#but it does confuse me when I see people analyzing it primarily as a supernatural thing

[secretmellowblog]

People who try to analyze what happened on Tumblr on November 5th, 2020, often really overstate how much it was actually “about” Supernatural. As someone who has never been in the supernatural fandom ever but dID join in on the hysterical destielposting—it was really more about the stress of the pandemic and the 2020 presidential election.

The two biggest Youtubers I’ve seen try to dissect “what happened that November 5th” in video essays both weren’t American—- and I think that explains why they both tried to explain the hysteria primarily via analyzing the Supernatural fandom/the original show, rather than through the lens of the election. And while those videos are cool, valid, informational, and make lots of really well-considered interesting points— I can tell you that me and almost all my mutuals had literally no knowledge or interest in the fact that “oh supernatural had made nods at the ship in the past but the creators were adamant that I wouldn’t be canon” or etc etc etc etc. the first time I learned about any of that context was way later, watching videos where people claimed that fandom history context (that I did not know anything about) was the actual reason for the hysteria.

But the reality is that people latched on to the Destiel stuff because it was a piece of big useless inane zero-stakes fandom news in a time when we were desperately waiting for serious high stakes election news. We were latching onto a “positive “ piece of inane stupid fandom news in a time of great stress, with all the desperation of a drowning man who latches onto whatever piece of wood will keep him afloat.

The core of the hysteria was that Americans (who make up a huge chunk of tumblr’s userbase) were currently glued to their laptops watching the live presidential election vote counts come in. These vote counts were taking an extended amount of time due to the pandemic causing high numbers of mail-in ballots, resulting in a constant state of Election Day Stress for multiple days straight.

This was also during the height of the Pandemic. People had predicted Trump’s presidency would be bad; no one had predicted it would be this apocalyptically bad. No one had predicted pandemics and lockdowns and hospitals overflowing with bodybags. remember Trump spreading Covid lies and conspiracies?? There were so many Qanon conspiracies about democrats being Satanic child traffickers who had to be put to death, and coup threats were mounting from the right wing side. It seemed like this election was a choice between ‘centrist democrat’ and “apocalyptic right wing conspiracy theory authoritarianism,” in the midst of pandemic conditions that people feared would never ever improve— and it seemed like a close election.

Another major point was that Trump voters were more likely to be antimaskers/Covid deniers, while Biden voters were more likely to take the pandemic seriously— so Biden voters were more likely to send in mail-in ballots instead of risking the in-person voting crowds, which meant their ballots would take much longer to count. And so, in many state electoral vote counts, it would initially seem like Trump was very far in the lead— only for Biden to slooooowly build up an agonizingly small lead as the mail in ballots came in, and then defeat Trump at the very end.

So you’re just watching these news sites giving live election updates, refreshing the page every 2 minutes to see if you’re going to live under a spineless centrist democrat or a literal Qanon Dictatorship. And then you go on tumblr to distract yourself, and there’s more election posting, and more agonizing over the votes, and more stress and despair—-

And then it’s been days and we’re right at the crucial tipping point where it’s anyone’s game and the next few hours will determine whether Trump will win, so you need to keep your eye on the vote count, because the next hours will determine the future of the pandemic and your country and your plans for your entire life—

And then stupid Destiel becomes canon! And it becomes canon in the silliest way possible!

If Destiel had become canon at any other time, it would have been a big goofy tumblr celebration? But we wouldn’t have gotten the insane explosion of hysterical interaction.

The entire core of it was the contrast between the inane meaningless stupidity of fandom news vs the actual stressful election news you wanted to hear! It really is best conveyed in that meme where Castiel says “I love you” and Dean indifferently responds with a piece of important election news.

It’s about the contrast between the low-stakes inanity of fandom and the massive life-destroying stakes of a terrifying election. There really was no reason it had be Supernatural specifically, except that Supernatural was a thing everyone knew basic things about from dashboard osmosis— it could’ve been any other equally huge silly fandom ship news about a ship everyone *knew of* but might not necessarily be invested in (ex. Stucky becoming canon, Johnlock becoming canon, Kirk/Spock becoming more canon somehow, etc etc etc.)

I think it’s true that people who weren’t paying agonizingly close attention to the American election news got swept up in it, and that non American Supernatural fans also were extremely excited for purely fandom reasons — but the entire reason it blew up to an unprecedented degree was because of that core of stressed out terrified Americans glued to their computers watching election results and suddenly receiving stupid fandom news instead, and deciding to just hysterically parodically hyper-celebrate this absurd useless zero-stakes news.

