Anti Hellers - Tumblr Posts
I have absolutely nothing against peeps who ship Destiel, for the record. Hellers, though... Hellers I'll rub this shit in their face all day long.
I kinda feel bad for them, you know? They see them look at each other for 2.4 seconds or they see them hug breefly and they start screaming “CANON, I KNEW IT, IT’S CANON” and we’re quietly sitting oven here, whistling like:
P.S. None of the images above are mine so if you see something yours or something you recognize, tell me and I’ll give credit
I was so ship-and-let-ship before joining this site. I'm hanging on to that by the skin of my fucking teeth. I know decent and reasonable Destiel shippers exist, but the more of this shit I see, the more I'm infuriated by everything about it.
in re: “cas knows dean better than sam”
“cas sees dean as a whole person and sam just sees dean’s façade as his big brother slash parent” but like how and where. outside of your fanfiction. season and episode. scene and line. if it’s so obvious and apparent you should have at least 3-5 concrete examples right? “sam doesn’t know dean carried him out of the burning house” yeah but did cas? outside of a footnote in the angelic manila folder they gave him between seasons 3 and 4 so he could better manipulate him and sam into doing heaven’s bidding? like if you’re going to say “cas knows dean better than sam” than you need to show how cas succeeds where you perceive sam to be failing at the very least. but even your perceptions of how sam doesn’t measure up are so warped, blinkered, and moronic that it wouldn’t even be worth much if you could provide the textual evidence, but at least you’d have a semblance of a point. like say anything without going “as an eldest daughter…” “well my relationship with my sibling isn’t…” please say anything without fucking projecting your own self-pitying crybaby bullshit onto your little woobie dean and using the actual canon text of the show. I’m literally begging you.
like the thing of it all is and always has been that you’re so hell-bent on twisting the sam and dean relationship to fit into this narrow and almost entirely inaccurate mold which is the basis upon which you build the entire Destiel Mythos that you literally lose all sense of media literacy. you don’t even miss the forest for the trees, you miss the trees for like, the pretend invisible things you’re seeing in between the trees, the forest is a whole long way away from your current level of perception. because the Destiel Mythos is based entirely on the fact that dean is Not Seen and Not Appreciated and Not Loved and Cannot Be Himself until cas comes along, and that Family (read: sam) Is Only A Burden on Him That He Must Be Freed From In Order to Flourish, so you keep trying to warp the sam relationship into something that is only one dimension of it – and keep ignoring the ways in which dean is seen, loved and understood within it, because you need to keep lying to yourselves that there is a narrative need to emancipate dean from something that he has never wanted emancipation from because it is ultimately a net good for dean in the particular circumstances of their lives. it’s also profoundly unhealthy, codependent, evil and toxic etc. (a lot more dean’s fault than sam’s but I will nawt be getting into all that right now) but that doesn’t change the fact that sam and dean both know and understand and feel deeply that they are each other’s person – that they know the best and love the most in the world. but that – which IS true canon fact – is incompatible with the Destiel Mythos so it must be ignored and all good sense must be thrown out the window in order to do it.
anyway i digress there are two main categories of Bad Thinking that i will be addressing below
childhood/ “parent/child” / blah blah blah
every single thing people are saying in favour of the deeply stupid thesis in the title of this post is proof positive of the very silly form of ‘analysis’ I just described. a few things:
“wah sam didn’t know that dean carried him out of the burning house :( this means that dean withholds things from sam to protect him because he is a PARENT and sam can only know things about him in the context of him being a PARENT to him” – what the fuck are you on about genuinely. first of all reducing the sam/dean relationship exclusively to parent/child is in itself foolishness for so many reasons that I don’t have time for right now. but also, it’s clear that this is just something that happened when sam was a baby that just never came up. in the scene (1.09) where this is brought up, dean is mildly surprised that he or john never mentioned that detail and then states that sam knows the rest of the story (i.e. the actual traumatic stuff) just as well as dean does – which is true, demonstrably whenever they talk about it.
