Doesn’t really ship but lowkey believes in it. *I* don’t even ship it but let me make this BETTER FOR YOU ALL.
Okay so let me put this into some context. My girlfriend until about a year(ish… maybe year and a half?) ago was violently anti-Destiel. Like, to the point that even before I fell in the trashcan, half of my rhetoric was designed to actually defend shippers from narratives I’d heard her breaking out (which she had unwittingly soaked up from the anti lanes she didn’t realize she was floating in like WinBros on FB that are so easy to casually fall into for years if you aren’t deep-exploration-fandom). I always defended Destiel shippers and understood their narrative and production standpoint, if from a literary arms’ length level. 13×5 slammed the nail in my dumpster coffin after holding out, again for literary reasons because to me it was a full series of bookends beyond bookends and a direct mirror of a few other earlier endgames and all kinds of other shit I’ve already discussed. Like I literally couldn’t hold out because as someone raised in literature, at that point, I could not negotiate the plot details as anything other than canonically romantic.
I found out a few months ago she had lowkey fallen into the Destiel dumpster recently–though I had my suspicions before that, such as her suggesting songs for me to make Destiel videos to. I had dismissed it as her deciding to be supportive rather than argumentative since we’d actually had a few spats (mostly from mischosen words like calling me her Cas while she identifies as Dean [cuz… her Sam would be gross; as antiDestiel as she was, she was 100x more antiWincest], only to turn around and a few sentences later talk about hating Destiel, so OW.); but nope, turns out she’d been trying to fight out of the dumpster.
Well, today I got asked about a few things by her, like The Ineffable Post, Mitch Kosterman’s RT, or whatever. And I sort of flatfaced, because I hadn’t even told her the contents of The Ineffable Post, so I started with a whole idle thing on why I don’t mind Cockles shippers, even if I feel like they may kinda be onto something, I just put it in the bin of “not my business” and move on without thinking about it as best I can, but don’t mind them because they’re just so benign and squii-based unlike the core of J2 Tinhat fandom. Well, she turns around and is like “I mean, I gotta admit. Yeah it’s not my business but Jensen is wayyyy more comfortable with Misha these days and like, sure, there’s gotta be something going on there but whatever is giving him googly eyes at Misha and looking at various parts of him the way he does, not my business but yeah.”
I think I almost fell over. And she doesn’t hang in shipper circles, she doesn’t do ANY of that, oh my gOD whAT. She also cited all by her onesies the difference between Cockles “omg I love boyfriends!” vs like “J1/2 needs to drop that fucking talentless cunt” attitudes what the fuck.
WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON THIS LAST YEAR OR TWO.
Cockles Stage 1:
Cockles Stage 2:
Cockles Stage 3:
Cockles Stage 4:
Cockles Stage 5:
Cockles Stage 6:
(Tag urself)
I guess I’m somewhere between ½, and she’s somewhere between 2/3. Pretty sure we’re gonna hang around 2 though. I really don’t consider it shipping. But – the real thing is –
I think what got me was her calling out so many J2/Cockles ship differences. Like her gaydar is going off hard on Cockles and she considers it genuine flirtation and sees it draw out a completely different side in Jensen that nobody else does, whereas she literally started – just us smoking on the porch mind you, and me weathering through it as “Yeah, Cockles shippers are pretty nice folks” – pretty much slamming on the way J2 hats read J2 because they twist any form of contact into hatting material, which – even though she hates talking concepts like “societal enforced toxic masculinity” as a woman raised extremely conservative and just now really coping with her own bi-ness – that was basically the subtext of what she was unwittingly getting at. That J2 Hats won’t even let them breathe in each other’s vicinity or pat each other on the shoulder or knee which is wildly unfair to them and to dudes, or twisting every joke they make, or moment they hang out; versus Jensen turning into a flirty, swaying gigglemonster and blatantly eyeballing certain things I don’t even have the balls to type.
I was freaking MINDBLOWN to hear this from her. MIND. BLOWN.
Because we DON’T talk about RPS in this house. We DON’T discuss it. She was once more overt about her distaste of RPS than of Destiel even. I don’t think she ever really rivaled anything against her distaste of Wincest, but, come on, it’s fucking incest. This just came up on a fluke from my recent overt laughing about Mitch and vague mention of The Ineffable Post so she got curious wtf was being talked about. (That should scale how little we talk about it – I didn’t even mention that post to her. She had no idea.) But once it came out it all came out and I’m over here like
as some of y’all may know, i used to be into the whose line rps fandom back when i was a youngin. i got older and i grew out of rps. got too empathetic, apparently.
cockles is… well… i tried very very very hard not to let it bite me. i even sent an ask a couple years ago to destieldrabblesdaily who is a cockles shipper going “i really am not into rps…. BUT THEY JUST WONT STOP”
now i’m at the stage where it’s fun to talk about and giggle over, but i still won’t read fic cause that’s still Not My Thing, tho i try (with them and several other rps ships; i just cant turn my brain off). i’m even in a group for them. A GROUP, GUYS.
they just… keep… FLIRTING
it’s so obvious that the kind of happy jensen is with misha is different than the happy he is with jared. the kind with misha is so similar to the happiness you see on his face when he’s with danneel that my brain just can’t NOT think “jfc guys YOURE IN PUBLIC”
like my god look at these two
i’ve given up fighting it and now i’m just along for the ride, wherever these assholes take me.
Chriss’ Home of Gifs, Squee, and Fandom Issues 