I think it was also all elevated by the fact that, as I said before, this happened at the crucial “tipping point” of the election where the next few hours would determine the winner. The fact that Biden began to slowly develop a lead in the hours after made it feel, hysterically, as if the hours after Destiel became canon was somehow the turning point where he began to win; so celebrating Destiel felt like celebrating that slow turn towards victory.

The tl,dr is that it’s so important to Remember the Fifth of November …..in preparation the inevitable hysteria that will happen in the presidential election on November 5th of next year. XD. Personally I’m rooting for Johnlock or Frodo/Sam to somehow become canon in the eleventh hour right before the democrats win

#November 5th #november 5 2020 #the fifth of november #just a random ramble #November 5th 2020 is such an important day to me #it really is a holiday #but it does confuse me when I see people analyzing it primarily as a supernatural thing #instead of a ‘hysteria over an election reaches a breaking point when inane zero stakes fandom news comes out and we all latch onto it’thing #but yeah!! #this is my personal essay out of love for the holiday

[incarnateirony]

Standom Perspective: The GA’s viewing experience.

So, it’s no secret that stan twitter has a hard time discerning where their perspective ends in relation to a broad wash of the general audience. It is one thing to point out that the majority of the audience aren’t single character stans, the majority of the audience are not meta authors/readers, and the majority of the audience aren’t “woke,” but it’s another thing to really carve out what that means before people start yelling about “reasons the show will fail/is failing,” which generally miss the mark already like the recent claims of failing ratings. [1] [2] - and that’s just the recent ones. We’re not gonna touch on how long people have erroneously been citing ratings-death every year, though ironically source 1 touches on the same issue I’ve been talking about in my #ratings tag.

But the real point is - how does the GA react when not actually sculpted by occupants of stan twitter?

I’ve almost accidentally run an observational experiment without realizing it, with the recent streams of SPN by Sonalii Castillo, the actress from The Outpost that I’ve gotten to watch SPN. Make no mistake: Sonalii and I are friends, but I have gone out of my way to not sculpt her vision as much as humanly possible. In fact, it’s to the point I answer “it’s complicated,” or a few episode citations to rewatch when she asks me things that have a very Destiel-esque answer to them, like the “living life in reverse” or Amara finding Dean via Cas when Amara couldn’t find him herself. Answering these from my perspective would automatically paint a Destiel lens, so instead I’ll just direct source a related quote from an episode and/or tell her to watch it and draw her own interpretation. 

She’s also point-blank asked me about the nature of Dean and Cas, what point it ends at audience and what point it begins in the show while she’s catching up and hearing about it passingly through people’s fleeting squii tweets. Even that, I’ve tried to leave simply at “it’s complicated, just enjoy it as you see it.” as best I can.

That said, I’ve been doing backflips to avoid heavily impacting her experience, but still catch questions, so I’d like to address some of this beneath a cut to really scale what a GA experience is like for someone coming in with no real extended knowledge of the series or production, and someone who watches on what we WOULD call a “casual viewership” level - and why ratings screeching, yelling about continuity failures causing nonexistent ratings-death, or whatever else simply does NOT match what happens in the GA.

Okay, first of. Sonalii Castillo is a bean. I adore her. And not in that hero-worship actress way, but on that “we hold long discussions every day and I know who she is as a person and what she aspires to be” way. So let it be said if any of my wording about her paints a knee-jerk bad reaction in someone’s head, to ask for clarification before going off on the woke-brigade or stan-mob effect on or about her, as I may be clarifying badly and I do not necessarily speak for her, as much as attempt to illustrate a general perspective about her that I may need to refine.

First: about the person, about who she is, what her viewpoint is, and her general standing in the GA. So first,

About the viewer.

She’s an (until-now indie) actress, writer, producer, but has never had an enduring role and never really watches shows THIS LONG. Most of her personal writing and producing is in the area of 20 minute shorts where everything is a quick pile drive of as much as you can accomplish in as little time possible. She knew next to nothing about Supernatural when I dragged her in, as ten years ago she applied for a certain female role we would all know and recognize, but got declined because she -- frankly -- didn’t meet the racial profiling needed. There was an ax to grind and I had to lighten that from her and she eventually caved as on a friendly level she heard me constantly talking about Supernatural with other people, and curiosity got the better of her. 

