My PhD is in English literature from a Prestigious University and I work at another Famous University now and I have been in this field (starting when I was a graduate student) for fifteen years and I have never seen anything even approaching the levels of fierce commitment to particular (often overly narrow) understanding of literary concepts as the in the “is Destiel already canon” arguments. This is saying something since academics as a group are pretty fiercely committed to narrow literary concepts. I don’t really have a point, I’m just kind of in awe.
My longsuffering boyfriend who, and I quote, "Would rather chew on rusty nails than watch Supernatural," replied to one of my many rants about destiel, "Oh, so it's text, it's not just subtext!"
(This rant in particular was about examples of destiel before it became canon)
i’m having a hard time, and honestly feeling confused about what moftiss are trying to say with dracula. to me, it honestly just seems queer coded, not explicitly queer. it feels subtextual rather than textual. which is what dracula has always been..
if the queerness isn’t explicit, and we are reading it metaphorically, then what makes dracula metaphorically queer is also what makes him a monster. he kills and eats people. this is what is being conflated with sex (queer sex in the case of jonathan harker). so its not just a villain who happens to be queer (i’m cool w/that, we aren’t all angels). the queerness and the monstrosity are explicitly tied. once again, this is a pretty straight forward interpretation of victorian gothic lit that to me doesn’t feel really forward thinking and isn’t saying anything new, unless i’m missing something?
if it’s supposed to be more than subtext, meaning we are supposed to think that jonathan harker and dracula were having sex while he was at the castle, then it feels really rapey. every time we see a hint of this it is while jonathan is either passed out or sleeping. the first time he is supposedly having a dream about sleeping with his fiancee when dracula’s scary old-man face with a bloody mouth appears suddenly above him, and its honestly objectively horrifying. jonathan seems terrified of dracula the entire time. and the scenes where dracula is overtly sexy (while jonathan is actually awake) happens while he threatens him. i’m having a hard time reading this as consensual.
i’m not sure what message i’m supposed to be getting from this and am just generally confused about all the comments i’ve seen about how great and gay it is. i’m also not trying to just criticize moftiss for no reason, i think they are brilliant writers. i’m not interested in bashing, but i do want to engage in conversations that are complex and critical without looking at everything as all good or all bad.
Despite us spotting the (pun intended) lampshading of our dancing Dean I haven’t seen anyone yet commenting on how queer (and specifically bisexual) Cole Porter was, not to mention the subtext of singing “Let’s Misbehave” while dancing on the freaking map table (the very thing that so often separates Dean from Cas) in an apparently empty bunker.
All I can say is: Dean Winchester, you dream in fanfic.
“Let’s Misbehave” lyrics:
We're all alone,
No chaperon
Can get our number,
The world's in slumber,
Let's misbehave!
There's something wild
About you, child,
That's so contagious,
Let's be outrageous,
Let's misbehave!
When Adam won Eve's hand,
He wouldn't stand
For teasin',
He didn't care about
Those apples out of season!
They say the Spring
Means just one thing
To little lovebirds;
We're not above birds,
Let's misbehave!
Let's misbehave!
Let's misbehave!
If you'd be just so sweet
And only meet
Your fate, dear,
'Twould be the great
Event of nineteen twenty eight,
Dear!
Let's misbehave!
Let's misbehave!
So, I’ve been relatively scarce of late (except for when I went bonkers with reblogging deadly Cockles content...which I think I blacked out from b/c it was like being waaayyyy too high and it’s all their fault) because, if y’all don’t know, I have stage 4 breast cancer and am in chemo. I’m tolerating it really well but it takes a surprising amount of time, actually, especially since I’m still working 80% time and also living alone so doing house stuff etc.
This is all to say that I’m weighing in on things belatedly a lot. Like, I do still want to analyze the Cockles JIB panel as a whole b/c, oh my, was there a lot there. But today I will settle for this piece of it. I apologize if this is reduplicating what smart folks said elsewhere right when it happened. I was also off Twitter to avoid having it bring me down so I might just be really unaware. But as soon as this moment happened I was like, “oh man we’re gonna argue about this for like 84 years.” So here’s my small contribution on what this reminded me of.
To me, listening to Jensen and watching him engage the crowd, inspired a lot of anxiety b/c it did definitely seem like he was pissed off. I just couldn’t tell with what or who, especially given firsthand context from some folks in the room like @bluestar86 who wrote this account: https://twitter.com/bluestar861/status/1130255687290937344?s=21 about the general positivity Jensen and Misha had shown earlier (which is why Misha mentioned the shirt) and how the energy in the room was almost entirely positive. I totally believe that. But it didn’t reconcile easily with what I felt I saw from Jensen.
