Ehhh, letting fans interfere is always a bad move cause it encourages crazy and annoying fan behavior. I knew that had happened once or twice on OUAT (and both of the cases I know of were terrible writing decisions!), but didn't know it was the case for SPN. It sends the message that if you yell loud enough you'll get your way, which really shouldn't be how it goes. I'd be more like 'take it or leave it' if I was a writer :p
I had no idea anyone would dislike Charlie being gay??? wtf. Overall I've only seen positive reactions to her, except for some pretty mild stuff about her being annoying. (I agreed with that at first tbh but she won me over)

I know it doesn't make sense to hate on love interests when none of my ships don't have a chance of becoming canon. I mean, I don't even want my ships to be canon, cause canon makes things boring and also if something is safe and sane enough to have canon potential it's too vanilla for me to like in the first place! However, I'm not even pretending to talk about something that makes sense, just about pure emotional response that is far beyond my control. I can't just start liking a character only because I know I have bad reasons for not liking them, it's just an automatic reaction I get, even if the show has already ended so there's literally zero chance of the canon changing in any way! It's not just female characters that get this reaction from me btw, in some shows like OUAT of Buffy where my preferred ships are femslash or some alternative het ship for the female character, I want the love interest guys out of the way. My ideal show would have zero canon romances (for main / important / interesting characters) but lots of subtext for all kinds of interesting ships. And yes I get that this is super childish but yeah... :c

lol I can't believe you actually speed up his scenes. Doesn't it transform their voices in a weird way..?? I'd imagine it takes the drama out of the scenes if you're listening to squirrel!Cas :p or maybe that would make them slightly more entertaining, idk.

I started to reply yesterday, made one wrong click and everything was gone. I was so mad at myself, I closed the tab.

It's not like writer would admit it, but it's pretty clear that it's reason Bela was killed and Castiel is still there. The (vocal) fans wouldn't admit it either since they'd have to admit their own misogyny and that's never cute.
I only see reactions on ONTD and occasionally tumblr (but that's pretty much a thing of the past since most people on my dash have moved on to other fandoms), but yeah, her being gay was not really see as a positive everywhere.

I actually have some canon ships, but as soon as they become canon, I stop reading fanfic or pretty much thinking about them. You're doing shipping right though and everyone has characters they just don't like (my list includes two female names I should never mention anywhere).
What I was talking about was the delusion some fans have that their ship has to become canon and it's actually already on the show. Yes, a lot of people read that into scenes between Dean and Castiel and get angry that there isn't more. And these are the vocal people. Most shippers are luckily not like that.

My ideal show would have zero canon romances (for main / important / interesting characters) but lots of subtext for all kinds of interesting ships.
That actually sounds awesome! The Avengers had that for me. No romantic relationships, but I did kinda ship Steve/Tony and Natasha/Clint at the end.

Some people skip scenes with characters they don't like. My thing is better lol
And noooo, everything is just faster. Most of the time I only do 1.5, so it's really like a person who talks a little faster. That's also how I watch the "previously on" sequences for most shows, my memory is not that bad that I need a full refresher every time. I actually do that with more characters and scenes. Whenever I feel like I'm not paying proper attention, I just speed it up a little because then I have to pay attention, but I also don't have to spend as much time on a boring scene.

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree re: possible misogyny... I just don't see it, especially since the majority of the fans are female themselves. I think the obvious reason is just that they don't like love interest characters, they have the same NOPE gut reaction as I do, which has nothing to do with hating women and everything to do with shipping and the fact that most of them are probably straight so of course a cute male character with a (once) interesting personality has the potential to become much more popular than a cute female character with an interesting personality. They might still like other female characters that don't interfere with their ships, or maybe female characters in some other fandoms. I don't think anyone would mind if characters like Jody or Linda Tran got more screentime, but even if not, I don't really have a problem with SPN having a male-centric cast or fandom, it's no worse than the opposite. I love good female characters but SPN is so not the show I go looking for them, when there are so many other options to find them :>
as for writers, they could always just put a not liked character on a bus so if they choose character death instead, I think there must be another reason.

Thanks for saying that I do shipping right, I just don't see that much difference between my shipping and everyone else's shipping, except of course that I don't expect my ships to become canon. I'm not actually sure why I draw the line in the specific place I do: that I want canon to cater to me as in not having canon ships in the way, yet I get annoyed when other fans expect canon to cater to them as in making their ships actually canon. Maybe it's cause I hate all kinds of serious accusations (sexism, racism etc) and 'queerbaiting' is definitely on that list. Some fans like to throw it at the writers as an attempt to force them to write their ships into the show, as if that was ever going to happen. There are crazier fandoms (SHERLOCK), but Destiel is pretty close tbh. I just have never seen anything between them in canon so idek how anyone can get it in their minds that there's queerbaiting going on? where's the bait? Annnnd to open another can of worms, the thing called subtext used to be well liked at some point, what happened? I still belong to that old school slash shipper base that is happy to get any subtext, intentional or just up to my interpretation. The current fans are more 'all or nothing' about their ships, but making such demands to writers is not that smart cause if those are the options, almost every writer chooses nothing, so I'd just prefer to enjoy my 'queerbaity' subtext in peace. And for this reason I think I'm very much doing shipping 'wrong' :S

Well, it might have been my mistake because I was still talking about Bela and that was six years ago. Tumblr has made people aware of misogyny and, more importantly, internalized sexism. Lots of women are misogynists and just tend to pit women against each other without realizing it. Since season four, at lot of that comes from wanting Dean/Castiel together. Like you said, crazy fan(dom)s! They are usually the louder ones.

Maybe it is the fact that the SPN writers just like to kill off female characters! Cole is still alive and after being in more than one episode, they could have also just killed him. Then again, so are Jody and Donna (I'd love to see a spin-off or mini-series with them <3), maybe they are getting better at it.

Queerbaiting is a term I see used so often by Dean/Castiel shippers and I don't get. Yes, they joke (one was "Cass get out of my butt" or something like that), but that's something you see everywhere and does imo not constitute queerbaiting. I don't even want to talk/think about Sherlock in that regard.

I don't interact with the Hawaii Five-0 fandom at all, but the subtext and shipping potential between Steve and Danny was just phenomenal on the show. Hopefully nobody called that queerbaiting.

Okay, we both doing it wrong then lol
I'm actually thinking that there's actually a greater divide between ages now then there was before when it comes to shipping. It's the often younger (SJW) generation that thinks like that. And with younger I mean mostly people under 20.