Grey Area

A lot of times, shows get called queerbait incorrectly, specifically because the audience sees potential, and they COULD take it there, but the showmakers don't take it there because that was never the plan. This includes things like BBC Sherlock and the MCU. Without the active choice to make Destiel a viable canon, this is where Supernatural would fit. Not going along with a popular ship that wasn't planned to exist in the first place is not queerbait.

Actual queerbait happens when the showmakers never intend it but act like they are gonna, promote the story as such, and then actively choose not follow through. This is where I'd put things like What We Do in the Shadows. It's a promotional stunt, done to attract viewers via the Will-They-Won't-They, knowing full well that They Won't.

Both the queerbait and not-quite-queerbait things often have an extra salt rubbed in the wound by slapping a big giant helping of Excessively Het Stuff on top at the end, juuuust to make sure we get the message that This Is Not For You. This is where you get things like Steve Rogers going back in time to marry Peggy thereby destroying 10 years & multiple movies & shows worth of character development and other character relationships. Compulsory Het additions are used just to really emphasize that yeah, they're SUPER FUCKIN STRAIGHT and SOULMATES.

As a narrative example, in the case of queerbait, excessively het endings are like that high school prank trope, where someone pretends they're gonna take the loser to prom, then shows up with their Real Date to throw eggs at them on the porch on prom night. In the case of not-quite-queerbait, the excessively het ending is where you have that popular kid that's always nice to the loser, that the loser has a crush on, but is still gonna date the other popular kid, not out of spite, but simply because they weren't interested in the first place.

But we do have a realm of Queer media that plans to be queer and follows through, like Heated Rivalry, Our Flag Means Death, Sense8, assorted movies. But there's a different flavor to media like this. It starts out and carries through as openly queer. It celebrates queerness. But often, because it is so openly queer, these get boxed in as "Queer Show" to the exclusion of all else. It's advertising focuses on that it's queer. The narratives often revolve around what it means to be queer. Narrative elements that aren't Being Queer are, very often, just a backdrop. The stories are incredibly conscious and aware of their queerness, of their queer audience. They deal with themes around identity, the closet, sexuality, family dysfunction, societal expectations, religious and authoritarian pressure, fear of rejection, grief, romance, safety, isolation — things that are deemed "the Queer experience". And these are absolutely fair themes to apply; there's a reason those resonate.

Now. Supernatural.

Supernatural didn't set out to directly be queer media. It has always held elements of it, yes, and I will argue for that forever. But it's intended audience was not out and proud queer people the way that Queer Media (tm) was. It talks about several similar themes — patriarchal pressures, grief, family dysfunction, the conflict between sacrifice for the community vs. choosing what is right for yourself. It's one of the reasons why other queer themes like the closet slot in so easily. But the characters were not intended to be out and proud and open. Often when queer media features a character in the closet, the narrative is about them coming out. It deals with their interiority around their sexuality — guilt, shame, passion, fear. At some point, they're always intended to Come Out.

Supernatural handles the closet differently. A queer reading of Supernatural deals with a character that has no intention of ever coming out. For whom the closet is still more safe than it is a trap. And, importantly, there are other concerns than if it's safe to be openly queer. Being openly queer, after all, is about fulfillment and self-actualization. But Supernatural is a war story. It's narrative revolves around survival, around sacrifice, around saving the world. And so it's themes treat self-actualization as a distant dream. Often an unachievable one. Maybe one day, when the Mission is complete, we can stop. We can have a home and love and a life. ...but the Mission will never be over, will it? That life just isn't for us, I guess.

And then there's Cas. Cas, who comes from this hyper religious background, who undergoes religious indoctrination and re-education, who is given conversion therapy to literally kill the person that he loves. His love, in the eyes of heaven, is illicit, forbidden, in every sense. Cas who chooses to escape his cult for a beautiful boy that believes in him. Who gives up everything for Dean, always drawn to him specifically, protecting him, supporting him, sacrificing for him. Cas, who misses and loves his family in spite of their rejection and abuse, who keeps fighting and begging for them to see him, to give up their prejudices and see the beauty that he sees, to be free of the prison they have made for themselves.

And Dean, for whom family is everything. Dean who is willing to sacrifice everything if it means protecting innocents. Dean who craves comfort and safety for himself, but moreover, someone that he can feel safe to drop the mask around. And then he meets Cas, who becomes his best friend. Who sees his vulnerabilities and weaknesses and doesn't judge him for them, who accepts him - all of him. Who also is willing to do the hard thing, to make the big sacrifices, to protect the innocent. Cas who is funny, and steadfast, and strong, and kind but also kind of a bitch, who loves humanity as much as Dean does.

They make each other want to be better. They challenge each other. They accept each other and support each other, even when they fail. They help each other up, dust them off, and say let's try again. We'll do better this time. They fight the good fight, but they also protect each other's right to rest, to have things for themselves for once.

Is it any wonder that the audience looked at this and said oh. Obviously they're in love.

But they didn't start out that way. Cas wasn't supposed to be there. He was meant to die three episodes in. A minor throwaway character, there to serve a quick purpose, and be discarded.

But the energy just felt... interesting. Lightning in a bottle, they called it. The way Cas and Dean clicked onscreen, the way they reacted to each other. And so the showrunners reworked the plan. And they kept reworking it. And kept reworking it. Every season, every new showrunner, every new writer, adding on. Misha and Jensen, adding their spin.

It wasn't planned. Not initially. But it worked, and it made the story better, made it more interesting. Cas & Dean's dynamic was interesting, and it made each of their characters as individuals better. Offered complexity and complication and subtlety.

It would have been so, so easy for them to leave it at that. No one would have been surprised if they left it at that. I'm sure many would have cried queerbait — they already were. And others would have been very smug and triumphant with yet another win over the gays, I'm sure. Because fuck us and our exhausting wish to feel seen and accepted, right?

But they didn't. They chose to go there. Cas confessed, and it was explicitly romantic, explicitly and openly queer. and it mattered. It mattered SO MUCH because it wasn't originally planned. Because the writers and showrunners of Supernatural, for all their flaws, were willing to follow through on an element of the story that developed over time, instead of chickening out, or forcing it to fit a heteronormative mold. They let the characters develop and change and grow according to what clicked in the narrative, according to what made the story more interesting. One of Supernatural's strengths is that, in spite of it's formulaic plot structuring, in spite of all the negative influences against it, they managed to coax out characters that feel True and Real. Not always, and sometimes they have setbacks, but when they nail it, it's because they let the characters develop instead of fighting it. Cas's confession was so, so earned. Taking something that had been implicit, that had underlaid the entire show if you knew what to look for, and bringing it into the open where everyone can see it. And that was something they excelled with from the start with Cas — they saw character & story potential and they used it.

The love is explicit. It is canon. The queerness is there, openly, verbally, on screen. It's there, and it's ours, and it is true. And it validates everything that Destiel fans had been seeing and arguing for for years.

you are in the medieval era and you have this role!

And he has to explain that he doesn't care if they're gay or whatever and obviously them getting outed is awful, but why did his boy Shane Hollander have to pick Rozanov.

He's trying to explain the rivalry in football terms when someone chimes in like didn't he already come out a few years ago? Kissed his fella on the ice?

(Not every day that a professional male athlete pulls a move like that, especially after a championship — of course they'd heard about it.)

When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.

Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.

In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”

Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."

— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"

As of some one gently flapping, flapping at my chamber door.

“’Tis some fairy,” I muttered, “slapping at my chamber door—