Until I remembered SDCC 2011. The one where Misha had been fired and all of them knew but none of the fans do. I wrote a long meta on that panel that I’m actually super happy with so maybe check it out? Anyway, this is how I described some of the dynamics:
The way everyone is sitting at this table isolates Sera and the body language from Jared and Jensen is openly hostile. Jensen especially pushes himself as far away as possible, defensively crosses his arms, leans away, doesn’t make any eye contact. Jared is also pissed and is functionally shielding Misha with his body while he does the first Cas question. Both of them are very protective and Jensen is more than a little hostile. They also both keep egging the audience on in their love for Cas/Misha, as when Jensen shouts “YEAH!” in affirmation of audience shrieks about the character. They want to show Sera what a piss poor decision it was to take Misha away from the fans…and from them. Whatever else you see happening these are some amazing friends.
So, we had a remarkably angry Jensen at this panel and he was angry specifically because the network had made what he considered--both professionally and personally--to be a fucking terrible decision. But he couldn’t say that. He’s got NDAs and stuff to worry about. So instead he settled, among other things, from egging the audience on to show how much they loved and wanted more Castiel.
Now I’m not saying the correlation is 1-1 with Destiel. But I am suggesting a thought experiment where something similar could be going on. And by “something similar” I mean “Jensen has inside knowledge about a thing the network has decided that he thinks is fucking stupid and that will hurt the fandom.” Like, oh for example, they’re not moving Destiel out of the subtext.
Additional fuel for this fire. Many have speculated that it’s network president Mark Pedowitz who’s the blocker. Jensen, earlier in the panel, asks the audience to applaud Pedowitz. That’s weird and he’s never done it before. True, Jared was talking about how Pedowitz says that they set examples for other shows and that Pedowitz is complimenting them on it so it was at least that in part. But Jensen is MASTERFUL at throwing shade while appearing to be doing the correct, professional thing. Witness his comments about Bob Singer and last year’s S13 finale. He’s done it with Eugenie and Sera too and probably others I don’t know about. Having the audience applaud Pedowitz if he knows something negative about Pedowitz--something the audience won’t like and that will actively hurt many of them--has a major bite of irony that I feel Jensen is perfectly capable of trying to engineer. (Or maybe there hasn’t been a final decision but he knows it doesn’t look good and why. Don’t lose hope! This is just speculation and a thought experiment.)
I’m going to put the JIB analysis under a cut, since it’s long and has lots of images. It ends with “The most similar behavior I saw was Jensen angrily getting the audience to cheer for something, even doing the same hand-raising gesture. In 2011 it was Castiel (”Go on! Show Sera how much you love the character she killled!”) and this time it was Destiel (”Go on! Show the network how much you love the ship they won’t textualize!”). That’s what made me think, initially, that he may know something about plans for Destiel that a) makes him mad, b) that he considers a bad decision by the network, c) that he thinks that audience will be hurt by.”
Anyway,
If you watch the JIB panel (starting about 12 mins in) you see, first, that Jensen wants Misha not to bring it up. He raises his hand at Misha which I first thought was him being like “shhhhhh don’t bring that up!” but which on repeat viewing I think was him actually just trying to get Misha to shut up so he could literally try to understand what she was saying. Once the audience reacts to Misha’s comment these are their faces:
Jared is absolutely looking at Misha like, “dude, why did you have to go and do that? You just threw a live grenade onstage.” Jensen is hamming it up gesturing at the audience to scream louder.
Jared changes his face to “well, when you’re right, you’re right! What are you gonna do.”
Here’s Jensen. He’s looking grumpy. Now, is it fake grumpy, a recognized and favored persona that he has. Or is it actually grumpy? Or is it both”
I think it’s both. But I also think he looks sad. And concerned. Like, on behalf of the audience not for him. Now you can say I’m projecting if you want--this is all total rampant speculation--but look at his eyes. I think he’s upset that he has to talk about this at all (since he knows a little about the fandom conflict it sets off) but there’s something else.
He pauses for a good, long time looking at the audience responding. And according to Saz and others the response was HUGELY POSITIVE! So why does he then announce into the mic with a grumpy fake laugh and what I honestly have to call sarcasm, “Destiel is real!”
Note that Misha is not worried by this. If Jensen were actually legitimately furious I think Misha would look a little worried. But instead he looks amused and curious about where this is going.
This is Jensen asking “Is it?” for the first time. He looks intentionally confused - that’s the bit he’s doing.
Here’s Jensen after the audience starts to audibly yell “Nooooo!!” His face says “WHAAAAAAT!?”
People then yell “yes” to drown them out and he asks, “Where?”
Second “where?”. Maybe he’s trying to get them to say “subtext” - a word the cast has great familiarity with and which was used in “Fan Fiction” and which they can joke around a lot about. That’s my guess. Maybe he has a subtext joke set up he wants to do with Misha. (Remember his tweet to Misha during “Fan Fiction: “you keep your subtext to yourself. I’m not that kind of girl. Wait...”)