obviously there are some things that happened to dean in their childhood that sam doesn’t know about (or didn’t know about, until told in whatever episode they come up in). equally, there are things dean doesn’t know about sam’s childhood, e.g. the fact that he was so lonely he needed a zanna (11.08). or how dean didn’t remember that sam was friends with barry cook until he mentions it when they go back to their old school (4.13). or about the nature of sam’s relationship with amy pond (7.03). these don’t mean that ‘sam withheld these things to protect dean out of parental love’ lol, it’s just that there are details and events in each of their lives that the other happens to not have been told about.
similarly “sam didn’t even know dean wanted to be a firefighter L” girl did dean know sam wanted to be a lawyer? in 1.01 he’s pretty surprised that sam has a law school interview. the point here isn’t “neither sam nor dean know each other well,” these are minutiae that aren’t relevant to how well you know someone as a whole, and very poorly demonstrate the bad and inaccurate point that dean withholds things from sam the way a parent does a child (on a constant or regular basis). obviously the way they were raised, sam was deemed too young to know about certain things until he got older and dean had to keep that secret, but as shown in 3.08 flashbacks, most if not all of this is eventually revealed throughout their childhood when sam is still fairly young.
or possibly the dumbest one is that “wah sam doesn’t even know that dean reads books L” whenever that was he was also obviously joking because in more serious moments (e.g. 8.14) he admits that dean is smart/a better researcher than he is, literally remembers dean reading to him as a kid (8.21) so like. clam down
one of the extra annoying variants of this type of ‘proof’ covers things that are very clearly novel pieces of information about dean that dean, sam, and the audience are learning about dean in real time. like if you’re actually watching the show to comprehend it as it was intended to be comprehended, instead of funnelling everything through the Destiel Machine until it’s unrecognizable slop that fits neatly into your pre-ordained molds that Make Destiel Necessary In the Narrative (when it actually isn’t, at all) it’s abundantly clear. the top two worst offenders:
“sam didn’t even know that dean is good with kids :( he doesn’t even realize that dean raised him :(” first of all you people need to understand that parentification does not literally create a parent-child dynamic between siblings but I digress – this doesn’t make any sense bro. in 1.03 dean admits he doesn’t know any kids as an adult. dean being good with his own kid brother when they were both kids is to any reasonable person not necessarily linked with him being good with other random kids when he’s an adult. in 1.03 it’s clear that dean himself is a bit surprised that he’s able to connect w/ lucas so well because he’s clearly not dealt with a lot of kids since sam grew up. the whole point of this is that dean, sam, and the audience are all sort of seeing a new side of dean. who again is just 26. after this very early episode, there’s no question from sam that dean is able to connect w kids. sam being a bit surprised by this also has absolutely zero connection with him not understanding or realizing that dean looked out for him when they were both kids – sam is standing there at 22 years of age talking about adult dean and children – of fucking course he doesn’t mean himself are you stupid.
from the very first season, sam is very clearly aware of everything dean ~did for him~ when they were kids, see e.g. 1.21: “Dean...ah...I wanna thank you. […] For everything. You've always had my back you know? Even when I couldn't count on anyone I could always count on you. And I don't know, I just wanted to let you know, just in case.”
and 1.06: DEAN: Well, I’m a freak, too. I’m right there with ya, all the way. (SAM laughs.) SAM: Yeah, I know you are.
and then possibly even more stupidly, the one where it’s like “wah sam doesn’t even know dean can cook :( he doesn’t even know that DEAN was the one making him food as a babe in arms :(” – when sam is surprised that dean made something fairly gourmet and from scratch literally the first time they have ever had a permanent living space with a functional kitchen. in this VERY scene (8.14), dean himself points out that they haven’t had a kitchen before and when sam remarks on the irregularity of him doing serious cooking, he says “I’m nesting”, clearly showing that this is a novel development because they now have a kitchen, and that it’s irregular relative to past behaviour – both of them acknowledge this. because real proper in-depth cooking and making box mac and cheese for sam until he was like 11 and old enough to be left alone are two different things, which sam understands because he’s smart, unlike whoever chooses to make this point. dean never showed significant signs of liking to cook before this, which is what the exchange is about, but he did have to prepare food for them both when sam was too young – of course sam knows he had to, there are childhood memories referred to (e.g. 14.11) where sam is mentioned to literally help dean do the cooking as kids lol (and yes, genius, sam says ‘I didn’t know you knew what a kitchen was’ or something to that effect, but if you think he’s being 100% literal there I have an oceanfront property in Kansas to sell you)
again, obviously there are pieces that sam doesn’t know about dean, e.g. when he’s talking about his response to mary dying in 1.03. but again, Sam is 22, dean is 26, the last time they were in regular contact was when sam was 18-20, these are things that happen when people grow up, they’re able to reflect and share on childhood experiences if they’re close with their siblings as adults. it’s clearly not something that 26 y/o dean wanted to hide from 22 y/o sam. yes sam didn’t know everything about how dean felt when they were young, but that’s equally true in the other direction, and it’s such an irrelevant point in this discussion when, crucially, sam does learn these things about dean mostly fairly early on in the series (i.e. when they’re really not that deep into adulthood yet). cas was also not magically blessed w/ knowledge about dean, he also had to learn whatever it is that he knows, but somehow sam has to know everything about dean from age 7 or it doesn’t count when it’s sam lol.
