E is for Eidolon

If shippers of Destiel want to ask questions about Dean and Castiel's actual relationship in the show (friends and brothers-in-arms, and all the ups and downs they had) they are welcome to do so. The problems arise when it becomes apparent that the questioner doesn't know where the line between canon and fanon is.

Canon is fair game for asking the cast about.

Fanon should stay in fan only spaces, unless a cast member has made it clear that they are okay with discussing fanon. A few of them are, Jensen is not one of them.

The biggest questions most actual fans of the show are going to have upon finishing it are going to be about Sam and Dean and actual major storylines, not a side character's ambiguous awkward dying word vomit that's very similar to a previous almost-death scene (just with a smaller audience). Especially because they haven't spent years marinating in bad meta insisting a handful of throwaway jokes and interpretations of random colors, wardrobe, and wallpaper are a building storyline convincing them that scene was something more than throwing shippers a bone to fanfic about and sending off Castiel as a long-standing supporting character (to make him unavailable as a convenient healing machine for the big finale).

So let’s break that down a bit more.

There were 53 writers over the course of Supernatural. 3 writers accounts for just 5.6% of all the writers in the show who allegedly wrote Destiel as canon.

The three writers I believe wrote the following number of episodes (plus percentages):

65 = 19.8%

14 = 4.2%

2 = 0.6%

Total 81 = 24.7%

This means that 75.3% of episodes were written by writers who didn’t have a Destiel agenda and who haven’t confirmed that they were deliberately leaning into the ship for the fans.

Effectively you want me to believe people who had less then half writing credits on the show combined over the creator; and an actor who appeared in 100% of the episodes?

That’s absolutely not going to happen and proves how stupid hellers are when they use the ‘writers created it’ argument.

Time to face reality. They took advantage of you and have made you all look foolish.

Edit - I think it should also be mentioned that the two people who leave heavily into the ship to pander to Hellers (Misha Collins and Robert Behrens) have both had limited work since the end of Supernatural.

Not that they liked it or totes believed it should be canon, but were actively, intentionally trying to convey Dean and Castiel had a romantic relationship to the entire audience as a storyline. Because liking some random fan tweet is not that. Even Berens saying he wrote the confession to only be seen as romantic if he did (pathetic lie given the intentional ambiguity, but whatevs), would not actually be the same thing as writing the ship into the show as canon.

“Bisexual lighting” is not taught in film school as a legitimate medium. What is taught is lighting palettes can signify certain moods or atmospheres. E.g as in real life, blue is calming, red can be aggression etc. In terms of “bi lighting”, this is the top answer.

But also it’s used to signify change, either time going from day to night or a change in a person or situation. One of the people involved in SPN was asked about the “bi lighting” and he said it wasn’t a thing in SPN. There’s a tweet for it.

Do many people in the wild even recognise the colours of the bisexual flag? Most don't know any beyond the basic rainbow pride flag unless they're actually part of the community.

jensen ackles commencement speech may 2026 - source

But having that partner; someone to rely on, someone who would rely on you, is sometimes the only thing that got us through. But when someone needs you like that, showing up for that person matters more than anything else.

The audacity of @bucketforme to claim that Jensen is an irrelevant actor. I'm sorry, but he's the most relevant person there is to speak about Dean and the character's existence! Jensen's the only one who's spent more time with Dean than any other person. SPN had so much turnover with writers and showrunners to the point where writer's talked about only being required to watch a couple of episodes before they got to write one themselves.

That's not to mention how many fans think they know better than the character. I've mentioned this before, but let's look at numbers! Jensen and Jared worked on 327 episodes of SPN. Each episode takes about 8 days to film, typically working an average of 14 hour days. I'll be generous and say that J2 spent 6 of those 8 actually filming. In addition, they would have spent non-filming time studying the scripts, not just the words, but the actions and motivations of their characters. I'll give that three hours in a day (they have to sleep sometime!) So, that's 17 hours, 6 days a week for 327 episodes. That comes out to 33,354 hours of work put into creating SPN and living as Sam and Dean.