They don’t - at least not clearly. Someone in the front row says, “Nowhere.” Misha says, “Help” (after mouthing something at someone in the audience that is probably “I’m sorry about this.” Jensen checks on Misha BUT disregards the fact that he’s looking over at the question-asker (who didn’t even ASK a Destiel question, just wear a shirt she liked) and asks “Where?” AGAIN.
Misha then takes things in hand and reaches out to tell Jensen, “don’t get into a fight with these people.” Jared is making a “Yikes!” face at the person in the first row who is continually yelling “Nowhere!”.
Jensen does sit down, but he’s mad. He’s really tense and it takes him a while to shake it off.
Who’s he tense with? The most obvious answer is the audience but let’s consider a couple things. 1) The audience was giving a mixed answer, including and sometimes more loudly the “Nowhere!” that you would think Jensen would want to hear IF he were angry/tense about the “Destiel is real” shirt or the audience’s support of it. 2) He was demanding consensus and an answer to where it was real EITHER to have them say “nowhere”--which they did so why not just stop?--OR to get them to say something like “subtext” to lead them into either a question or a bit about it.
So why keep pushing? Hoping to change the answer? Hoping to find consensus? Or maybe just hoping to get them to make a lot of noise about it for a long time (at which he succeeded). Now, Jensen is famously inconsistent about Destiel and also famously different onstage, especially for J2 audiences...though this, the most Holy Gay panel of all the panels, isn’t a place he’d shy away from, e.g. “What would Dean and Cas do on a trip to Rome? Everything I think of right now is inappropriate.”
Which brings us back to “who’s he tense with”? Could it be only part of the audience? Which part? The part yelling “nowhere” or the part yelling whatever positive things they were yelling? I’m going to hypothesize, based on a LOT of other stuff that I’ve written about, that he’s annoyed with the negative folks spoiling it for everyone with their “nowheres” and is trying to get the positive folks to drown them out and give him a good answer he can run with.
The fact that nothing coherent emerges is actually what gets him annoyed. And, by extension, the volume and persistence of that small part of the audience, which lets people like Pedowitz shoot down the idea of textual Destiel as something the viewers “don’t want,” annoys the living shit out of him because he sees the viewers all the time and knows that a majority of them either are ok with or actively want textual Destiel. I imagine him thinking something along the lines of, “Why can’t these nice people just have what they want? It’s b/c of assholes like you.”
He definitely lets his emotions get the better of him. He was already not in the best place, thanks to circumstances I hope to write about later but which boil down to having his special panel with Misha (that he was visibly psyched for from the moment he got onstage, “I always have so much fun with you!”) taken away because he got some awkward wood from being choked and straddled. So with that grumpiness he was primed not to make the best decisions. He gets aggressive and confrontational when he’s pissed, which is a thing I don’t love about him, even though it’s very easy to see why, and maybe this was just his battleground of choice.
To get back to the thought experiment about whether this is like SDCC 2011, though, I think it could be. I think it’s far more complex, given all the discourse surrounding Destiel and Jensen’s own sexuality. (Here’s a post I wrote in response to a question about Jensen and Destiel and bi!Dean that asked whether I thought he experienced them as about himself and Misha.) It’s tough, b/c each piece of evidence could go both ways (ha). Either mentioning Pedowitz for applause is excellent shade or total sincerity. Either Jensen is mad at the pro-Destiel audience and trying to get them to admit that they’re wrong, or he’s mad at the antis and trying to get them drowned out.
The most similar behavior I saw was Jensen angrily getting the audience to cheer for something, even doing the same hand-raising gesture. In 2011 it was Castiel (”Go on! Show Sera how much you love the character she killled!”) and this time it was Destiel (”Go on! Show the network how much you love the ship they won’t textualize!”). That’s what made me think, initially, that he may know something about plans for Destiel that a) makes him mad, b) that he considers a bad decision by the network, c) that he thinks that audience will be hurt by.
Given his shift in attitude overall and the mood of the room as described by attendees, it seems plausible to me that his engagement was a performance, using the audience, of what it is the viewers ACTUALLY want. But it could also just have been a grouchy Jensen taking it out on an old, familiar punching bag - the topic he never wants to discuss onstage - Destiel.
So you’re telling me that they created a wholly unnecessary “romance” between Ketch (a foil for Dean; a character used to draw out queer subtext) and Rowena (official representative of female sexuality; set up as Sam’s endgame partner) only to then have Ketch be possessed, have Dean shoot him, and have Cas not be able to heal him?
Take that, compulsory heterosexuality that is obstructing a relationship in the show that obviously carriers real emotional weight! Dean and Cas certainly can’t fix you right back up!
Sooooo...in the episode after “The Rupture” Sam and Dean work a case in...Beaverton?? Are you fucking kidding? “Oh no, Sam, I’m totally fine! Let’s just go to Beaverton and it’ll all be FINE WITHOUT CAS!!” Smdh.
