J2 | Chicago 2024

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@canonicallysoulmates Trust these two to bring even more awesomeness and good times. ❤️

One more step and I will kill you.

Tracker 2.02 | Ontological Shock

one big thing i think people outside fandom (like, all fandoms, fandom in general, not any particular one) tend to misunderstand is they know it's a subculture of people who are weirdly deeply invested in fictional media, and they hear about drama caused by people in those subcultures being unhinged in not-fun ways, and they think the unhingedness comes from the fact of being overinvested in works of fiction.

which is a natural assumption, but in my experience that's not really the case? like in my experience the drama llamas in fandom are usually not the ones who are just genuinely very deeply into the fiction. i've known people who are basically thinking about star trek or x-men comics or supernatural pretty much 100% of their free time and ime that type of person is usually very nice and surprisingly functional in their regular life. when someone's a constant nexus of fandom drama it's usually not that they are obsessed with the actual work of fiction the fandom is about, it's at least one of the following:

and very often you get the same person doing 2 and sometimes even all 3 of these, and that's where the trouble really starts

holy shit I've never seen this articulated but OP is EXACTLY RIGHT.

reblog if you consider the people youve befriended on this website (and other websites) to be real friends, even if youve never met them irl before

trying to prove something to my dad

🤣🤣🤣🤣Gimme a break. Trauma. What trauma? Idiots.

Yes, it is about a ship. Don't pretend it's about all this other nonsense. Television can't traumatize you. If it does you need help.

Oh PLEASE. The story was Sam and Dean. Get over it!

Yeah this reminds me of this article going around Twitter.

My f**king god. This is the most ridiculous, over dramatic, entitled bullshit I’ve ever wasted the time to read.

Get. Over. It.

This has Dot’s signature all over it. I can just imagine them writing this and thinking they’ve served when it’s pure drivel

“This isn’t about a ship…” they say, then proceed to write a couple of paragraphs where it’s entirely about their entitlement to a specific ship.

“Fans are… devastated” - please, 1% of fandom at most

“…for queer fans” - majority of Destiel shippers are straight white women who have a m/m fetish so nope, genuine queer fans were pissed at the last minute cash grab attempt by Collins and Bobo

“Once, just once, they would get what they deserve in this world” - congratulations! You got exactly what was deserved for the toxic assholes you were to everyone else for 11 years

“The story being told would be finished” - it was! The story you made up in your head was never the one being told, kinda sucks to be you

Yeah, that's pretty much a more concise version of what I was going to say, the most telling thing about that drivel is the self-deluding, self-important way they choose to word it.

"Fans" are devastated, implying all fans. "Queer fans" are stung, implying, again, all queer fans are bothered. It's about something being "deserved" for investing in the show and that thing being only what they specifically wanted out of it, because they "devoted time" to and "deeply connected" with their own vacuous brainfarts the story in a way that was The Most Valid. Any ending but the one they "saw themselves" in, is a matter of failing to give them "dignity, respect, and love".

Not only is the last part of it where the random writers of a CW tv show are supposedly required to provide a lifetime of missing validation to individual fans fucking weird as hell? The idea they speak for all fans - or even fans of Supernatural at all, rather than fans of their made up fanon nonsense - is obvious bullshit. Plenty of fans, queer and otherwise, are just fine with not having the story ruined with OOC romance out of fucking nowhere but bad ~*interpreted*~ nonsense at the eleventh hour, actually!

People who are fans of the actual show did not experience "rug-pulling confusion" because they watched the show instead of dreaming up romance-centric fairy tales only vaguely inspired by it. Plenty of people who "deeply connected" with the story actually playing out on screen got "emotional catharsis" and "resolution" from an ending that followed very obviously on from the fifteen years of brother-centric brothering brotherhood that was at the center of the show episode after episode, season after season. Sure, not everybody invested in the actual story liked the way it ended, but that was literally never going to happen whatever the ending was. Which again comes back to how fucking bonkers it is to pretend any tv show owes you what you personally want - even in cases when it might actually be a reasonable possible ending!

