006: Shipping, Legitimacy, and "Outside Opinion" in fandom, fanon, and gif-culture
It dawns on me that one of the major problems with fanon and Tumblr is that gifs are often intentionally constructed to remove the context of a canonical situation and frame it in ways that are more friendly to fanon interpretation.
So then people take those gifs as gospel truth because they see the gifs more than they see the episodes. Upon revisiting the episodes they're distressed when those moments that last .002 seconds don't as heavily imply things as watching them looped in a gif would suggest.
I've seen at least five posts in the past week that attribute thoughts or opinions to someone else. For example "I asked my dad why he ships x" or "I showed this gif to my guy friend and--" There seems to be this notion that to legitimate your ships or your interpretations of events you need to have someone else--someone outside of the fandom and usually male--affirm that you're not just reading too much into things, or that you're not crazy, or that they see it too. For one, it's ridiculous that there's a notion even within fandom and shipping culture that to ship is somehow lesser or illegitimate, or that the only people who do it are clearly just reading too much into things. For another, why does it only count as legitimate if some outside male is the one confirming these suspicions? And another, these "what's happening in this gif" experiments erase all context for the situation, characterization, and scene. It's just a gif of a person's reaction to an unknown scenario. We're trained by mass media to expect romance in everything. In conducting an experiment in that way we're also diminishing a highly intricate and fantastic relationship down to "this is how they look at each other!" It's not about their relationship--the way they relate--anymore. It's about tiny ticks of the actors. Frankly, I find that degrading to the writers and actors who have given us relationships (relationships, not just "ships"--not just "I want these two characters to kiss/have sex/get married/have kids/whatever other sex-focused romantic scenario you can think of"--the relationships that these characters have, inclusive and exclusive of sex) that are as well-constructed as the ones we're getting--Dean and Cas from Supernatural especially.
There are two scenes in particular that are "infamous" and that people keep claiming to show gifs to their male friends for confirmation of the romantic overtones--the scene where Cas appears clean and whole and Dean shifts awkwardly in his seat, and the scene where Dean looks at Cas after the old woman in the rest home basically hits on Cas.
In the first situation, the gif is always taken out of context and to impose a "boner" reaction onto it erases all of Dean's character history and the shared history of his relationship with Castiel. (Yes, I'm still mad about the whole "boner" fiasco on Tumblr. Massive guilt complexes do not equal "boner.") To understand the gestures of both characters in that scene you would have to know their entire story from the start and fundamentally understand the issues of both characters--something that any unsuspecting subject of an experiment couldn't even begin to guess. The trust issues, the guilt issues, the self-loathing--all of that is even directly in the episode. No one outside of the fandom is going to read that into the gif when they don't know it exists, and the "pretentious jerks" and "anti-shippers" that the experimenters are running these experiments to confront are people who do watch the show and are aware of those character traits.
In the second situation it's usually reported that someone says "oh, he's looking at a significant other--his girlfriend or wife." What they fail to inform these supposed test subjects is that the person he's looking at is--in that moment--the subject of a joke. It's similar to the look you give your best friend when the person you were just talking about walks in the room and does exactly what you were just discussing. It's a joke. If you were tell your test subjects "oh, by the by, this woman just said something funny in regards to the person he's looking at" they probably wouldn't read the gif as romantic, but as a reaction to a punchline. Because that's what it is.
Most media is heavily romance focused--even media where romance isn't the primary objective. We're bombarded with images of love, sex, relationships. If you show someone a small cycling snippet of a media object the odds are pretty high that it's going to be assumed to have a romantic overtone. For me, a large part of the glory of SPN is that it doesn't focus on romance at all. Romance or romantic relationships only ever exist to demonstrate how unfeasible, dangerous, or unrealistic they are. Trying to construe every single nanosecond of a show like Supernatural as explicitly focused on romance fundamentally warps perception of the show, both by viewers and by non-viewers. It erases the nuances that have been painstakingly built into the relationships in canon. So if I hand you a gif and give you canonical context do things still get read as romantic? They may. There's plenty about Dean and Cas's relationship that's implicitly treated as romantic. But not every second is about how much they love each other.