“sam doesn’t know the One True Dean / doesn’t see through his facades”
the next branch of defending this flawed thesis is invariably that sam has little idea of the fronts and facades that dean puts up and is content to just believe them, whereas cas digs deep and sees the One True Dean that stupid sam always misses. there is nothing in the text that demonstrates this is true. multiple times, we see sam being very knowing of the fact that dean puts up fronts and facades. sam is also knowledgeable of the way dean perceives himself, and – demonstrated in multiple episodes before such sam lines were very poorly recycled and regurgitated into cas’s dialogue in 15.18, but keep acting like that was the first time anyone ever showed that they knew the One True Dean.
Obviously there are times where sam teases dean when he’s being more touchy-feely than usual, but 9.99 times out of 10 (as a conservative estimate in case there's something i'm forgetting otherwise i would say every time) that’s very clearly coming from a place of knowing the real dean vs. the façade he puts up because that’s the whole joke. and it’s allowed to be a joke because they’re siblings and that’s what siblings do lol. esp since sam and dean have touchy feely moments at the end of like every episode.
examples of all of the above off the top of my head (there are more than these, but these are the ones I can think of):
2.02 (about John’s death)
Sam: “I mean this ‘strong silent’ thing of yours, it's crap. […] I'm over it. This isn't just anyone we're talking about, this is Dad. I know how you felt about the man.”
Dean: “You know what, back off, all right? Just because I'm not caring and sharing like you want me to.”
Sam: “No, no, no, that's not what this is about, Dean. I don't care how you deal with this. But you have to deal with it, man. Listen, I'm your brother, all right? I just want to make sure you're okay.”
2.03 (Sam to Dean, also about John’s death): “You know, you slap on this big fake smile but I can see right through it. Because I know how you feel, Dean. Dad's dead. And he left a hole, and it hurts so bad you can't take it, but you can't just fill up that hole with whoever you want to. It's an insult to his memory.”
Note that Dean essentially admits that Sam is right in these two instances in 2.04 bc I know yall have stupid shit to say about john too that has nothing to do with how anyone actually felt about him in canon
3.07 (about Dean’s demon deal – also proven true in later episodes)
SAM: Dude, drop the attitude, Dean. Quit turning everything into a punch line. And you know something else? Stop trying to act like you're not afraid.
DEAN: I'm not!
SAM: You're lying. And you may as well drop it 'cause I can see right through you.
DEAN: You got no idea what you're talking about.
SAM: Yeah, I do. You're scared, Dean. You're scared because your year is running out, and you're still going to Hell, and you're freaked.
DEAN: And how do you know that?
SAM: Because I know you! […] Yeah, I've been following you around my entire life! I mean, I've been looking up to you since I was four, Dean. Studying you, trying to be just like my big brother. So yeah, I know you. Better than anyone else in the entire world. And this is exactly how you act when you're terrified. And, I mean, I can't blame you. It's just […] I wish you would drop the show and be my brother again. 'Cause... (can't find words; tears in his eyes) just 'cause.
5.18 [Sam figures out what Dean is doing re: his plan to let Michael possess him, tracks him down, and eventually is the catalyst for Dean ‘making the right call’, which he predicts] – e.g.:
SAM: No, you won’t. When push shoves, you’ll make the right call
DEAN: You know, if tables were turned…I’d let you rot in here. Hell, I have let you rot in here.