What hellers and their ilk actually "had faith" in was a bunch of bullshit they made up to promise themselves and each other that they then thought they could badger the writers into throwing the actual story of the canon away for by sheer volume of entitled whining. Saying the words it's totes not just about getting their way in regards to the ship doesn't work when they have always made it very, very clear it was about literally nothing but that. Come the actual fuck on, we spent all those years having to share a fandom as they made up batshit theories and then melted down when they didn't come true. We know exactly what they mean by the "resolution" they waited for. They can use as many vague dramatic words as they want pretending to be ~*harmed*~ by a tv show, but 'I was so blinded by my ship I ignored the actual story until it forehead-touched right in front of my salad' is not the narrative of legitimate victimhood they desperately want it to be.

Yes, all of this, but most especially the parts about:

I tell you this made me laugh way harder than it should have...

I need to know. CW: Not-great question about Misha Collins.

I don't want to make posts like this, but I need to know. A deeply concerning post showed up on the front page for me this morning. I've been searching for a couple of hours now for proof... because I need it. When and where did "Mishmash" say that Castiel was a r*tarded angel in relevance to the "headcanoned" autism? I'm not "asking for a friend". I'm asking for me, an autistic person who has been a blind-ass J2M fan since 2014. A blind-ass fan who doesn't pay enough attention to what happened outside the show/off set. After everything else I've learned, I feel as if someone has died. I've met this man a few times... and somehow, I continued to be his fan even when my lasting memories of him are NEGATIVE (you can read about them under the cut). I'm too old to be this naive.

Misha said that word during the Spn 2024 SF con main panel with Jensen at 22:52, and I’ll leave a link to the YouTube video here -> link.

Also, Misha didn’t say that the crew said that, he just blurted it out, and I think Jensen was trying to cover Misha’s ass by following it up with the crew comment. I’m sorry you’ve had some bad experiences with him, but I hope you have better con experiences in the future.

Fandom Problem #5379:

"Sherlock was queerbaiting. Teen Wolf was queerbaiting. Supernatural was queerbaiting. Now Loki is queerbaiting."

Newsflash: you shippers are the most common denominator.

You know how they say, if you meet an asshole, you met an asshole, but if everyone you meet is an asshole, then you are the asshole? That applies here.

Those shows didn't do anything but have male characters exist as friends. You decided to make it into something more. You queerbaited yourselves, and now you're trying to project it onto the creators.

It's always the same group of people shipping two male characters together, and then acting like victims when it doesn't become canon and hurling insults at creators and other fans. Y'all just migrate from fandom to fandom using the same rhetoric, parroting the same accusations, throwing around the same insults.

Have some fucking self reflection.

Are you seriously saying obvious queer baiting subtext (Sherlock and Supernatural) was just SHIPPING?! You can just say you have NO idea what you're talking about.

Seeing as there was no queerbaiting subtext, yes, it was just shippers getting WAY, WAY too over-invested in their ships, certainly as far as Supernatural goes. I’ve yet to watch Sherlock, but I also have yet to hear anything that actually qualifies as queer baiting, as other characters mistaking characters A and B for a couple does NOT dictate A and B’s actual feelings towards each other. Not saying there isn’t a reason for that, because of course there is, but the reason isn’t always a romantic one.

As for Supernatural, if we’re going by the standard of mistaken as a couple, then d3stiel still doesn’t qualify, as Dean and Cass have never, not once been MISTAKEN for a couple (there is a vast difference between genuinely being mistaken for a couple and being taunted, with known false info/insults, to get a rise out of you), BUT Wincest would qualify as being queerbaited as Sam and Dean have been genuinely mistaken for a couple on at least 5 different occasions (off the top of my head), two of them within the same episode.

Which isn’t even getting into the genuine parallels between Sam&Dean and actual romantic couples (Bonnie & Clyde, Mickey & Mallory, and Leob and Leopold to name a few), all of the times they sacrificed themselves for each other, the way they cannot function properly without each other, the way they freak out if there’s so much as a door separating them, and the way they sit absurdly close to each other even when they have an abundance space to list a few things.

So in conclusion, Supernatural either queerbaited Wincest, or it didn’t queerbait at all, as Wincest is the only non-canon gay pairing with any actual there there.

Dude I was THERE for Sherlock. A big part of the marketing in between series 2 and 3 was baiting subtext. "Will they won't they".

Every character has a gay joke ready "so they can't joke about it?" Not every fucking episode. Almost every episode people ask if they're a couple (a study in pink in particular has a few characters) and John's girlfriend thinks John is gay for Sherlock. This is CLASSIC "will they won't they." But hey, what do I know? It's not like these tropes are readily available to research.

