Supernatural was a show about hetero American masculinity that was never made for queer people, that got reclaimed by the queer community, who managed to find their own experiences within the lines of the text.
The show then became a meta representation of itself, where the characters that started out as stereotypical masculine action heroes turned out to be trapped in that role against their will. In the canon of the show, they were literally being written into a trope that didn’t fit them.
Cas was a character who was never meant to stay in the show, but ended up lasting longer than any other side character because of what the fans wanted.
In the show’s canon, Cas was an angel who was never supposed to play the role in the story he ended up playing, but ended up gaining free will against the wishes of a vindictive writer.
Writers tend to lose control of shows in an utterly unique way that no other media tends to experience, and Supernatural is the logical extreme of that idea.
The queer community reclaimed this show so thoroughly that they made it their own, and warped it until the writers had no choice but to put the queerness into the very text of the show itself.
Supernatural could have ended as a show about the power of reclaiming your own story and breaking out of tropes, both literally and figuratively. It could have been a beautiful statement on the power of interpretation and a groundbreaking queer love story.
But it wasn’t. Because it’s Supernatural, and Supernatural is garbage, and it frankly makes sense that they would fuck up their one chance not to remembered as garbage, even when it was all written out for them.
But it doesn’t matter. Because in the end, queer people still managed to reclaim a story written with such a strong dislike for them. They managed to inject their own interpretation of that and continue to do so to this day. And that’s pretty fucking awesome.
Happy November fifth.