It’s so weird. I started watching SPN two years ago, after four years of procrastinating because I knew when I started to watch I’d be lost. I knew about destiel, and I knew I was going to ship it, and I was a johnlock hardcore shipper. All this just to paint the picture. When I reached season 4, I was really taken aback by how gay the real thing was - there’s no other way to put it. I had seen a lot of gifsets and I genuinely thought that they twisted slightly the actual canon scenes, like it was the case for many johnlock famous gifsets, like, leaving out the context, or cutting out a small look that changed the meaning of the scene. I mean, the johnlock scenes were all canon, but there was always that other obvious possible reading. In spn, most of the time, the innuendos and the destiel reading were right in your face. Along the seasons, the accumulation of it made it almost impossible to have another reading. Â
Nevertheless, until the end of Sherlock s3, I was sure that johnlock would become canon one day, not destiel. The whole writing, production, diffusion, cultural contexts were so different, and I felt that the BBC was way more likely to deliver a canon lead same-sex couple than the CW. I tried to keep my hopes up during the s3/s4 hiatus of Sherlock, but “His Last Vow” had really crushed me, and my worst premonitions about s4 sadly became true.
At this point, I would still have bet on canon sterek before destiel (but then I don’t watch Teen Wolf). There were also more same-sex ships going canon (hannigram, among others), and I thought that maybe SPN had just missed the opportunity of “making history” (if you know the johnlock fandom, you’ll understand why I don’t really like to use this expression).
But now, I feel that 13x01 reached a point of no return, and in a way, I don’t like having my hopes skyrocket like this - once bitten, twice shy, you know. But when people who hate the ship start yelling “tag your shippy stuff” about canon gifsets, well, it’s hard not to get optimistic... So we’ll see. I still don’t want to be delusional, I know things can go sideways and nothing is sure yet. But Cas is a symbol for hope, right? :)
