Destiel, Queerbaiting and the Transformative Powers of Gay Shipping

By Eleanor Flower, 3rd Year English and Classical Studies

On 5th November 2020, three events occurred that would come to define the political landscape for the next five years. Firstly, after days of agonised recounts, it was confirmed that the state of Nevada had voted Blue, confirming Joe Biden’s position as the next president of the United States of America over Donald Trump. Secondly, all contact was lost with Russian intelligence, leading to global leaders becoming concerned that Vladimir Putin had gone missing, a situation that while concerning at the best of times, was heightened by the uncertainty characterising US American leadership. And thirdly, after eleven years of homoerotic subtext and over 100,000 works of fanfiction, Destiel became canon.

Image source: @shrimpmilf on Tumblr.

Supernatural first aired in 2005 as a monster-of-the-week fantasy show with characters based loosely on those from Jack Kerouac's novel ‘On the Road’. Across three seasons, the audience follows brothers Sam and Dean Winchester as they drive around America trying to hunt down the demonic forces that killed their mother (and any other supernatural threat that gets in their way), a quest which climactically ends with Dean being killed and dragged to Hell. 

Yet this does not last for long. The first episode of season 4, ‘Lazarus Rising’ opens with a shot of Dean’s hand grasping out from a shallow grave. And as he emerges, we see a new, red burn on his shoulder in the shape of a hand. As the episode progresses, we find that both Dean’s biblical resurrection and his new scar is the work of an angel, Castiel. And so began eleven years of one of the most intense and enduring homoerotic relationships in 21st century television: the damned man, Dean Winchester; and the angel who ‘gripped [Dean] tight and raised [him] from Perdition’. And the fandom around this relationship triggered a cultural landslide.

Supernatural, s04e01: ‘Lazarus Rising’.

It is easy to pass off the frenzy around Dean and Cas, or ‘Destiel’ as they became collectively known, as a passing phenomenon that affected little more than the disturbed adolescence of teenagers on Tumblr whose obsession was deemed irrelevant in the grand scheme of the socio-political landscape. But in many ways, Destiel—and by extension their canonisation—was instrumental in the development of contemporary fan culture and has shaped discourses around the internet and pop culture far beyond its original spheres of influence.

When Castiel was first introduced in 2008, it was at a crucial time in fandom history: with the acquisition of Fanfiction.net by a private company and the declining popularity of self-sustained, fandom-specific archives, internet fandom was in the process of migration from an old order to a new one. And the place where it seemed to converge was in a relatively new ‘microblogging’ website called Tumblr. Unlike previous forums, which relied on often convoluted coding and was jealously gatekept by moderators, Tumblr was widely accessible to the public and was therefore attractive to fan communities like that of Supernatural, many of whose members were relatively inexperienced. It was, through sheer coincidence and timing, Supernatural fans who became one of the main demographics that shaped the development and culture of the site, and subsequently that of those who followed it.

Furthermore, 2009 marked another major development in fandom with the creation of the fanfiction site ‘Archive of Our Own’, which has enjoyed dominance as the major fanfiction site from its inception to the present day. Again, Supernatural was one of the most prominent forces that came to determine the site’s culture and reputation, with Destiel remaining the site’s most popular ship pairing to this day with over 120,000 works in its name.

Supernatural, s13e06: ‘Tombstone’.

The notoriety of Destiel was a cultural reset in more ways than this: by the time the show’s finale aired in 2020, the pairing had become the dominant force of discussion at Supernatural conventions, been referenced in several meta episodes within the show itself, and indirectly resulted in the advent of the term ‘mansplaining’ through the subsequent discourses around the representation of queer and gender-atypical subtexts in media and the transformative relationship of these cultures in line with a New-Critical perspective.

Destiel becoming canon was not just an internal fandom event, but a cataclysm inextricable from the fabric of the internet and fandom culture: the end of the ‘Great American Queerbait’, as it had come to be known represented the manifestation of over a decade of fan narratives and queer engagement with a source material that had not only influenced, but transformed its contents. Season 15 ends with the characters assuming the seat of Heaven and recreating the cosmos in the image of freedom, rather than divine dictatorship, and in a way, Destiel are a metatextual symbol of this: the radical usurpation of a hegemonic literary norm with a Queer, nonconformist defiance built from the dreams of a community, more than a creator.

Of course, Supernatural was objectively not a good TV show. And the idea of Destiel as a perfectly constructed ideal of freedom is a reductive one if we do not consider the corporate motivations, the eleven years of baiting and exploitation of a queer fanbase, and the fact that immediately following Castiel’s confession, he is sent to a place canonically worse than Hell precisely because of his feelings. In fact, the ending of Supernatural is as much of a mess as the fifteen years that preceded it, and its coincidental timing with several defining events of contemporary politics only served to make this more comical (it has since become a trend in fandom circles to use screenshots of the confession scene to convey breaking news). But in spite of—and perhaps in some ways because of—this, ‘Destiel Day’ remains a milestone within popular and nerd cultures that deserves to be celebrated both for its culminative significance and its hilarity.

Image Source: Supernatural s15e18: ‘Despair’, text by Eleanor.

In the words of the show itself, maybe sometimes ‘Gay love can piece through the veil of death and save the day’.