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dimples-of-discontent · 5 years

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Thoughts on “Destiel is Real.”

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.”

Anyway,

If you watch the JIB panel (starting about 12 mins in) you see, first, that Jensen wants Misha not to bring it up. He raises his hand at Misha which I first thought was him being like “shhhhhh don’t bring that up!” but which on repeat viewing I think was him actually just trying to get Misha to shut up so he could literally try to understand what she was saying. Once the audience reacts to Misha’s comment these are their faces:

Jared is absolutely looking at Misha like, “dude, why did you have to go and do that? You just threw a live grenade onstage.” Jensen is hamming it up gesturing at the audience to scream louder.

Jared changes his face to “well, when you’re right, you’re right! What are you gonna do.”

Here’s Jensen. He’s looking grumpy. Now, is it fake grumpy, a recognized and favored persona that he has. Or is it actually grumpy? Or is it both”

I think it’s both. But I also think he looks sad. And concerned. Like, on behalf of the audience not for him. Now you can say I’m projecting if you want--this is all total rampant speculation--but look at his eyes. I think he’s upset that he has to talk about this at all (since he knows a little about the fandom conflict it sets off) but there’s something else.

He pauses for a good, long time looking at the audience responding. And according to Saz and others the response was HUGELY POSITIVE! So why does he then announce into the mic with a grumpy fake laugh and what I honestly have to call sarcasm, “Destiel is real!”

Note that Misha is not worried by this. If Jensen were actually legitimately furious I think Misha would look a little worried. But instead he looks amused and curious about where this is going.

This is Jensen asking “Is it?” for the first time. He looks intentionally confused - that’s the bit he’s doing.

Here’s Jensen after the audience starts to audibly yell “Nooooo!!” His face says “WHAAAAAAT!?”

People then yell “yes” to drown them out and he asks, “Where?”

Second “where?”. Maybe he’s trying to get them to say “subtext” - a word the cast has great familiarity with and which was used in “Fan Fiction” and which they can joke around a lot about. That’s my guess. Maybe he has a subtext joke set up he wants to do with Misha. (Remember his tweet to Misha during “Fan Fiction: “you keep your subtext to yourself. I’m not that kind of girl. Wait...”)

They don’t - at least not clearly. Someone in the front row says, “Nowhere.” Misha says, “Help” (after mouthing something at someone in the audience that is probably “I’m sorry about this.” Jensen checks on Misha BUT disregards the fact that he’s looking over at the question-asker (who didn’t even ASK a Destiel question, just wear a shirt she liked) and asks “Where?” AGAIN.

Misha then takes things in hand and reaches out to tell Jensen, “don’t get into a fight with these people.” Jared is making a “Yikes!” face at the person in the first row who is continually yelling “Nowhere!”.

Jensen does sit down, but he’s mad. He’s really tense and it takes him a while to shake it off.

Who’s he tense with? The most obvious answer is the audience but let’s consider a couple things. 1) The audience was giving a mixed answer, including and sometimes more loudly the “Nowhere!” that you would think Jensen would want to hear IF he were angry/tense about the “Destiel is real” shirt or the audience’s support of it. 2) He was demanding consensus and an answer to where it was real EITHER to have them say “nowhere”--which they did so why not just stop?--OR to get them to say something like “subtext” to lead them into either a question or a bit about it.

So why keep pushing? Hoping to change the answer? Hoping to find consensus? Or maybe just hoping to get them to make a lot of noise about it for a long time (at which he succeeded). Now, Jensen is famously inconsistent about Destiel and also famously different onstage, especially for J2 audiences...though this, the most Holy Gay panel of all the panels, isn’t a place he’d shy away from, e.g. “What would Dean and Cas do on a trip to Rome? Everything I think of right now is inappropriate.”

Which brings us back to “who’s he tense with”? Could it be only part of the audience? Which part? The part yelling “nowhere” or the part yelling whatever positive things they were yelling? I’m going to hypothesize, based on a LOT of other stuff that I’ve written about, that he’s annoyed with the negative folks spoiling it for everyone with their “nowheres” and is trying to get the positive folks to drown them out and give him a good answer he can run with.

The fact that nothing coherent emerges is actually what gets him annoyed. And, by extension, the volume and persistence of that small part of the audience, which lets people like Pedowitz shoot down the idea of textual Destiel as something the viewers “don’t want,” annoys the living shit out of him because he sees the viewers all the time and knows that a majority of them either are ok with or actively want textual Destiel. I imagine him thinking something along the lines of, “Why can’t these nice people just have what they want? It’s b/c of assholes like you.”

He definitely lets his emotions get the better of him. He was already not in the best place, thanks to circumstances I hope to write about later but which boil down to having his special panel with Misha (that he was visibly psyched for from the moment he got onstage, “I always have so much fun with you!”) taken away because he got some awkward wood from being choked and straddled. So with that grumpiness he was primed not to make the best decisions. He gets aggressive and confrontational when he’s pissed, which is a thing I don’t love about him, even though it’s very easy to see why, and maybe this was just his battleground of choice.