And I'm sorry you're fucking CRAZY because you saw two BROTHERS as romantic. They wouldn't have ever fuckin done that, America has a different views on incest it's why the 90s put multiple queer people as siblings as censorship. That is queer baiting yourself.

And the worst part is canonically making a gay character and then sending them to SUPERHELL? That's worse than queer baiting. That's burying your gays ANOTHER thing supernatural has done MORE THAN ONCE. And, guess what. THATS STILL FUCKING QUEER BAITING.

You guys are so fuckin media illiterate you guys don't even KNOW what counts as queer subtext that isn't spitting in your face? Are you that ignorant of queer culture?

A big part of queer baiting is intention, which the show absolutely intends to queerbait

Queensjournal's article "supernatiral has a history of queer baiting puts it succinctly:

"A key part of queerbaiting is intention, showrunners and writers looking to capitalize off of the increased viewership that comes with a queer audience. Supernatural’s production team and cast is well aware of Destiel and the queer viewership it attracts: they’ve acknowledged the Teen Choice Award win, discussed the ship at conventions, and even reference it explicitly in the show.

In a particularly notorious meta episode, Sam and Dean hunt a monster at a school which is putting on a musical based on an obscure series of books written about their lives. While talking to the show’s director, Dean is confronted with the ship when the student says she’s incorporated the couple into her imagining of the Supernatural story. It’s a funny moment on the series, but it also mocks the fans who are invested in seeing Dean and Castiel’s relationship exist outside of subtext."

So not only are they aware of the ship, tease the ship they also MOCK the shippers for being righteously PISSED about being baited.

There are a lot of queer articles about these shows queer baiting but sure it's "just shippers"

I don’t have a media literacy problem, you have a reading comprehension problem. While I never saw the marketing for Sherlock and therefore can’t comment on it, I didn’t say that wasn’t a trope, nor never used like that, in fact I acknowledged that it was by saying that it isn’t ALWAYS used like that, as in sometimes it is. I also said that other characters’ perception of the relationship of the characters in question doesn’t dictate the feelings of said characters, even if it IS literally every episode, as such a thing can be used to illustrate simply the depth of the relationship rather than the nature of it.

As for Supernatural, I never claimed that I thought it was queerbaiting wincest, I said it’s the only pairing that qualifies, IF you’re going to try to make the argument that Supernatural queerbaits. Castiel was never denoted as gay in the actual canon, between him/it not even being remotely human (it’s literally a celestial beam of light that simply uses a human meat-suit to communicate and interact with humans) and his/it’s last scene being ambiguous as all fuck, and literally nothing but attraction to women and only women before that. Misha Collins can have whatever interpretation/headcanon he wants to, but it doesn’t supersede canon anymore than anyone else’s interpretation/headcanon.

Aside from maybe Misha queerbaiter Collins, literally no actor (or writer who has been at conventions) has at all talked about d3stiel unless a fan brought it up first, ergo only in responding to questions, never of their own volition. Furthermore, knowing and acknowledging what types of shippers follow your show does NOT inherently mean they’re going to kowtow to any of them, hell, they acknowledged wincest and wincest shippers in the actual show long before d3stiel was, didn’t mean it had a chance in hell of being canon either, no, wincest was never going to be canon, period, but that’s not the point, the point is that acknowledging the presence of certain shippers is not inherently indicative of whether or not said ship will be canon.

As for the episode Fan Fiction, no shippers were mocked by the show, the brothers responded in character to the goings-on in the play, the d3stiel scene was clearly stated to be put in the 2nd act, which was clearly stated to contain nothing but things that weren’t canon to the actual show, and they gave a respectful nod to all shippers in Dean and Marie’s last scene together:

All this to say, while queerbaiting does require intent, in regards to Supernatural specifically? Neither you nor anyone have proven intent on the part of the creator, any showrunner, writer, or actor, aside from Misha queerbaiter Collins, and maybe Robert Berens, particularly since every other show runner and writer that talked about d3stiel in regards to canon, was explicitly upfront about the fact that there was absolutely zero intent for it to ever be canon.

Which doesn’t even expound on how there was no winning for the Spn writers either, given that destiehellers would scream about twu lurve and romance in a scene where Dean and Cass were literally just standing in the same room simply making eye-contact, not a word of a lie.