The total runtime of SPN is about 240 hours. Even if a superfan watched the entire show 10 times over (and again, that's being generous), that's only 2,400 hours, or only 7% of the total time Jared and Jensen spent with Sam and Dean.

To say that Jensen's words about Dean's thoughts and motivations are irrelevant as an actor is ridiculous and frankly, insulting. He's the only one who knows the character best and can speak on him, so when he says Destiel is not valid and that Dean only cared about Cass as a brother, then that's Dean's truth and no amount of explaining/hand-wringing/manifesting/harassing that hellers do is going to change that.

You’re absolutely right anon, Jensen is THE relevant person there is to speak about Dean, because he is THE expert on Dean. Between the sheer amount of time Jensen has spent molding and living Dean and the amount of writer turnover as you said. Like, especially when you look at the actual numbers, it’s not even close, even when we shave off some hours for the reduced work time and days for when J2 both scaled back their workload in later seasons somewhat, that would still come out to over 20,000 hours at least. So at a bare minimum Jensen spent 10x as many hours with Dean as a fan who watched the entire series 10 times over.

Also fuck all the way off with more abelism. Now we're calling him schizo?

They're too illiterate to see that it wasn't a love song. It was a song. The same way they're too illiterate to understand that the straight man who says he's straight and only hooks up with women is straight and that there isn't a super secret plot going on.

Hellers aren't stupid. Hellers, at least twitter hellers (I've never been close with the tumblr ones and don't want to be) are a high-control group. Questioning Anything will quite literally get you ostracized, sent death threats, and (I wish I was joking) accused of being a "secret Wincestie infiltrating the space". Like that's a real thing that they believe in, or at least claim to believe in to excuse turning on their own when there's no actors or "rival" shippers to direct their endless anger at. It's really hard to be media-literate when the results of said literacy will turn you into the Target Of The Week.

Don't give them a damn bit of excuse or empathy for it. They refuse help and reason, trust me I've tried.

But don't mistake them for stupid.

It's ruined the fun of shipping to have this cult mentality, and it's ruined the fun of fandom to have this insistence that it's canon when we want to talk about the show. I don't care what people ship. Or rather, I didn't. But there's this hellish heller subsection that don't just ship it but insists it's the core theme of the show. I've somehow been called a paedophile for not agreeing with their headcanon? I think because they assume everyone who isn't a heller is a wincestie, and somehow that makes them...? I don't understand it. It sometimes feels like I'm the only one who isn't shipping anything that moves. But these are strong accusations that they throw out.

Just like calling Jensen homophobic constantly. There is nothing that suggests he's homophobic. A straight man playing a straight man as straight and saying that the straight man was straight but you can write your own fanfic about whatever you want as long as you can tell the difference between the show and the fic isn't homophobic. It's him being open minded and accepting but not giving them the exact answer they want. They definitely didn't like him equating it with other fanfic, but the truth is none of that is canon.

Jensen is saying correctly that Destiel does not exist in canon. His character does not reciprocate the “romantic” love and as he’s said (again correctly imo) that he himself doesn’t see the “confession” in a human way, Castiel is on a different plane of existence and cannot be defined in human terms - even M constantly forgets Cass is not human and talks about the confession in human terms.

a) bi Dean is not the “most popular” reading of his character by any means at all, it is A reading, it’s got validity in fanfiction but not presently in canon (even if you trot out your list of gross stereotypes) and that should be okay. You exist in a very small bubble that acts as an echo chamber on a continuous loop but even at its peak, Destiel shippers didn’t top above around 10k “real” people and it’s really fallen off in the last couple of years.

b) The individual writers are irrelevant, it’s the showrunners that decide where a story is going and they have been very clear they were aware of the ship but were not writing it at all in the writing room (other than ship nods that none of you seemed to understand that the purpose of them was a “we see you” and not a “we’re writing this for you”). They did the exact same with other ships, such as wincest and sastiel, even J2 as a ship got nods. That said, 2-3 writers were unprofessional in their online interactions with shippers but none of that was sanctioned in the writing room itself. Even your overlord admits that was the case, even repeating it on Saturday. It was never the story being told in the writing room.

