Once you stop looking at Supernatural episodes in isolation and instead look at the whole thing holistically it's impossible to think the writers didn't know what was going on. Once you can let it into your heart that the show was good and did things on purpose you can see the things that go across episodes and seasons. The callbacks. The clear omages.

Once you look at the queer coding as a whole it's fairly obvious:

• It started very early - s1 early
• Misha/Cas didn't turn Dean queer
• This was not a lone writer fighting the good fight
• It involved multiple departments working together
• There is no way any of the showrunners were unaware of it happening
• There is no way Jensen wasn't an active participant

Supernatural is a modern day masterpiece on queer coding. It should be studied and lauded for what they managed to do.

But fandom doesn't do that because people would rather make jokes about Jensen being homophobic and how nothing was done on purpose.

this has really been one of the biggest takeaways from the rewatch I'm working on: more of what makes this show good is intentional and on purpose than the fandom-at-large seems willing to admit these days.

it's become de rigueur to try to "infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters" the SPN writers room, not just in terms of the queer stuff but just in terms of anything interesting or enjoyable that came out of the show. "Supernatural is bad except for when it's not but because it's bad the times that it's not must just be an accident because the incompetent writers just happened to coincidentally do a cool thing by mistake" energy.

my personal theory on why this is the case is complex, but I think the bulk of it comes from people evaluating Supernatural, not based on what it's doing, but rather on what it isn't doing. "it would've been so cool if SPN did X! why didn't they do X?" well, for one thing, a good half the things people talk about that could be filled in for X in this scenario would've required an FX budget ten times greater than the consistently-broke network would ever have been able to afford, and for another thing, X was never the intention of the story being told and if you're evaluating the show based on how it failed to do X rather than how successfully it did Y (where Y is the thing it was actually doing on purpose) of course you're going to be disappointed in it! but when you stop worrying about X and start looking what it's actually doing, you start to realize that SPN does Y pretty well a lot of the time. generally not flawlessly— because if you're expecting flawless execution that consistently satisfies all audiences from a low-budget genre show you're kidding yourself— but very effectively nonetheless.

which brings me back around to the subtextual (and more-than-subtextual) queerness of Dean. and like my good friends above me have said: this was done with purpose and intentionality from much earlier on than is often supposed.

I'm inclined to think that a lot of the queercoding of Dean in the very early seasons of the show was done without the intent of actually making anything of it. A combination of some of the creatives leaning into the early aughts "lolgay" of it all and some of the creatives earnestly building queerness into Dean's character. it all adds up over time, but those early seasons it was done without the expectation of it ever being anything more significant than a bit of subtext to enhance the way Dean's character is positioned as a complex navigation of gender performance. but if you're actually keeping track of what that subtext is and how it's used within those early seasons, it becomes extremely apparent that it is being put into the show intentionally. some writers will call back to queer subtext from earlier episodes, there will be consistent visual motifs across multiple episodes... these things don't happen by accident. and of course as the show went on and the cultural context in which it was being produced evolved, that subtext becomes more and more overt and begins to encroach on the core meaning of the text more and more directly... all of which was also done on purpose.

were there some things on Supernatural that were accidental? yeah, absolutely. they weren't casting Castiel as a love interest for Dean so there wasn't a screen test for romantic chemistry; they had no way of knowing the energy between Misha and Jensen would be so intense you could practically use it to power the entire eastern seaboard. that was an accident, but one which (if you actually listen to the things the creatives say) the writers and directors and other creative contributors were very obviously excited about. they made subsequent decisions about the direction of the plot and character arcs with that taken into account.

ultimately, fiction (and especially television) is a constructed reality. some things may be improvised by the actors, or may be a coincidence of weather while filming a given scene, or a last second innovation by the director... but even once the in-the-moment things have happened, the decision to leave them in or leave them on the editing room floor, the decision about which takes to use for the final episode? those are all active choices made by the creators. and the idea that this much queercoding, this much innuendo and subtext and significant character work that all leads back to the implication that Dean is incredibly queer, somehow got left in by mistake or by accident... that's just not how this works.

here’s a bunch of links of meta on dean not being the straightest straight to ever straight, earliest one might be from 2007