now that it’s all over, i gotta say how incredible and bitterly hilarious it is that not even greed is stronger than homophobia.
like, people love misha collins. people love castiel. when they killed cas off in s7, viewership dropped by thirty percent and they had to scramble to rewrite him back into the show - and he’s only gotten more popular since then. at spn conventions, they have two costume competitions - one for castiel cosplayers, and one for everyone else. there are only a fraction of sam and dean costumes compared to cas costumes. misha is, as far as i know, the only cast member to do photo ops as his character - he puts on the suit and coat and takes pictures with fans while behaving like cas. people love it.
and people love destiel. it’s one of the biggest ships on the fucking planet. it has 90k+ fics on ao3. you can find destiel merch just about anywhere. after 15x18, destiel trended online over the presidential election.
a ton of people tuned into the finale just on the hope that cas/misha would return, that they’d been lied to when it was said 15x18 was his last episode. if they had teased a clip of cas coming back - forget that, if they had teased a clip of a kiss? millions of people would have tuned in to see it happen. people who’d never watched the show and never would have watched the finale would have watched. sure, they would have faced some blowback from the conservative fans, but that wouldn’t have mattered after the finale.
and if they had embraced cas and embraced destiel, they could have milked that cash cow for years. they could have marketed to the entire queer community, they could have patted themselves on the back and “proven” they were never queerbaiting at all. they could have grown the fandom instead of shrinking it. the money-making opportunities on cas and destiel are practically limitless.
instead, they fucked over not only cas fans and destiel fans, but dean fans and sam fans; i’m not in w*ncest and bronly circles, but i can’t imagine even they enjoyed this, considering sam just moved on with his life after dean died and they were separated for 50 years. people are utterly furious. there’s a real chance that this fandom is going to completely implode, game of thrones style, and nobody will want to go to cons or buy spn merch anymore. it could have been cool to like spn, now it’s more embarrassing than ever before.
and all that because some dudes out there were like, i hate the idea of two men kissing more than i love piles of money. that’s fucking wild.
