For me, one of the many side effects of being Extremely Online has been unintentionally, unwillingly learning everything there is to know about TV shows, movies, and franchises I’ve never even watched. For example, I’ve never watched or read a single Harry Potter book or movie, but I could tell you quite a bit about them that I’ve absorbed through sheer osmosis; it’s so ubiquitous that there’s really no escaping it, no matter how hard you might try.
Like many of the Terminally Online, I’ll joke or complain about the information being forced into my brain, but the truth is that I genuinely have a lot of fun with this sort of thing. Sometimes, seeing out of context clips or theories about TV shows will make me curious to check them out, and sometimes that even pays off—I would never have watched Doctor Who without a bunch of kids on Tumblr or Twitter posting random scenes that caught my attention, and though I haven’t kept up with that show much over the past few years, it brought me a lot of joy for quite a while. Sometimes it’s fun to keep up with a show out of morbid curiosity; I read much of the AV Club’s coverage of Modern Family for its last few seasons despite not watching the show because it was fascinating to see the reviewer figuring out what to make of a former cultural juggernaut limping through its final years with seemingly no direction or aspirations.
But sometimes, you get a piece of media you have absolutely zero interest in that still manages to absolutely inundate you. This doesn’t seem to happen quite as often anymore thanks to the rise of Peak TV and the splintering of online fandom, but in the peak of online fandom culture in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I couldn’t refresh my Tumblr dashboard without being deluged with information about Teen Wolf, Sherlock, Homestuck, or any other number of series I’d never watched, yet felt like I had nonetheless. There’s fun to be had with this, too, though; not necessarily in checking the series out, but in being able to joke and complain about their ever-looming presence with similarly inconvenienced friends.
There’s a sense of community to be found even in the shared experience of ignoring (or mocking) the same pieces of culture. It’s been a while since I’d truly experienced that, but this past week brought that blissful, surreal feeling flooding back stronger than it ever had before. Warning: this is about to get really, really weird. I may be the only person reading this who will enjoy or even understand this, in fact. But all this nonsense simply brought me too much joy not to share it.
Okay, so let’s start with the TV show Supernatural, a CW series about two brothers who fight monsters that has somehow been on the air for a staggering, excruciating fifteen seasons. This is another series I’ve never watched, not even one episode, but around 2012 it was utterly inescapable; even though my highly-curated social media feeds didn't seem to contain a single actual fan of the series, its digital footprint was so overwhelming that GIFs of scenes, fan conjecture, and online stunts (such as the “Mishapocalypse,” where fans mindlessly flooded every possible social media platform endlessly with the same picture of Supernatural star Misha Collins, seemingly for no reason other than to annoy) gushed into my feed with a frequency that couldn’t be avoided. Everybody I knew had a knowledge of Supernatural, even if that knowledge was “God, this show is annoying.”
The most infamous aspect of the Supernatural online fandom, though, was the “shipping.” For any of you unfamiliar with the term (you sweet, summer children), “shipping” is the act of wanting two fictional characters to be in a relationship. More specifically, it usually involves fans creating their own online content about two (or more) fictional characters being in a relationship, be it their own stories, art, videos, or simply brief posts about the kinds of interaction they think the characters would have. The shipping scene in Supernatural was uncomfortable from the start, as the most common “ship” was Sam and Dean, the two brothers at the heart of the series. At the time (the early 2010s), most “shippers” were teenage girls, and the most popular ships tended to involve two men no matter how many women or heterosexual relationships the show actually contained, but Supernatural almost necessitated this by having almost no female characters (and the few who did show up tended to quickly meet grisly fates) and also no regular male characters other than the two brothers. So instead of not shipping, many of the most involved fans got interested in incest instead—y’know, as one does.
