One thing I always love: fighting in the fandom when you are on the same side.

This post is queued so is taking place a bit… after this started, but it’s still relevant. Of the people who ship Castiel and Dean Winchester together (Deancas, Destiel), there are people who ship this pairing and don’t really like Dean. They put up with him because Cas loves him and they like the pairing. And that’s not the first odd thing about this. They’ve spent a sizable portion of their time on social media shit-talking Dean, making fun of people who like Dean — even a little bit more than Cas, I like both of them equally so I can’t really speak to liking one of them more than the other — and generally being extremely rude about the problem that they themselves chose to create on social media. They literally completely made this problem.

Luckily for me, I have not actively been engaged about this even though most of the problem seems to be taking place on Twitter. And I’m probably going to choose not to engage unless Cas stans — one of my friends put it beautifully and wonderfully — engage me, and get extremely belligerent in the process. I’m trying to be the mature one here. It should go without saying at this point that the Supernatural fandom is alive and well, at least depending on how you want to classify the word well, even though the show ended almost a year ago (and simultaneously feels like the show literally ended just yesterday, believe it or not).

I like how Castiel just stands there watching the explosion, staring at the burning vehicle.

I’m not sure where I have and have not mentioned this, but during… a debate with someone (although I may be mischaracterizing that in that, toward the end, I repeatedly asked them to stop contacting me, and they only did so when I blocked them after they fraudulently reported my [old] Twitter account to Twitter for self-harm and suicidal content, causing Twitter to have to verify that there was none), they threatened to contact my minor children without my permission and send them what they made clear enough was explicit Supernatural fanfiction. All of this — them continuing to Tweet me after I had by that point repeatedly asked them to stop, the actual Tweets itself that I just referenced — initially “did not violate Twitter’s Terms of Service” in spite of the fact that multiple people reported the Tweets where they told me that they wanted to contact my minor children without my permission and… yeah. I literally don’t feel like typing it all out again.

So I began Tweeting to Twitter support (Support?), rife with a screenshot of the events as they had occurred, even if in the screenshot their Twitter handle was not visible since I did not want people to potentially go vigilante on them. I asked them if they were condoning the fact that someone threatened to contact my minor children without my consent and send them explicit content. I asked more than once. I Tweeted it to Jack for the sake of doing so, and I Tweeted their Twitter Spaces account when Twitter Support included them in a Tweet. Only after all of that, it seemed, did Twitter take action on the account in question, suspending it. And I could tell that the action in question was manual, because I got automated e-mails from Twitter initially stating that no reported Tweet violated the Terms of Service, and then all of a sudden this person’s account is suspended. I can’t say that I feel bad that this person’s account got suspended. I don’t.

The moment you drag someone’s personal life into it, particularly family members of theirs, is when you lose.

For the sake of preserving mental clarity in all of my readers, I am not and will not share pictures actively taken from the finale episode itself. This is a behind the scenes picture that was taken that I liked a whole lot.

So many people still complain about how triggering Supernatural‘s finale was for some people, claiming that The CW “shouldn’t have been responsible for their mental health”, that they “should have known better before watching it, especially because it’s Supernatural” and an assortment of other things that almost a year later aggravate me to this day. Without going into extraneous detail to respect the mental health issues that fans of Supernatural and my readers may have, I’d like to say a few things about that, which I’ll get into.

First of all, I absolutely think that the rating of the show should have been raised for the finale alone and quite possibly the episode titled “Despair”. As it stands right now, Supernatural is TV-14, meaning that anyone fourteen years of age or older can freely and legally watch it… and if adults were so triggered by the events that occurred in the finale, one can only imagine how distressing and triggering this might have been (or in some cases, must have been) to the teenagers that happened to be tuning in. Being as vague as possible for the sake of this post, this involved a major character death in a particularly… bad way, and I don’t think that people should have been allowed to just walk into that with no warning. I think it was wrong of The CW to provide no warning that… the events I’m describing actually happened on air. If you’re going to make this to where teenagers can watch this, you need to be more responsible. End of. Except not…

My second point: Jared Padalecki has made bank off of his “Always Keep Fighting” campaign in honor of spreading awareness about depression and erasing the stigma, so to say that “people should have known better before watching this” is erroneous because Supernatural is known to have viewers who are mentally ill, which is made up of the bread and butter of mental illness (hence Jared’s campaign), and that spreading awareness of this campaign via the various items that he sells or that are sold on his behalf are helping Jared make bank. It’s incredibly hypocritical to say that “people should have known better before watching this since it’s Supernatural” given Jared’s investment in spreading awareness about depression as it directly relates to the show itself. I mean, the phrase “always keep fighting” was intentionally dropped in the finale.

To be perfectly honest, I haven’t watched The CW since this aired. I have a lot of other, better things to do.

But as we stand as a society, we need to do less gatekeeping of those with mental illness from things that they would enjoy in the appropriate capacities, giving warnings when necessary and raising ratings when necessary. It’s the least we can do. We shouldn’t leave those with mental illness to “fend for themselves”.