Speaking OF racial profiling, she struggles in the industry. She’s technically afro-latina, but does not identify with the afro-side, to the dismay of some african-american fans of hers. She was raised in the dominican republic -- which is also why I cite cultural impact since they’re a little less progressive over there about LGBT than even in the US (no discrimination protections, far lower/latent same-sex marriage support rate, but same-sex marriage was legalized when the DR was bound under the American Convention on Human Rights), so I actually greatly treasure what is, for her, culturally an accepting mind she’s still willing to grow with. She released an interview recently where she cited that once she got to America, the black teens didn’t know what to do with her because she was too latina, but the latina people thought she was too black, but she was raised in latinx culture, so TLDR, she identifies latinx even if not all latinx people accepted her as such in the US, especially after a brief time in France adding other stuff to her journey. She actually commented that, from her perspective, the racial divide actually seems worse in America; that it could be wrong, but nobody in France or the DR looked at her skin color, and now she’s running into stonewalls of it everywhere. Too latina to be black or white but too black to be latina and too anything to be anything that fits anyone else’s mold they want for her.

Now - Sonalii Castillo is super-duper straight. She is accepting of queer people, she knows about me and Shea and engages us regularly about our relationship, that it “isn’t for her,” but she will never EVER judge anyone for who they love or are attracted to. But she is still enough -- perhaps culturally due to where she was raised, then moved to over time -- in the straight-bin she feels like being straight is “under-rated” in our modern society. She is on the defensive-straighty spectrum, but again, culturally, I understand why and I more choose to let watching me and Shea deal with life become a passive form of education rather than trying to aggressively indoctrinate her because frankly, that will go a hell of a lot further and she has a good soul and I’ve seen her start to gain awareness of things. 

That being said, she is ALL UP on wanting to monkey climb all three of our boys and a lot of her fangirling centers around their visual imagery as much as anything else, although she’s definitely not an emotional brick and is able to empathize with clearly illustrated trauma and pain. She is not a single character stan. She loves all three, for different reasons, and often talks about their strength as a unit and how they compliment each other when reviewing events; she feels for all of them, and sometimes feels bad for not even realizing she should have been feeling for some of them in certain ways that had slipped her mind.

And, realistically, this is still representative of a large wash of our audience with a racial bend to it (since America IS primarily white, for better or worse -- mostly worse.)

I disclaimer this all to really give you a view of what a GA member may look like. Not all GA will be writer-producers, but oddly, her style of writing-producing actually has ramifications that make her miss very large swathes of seasons-long story arcing until she comes scrapping up like “Wait... so, wait. Okay, did that mean-” which... well, the GA will do too. She is often taken aback remembering certain traumas or dangling plot ends WEREN’T handled or WERE still out there, because she’s not out there to meta these episodes. She’s out there to experience the ride. The shock and horror on her when the Michael flashbacks started kicking up in season 13′s finale are extremely telling, dividing the line between the meta community and the GA.

To her actual viewing response, let me say a few things. These have actually been live streamed to the public. She comes scrapping to the audience watching her looking for answers often. If they’re outright spoilers, nobody answers. If they’re basic questions like why X effect did Z thing, people will explain. But by and large, it’s mostly reactionary effects.

Sonalii Castillo is a brilliant woman. She isn’t dumb. But she watches the show as it comes. She doesn’t sit here psycho-analyzing every motion for purity, she doesn’t break apart every potential plot hole or retcon. In fact, she hasn’t mentioned, noticed, or asked -- be it to me personally or the folks on the livestream -- about a single damn one. In fact, she has more questions about consistent canon elements confusing her than what the stan/meta community has declared as plotholes, sometimes accurately and sometimes not.

And that part is my biggest point to really make.

She didn’t flinch about Cas not seeing the demons; she didn’t even ask. She didn’t dig into any of the S6-7 plot holes or anything in Taxi Driver or ANY of that. Because your average viewer? DOESN’T NOTICE, MUCH LESS GIVE A SHIT.

I know that’s hard for stan twitter to wrap their skulls around, but it’s a simple fact. THEY DON’T GIVE A SHIT. That’s why it hasn’t hurt ratings before, that’s why (beyond it very obviously NOT tallying as mid-episode tune-out) it’s not the cause for any decline this year, and it never-ever will be. In the stuff I linked above to adjacent conversations, there’s any number of reasonable explanations, including: the decline is NOT as dramatic as people act like, it’s negligible and can have other explanations including Wayward axing, bad promotion, or a bad finale.

Speaking of the bad S13 finale, her hot take on it? She considered the finale epic still. To the side she told me, yes, the wires were terrible, and you could see that it was awful, but it was forgivable. Maybe that *is* her indie side showing and being more understanding, I’m willing to even argue that point, but odds are, not THAT many people are going to perma-grudge the show over the wires as much go “what the fuck?” and see if they fixed it later. A few might. That’s the great thing about a GA. It’s diverse. 