What changed all that—and what made Supernatural omni-present and annoyingly unavoidable—was the introduction of a character named Castiel, a fallen angel played by the aforementioned Misha Collins who joined the two brothers on their adventures full time. Fans instantly detected (or fabricated?) a bit of chemistry between Cas and one of the brothers, Jensen Ackles’ Dean, and began shipping the two in droves. Commonly referred to by fans as “Destiel,” the imagined relationship between these two characters came to dominate the internet, with a significant percentage of that legion convinced, insistent even, that the pairing would eventually become canon on the show itself.
They may not have been imagining that chemistry, at least not after a while. A common trend among TV shows in the early 2010s was a phenomenon that came to be known as “queerbaiting,” when writers discovered that fans were really excited about a potential gay or queer relationship between two of their characters and began catering to them, writing flirty or innuendo-laden scenes between the two characters in order to keep fans speculating without ever intending to actually get the characters together. Shows like Merlin, Teen Wolf, and Sherlock were all infamous at the time for their queerbaiting, but Supernatural may have been the king of the trope. The show was about a very specific traditional, old-fashioned brand of masculinity, and several of its stars, including Ackles, were dismissive and sometimes aggressive when fans would ask them about or present them with theories about their character’s sexuality; the writers never had a thought of making this relationship a real thing, which was perfectly fine!, but they also had no problem insinuating that they might someday to egg on a certain section of their fandom, and there lay the problem.
See, queerbaiting is a short-term tactic. Plenty of shows amassed massive online footprints due to queerbaiting, but fans will only swallow the bait for so long before they want something tangible, and time and time again, when the shows failed to deliver, their fanbase would collapse and become shells of their former selves. That wasn’t always a show-ending thing—these kind of fanbases tend to be louder than they are numerous—and in fact, Supernatural itself stayed on the air for five or six more years once the Destiel bubble popped, but it primarily did so because of the CW’s unwillingness to cancel any of their shows more than a season old with at least five warm bodies watching it. It limped towards the finish line with a passionate but extremely small core viewership, but its online footprint practically disappeared overnight, going from a dominant force to a cultural tumbleweed.
That is, it did until the night of Thursday, November 5th, 2020, when the ominous phrase “Destiel is Canon” began trending on Twitter.
What happened is that, in one of Supernatural’s final episodes ever, it seemed that the writers had made every Destiel shipper’s dream come true and finally made the pairing canon, gotten the two together. The internet exploded, but probably not in the way Supernatural writers intended. There were some cheers, sure, but far more disbelief and even more outright mocking.
There’s two very important, very hilarious reasons for this belly flop. First of all, this move came close to a decade too late for anyone but the most dedicated, long-term of fans to care. The passionate userbase that would have made the internet nigh unusable had this happened in 2012 just aren’t there anymore. Second, and more importantly, what happened wasn’t that Destiel became canon—what happened was that Cas declared to his love to an entirely indifferent Dean, and then died for it.
This clip is the only five minutes of Supernatural I have ever watched, and I am flabbergasted by how vacant Ackles seems—I’m going to guess he mentally checked out of this show, let’s say, five years ago? This scene is the equivalent of a fifteen year old boy yelling “no homo!” when faced with even the mildest bit of genuine intimacy, and it is unintentionally one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.
So not only did this much-hyped ship not sail, but Castiel’s unrequited confession killed him. This is digging into yet another unflattering trend commonly referred to as “bury your gays,” the idea that gay characters are killed off far more often, and usually in more brutal or undignified ways, than their straight counterparts (in fact, this is what killed another CW series, The 100, similarly wiping out its cultural footprint overnight). And it’s not just that Cas died—it’s that he died because loving Dean made him happy. There’s something genuinely insulting about the fact that the greatest happiness Cas could imagine was unrequited pining, that his happiness was all about building up another character, one who responded to his confession with all the mental energy of one of those bird toys whose head bobs up and down in a bowl of water. And Cas didn’t just die—he was dragged down into what I’ve seen actual fans of the show describe as a “Super Mega Hell.” It’s so surreal, outrageous, and wrongheaded that I can’t help but laugh.