SAM: Yeah, well…I guess I’m not that smart.
DEAN: I—I don’t get it. Sam, why are you doing this?
SAM: Because… you’re still my big brother.
8.14 (basically the o.g. version of whatever went on in 15.18 + sam intrinsically understanding the trials are a death wish for dean): “I'm closing the gates. It's a suicide mission for you. I want to slam hell shut, too, okay? But I want to survive it. I want to live, and so should you. You have friends up here, family. I mean, hell, you even got your own room now. You were right, okay? I see light at the end of this tunnel. And I'm sorry you don't – I am. But it's there. And if you come with me, I can take you to it. […] I AM smart, and so are you. You're not a grunt, Dean. You're a genius – when it comes to lore, to – you're the best damn hunter I have ever seen – better than me, better than dad. I believe in you, Dean. So, please – please believe in me, too.”
10.22 (understanding how much dean has ~done for him~)
SAM: I'm saving my brother.
CASTIEL: You told Dean—
SAM: —I know what I told Dean. Cas, look. I've been the one out there, messed up and scared. And alone. And Dean—
CASTIEL: He did whatever he could to save you.
SAM: Yes. I mean, it's become his thing. I owe him this. I owe him everything.
10.23 (basically the o.g. version of whatever went on in 15.18, x2 – from Sam to Dean): “You were also willing to summon death to make sure you could never do any more harm. You summoned me because you knew I would do anything to protect you. That's not evil, Dean. That's not an evil man. That is a good man crying to be heard, searching for... some other way. […] You will never, ever hear me say that you -- the real you -- is anything but good.”
11.13 (Sam understanding exactly how Dean feels about Amara being his ‘deepest desire’, and confirming that it doesn’t make him a bad person)
Dean: Why? Because if she is that means that I’m…
Sam: Means you’re what? Complicit? Weak? Evil?
Dean: For starters, yeah.
Sam: Dean. Do you honestly think you ever had a choice in the matter? She’s the sister of God, and for some reason she picked you and that sucks, but if you think I’m gonna blame you or judge you…I’m not.
Dean: You know that I want her ass dead.
Sam: Yes. Of course. And I know you’ve also probably beaten yourself up a hundred times over it, but where has that gotten us? (Long silence) Just how bad is it?
13.02 (Sam perfectly explaining Dean’s psyche to Jack)
JACK: Is that why Dean hates me?
SAM: Dean doesn’t hate you. It… Look, sometimes the wires in Dean’s head get crossed and—and he gets frustrated, and then he mixes frustration with anger, and—and fear.
JACK: Why would he be afraid?
SAM: Because Dean feels like it’s his job to protect everyone. And right now, we need to protect you. But we may also need to protect people from you.
14.03 [Sam assesses Dean’s psychological/emotional response to the Michael possession; end of episode, Dean confirms that Sam’s assessment was fully accurate]
14.10 [Sam is the only one able to snap Dean out of his weird Michael mind loop by using their code word]
14.11 [Sam figuring out that something is troubling Dean just based on the fact that Dean hugs him]
15.17 (self explanatory at this point)
DEAN: Chuck has to die. He has to! Otherwise he'll keep us tap dancing forever, and I can't live like that, man! I can't live like that! I won't!
SAM: I know you feel like that right now, okay. I know you do. But you gotta trust me. My entire life, you've protected me— from Dad, from Lucifer, from everything. I didn't always like it, you know, but... it's the one thing in the whole world that I could always count on. It's the only thing I've ever known that was true. So please... put the gun away. Just put it away, and we'll figure it out, Dean, we'll find another way, you and me. We always do.
like maybe there are some cas moments w dean along these lines too. i don't know, i don't remember what the guy says or does anymore it's been too many years and he is not memorable. but the point is where and in what capacity and based on what metric other than the amount of bad fanfic you've read does cas exceed sam in these respects.
so basically just. genuinely, what are you people literally ever talking about. go watch the show instead of saying stupid wrong stuff about sam on the hellsites all day. or watch another show (please for the love of god watch any other show this one is absolutely lost on you and it’s such a stupid one too i'm embarrassed for you)
The Road to Hell(erism)
Loorrddd. Looooooorrrrrdddtttt. Lord have mercy.