Destiel

Why are you afraid to write it out?

Destiel

It's just a word.

Destiel

Who do you think is going to come after you for writing out words the way they are correctly spelled?

Destiel

What censor are you bowing to or hiding from?

Destiel

Don't live in fear. You have nothing to lose but your chains. Don't contribute to the panopticon!

Yeah, I’m not going to invite any bullshit from destiehellers, who don’t realize when they’re doing a tagged vs general search, and who may not understand the difference, if there’s a simple fix to avoid that on my end and there is.

Oh gosh, so desperate to not want them be soulmates. Like, how can you claim to have watched it and not seen it??? 🤣🤣🤣

I like how she rants about people using the finale to say they're soulmates but only shows screen shots of people using DSOM....so where are these people talking about the finale as soulmates then?

Wow.

The desperate attempt to deny what is clearly and explicitly stated on screen. Sam and Dean share a heaven and are soulmates. Period.

This is canon.

No amount of denial or spin is going to change that. None.

I mean, it's a microcosm of their meta in general, really. No, no, what the show is directly saying can't be true, you have to dig deeper! Here's several thousand words of cherry-picking, rationalizations, and random prescriptive assumptions I've just made up to make it mean what I want it to mean instead of what you directly get out of what was said and shown onscreen!

Castiel asks Dean what he sees and says other people see a tunnel or a river, but for Dean it's a road, so follow the road and he'll find Sam. The transition between Sam's memories is also a road. The only place Ash later mentions as having overlap is where all the individual lands meet up at the end of their individual paths to the Garden.

They didn't appear in literally the same room, so it wasn't the same heaven! I've decided roads can only work like this specific kind of road in this specific circumstance, so actually they were moving between different heavens - Castiel didn't say they weren't! Actually it was Ash that let them move through each other's memories!

Ash didn't appear until later and needed a spelled door to move them to his heaven. He specifically says most people can't leave their own heavens and literally brings up soulmates for no other reason. He calls their heaven Winchesterland and says they were in "your heaven", not Sam's heaven or Dean's heaven. We see in later seasons private heavens have an escape hatch to go between heavens which is different from the Axis Mundi, which Sam and Dean also don't use.

Ash was only talking to the specific brother he was looking at! He doesn't know what he's talking about - he was drinking too much beer! He didn't understand Enochian as well as he thought he did! Didn't you pay attention to the themes?! They were in clearly different heavens because they had conflicting desires (in the season heaven and hell were pointedly pitting them against one another), so the whole point is that they're not soulmates! Ash was just joking, obviously!

They always do this. They take what was directly said and shown, then sit down and brainstorm reasons why it can't mean what it would obviously mean taken at face value. Then they convince themselves and each other those rationalizations, hand-waves, and hidden meanings they had to put various degrees of effort into making up are clearly the conclusion the show wanted the audience to draw instead! It's so obvious!

Which is why they were blindsided episode after episode, season finale after season finale to the show's very end. Wait, wait, wait, a straightforward horror fantasy tv show just tells the story it's telling, you don't need to ignore half of what happens and use a secret decoder ring on the rest to figure out what it really means? Inconceivable!

Yes, all of this. No matter how hard the hellers try at hand-waving, denial, etc, there is just no getting around the canon in DSOTM that you need a spelled door to go to another person’s heaven, and neither Sam nor Dean have that knowledge until later in the episode after Ash collects them both, already together, in their shared heaven. You’re also right that even if we take the later retcon of individual heavens having escape hatches into consideration, Sam and Dean still didn’t use one to find each other, Dean just drove down the road, like Castiel said, and there was Sam.

This also doesn’t get around how absurdly easy it would have been to have Ash say Samland and Deanland instead of Winchester land and how they absolutely could have worked it so that Ash collected the brothers separately in order to illustrate Sam and Dean having separate heavens. Instead everything in DSOTM illustrates Sam and Dean having a shared heaven. I mean, just because not all of their happy memories revolved around each other, doesn’t mean it wasn’t still a shared heaven, especially when you take into consideration the context that both heaven and hell were doing their damnedest to pit them against each other AND that it was illustrated in that very same episode (DSOTM) that angels could manipulate peoples heavens.

jared padalecki and jensen ackles spn dc con 2024 - main panel (youtube)

bodyguard13 Sure , there’s no time for dessert but there’s time for a couple dorks to play chess against each other whilst sitting at the same table #thirdwheel #nodessert #nosmores

LOL! I'm sure Clif is used to being the third wheel around those two.