Guys, I ship Dean and Cas pretty damn hard. But everything doesn't have to be about romance, sex, and kisses. Take the goggles off and discover the fantastic nuance of the show, the writing, and the performances that they give us. And, yes, the romantic under/overtones between Dean and Castiel.
So then people take those gifs as gospel truth because they see the gifs more than they see the episodes. Upon revisiting the episodes they're distressed when those moments that last .002 seconds don't as heavily imply things as watching them looped in a gif would suggest.
I've seen at least five posts in the past week that attribute thoughts or opinions to someone else. For example "I asked my dad why he ships x" or "I showed this gif to my guy friend and--" There seems to be this notion that to legitimate your ships or your interpretations of events you need to have someone else--someone outside of the fandom and usually male--affirm that you're not just reading too much into things, or that you're not crazy, or that they see it too. For one, it's ridiculous that there's a notion even within fandom and shipping culture that to ship is somehow lesser or illegitimate, or that the only people who do it are clearly just reading too much into things. For another, why does it only count as legitimate if some outside male is the one confirming these suspicions? And another, these "what's happening in this gif" experiments erase all context for the situation, characterization, and scene. It's just a gif of a person's reaction to an unknown scenario. We're trained by mass media to expect romance in everything. In conducting an experiment in that way we're also diminishing a highly intricate and fantastic relationship down to "this is how they look at each other!" It's not about their relationship--the way they relate--anymore. It's about tiny ticks of the actors. Frankly, I find that degrading to the writers and actors who have given us relationships (relationships, not just "ships"--not just "I want these two characters to kiss/have sex/get married/have kids/whatever other sex-focused romantic scenario you can think of"--the relationships that these characters have, inclusive and exclusive of sex) that are as well-constructed as the ones we're getting--Dean and Cas from Supernatural especially.
There are two scenes in particular that are "infamous" and that people keep claiming to show gifs to their male friends for confirmation of the romantic overtones--the scene where Cas appears clean and whole and Dean shifts awkwardly in his seat, and the scene where Dean looks at Cas after the old woman in the rest home basically hits on Cas.
In the first situation, the gif is always taken out of context and to impose a "boner" reaction onto it erases all of Dean's character history and the shared history of his relationship with Castiel. (Yes, I'm still mad about the whole "boner" fiasco on Tumblr. Massive guilt complexes do not equal "boner.") To understand the gestures of both characters in that scene you would have to know their entire story from the start and fundamentally understand the issues of both characters--something that any unsuspecting subject of an experiment couldn't even begin to guess. The trust issues, the guilt issues, the self-loathing--all of that is even directly in the episode. No one outside of the fandom is going to read that into the gif when they don't know it exists, and the "pretentious jerks" and "anti-shippers" that the experimenters are running these experiments to confront are people who do watch the show and are aware of those character traits.
In the second situation it's usually reported that someone says "oh, he's looking at a significant other--his girlfriend or wife." What they fail to inform these supposed test subjects is that the person he's looking at is--in that moment--the subject of a joke. It's similar to the look you give your best friend when the person you were just talking about walks in the room and does exactly what you were just discussing. It's a joke. If you were tell your test subjects "oh, by the by, this woman just said something funny in regards to the person he's looking at" they probably wouldn't read the gif as romantic, but as a reaction to a punchline. Because that's what it is.
Most media is heavily romance focused--even media where romance isn't the primary objective. We're bombarded with images of love, sex, relationships. If you show someone a small cycling snippet of a media object the odds are pretty high that it's going to be assumed to have a romantic overtone. For me, a large part of the glory of SPN is that it doesn't focus on romance at all. Romance or romantic relationships only ever exist to demonstrate how unfeasible, dangerous, or unrealistic they are. Trying to construe every single nanosecond of a show like Supernatural as explicitly focused on romance fundamentally warps perception of the show, both by viewers and by non-viewers. It erases the nuances that have been painstakingly built into the relationships in canon. So if I hand you a gif and give you canonical context do things still get read as romantic? They may. There's plenty about Dean and Cas's relationship that's implicitly treated as romantic. But not every second is about how much they love each other.
Guys, I ship Dean and Cas pretty damn hard. But everything doesn't have to be about romance, sex, and kisses. Take the goggles off and discover the fantastic nuance of the show, the writing, and the performances that they give us. And, yes, the romantic under/overtones between Dean and Castiel.