Just came across a Heller post. On the For You feed, naturally. Wtf, Tumblr.
Anyway.
Big, pissy DNI wail, threats of blocking (stop, wait, come back... 🥱). Went to their blog to block them so I don't accidentally interact and hurt their very important feelings. Saw they'd reblogged another Heller post, so couldn't resist briefly peeking at the notes. The tags on the reblogs alone...
You fucking what. 😂
Bitch, your angel didn't show up until four seasons in. We built this fandom.
(Sorry, Cas, I don't actually dislike you. Some of your fans are just...)
Anyway, that's not the best part. The original poster, who was yelling about blocking and DNIs over our immoral, incestuous fantasies?
Six posts down:
It's strange to see people reacting like Jensen's said something new here. I've listened to pretty much everything he's ever said on the topic and, as far as I can tell, he's always understood that scene to be a confession of romantic love on Cas's part.¹
The part that Jensen's repeatedly pushed back against — and sometimes gotten exasperated or frustrated about — is the insistence of some fans that Dean must reciprocate Cas's feelings. He's been very clear about the fact that he understands Dean to be straight, that he's always played him as straight, and that he's never gotten guidance from writers or directors or showrunners that he should be playing him differently.²
Meanwhile, Jensen has consistently affirmed that Dean feels love for his dearest friends — which includes Cas — but he has also consistently avoided using language that suggests Dean feels romantic love for him, because he doesn't think that Dean does.
That's why Jensen describes their relationship by calling Cas "one of [Dean's] best friends," "one of his closest allies," "not only a brother-in-arms, but one of his closest — the closest people to him," and doesn't describe their relationship by calling Cas "the man he loves" or using other phrases that people usually reserve for romantic partners, like "his everything."³
In any case, what Jensen is trying to say seems pretty clear to me even without the above context, but with it, I'd call it beyond clear. When he says there's nothing to resolve, he's saying that (consistent with what he's said before) Cas & Dean were on the same page by the end of the scene. Dean understood Cas's feelings and Cas understood Dean's.
To spell it out: Cas loved Dean romantically but knew that Dean would never love him back romantically because he was straight (thus, the wanting something he could "never have"). But he realized he could still experience joy in confessing his love and accepting it for what it was, even if it was never reciprocated. And he expresses both of these things to Dean: that he loves him romantically and that he knows that Dean doesn't (can't) reciprocate.
And he's right, so there's really nothing Dean can say to that. Cas knows how Dean feels — that he loves him platonically, that Cas is (in Dean's own words) like a brother to him — and now Dean knows how Cas feels, but it doesn't change anything between them. Dean can't make himself love Cas like Cas loves him. But he also won't stop loving Cas like a brother just because he finds out that Cas's feelings are different, either.
So, while Cas's confession was poignant, it doesn't change who they are to one another or how they would exist in each other's lives.
Thus... there's nothing more to really say about it. The scene included its own catharsis, its own resolution. Setting aside the resulting grief/loss parts (due to Cas's death, not his words), both sides had reached a kind of peace with Cas's confession as it stood.
¹Although, early on, he was more accommodating of the perspective of some fans that it wasn't — clearly trying to be diplomatic — and today, he obviously sees less point in equivocating about that.
²In the past, Jensen's gotten annoyed by repeated assertions that Dean is bi, and people have seemingly mistaken this for him being homophobic or somehow opposed to the idea that Cas has romantic feelings towards Dean, but that interpretation doesn't make sense in the context of his statements as a whole. The problem is, if you're straight & people keep telling you they think you're gay, it's really hard to stop them without seeming like you think there's something wrong with being gay. But it's annoying to have your orientation constantly questioned, just like it's annoying to be misgendered or repeatedly mistaken for pretty much anything you're not.
(And yes, I get that Jensen isn't Dean, but when you're a straight man playing a straight man and people won't stop coming up to you to tell you that your idea of "a straight man" is totally gay/bi, then, yeah, they're basically saying that you're wrong about your own orientation: that you don't understand how a "real" straight man would react to x, y, or z. Basically, "mansplaining" (reverse-mansplaining?) your orientation to you. Or, at the very least, your acting.)
