I get a weekly urge to talk about Supernatural. Not just because I’ve spent 3,000+ hours of my life watching those emotionally constipated men drive around in a car fighting demons (though that’s part of it), but because Supernatural is quite possibly the most unique cultural phenomenon I have ever seen.
This week, I feel the need to talk about how this show, a show that started as “what if X-Files and Buffy had a baby,” accidentally created the most influential queerbaiting blueprint in modern television history.
And before anyone comes for me in the comments – yes, I said accidentally.
Because that’s the thing about Supernatural that makes it such a fascinating case study: I genuinely don’t think anyone involved knew what they were doing at first. They stumbled backwards into creating a phenomenon that would help shape how media treats queer audiences for over a decade, and they did it all while trying to tell a story about family trauma and daddy issues with a side of apocalypse.
Oh, spoiler warning, by the way. If you haven’t seen the show and care about knowing the ending…don’t read this one. Although really, who hasn’t heard of Destiel at this point?
The Perfect Storm of 2005
To understand how we got here, we need to time travel back to 2005. Bush was president, Facebook required a college email, and The CW was about to launch a show about two brothers fighting monsters in middle America. I can make a pretty good guess that nobody – and I mean nobody – was sitting in that writers’ room thinking “how can we string along queer viewers for fifteen years?”
The show had a simple premise: Sam and Dean Winchester, grieving their mother’s supernatural death and searching for their missing father, hunt monsters while processing their trauma through violence and classic rock. Standard stuff for mid-2000s television. But something happened between the pilot and the season four introduction of Castiel that nobody saw coming.
The fandom got weird. And I say that with deep affection as someone who is absolutely part of that weirdness today. Well, not this part.
See, Supernatural arrived at this specific cultural moment when several forces collided. LiveJournal was thriving. Fanfiction was moving from hidden archives and fan zines to more public spaces. And most importantly, people were collectively starting to realize that mainstream media was never going to give us the queer stories we desperately wanted. So we did what fandom has always done – we made our own.
The early Supernatural fandom was writing Dean/Sam fiction before the show even aired its fifth episode. Yes, the brothers. I know, ok. I don’t get it, but hey, they’re not hurting anyone. By the time Castiel showed up in season four with his tax accountant fit and his inability to understand personal space, the fandom had already been trained to read subtext in every lingering glance and emotional conversation.
They were primed for Destiel before Dean and Cas even met, and once he was there, most people jumped on board that ship pretty quickly. The first Dean/Castiel fic was posted just 45 minutes after the end of Castiel’s first episode.
Enter the Angel
The crux of what made Supernatural’s queerbaiting so effective is that it was built on character choices that made narrative sense and played to the romance interpretation enough for plausible deniability.
An angel rebels against heaven for one human. He falls from grace, loses his family, starts a civil war, and essentially destroys his entire existence as he knew it. For Dean Winchester. A flawed, broken human, who never felt like he deserves to be saved.
When you write it out like that, it sounds like a romance novel you’d find in the paranormal section with a shirtless guy with wings on the cover. If either one of them had been a woman, they’d have gotten together within the first season.
But no, the show never explicitly said it was romantic (until the very end). Instead, they just gave us:
Profound bonds.
Staring contests that lasted longer than some of my relationships.
Dean praying to Cas like he was writing love letters.
Cas literally choosing Dean over heaven multiple times.
That scene where Dean tells Cas “I need you.”
And so much more.
The network discovered they could have their cake and eat it too. They could write what was essentially a love story, market it to their demographic of straight viewers as a bromance, and keep queer audiences hooked on the possibility that maybe, just maybe, this time would be different.
The Blueprint Takes Shape
By season six, other shows were taking notes. The Supernatural formula was working. The show maintained steady ratings, had an incredibly engaged fanbase who created free marketing through their art and fiction, and generated tons of press coverage from the shipping wars alone.
The blueprint is deceptively simple:
Create intense emotional intimacy between same-gender characters.
Frame it as friendship or brotherhood.
Throw in enough lingering looks and charged moments to keep queer readings valid.
Never confirm or completely deny.
Profit from both audiences.
Shows like Teen Wolf, Sherlock, and Merlin ran with this formula. Eventually, every genre show had its own queerbaiting ship. Sterek, Johnlock, Merthur – they all followed the Supernatural model. Give them enough to keep them hoping, never enough to make it real.
But Supernatural perfected something these other shows didn’t quite manage: that plausible deniability through believable storytelling. When Dean and Cas had their moments, they were backed by real character development and plot significance. Their scenes together were never just fan service; Dean and Cas’ relationship was integral to the story. Which made it so much worse when they refused to acknowledge what they were actually writing.
The Long Con
Fifteen seasons. That’s how long Supernatural ran. That’s longer than most marriages. Longer than the entire run of Friends. Longer than some actual wars. And for twelve of those seasons (Cas joined in season 4), they played this game of “will they or won’t they” with Destiel.
The show became a masterclass in gaslighting. They’d give us Dean saying “Where’s the angel?” in a voice that sounded like his heart was being ripped out, then follow it up with no homo jokes. They’d have Cas sacrifice everything for Dean, then make sure to throw in a female love interest that nobody asked for. They’d write entire episodes that played like romantic comedies, then have cast members at conventions insist that fans were “reading too much into it.”
