Oh Shit This Is A Good Post - Tumblr Posts

Hi, I've never really watched much SPN but I saw you say in a post to look through your J*red tag, (I could've sworn people loved him but I took a long tumblr break) and I'm confused about the Destiel thing. I thought when the Destiel episode aired, that people said Jensen looked like he was holding back a slur in that episode. But also excited for it? Which is it?

let me preface this by saying that i'm not mad at YOU at all, but i really am fucking annoyed that people took one screencap with no further context and made it a meme that a whole person was homophobic because of what they interpreted as his facial expression.

first of all, here's a gifset of that part of the scene so you can see what's said and how they look while saying it. here's a gif of the specific bit that the screencap was taken from:

i can't speak for anyone else, but i'm pretty good at reading facial expressions, and i've been watching jensen/dean for years now. i can tell you that this facial expression, being shown in response to "i love you" is dean saying please don't, not like this.

because cas isn't JUST saying "i love you", he's saying it to trigger his own death, in order to save dean's life. by the time cas says it, dean knows that, he knows this is goodbye. and he can't fucking bear for what's between them to be said out loud like this, for the first, the only time, not as cas leaving him again, not as cas sacrificing himself for dean.

this is nothing remotely like "i want to say a slur", it's not pain because he doesn't feel the same; it's pain because this is basically dean's worst nightmare. cas has just told him everything he always wanted to hear, and he's saying it as a goodbye.

BUT, what's more important than my personal interpretation of these facial expressions is that in jensen's first panel after this episode, he said - as tactfully as possible - that a lot of dean's reaction in this scene had been cut.

(he also was very animated when talking about the episode and this scene in particular. he said that he had a crew member record the scene on jensen's personal phone because it was so important to him. he and misha sent fan reaction videos to each other that night. he was excited while talking to fans and asking what they thought, all smiles and delight with how much we liked it.)

you can see that, right after the previous gifs, dean looks over his shoulder at where the empty is coming for cas, and his eyes are absolutely filled with tears.

as soon as the camera angles switch back, the tears are gone.

so we know there were takes where jensen was acting his ASS off, he was full-on crying, and they just cut it all for the blandest reaction possible. because the thing is that while they filmed this episode, 15x18, just before quarantine, they finished filming the last two around six months later. however, 15x18 didn't AIR until after those six months.

long story short, it appears that they were going to make destiel canon, but that long break caused the cw execs to get nervous and hit the panic button to cut out as much gay as possible (most likely to keep the gay cooties off of padalecki to repackage him for his new show walker). i cannot emphasize enough how everything about the season (which was genuinely good) leading up to this moment absolutely screamed 'canon endgame destiel', and then something happened, and nothing about the final episode (which was horrible) or what anyone says about it makes any sense.

we know that misha was in vancouver at time of filming the finale, yet castiel never reappeared. we know that at least ten scenes were cut from the finale script, and the aired episode was suspiciously short with a lot of filler. we know that the explanations people have given for why things changed don't hold water, and we've gotten different stories from different people, some of whom are obviously under NDAs.

okay, so the reason i explained all of that is because fans more knowledgeable in filmmaking than i have analyzed this 15x18 confession scene and determined that it's not just that they used the most boring takes, but they actually butchered it. i.e. they used footage of jensen from different parts of the scene and shoehorned it into this moment so that it was as not-gay as possible.

my friend @winchestersingerautorepair has done a bunch of meta on this topic if you happen to be interested on the above mentioned analysis of the editing.

tl;dr: they butchered jensen's acting to make the scene as straight as possible.

and despite that, they couldn't edit out the fact that dean spent hours sobbing on the floor after cas was taken.