³It's challenging to talk about a relationship where on one side, you've got platonic love, and on the other side, you've got romantic love. If you call them friends, you seem to be dismissing the one person's romantic feelings. But there isn't a better term. That's why Jensen switches (somewhat fumblingly) between terms like "allies" and "friends" and "closest people."
And what's this, in the comments?
Oh, shi–
Photo source x
Evidence is mounting for me that many of them (especially younger ones or, I guess, people new to the concept of fandom) believe shipping can only be done with canon pairings, so they're desperate to have their pairing validated explicitly in the canon or by the creators to justify their shipping of it. As if it needs justifying somehow...
Of course, I'm sure plenty of it is just sealioning and bad faith arguing, too.
how is dean straight if you’re a wincestie i don’t get it? genuine question no hate
The real saw trap is reading an incredibly wrong take about your blorbo and seeing that it’s actually very popular
this is hilarious when you consider it was castiel who went to superhell for being in love with dean while samdean went to heaven to incest openly
Just throwing some thoughts on the pile.
Are we using 'problematic ship' as longhand for proship? Because if we are, or if anyone in these threads is, please know that's not what proship stands for. Proship is just 'pro', as if 'for', shipping. As in, 'in support of shipping'. It's another version of Ship And Let Ship. You enjoy your thing and let other people enjoy theirs.
I don't know if this is a fandom-generation thing, but as far as I've ever seen and known and used the term from back in early 2000s, 'shipping' has always been a way to refer to pairing characters sexually or romantically (neither of which has ever excluded general interest/fascination/exploration of other themes involving the pair, for the record. All of that can be explored within the scope of sex and romance. But if they're explored exclusive of it, it wouldn't quite be considered shipping to me). If that's evolved over time, then so be it, but taking everything the previous posters said into account, I have to wonder if it could also be a response to the anti movement, where reasonable people are (subconsciously or otherwise) distancing themselves from the traditional meaning of the word so as to avoid the ire of the roving anti brigade.
Regarding the point that antis have started using 'shipping' to mean 'want to see in canon', that tracks with what I've been noticing lately. In SPN fandom, there's this bizarre need among hellers to insist to all and sundry (despite lack of actual evidence) that their ship is canon, and demand confirmation from involved parties (actors, writers, etc.) that it is so (despite repeated denials from all but one, who's a known attention-seeking shit-stirrer) as if their ship is somehow invalidated or disallowed if it's not, which explains why they're so rabid about it. They seem not to understand that shipping has nothing to do with canon (although you can ship canon relationships, of course). It's purely a fanonical venture and that's fine. That's good. It's allowed. It's expected. It's been done since the very beginning of fandom, and you hold no moral superiority over another based on whether your ship goes canon or not.
I guess that's the bit that mystifies me the most. We're all in here watching our dumb little shows for our dumb little blorbos. They often have weird, extreme, gross or, yes, problematic themes or behaviours exemplified within them. That's what makes them interesting, for crying out loud. We like them anyway, antis included.
So quit trying to make it a morality contest.
Although I mean, let's be honest, you lost the first time you told someone to be less alive about it.
i think what’s generally more acceptable now isn’t shipping problematic ships. it’s shipping “problematic” ships the way an anti would, meaning you are only meant to focus on how abusive, horrible, unhealthy something is. you are not allowed to have empathy for the characters or discuss the LOVE involved at all to the point where a lot of complex relationships get flattened and shipping gets reduced to "analyzing the abuse”, making it so that no one’s allowed to find beauty in dark content at all.
Feeling extra messy today so another rant
But like. U don’t have to like wincest but what do u mean “why is it so common”???
Did we not watch the same show?? Wincest is possibly the spn ship with the MOST subtext. I don’t rlly feel the need to even name all the reasons wincest makes sense cuz they’re so obvious and naming them all would take a while and that’s not rlly the point of this post.
Also why r u acting like wincest is a plague or invasive species in the spn fandom. Like the spn fandom was BUILT on wincest. It makes sense that a prominent part of the fandom are wincest shippers.