Some arbitrary potential plothole isn’t going to ruin the show for the GA. Hell, bad wires isn’t going to ruin it for most of the GA. Anything you consider a character oversight for your personal favorite is not going to ruin it for the GA. Your character stanning point may even resonate with portions of the GA that do think like you do, but it is not enough to actually cause a widespread pandemic among the GA just because Cas was tied to a chair, or didn’t see demons, or Michael Dean isn’t Dean enough for you, or a camera blurred on Sam’s face in a few scenes. 

Most won’t even fucking notice, much less care. Because the storytelling and cinematography and everything else is doing what it’s supposed to -- largely engaging the audience, and the audience is just as likely to have confusion “wait, what?” on actual canon-solid events that they have to doublecheck and negotiate backwards with information from six years ago as they are any brief “wtf?” momentary questionable plot events. And if they can negotiate those events with histories-old canon-solid events they can negotiate it with adjacent, subtextual, or even reasonable headcanoned reasons that they don’t even bring into question -- because why would they? They don’t have stan twitter in their fucking ear.

On a secondary point: Destiel

So here’s the fun thing about Sonalii and Destiel. Sonalii, on her own, while I bibbity bobbity bounce and dodge answering questions like that, has pretty much fulfilled what I’ve said about the GA. Or at least the straight GA. She sees things, she questions it, but she’s not entirely “sold” on it; she’s made comments that if it happened that’d be neat, she still squiis over “Awww, Cas loves Dean,” but she’s not out here 100% sold on DeanCas or shipping it or reading into it. Welcome to your aggressively straight female GA take on DeanCas. They see it, they occasionally coo about it, but they’re not sold on it as a standing product and are willing to consider other explanations or just not take it to heart until it happens, but they wouldn’t go fucking postal if/when it happens and wouldn’t be surprised, either.

This, of course, is different than if we were addressing viewership from queer-lensed viewers with a different origin than her, which accounts for 1/3 of the modern US population in our target demo (and 1-in-2 for our upcoming younger demo tilting into the bracket) [3], not counting highly receptive allies but people who tick onto the Kinsey scale in some degree. 

So here we have a GA that doesn’t ask about plotholes, reads it through their respective interpretational lenses, glosses the surface quality as their minds parse it, and fill in the gaps with headcanons they don’t even realize are headcanons and just absorb as truths until something challenges it in active-canon to make them go “what?” - because the GA isn’t out here refining the exact border of canon, subtext, or headcanon. They are naturally negotiating the story as it unfolds, without interference. Now, if the queer-receptive-but-very-straight-lensed woman is going “awwwwww Cas and Dean” but “I’m still not sold,” but also “I mean, I see it though,” when people ask her or is even out here actively asking questions like what is going on with it, what do you think that means for our increasingly queer identifying audience as well?

Well, Jan, it means exactly what I’ve been saying it means. Don’t believe me? Check all the queerfolk that pour into twitter and tumblr after binge watching 12-13 seasons that are like “Wait, this is something people argue about? I thought this was just a thing???” and are utterly confused that it’s even in debate.

This of course says nothing for the aggressively-straight-lensed GA that are not receptive to LGBT or queer content. But the fact that we also see active outcry about “pandering” does tell us that they see it; they register it; they just simply want to dismiss it. It’s worth minding that 33% of the US is still opposed to same-sex marriage. Some are more passive in their homophobia than “FUCK THE QUEERS,” but it’s still a phobic tilt in society. Some of the same people opposed to it still endorse that they swear they love queer people, and you know -- I have a gay friend or whatever -- and may even try to be “progressively okay with” queer content so where exactly that 33% shifts down to is hard to say. It’s worth mentioning that every census in fandom has had a minimum 72% approval rate for Destiel, with something like 11%~ hard-against and the remaining being in neutral “Eh, no specific feelings on it.” 28% is not exactly far from the mark of 33% and to estimate 1-in-9-or-10 people in the US being giant cantankerous wankers about queer people still isn’t exactly way off the mark either, with like 6-or-7 in 10 being increasingly accepting and others floating in the middle, unsure how to feel, what to think, or what to do. Sonalii would be in that remaining central bracket, but tilts towards the supportive spectrum (I suppose #7 in the 6-or-7) and unshockingly, is in the “I see it/it’s cute/I’m just not sold/maybe it’s just a super weird bromance until it happens/it’s just not for me/so I’ll wait and see if it happens”) Given, those aren’t my hardest, most cross-checked numbers, but it’s basic observation skills.

