#network things

@disneynetwork public event: snubbed disney princesses 

giselle - enchanted (2007)

name: natalie age: 19  house: ravenclaw + horned serpent  character: rubeus hagrid

Hello lovelies! I’m Natalie and I’m a 19-year-old Ravenclaw from England. I’ve had this blog for just under two months, I think and it’s brought me so much joy already. It’s a great place for me to gush over my fave hp characters and make new friends. Outside of all things Harry Potter my interests are very limited tbh. I study Social Psychology at university, spent the majority of time with my boyfriend, and spent way too much time on my phone playing games designed to waste time. Also, I love foxes, hence my url. Writing this, I’ve realised how uninteresting I am, oops. Feel free to message me anytime, for anything, though. I love making new friends.

Requests are CLOSED (for now) I am currently on a SEMI-HIATUS

They RTed Misha about watching the finale and crying at the end, but that’s it. Even the tweet referring to heaven just says “Jack had a little help.” This doesn’t really make sense since Misha is a HEAVY Twitter user who usually boosts the stuff they tag him in. It doesn’t make sense...unless you want the audience to forget about Cas.

The ending must have been set (by the network) and he had to accept it, which is what Kripke told him. I’m not saying it had nothing to do with Destiel, but I don’t think the details of that were totally set that far in advance. Jensen may have also disliked the lack of Cas (and Misha) who’s a character (and a person) he loves, but I think that was way more last-minute. Personally, I think they did huge rewrites to remove the Destiel ending around when they changed the title of “The Truth” to “Despair.” I don’t know that Misha filmed post-COVID, but I think it’s possible.

Given that, it’s likely that Jensen would not have had reason to complain in advance about Cas/Misha specifically (as opposed to as part of their found family). I do think he’s on our side, given how excited he was about 15x18 and how carefully he signposted for us that Dean’s silence was because he was overwhelmed not because he didn’t reciprocate. I don’t think he had someone film him and Misha shooting the confession because he anticipated network fuckery. I honestly think it was because of how special his relationship with Misha is to him and how “momentous” he knew this was for both them and the fans.

So, I’ve been relatively scarce of late (except for when I went bonkers with reblogging deadly Cockles content...which I think I blacked out from b/c it was like being waaayyyy too high and it’s all their fault) because, if y’all don’t know, I have stage 4 breast cancer and am in chemo. I’m tolerating it really well but it takes a surprising amount of time, actually, especially since I’m still working 80% time and also living alone so doing house stuff etc. 

This is all to say that I’m weighing in on things belatedly a lot. Like, I do still want to analyze the Cockles JIB panel as a whole b/c, oh my, was there a lot there. But today I will settle for this piece of it. I apologize if this is reduplicating what smart folks said elsewhere right when it happened. I was also off Twitter to avoid having it bring me down so I might just be really unaware. But as soon as this moment happened I was like, “oh man we’re gonna argue about this for like 84 years.” So here’s my small contribution on what this reminded me of.

To me, listening to Jensen and watching him engage the crowd, inspired a lot of anxiety b/c it did definitely seem like he was pissed off. I just couldn’t tell with what or who, especially given firsthand context from some folks in the room like @bluestar86​ who wrote this account: https://twitter.com/bluestar861/status/1130255687290937344?s=21 about the general positivity Jensen and Misha had shown earlier (which is why Misha mentioned the shirt) and how the energy in the room was almost entirely positive. I totally believe that. But it didn’t reconcile easily with what I felt I saw from Jensen.

Until I remembered SDCC 2011. The one where Misha had been fired and all of them knew but none of the fans do. I wrote a long meta on that panel that I’m actually super happy with so maybe check it out? Anyway, this is how I described some of the dynamics:

The way everyone is sitting at this table isolates Sera and the body language from Jared and Jensen is openly hostile. Jensen especially pushes himself as far away as possible, defensively crosses his arms, leans away, doesn’t make any eye contact. Jared is also pissed and is functionally shielding Misha with his body while he does the first Cas question. Both of them are very protective and Jensen is more than a little hostile. They also both keep egging the audience on in their love for Cas/Misha, as when Jensen shouts “YEAH!” in affirmation of audience shrieks about the character. They want to show Sera what a piss poor decision it was to take Misha away from the fans…and from them. Whatever else you see happening these are some amazing friends.  

So, we had a remarkably angry Jensen at this panel and he was angry specifically because the network had made what he considered--both professionally and personally--to be a fucking terrible decision. But he couldn’t say that. He’s got NDAs and stuff to worry about. So instead he settled, among other things, from egging the audience on to show how much they loved and wanted more Castiel. 

Now I’m not saying the correlation is 1-1 with Destiel. But I am suggesting a thought experiment where something similar could be going on. And by “something similar” I mean “Jensen has inside knowledge about a thing the network has decided that he thinks is fucking stupid and that will hurt the fandom.” Like, oh for example, they’re not moving Destiel out of the subtext.

Additional fuel for this fire. Many have speculated that it’s network president Mark Pedowitz who’s the blocker. Jensen, earlier in the panel, asks the audience to applaud Pedowitz. That’s weird and he’s never done it before. True, Jared was talking about how Pedowitz says that they set examples for other shows and that Pedowitz is complimenting them on it so it was at least that in part. But Jensen is MASTERFUL at throwing shade while appearing to be doing the correct, professional thing. Witness his comments about Bob Singer and last year’s S13 finale. He’s done it with Eugenie and Sera too and probably others I don’t know about. Having the audience applaud Pedowitz if he knows something negative about Pedowitz--something the audience won’t like and that will actively hurt many of them--has a major bite of irony that I feel Jensen is perfectly capable of trying to engineer. (Or maybe there hasn’t been a final decision but he knows it doesn’t look good and why. Don’t lose hope! This is just speculation and a thought experiment.)

I’m going to put the JIB analysis under a cut, since it’s long and has lots of images. It ends with “The most similar behavior I saw was Jensen angrily getting the audience to cheer for something, even doing the same hand-raising gesture. In 2011 it was Castiel (”Go on! Show Sera how much you love the character she killled!”) and this time it was Destiel (”Go on! Show the network how much you love the ship they won’t textualize!”). That’s what made me think, initially, that he may know something about plans for Destiel that a) makes him mad, b) that he considers a bad decision by the network, c) that he thinks that audience will be hurt by.”