It’s like going to the ocean and seeing a sign warning of sharks and being like “aw:( why do sharks have to ruin the beach I just wanna swim” as if sharks aren’t an important and natural part of the ocean ecosystem. Like that’s their HOME. They’ve been here longer than YOU (the you is destiel shippers in this fuck ass analogy) if u don’t wanna risk being around sharks at the ocean you can go to a pool or lake (other fandoms) and if ur adamant on the ocean remember sharks aren’t bloodthirsty and horrible like they are in movies, and if you stay away from ocean areas that are prominent with sharks you should be ok. And even if you come across a shark on a beach that usually dosent have sharks don’t panic! You can get out of the water. Sharks won’t attack you unless you antagonize them.
Did that analogy make sense?? Probs not but fuck it we ball
Just. Tired of ppl acting like shipping fictional incest is the worst possible thing in fandom.
Dean Cas Wedding Tweet Report
Now that the dust has settled, I wanted to do a quick after action report on the #DeanCasWedding trend. For those who aren’t aware. #Dean Cas Wedding trended on Twitter, based on some recurring Supernatural castmates sending a tweet about Dean and Cas getting married at the roadhouse.
Destiel fans ran with this theory and created a fictional wedding between Dean and Castiel on Valentines Day. The hash tag trended for 8 hours, and peaked at #4 on Twitter’s United States trending top 30. In the end it generated 46.3k tweets.
I am doing a deeper social media analysis of the hash tag findings to better understand Destiel fan activity, during this campaign please. Further details are shared here as follows:
Overall Campaign Metrics
As posted before the majority of this campaign was based on retweets - 67% of this campaign was based off of retweets from 13.7k original tweets. 33% of the campaign came from original content. For scale that means of the 46.3k tweets that were generated during the Dean Cas Wedding trend ~30k came from retweets.
This means that the Destiel fan base has a predilection to retweet and spamming continuously to get their hash tags to trend.
Size of Destiel’s Fanbase/Stanbase
So this is the interesting story. Of the individual who participated in the campaign there were 2.6k active contributors, 5.3k total contributors, this means we can deduce that 2.7k or so were just retweet contributors. The 2.7k numbers are “passive” contributors in that they did not create any new content with their tweets. While the 2.6k active participants are the tweeters who created original content that fueled the hashtag. This means that 5.3k people in total fueled enough content to create a 43.6k hashtag campaign.
Supernatural’s Viewership Cross Reference
For context the average Supernatural episode in the last season attracted 1.1 million viewers. Quick facts to put this in perspective:
For every 208,000 general fan of Supernatural you will find 1 Destiel, Misha Minon, or Destiel Extreme shipper stan
Destiel as a fanbase is less than 1% of the Supernatural audience/fan base (precisely less than .5% of the general audience)
The average Destiel fan tweets 5-8 times to get something to trend
When an extreme Destiel fan screams that “they made Supernatural what it is”, “that they are the majority of the audience”, and that everyone wanted “Dean and Castiel together”, show them these numbers. All in all, the reach of this fanbase is quite small. Their hash tag campaign had an overall reach of 3 million people.
Cross comparison: Destiel’s hash-tag vs. Walker’s Live Tweeting
For scale Walker reached 12 million people when they trended for “Don’t Fence Me In” with a fraction of the tweets they had (46.3k vs. 11.7k).
#DeanCasWedding (2/14)
#Walker (Don’t Fence Me In, Live Tweet 2/11)
What Corporations Value
This is why Supernatural and CW executives do not take Destiel and their hash tag campaigns seriously. 67% of this campaign is basically just re-tweets, which is what devalues this campaign in terms of meaningful social media engagement that corporations and stations look for. The value of the campaign is not there despite the high tweet count (Trended at #4, and generated 46.3k tweets but with no substance). The problem for Destiel fans is that their conversation is all insular, which is why the reach is so small. You have a max of 5k people talking about a ship, and a less than 3k actually pushing it. It is basically just these small .5% of audience members talking to each other and passing the ball between themselves back and forth.
Destiel’s existing echo chamber
If you are interested in knowing who those individuals are look no further. I broke down the Top 10 Most active members during the campaign and top 10 for original tweets and retweets. You may see some familiar faces:
Lastly, we will delve into the age of the twitter accounts who were active during the campaign.