The schadenfreude brings me so much joy. Seeing all my online communities come together in total shock that this happened, and in complete mockery of how it played out (terribly, and close to a decade too late for almost anybody to care), is the happiest I’ve been in ages. This alone would be enough to make it a memorable online moment. But here’s the thing: this didn’t happen in a vacuum.
This happened in the middle of one of the strangest elections in US history.
By the time “Destiel is canon” started trending that Thursday night, America was three days into an exhausting, never-ending election. Nobody was prepared for this ghost of fandoms past to suddenly come rushing back into our lives as we sat there, continually clicking “refresh” on our browsers and waiting for Nevada’s numbers to move, but it ended up being just the break in the tension so many of us needed, finally a bit of absurd news we could laugh at rather than cry over.
Yet, it wasn’t just this Destiel business and it wasn’t just the election. At the exact same time, another bit of major news hit: Russian President Vladimir Putin had announced he’d be leaving office next year.
It looks like this ended up being a fake story, as it was only announced by The New York Post, practically a tabloid in its own right, and vehemently denied by Russian authorities, but that didn’t matter. The devastating three-hit combo of “Never ending election, Destiel is canon, Putin is retiring” all dropping at the exact same time was just enough chaotic energy to break even the most jaded of the Extremely Online, especially when so many of us were finding this stuff out, not from headlines or friends, but from the tidal deluge of memes that immediately followed.
Thursday night I was actually exhausted, and was going to bed nearly an hour early. But as I got in bed I checked my phone and saw this meme, and that was how I found out all of this. I didn’t end up falling asleep for another two hours, and the combination of the exhaustion and the information dump (more information than a Medieval peasant would receive in a lifetime, I got in ten minutes) had me frazzled, but also jubilant, sitting in my bed in the dark, trying in vain to hold the laughter in, frantically hitting the “refresh” button like a crack fiend looking for his next fix, needing more memes, more people who found this as ridiculously funny as I did, who actually understood why this was so funny. This is possibly the most serotonin my brain has produced at one time in 2020, period.
I suppose this entire column has been meant to explain to you all how I wound up in that state, utterly broken by this bizarre little development and the community response that popped up from it. I’d almost forgotten what it was like for so many people to be experiencing and reacting to the same thing at the same time, and it really did bring me back to the kind of wonderful chaos the early internet excelled at. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed it. That said, it also means that this column has also been one very long excuse to share some of my favorite of these memes with you all:
(If that was too much for you, just know that Substack apparently has an email length limit and made me cut out over half of the images I uploaded to this, which is definitely for the best.)
This one, though, is the one that finally broke me, that left me cackling uncontrollably on my office floor Friday.
I don’t even really fully understand why. I suppose it’s just Donkey popping in so enthusiastically with something so wildly unrelated and completely unimportant, reminding me of how truly dumb this all is. Or maybe I’d just reached my limit and my brain couldn’t take anymore. I may never know.
Anyway, I was burdened with actually understanding all of this, so now all of you have to be too.
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I realize that I’m saying “I don’t and never have watched Supernatural” with the kind of frequency I was accusing Dean of throwing those out “no homos” with earlier in this piece, but I just want to clarify one final time that this piece is in no way an endorsement of the show. I’ve heard arguments for the first five seasons being worth checking out, but I am not the man who should be making that argument.
In fact, I think this whole column has shown that maybe I’m spending a bit too much time online. My recommendation this week? Close your laptop, turn off the TV, and go take a walk.
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“Do You Know What I Love the Most?” is a newsletter from Spencer Irwin. Spencer is an enthusiast and writer from Newark, Delaware, who likes punk rock, comic books, working out, breakfast, and most of all, stories. His previous work appeared on Retcon Punch, One Week One Band, and Crisis on Infinite Chords, and he can be found on Twitter at @ThatSpenceGuy. If you like this newsletter, please subscribe and share with your friends!
I have no comment, except for laughing in agreement. Thank you. 😄