c) M has queerbaited for years for personal profit, he’s constantly being derogatory about gay relationships and once had to come out as straight when he joked once too often (because being gay is apparently one great big joke to him). He gives flippant derogatory answers when asked about Castiel and Dean in conventions (such as Dean having his ass baby). He went behind the backs of the show leads to collide with a bitter writer to out of the blue have Cass confess to being “gay”. An ambiguous “confession” that lasted 2 minutes out of 327 hours of the show, didn’t confess anything of substance or convey romance at all then the character immediately died. Then btw had “gay angel” merchandise ready to sell the next day in his store for profit. This same “ally” has then been existing for the last 6 years on income that relies on him pulling a JK to his fans by talking about how great that end was for his character and it was totes played by him as romantic and he wasn’t aware of the kill your gays trope. That’s your gay ally you’re defending? By all means, keep going to him and asking the all important queer questions of how many ass babies they have now. GTFO

d) you all lying and queerbaiting yourselves in posts, aided and abetted by chief queerbaiter himself and attempting to force your “interpretion” to be validated by Jensen is why this continues to happen. You believe the lies because you want to believe, then you post them and round and round we go.

Jensen is not the issue, he has been clear and honest from the very start about what story is being told and has never once lied about that. He is an ally to the community because he refuses to say that something existed when he knows damn well it didn’t. He, like Jared want quality representation in shows, not treating the genuine fans they love as an ATM.

He’s great with gays, he just really fucking hates dean winchester being gay(bi)…. for Some Reason

Because that's not how he was playing the character. That's it. That's the reason.

[this got long, sorry, OP. so putting the rest under a cut}

Jensen spent a lot of years investing his time, talent, and thought into creating who the character of Dean Winchester was going to be on screen. He literally talked to writers and show runners about intent. So of course he has a very set idea of who Dean was intended to be in the canon.

It's fine if people personally want to read other things into that performance he or the show didn't intend, or project their feelings into it; that's just kinda how art works sometimes even before you get into straight up fanfic.

What is not fine if that a certain subset of shippers insist their interpretation is the only valid one and must have actually been the intent of the show itself and are belligerent about it. Jensen just doesn't understand what he was doing with his own acting, or has to have been lying about his intent for reasons. If they just keep telling him who his character really was and asking him leading questions in different words, he'll eventually have no choice but to agree. The only reason he wouldn't see it is if he's a homophobe.

This is overall insulting, disrespectful, and frankly just stupid. Not only are these people bluntly making it clear they were not appreciative of what he was actually trying to convey, they repeatedly demonstrate they have no respect for anyone but themselves by "asking" him questions they will only accept one answer to - that he isn't going to give them.

https://www.tumblr.com/bluehandprint/817496618601480192/i-stepped-on-jensens-foot-felt-like-small?source=share

I stepped on jensen's foot. Felt like small revenge

How absolutely unhinged do you have to be to purposefully try and physically harm someone? First it's a foot, what's next? Someone needs to out this person to con organizers everywhere so they can be banned.

While looking for the above post, I also found this: https://www.tumblr.com/blanketforcas/817509288787443713/idk-if-you-can-hear-it-on-the-audio-but-after-i?source=share

idk if you can hear it on the audio but after i told jensen not to equate destiel to wincest and he doubled down on it, i was like "misha? 👀 um?" as in like "a little help pls" cause i couldn't believe he was doing a jared like that lmao

So much for the other heller's conspiracy theory that it was a J2/Jared stan asking the question. This is a well-known heller admitting to asking the question. (They have multiple other posts defending their question and how it was rude of the actor's and fandom to respond the way they did.)

The call is coming from inside the house, hellers. You people are violent, delusional, and have no sense of respect or boundaries. There is no safe space when you're around. This latest convention is your blaringly obvious clue to pack your bags and exit the fandom stage left, right, north, up, down, any way that gets you to finally let go and move on.