That is a far cry from there being a majority of antis in the GA. But rather, like I’ve said, a heavy dose of support. The wide majority of queer identifying people in the fandometric supported Destiel. [4] Now, as queer is not a borg and we are not mandated to all like the same things, unsurprisingly, not all queer people liked Destiel. And that’s fine. Again, because we’re not a borg. But it was a remarkable minority. And someone is free to not like it, but flagging around an “i’m queer and don’t like it” card also doesn’t make you an auto-winner in a Destiel shut-down-argument when the vast majority of LGBT fans do. You’re entitled to your opinion. It just isn’t the only opinion, it is not more important than the next person’s opinion, and while “appeal to numbers” is itself a logical fallacy, if this were taken to a basic vote, yes, the LGBT community would come out with support for Destiel. And, by most censuses, the straight community would come out riding a VERY narrow line between support, or “I wouldn’t have a problem with it/I kinda see it/it’s just not 100% yet/meh” with only a minority screaming about how awful it is. 

Let’s really double back to the census.

According to the census, the loudest screamers actually weren’t our antis. The loudest screamers were:

Male, Straight [5]

Conservative [6]

40+, especially 60+ [7]

Not all were all-of-the-above on the list, some only ticked a few of the boxes, but some also filled all the metaphorical boxes by basic vector overlap.

Also let me lay to rest the whole “it was all Cas fans that showed up to the survey so that’s why it was high Destiel” myth by dropping this. [8]

Let’s all be amazed that straight old conservative [read as: 89% white] guys don’t like the Destiel content. It came down to about 31% of straight-identifying men. Or, roughly, a cap of 10.3% of our demographic by general US demographics and known SPN male/female ratio outside of fandom centers. And possibly as low as 7.75% or LESS within target demo. Also unsurprising to us, straight-identifying women are more receptive to the content in regards to queer male content, because, IDK, just a shot in the dark here -- they don’t feel threatened by it to their own identity or some concept of “moral standard”; let’s not pretend we don’t 100% know conservative white dudes are totes okay with lesbians but gay men, that’s where they draw the line, because logic.

The rest are numbers that, unsurprisingly, tilt in female conservative, with a tiny overlap from bro-onlies that are the antis we know and love-to-hate.

Yes, the census has declared it isn’t 100% scientific. That’s just an outright responsible thing to declare. But it ran IP-checked individuality testing, it circulated across numerous platforms, and it resonates with every other online demo report we have today on modern trends, from hashtags to google search frequency, to even the imdb data an anti tried to break out on me only to admit it matched my point and not theirs, and yet they doubled down saying that didn’t prove anything either. Also cuz logic. 

This census, partnered with other matching trends, external polls, and basic industry awareness, is as close as we will get to a scientific breakdown of our demographic, especially since they went to exorbitant lengths to break down everything from age, gender, politics, favorite character and whatever else to view them by percentile response we can scale into the surrounding US population or general show demographic by their independently displayed percentiles. Because 500 hard conservatives, not even minding libertarians or moderates in their own pool? Is a pretty damn big test group on its own. And you can view their percentile findings independently. And shock-and-awe, when scaled into all of our other information, it still adds up to everything we see.

And that’s another thing to keep in mind in the red/blue demo divide. Not all red is the same. Not all blue is the same. Not all reds are raging homophobes, some are voting red on fiscal opinion (though this administration is thinning that line), some are phobic-coded but not outright hateful or vindictive about it as much as they are learning. Libertarian tends to count as red in a basic census that only gives you one or the other. It’s a form of conservatism. Moderates tend to still identify more red than blue, or at least did a few years ago, this last presidency seems to be shifting that into moderates identifying blue. But go figure, our last red vs blue census for SPN that was a reliable polling source and not some poll on a rando website that ran for a few days with some basic bitch “What’s your favorite TV show” questions ... was a few years ago.

This really isn’t hard. 

TLDR takeaways:

GA doesn’t give a shit about your declared plotholes

GA doesn’t give a shit about your character stanning

GA by and large recognizes Destiel in some capacity, with conservative old dudes hating it, a bundle of neutrals passively spotting/sighting/supporting it, and a whole lot of queers and allies yelling that they love it

You literally just have to watch people watch the show without intervening and filling their head with your horse shit to witness this

Also she completely independently raged when she realized Wayward Sisters was a spinoff that got axed and is like, WHY THE HELL WHAT WHY WOULDNT THEY IT WAS AMAZING WTF WHYYYYY so that’s a thing.

And that’s the tea.

#supernatural #demographics #casual viewers #general audience #ratings #and a little bit of #destiel #but mostly how arbitrary stan twitter is