sort of real threat to anon. Not literal, certainly; but I mean not even in a fandomy, existential framework kinda way.
Anon either has misconstrued me as some sort of threat that I am simply not. Or anon has identified me as someone who might make an easy target for punching-down fandom harassment. (Or the secret third thing, where it's not external fandom supremacy that anon fears, but the idea that maybe my ideas make a little too much sense to them personally, and they don't like that and had to lash out.)
Whatever the reason, and whether anon is someone who is able to conceptualize fandom power dynamics accurately in a realistic, three-dimensional way? The effect is the same:
Someone (in this case, me) has a rare and unpopular opinion from what certain people would like to think is the inalienable norm. A norm that's so established in its basic truth (at least, for them) it seemingly should warrant no explanation.
Anyone else who says or acts otherwise - regardless of their inability to actually challenge the status quo in any meaningful way?
Has clearly set themselves up as a target for fandom harassment.
To Recap The Obvious RE Fandom History/Dynamics
This is just sort of the default in a lot of ways. For anyone who, since Cas arrived in fandom, is even just casually like, yeah, Castiel is not it for me, I don't really get the popularity of destiel, and I think it's interesting to talk about why every once in a blue moon.
Even as the mega popularity of both character and ship, and Castiel's place in the show canon, make it so if you want to engage in this fandom, you... can't really ignore it. Not forever. Not unless you just want to pretend like a major aspect of the fandom experience just... doesn't exist.
Like I don't know, at some point, the fandom hate going so far that people who are just kinda meh about one aspect of the show are just supposed to expect harassment if they voice that? And not normal stuff, like blocking. Or having someone make their own post and respond to your POINT rather than personally attack YOU.
No, in the spn fandom? You don't like Cas and or destiel, even though there's no way that opinion could possibly be a threat or a punch down? Whatever, doesn't matter. You just put a target on your back. It's harassment hours, babe!
Maybe this is weird. You know? Maybe this is not good. Maybe this was the real boringbad fandom framework we made along the way.
Maybe it should be something we talk about! Acknowledge! Hell, maybe even address??? When we talk about the impact/history of the ship, the character, and the fandom. You know?
In Conclusion
To be clear, this ask is not like, painful for me to receive, I'm not hurting because I got it and in need of comfort or anything like that, lol. I'm not personally upset. I'm older and I've been in fandom, spn and many others, for a long time. I'm honestly not even sure I can get upset at stuff like this anymore.
I think the bigger thing here is that I wish this kind of behavior about this specific kind of post was a surprise.
And I know that younger/more vulnerable fans take stuff like this much more personally, and it can really affect them. Not just in the moment, but in their overall enjoyment and level of how welcome they feel in a fandom. Which becomes exponentially worse when your opinion is one that not only just pisses one person off, but when you know your perspective is not the popular mainstream, and you've just risked a much larger group turning its entire monolith of anger and affront on you.
I wish we could talk about the difference between really, really liking a thing in fandom, being glad there's a lot of it for you. Versus trying to make sure that no one else gets to have a fun time or a unique perspective or a different take.
I wish we spent more time talking about what that looks like, what effect that has, when you're part of the bigger, more popular subculture within a fandom. How behavior that might be a little easier to roll your eyes at when it's just some rando? Becomes mechanically much harder to ignore even when you want to, when you have to, tiptoe around a much bigger, more homogenous group. A group who feel fully entitled to go on the attack whenever they feel like it, no matter the context or actual threat level.
When I talk about being salty toward Cas's existence in the show, when I talk about destiel fans being some of the worst fandom neighbors I've ever seen, across literally dozens of fandoms, over decades?
I'm not just saying random shit.
I'm always going to mourn for a version of this fandom that has never existed, not even after the show's end, so none of us will ever get to see it:
The version where a very large, very cruel subset of destiel fans didn't feel it was their collective right to silence/harass anyone who wasn't them. Right out of the fandom
