That Was Mostly For Me - Tumblr Posts

In response to Misha’s tweet

First of all, I have two things to say, and if you stop reading immediately after that then I don’t care, but please:

Do not attack Misha, any of the other cast, or the writers. 

We don’t (and probably never will) know why Misha posted that video - whether it be ordered by the network or not - but even if you are feeling angry or betrayed, there is no excuse for attacking anyone.

And do not be distracted from the real target!

The network desperately want us to direct all our anger at someone else so that our cause runs out of steam, fails to make any real difference, or can be labelled as ‘crazy fans sending hate mail’.

Okay, now I’m gonna go into a little bit more depth, but they were the most important points to get out of the way.

Before all these shenanigans started, I was writing a paper on queerbaiting and the trope of ‘bury your gays’ using Supernatural as the main example. Then, we got the last three episodes, and I’m pretty sure people are getting sick of me talking about this, but I have been doing my research. I’m just going to go through all the important points of Misha’s video, and deconstruct it a bit.

Okay, first of all, we have the announcement that there ‘never was an alternate ending of 15x18′ but there was a ‘rouge translator’. I know absolutely nothing of how shows are dubbed or translated, but I do think this is one of the funniest things said in a while, because it is either an elaborate cover up OR someone actually did probably sacrifice their job so we could get requited Destiel. Someone buy that translator a drink. Maybe this is true, maybe it isn’t, but I think that people were more suggesting that scenes/lines had been edited out, rather than an entire alternate ending.

Then, Misha says that he is ‘proud’ of Cas’ ending, because it was ‘intentionally inclusive’. Misha absolutely should be proud of Cas’ confession scene, because that is genuinely some of the best acting I have seen in a long time and - as an actor - he really got to prove his skill and ability in arguably one of the most moving scenes in the show. To have Cas come out as queer was amazing, but in my opinion it was not inclusive, because Cas was not included in the ending.

Misha goes on to say that Cas’ confession was ‘done of his own volition with full knowledge of the consequences of his actions’, and this is where I think I start to see the problem. Misha is talking about the scene from the point of view of someone in the Supernatural universe, rather than a scene which has an audience. If no one had been watching that, if it was a real thing that happened, then yes. Castiel’s ‘declaration of love’ was beautiful and he chose self-sacrifice to save his love, and there is nothing ‘insidious’ about it, just a moving and bittersweet end to a phenomenal character. But the problem is that people were watching it. People who loved these characters, people who had been roped in by the possibility of queer representation for years, people who got that representation, only to have it ripped away from them only thirty seconds later.

The definition for the trope ‘bury your gays’ is the ‘presentation of deaths of LGBT characters where these characters are nominally able to be viewed as more expendable than their heterosexual counterparts’. In other words, queer characters are more likely to be killed off, because the writers/ show runners/ network/ audience see them as more expendable. Cas’ death is a prime example of this, and although I know he is mentioned as being out of the Empty in 15x20, he was still more expendable than Dean and Sam, and certainly expendable enough - even though he has been a main character for years - to not appear in the finale at all, other than two very brief mentions of him. Just like Charlie’s death was bury your gays - a lesbian whose death barely served the plot at all, other than to give Dean and Sam some angsty scenes.

Misha ends by saying ‘I wish we could just take a moment to celebrate the good of this show’ and I only have one problem with this. This show (as far as I am aware) has done nothing good. What good has been done has been almost entirely the fans. A prime example of this is The Castiel Project (along with every other fundraiser started after the finale) because the fans have raised over $50,000 dollars for an LGBT charity out of pure spite. Most of hated the finale, and yet we have managed to channel that anger into amazing things. 

Let’s do one last amazing thing as a family. Let’s burn the network down.