As seen here a sizable portion of this tweet campaign comes from twitter accounts that are less than 1 year old. This is an obvious indicator for multiple accounts and fake accounts. It shows that the two biggest splits here are twitter accounts that are less than 1 year old, and others that are 6 years or older. Combine this finding with the retweet threshold (67%) it’s highly likely that there is some double dipping going on here. Remember the average Destiel account retweets things 5-8 times. As we can take a look from the most popular tweeters during the campaign some of them tweeted an excess of 400 times just from one handle. The top 10 tweeters during the campaign generated 3k tweets just amongst themselves.
As such it’s likely that the 5.3k number shared here is inflated, with much of this engagement coming from fake accounts, double accounts which aren’t a genuine reflection of actual population size. I hypothesize that about a third of this fanbase is a result of multiple accounts. Especially since many Destiel fans say that they’ve been watching since season 4. How is it that a third of the audience just came aware of Destiel in the past year, when Castiel has been on the show since Season 4?
Summary
The Destiel fans need things to cling onto. Often when they try to trend spontaneously as in response to Misha’s instagram video on the 13th the trend only got 8k tweets before it collapsed. They need to latch onto a social justice themes to trend (Eileen), they need to latch onto Jensen and Dean’s fanbase along with LGBTQIA+ representation that exists in other fanbases to partner in order to trend (Shameless Gallavocih, MCU’s Stucky and Teen Wolf’s Sterek). But even for all of their efforts it doesn’t really mean anything in the end, when you look at the numbers and review the context.
In conclusion, I know this is a long post but I wanted to double down on a few things. The Destiel, Misha Minon, Extreme Destiel fans are not the majority. They don’t have a lot of power amongst their group. The economic value of this hash tag campaign doesn’t compare to the likes of live tweeting events generated from the CW during their live tweet shows: Batwoman, Legacies or Riverdale. Definitely not Walker. Even when they try to trend with all their might they can’t equal or make a significant dent in social media engagement that means anything to the network. This is why the CW has ignored them. As such I hope that this tumblr post can help people understand how small the fanbase is, and how their bullying and smear campaigns are insignificant and don’t amount to anything. I hope this number can give people perspective and context to what this crazy stan base has led to with all their tantrums, doxing, anti-voting sprees and generally toxic behavior. Ultimately I hope this post shows that they are insignificant. Let’s let them be so.
While I wouldn't consider myself a "super aggro anti-heller blog", I'm certainly anti-heller and occasionally aggro. So I hate to crush your hopes and dreams, but why would I be annoyed to see Dean not reciprocating Castiel's unrequited love every other day? The meme is inherently dismissive of Destiel. That's the whole entire point. "You're in love with me? Okay... So here's what happened in the news today." If anything, it's bemusing to me that it's seen as some kind of proof for the delusion.
And of course you'd be seething. Y'all have a fundamental inability to separate reality from fantasy. That's not news to anyone.
Jensen's anti-Destiel quote sources: [X] [X]
bromances
— @samwinchesterunderstander
(Sharing these so my tags have context too.)
how life feels when you have the destiel tag blocked
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.
August 23, 2023 - You thought the rogue translator chapter ended in 2020? Try again.
On November 24, 2020, the Spanish dub came out and the chaos it brought literally shut Tumblr down for a while [x]. All because of Dean's line "y yo a ti", which reciprocated Castiel's love confession.
Almost three years later, on August 19, 2023, a Tumblr user posted that she had managed to contact the Rougue Translator who had stated that whilst he didn't remember it completely, if the translation had had the line of reciprocation, it must've been in the script as he wouldn't have added it otherwise. The OP is still trying to track down the dub director [x] [x]. This brought back the speculations and the memories from the insanity of November 2020.
As the original post is a couple days old, it's possible that the news just hasn't spread until now. Alternatively, the catalyst for the trend could be completely unrelated - the landing of an Indian lunar probe on the Moon earlier today [x] [x]. This was naturally announced on Tumblr with the Destiel meme, and the result can be seen on the trending page [x] [x]. Even if this news didn't directly cause the trend, it definitely helped.
barn scene reactions
more finale reactions because they are great
I would really love to see their reactions when they learned Jensen was the one who suggested all the touching lol
I'm cleaning my pc so I'll keep posting stuff like this, I think everybody deserves to enjoy these aushaus