HAHAHAHA The funniest post I've seen in days. "We have no rights to claim to be a fan." Says a heller, someone who only watched for a non existent ship, also someone who hates the lead.

This is another one of those, "how dare we disrespect the loser extras" while they actively hate on the lead. Sit the fuck down and shut up. You have zero rights here, Dottie. It was always about the brothers, the only one who's erasing the actual themes are you. By the way, we're allowed to dislike any character we want. It's like this with every show. There are characters people love, characters people hate. And what we dislike about them, is the actors have become ungrateful brats for the amount of episodes they were in.

So stay mad, we'll continue to dislike them. Someone who hates the show has no business calling us "not a fan." This is rich. 😂😂😂

I'm sorry, what?

Sooo a "real" fan dismisses the character who was in every episode of every season, while proclaiming a character that arrived in season FOUR and at most appeared in half a season's episodes after that as a "main" character?

Sure Dottie.

Wow, that is so completely ass-backwards I can’t even (but it is Dot, so I’m not surprised). You can absolutely dislike the supporting cast (some or all) and still like the show, especially when members of said supporting cast start turning into entitled babies, who got entirely too big for their britches. You can also like certain characters, themes, and elements of said show, but you can’t like only said specific parts, and be a fan of the whole. Like, the hellers are the ones loudly hating the core of the entire show (the brothers and their insane bond with each other), not us.

In short: WE like what was actually presented on screen, THEY only like the version that they made up in their heads.

Sam and Dean mattered more than anyone else on SPN. The others were just stops along the way. If you think otherwise, you didn't get this show. Just that simple.

yep, they were the main characters. No other character can even claim to have been in every episode of any given season, forget the entire show.

Amelia shamed Sam into adopting a dog, without caring about whether he was willing or able, without caring if that was the best situation for him OR the dog. Not abusive? 🤨

(For legal purposes this is a joke. But also uh 😏 it does tick me off every time I watch that part lol.)

Yeah, I kinda get why they orchestrated it to happen that way because the whole point was making Sam settle down there to take care of the dog and to introduce Amelia? But holy crap does her grossly unprofessional behavior in that scene piss me right off.

Not just pushing the dog on Sam when there could be a plethora of reasons he might not be able to care for it, which is bad enough all on its own? But also the specific way she actively blames and guilt trips him for hitting the dog. "Well, maybe if you were such an upstanding guy, you wouldn't have hit him in the first place?" The people most responsible for a dog getting hit are usually owners who didn't sufficiently secure the dog (which can be varying degrees of preventable) or shitheads who abandoned one near a road. The kind of scum of the earth that would hit a dog on purpose aren't going to take the animal to a vet afterwords. Sam is clearly upset and doing the responsible, compassionate thing by rushing this dog someone else put in a dangerous situation to get help immediately after an unavoidable accident! Only to get harangued by this chick who acts like she doesn't understand literally anything about the responsibilities surrounding pet ownership or usual circumstances in pet/vehicle collisions despite being, you know, a veterinarian at an animal hospital. Lady, what the actual fuck is wrong with you?

I get the whole aim of her having a prickly outer shell and them revealing the trauma underneath later as a concept. I just don't care, because that introduction made it completely impossible for me to ever like her.

Exactly, all of this, especially that last part. I do tend to like the character trope (is that the right word here?) of a character being introduced with a prickly outer shell, and later revealing the trauma (and especially if it comes with a softer side) underneath, but holy fuck did they make Amelia unlikable. Between her character being totally unlikable, as illustrated why above, and it being OOC for Sam not to even try looking for Dean in lieu of any evidence of Dean being dead, I hated everything about that cluster fuck, save Dean actually using the words “our deep abiding love for each other” with Sam.

Probably unpopular opinion but I don't understand how people actually choose between these two. I can't. They're a package deal. A set. Conjoined twins. You gotta love both or neither. If you break them down into single their intertwined essence or vibe is lost.

@jackles010378 @michecolegate @sam-winchester-admiration-league @lacilou

i’d care if the person i reblogged this from vanished

idc if you reblog this from me but reblog it every time you see one of your friends or mutuals have reblogged it