To get back to the thought experiment about whether this is like SDCC 2011, though, I think it could be. I think it’s far more complex, given all the discourse surrounding Destiel and Jensen’s own sexuality. (Here’s a post I wrote in response to a question about Jensen and Destiel and bi!Dean that asked whether I thought he experienced them as about himself and Misha.) It’s tough, b/c each piece of evidence could go both ways (ha). Either mentioning Pedowitz for applause is excellent shade or total sincerity. Either Jensen is mad at the pro-Destiel audience and trying to get them to admit that they’re wrong, or he’s mad at the antis and trying to get them drowned out.

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.

Given his shift in attitude overall and the mood of the room as described by attendees, it seems plausible to me that his engagement was a performance, using the audience, of what it is the viewers ACTUALLY want. But it could also just have been a grouchy Jensen taking it out on an old, familiar punching bag - the topic he never wants to discuss onstage - Destiel.

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scriptlgbt · 5 years

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hey i saw that youre not taking mods under 18 but i think i could do a good job. im 17 in one month and i am really ok w seeing asks abt sex, considering that this is a writing advice blog i dont think there will be anything bad. i feel like 17 year old ppl and exactly 18 yr old ppl dont have that much separating them, and the ability to handle Sex Stuff really doesnt have much to do w age. u could make a sideblog for sex questions too. anyway can i still apply

In the kindest possible way, we are not going to budge on this. We are not making a sideblog for this purpose either (aside from it being not part of the ScriptFamily protocol to do something like that, it would not be enough, as this transcends even separating minors from sex questions).

It matters that you understand why this matters to us.

When I posted the application, explaining that the issue is about sex questions was a convenient summary that didn’t require TWs. The fact of the matter is that nearly every time we have made a statement that should be universal and obvious (like: necrophilia and pedophilia are bad), we get asks in retaliation that we ethically cannot post. That aren’t warned for and can be traumatizing, and are triggering sometimes for some of us.

A minor does not have the same level of support that people above 18 do. Even though I was paying my own rent and supporting myself in full at 17, I still wasn’t legally allowed to do most things without my parent signing off on it. Even with things that I legally had a right to access, they were still frequently barred from me because most people didn’t understand that. And I didn’t have the kind of power or sway in the world I would have needed if I’d had to deal with getting some of the asks that we get here.

This has also been discussed with the mod team and was a unanimous thing. Because this is a new rule, we had mods in the past who were under 18 when they started on the blog, who have since retired (for an array of reasons), who agree that we shouldn’t accept minors as moderators. While being 17 and 18 don’t feel very different for you, it matters for a lot more reasons than just psychologically. If it were just about psychology, I might even suggest raising the number higher.

Along with this, one of the qualifiers for people to be able to join a ScriptBlog is that we would be confident in our ability to answer questions on the topic as an expert witness in a court of law. (Think like, a scientist being asked to take the stand to explain the nuances of certain drug interactions, studies on the subject.) And being able to be cross-examined and have your research and expertise be questioned. Being able to answer questions with the quality of an expert in the field.

In this case, the field is LGBT+ topics and studies. Including our histories, medical issues, sociological determinants of health, subcultures, intra-community issues and dynamics, legal issues, prominent figures, how colonial forces impact gender, how to research LGBT+ historical figures (and what kind of coded language to look for and sometimes why that language was used), etc.

Being LGBT+ alone qualifies you with a lot of expertise, but we often get asked the kinds of questions that most researchers at the front of these topics haven’t even looked into yet. Sometimes, I have to use translators to access textbooks from 1920s Germany (bless the Hirschfeld Institute for having repatriated books online) just to answer a given question. It’s finding firsthand documentation, it’s reading textbooks and understanding what those textbooks say, and being able to develop your own independent idea of something because you’ve taken enough references (including your own firsthand experience) into account. It’s feeling qualified to write textbooks, even if just in theory.

Not that one person can know everything, but just as an example, I can list a bunch of names of Two-Spirit activists who I have learned certain things from, so I can refer people asking on certain topics where to go. I know that binarism is a colonial force of asserting a white colonial gender binary. That knowledge isn’t something that comes up on the first page of Google. (*cough* This was in the application and most people who answered it, got it wrong! But if you know this was you, you can totally go back to the link and edit your answer.) I know these things because I’ve done relentless research, over the course of years. I’ve been interviewed by Xtra (a gay paper, the gayper if u will). I’ve had a Medium article on my trans body experience selected by the editorial team at Medium as an article they wanted to hire someone to do a voiceover of.

These are just accolades. We don’t ask about accolades in the application, we ask what you know. We’re not asking what awards you’ve won for activism, we’re asking what you can advise on.

While I understand that young prodigies exist, that’s just not the norm. The majority of us are not experts in any field at 17. Or 18.

But we have to draw a line somewhere, and 18 is a minimum that falls in line with a lot of other important things. So it is the line we draw.

- mod nat

#Anonymous #mod nat #mod post #why can't I apply?#it's not that you aren't the expert on your own experience #it's not that we don't think you're tough and capable #it's that your mind is still developing hardcore and we don't want to put you in the line of traumatic fire #especially when you have no resources to put said fire out #I believe in you and your capability to acquire knowledge!#one day you may be ready. but alas #'tis not this one #lgbt #lgbt history #lgbt studies #I'm not trying to say this to intimidate people away from applying also #chances are you can get a handle on your qualifications based on your ability to actually fill out the application #since it's kind of a test in a way and if you can answer a bunch of those questions with confidence that's a big deal

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