Meanwhile, the actors were stuck in the middle. Jensen Ackles went from being uncomfortable with shipping questions to today where he (as far as I can tell) now understands the importance of queer representation and supports Destiel’s existence, even if he himself is not a champion of the ship. Misha Collins, who has always been the activist of the cast, became the unofficial spokesperson for the Destiel fandom, walking a careful line between supporting fans and not overtly contradicting the network.
In defense of the writers, we now know that several of them did advocate for Destiel behind the scenes, and wrote what they could get while toeing that same line Collins was with the network. They were just as shackled as him when it came to making the ship canon.
The most insidious part was how these networks used queer fans’ hope against us. They knew we were starved for representation. They knew we’d cling to scraps. So they threw us just enough bones to keep us watching, engaging, creating content, and driving up their social media metrics. They turned our desperation for representation into a marketing strategy.
The Confession Heard ‘Round the World
November 5, 2020. The day that broke the internet.
After twelve years of subtext, in the third-to-last episode, Castiel finally told Dean he loved him.
And then immediately got sent to superhell for it.
I’m not even being hyperbolic – he literally got sucked into a place called “The Empty” mere seconds after his confession. It was like the network said “Fine, you want representation? Here’s your representation. Now watch him die for it.”
The fandom lost its collective mind. Then the Spanish dub came out where Dean allegedly said “y yo a ti” (and I you) in response, and we achieved previously unknown levels of chaos.
The U.S. election was happening simultaneously, and somehow Destiel became part of the electoral discourse. Putin resigned (he didn’t), Georgia turned blue, and Destiel went canon via death. It was the most unhinged 24 hours in fandom history, and there are viral edits to prove it.
They gave us the confession in the most “bury your gays” way possible. Cas admits his love and immediately dies. Dean processes this for about thirty seconds before moving on to fight God. Castiel doesn’t show up in the finale even though everyone is dead and in Heaven anyways. They managed to make it canon and queerbait at the same time, which is honestly impressive in its audacity.
The Lasting Damage
The Supernatural queerbaiting model inadvertently taught media companies that queer audiences were exploitable and that we’d accept breadcrumbs instead of real representation. That our viewership and engagement could be bought with subtext and false hope.
For a while, it worked.
But, it also taught us to be better critics. To demand more. To recognize the patterns and call them out. The term “queerbaiting” entered mainstream discourse largely because of conversations around Supernatural and shows that followed its model. We developed a vocabulary for this exploitation.
The generation of fans who came up during Peak Supernatural are now creating their own media, and they’re not playing these games. Shows like Our Flag Means Death, Interview with the Vampire, and What We Do in the Shadows are now saying “what if we just made it explicitly queer from the start?”
Revolutionary concept, I know.
A Complicated Legacy
Here’s the thing I struggle most with as someone in this fandom: I can’t fully hate what Supernatural did. Yes, it was exploitative. Yes, it was frustrating. Yes, it caused real harm by perpetuating the idea that queer love was something to be hinted at but never shown.
But it also created one of the most creative, passionate, and resilient fandoms I’ve ever been a part of. The art, the fiction, the meta-analysis, the community – they built something beautiful in spite of (or maybe because of) what the show wouldn’t give us. They took their queerbaiting and turned it into a foundation for demanding better.
The Supernatural fandom raises money for charities, creates support networks for queer youth, and uses their collective frustration to push for real change in media representation. They turned queerbaiting lemons into activist lemonade. That’s not nothing, and I admire this fandom deeply for that.
A Better, Queerer Future
Supernatural ended in 2020, but its impact on how media treats queer audiences is still around.
The good news? The blueprint doesn’t work as well anymore. Audiences are savvier. We call out queerbaiting faster. We support shows that give us real representation and abandon ones that string us along.
The bad news? Some shows are still trying it. They’ve just gotten sneakier about it. Instead of obvious queerbaiting, we get “organic storytelling” that somehow never organically leads to queer relationships. We get creators who swear they’re not queerbaiting while doing exactly that.
But Supernatural’s fifteen-year experiment ultimately proved that you can’t queerbait forever. Eventually, your audience will either leave or force your hand. And if you finally give them what they want in the most half-hearted way possible, they’ll see it for what it is – too little, too late.
The Supernatural queerbaiting empire wasn’t built in a day, and it didn’t fall in one either. But it did fall.
From its ashes, I hope we can build something better. Shows with explicit queer representation from the start. Media created by and for queer audiences. Stories where love doesn’t have to hide in subtext and suffering.
So thank you, Supernatural, for teaching us exactly what we don’t want anymore when it comes to queer rep. Your accidental empire showed us how powerful we can be when we demand better. We’re not settling for breadcrumbs anymore, we want the whole damn bakery.
And we’re going to get it, I have faith in that. Even if we have to build it ourselves. One fanfic, one fan art, one explicitly queer show at a time.
Because if there’s one thing fifteen years of Supernatural taught me, it’s that fans are very, very patient.
