Time to put on my old lady hat for a minute
I’ve seen on my dash some people commenting that ‘well, yeah, the show gave us permission to have our fan fiction, but we didn’t need it.’
You’re right. They can’t stop you from thinking creative thoughts inspired by your show and your ship. They can’t stop you from writing them down or drawing them and sharing them with your friends. Even if the Copyright Fascists seize power and take everything off the Internet with even the slightest potential to infringe, you still have pencils and paper. You can go back to ye olde school fanzine, where someone collects, copies, and distributes fanworks and there’s not a lot they can do to stop it. (My first contact with fan fiction was just like that - a fanzine for Pern that a friend’s roommate submitted to.)
So, yeah, permission to ship? Eh. Maybe not so big a deal, from your perspective. But really, with my old lady hat on, it was huge.
The show ACKNOWLEDGED THE EXISTENCE OF AT LEAST TWO AND POSSIBLY THREE SLASH SHIPS. And the show welcomed them. This is new. This is big. Slash used to be the dirty little secret of fandom. This absolutely would not have happened back in the day. This probably wouldn’t have happened ten years ago. It might not have happened five years ago. Even if TPTB of a particular property was aware of fanfiction (not a given) and approved of it (even less likely) there was still this attitude about slash: ‘why do you have to make them gay? can we pretend this doesn’t exist and hope it goes away? or at least shove it over into a corner and make it clear that it’s icky?’, often even from other fans who were writing gen or M/F fic.
For TPTB of a TV show to be okay with slash - that’s new.
For TPTB of a show to ACKNOWLEDGE IN THE SHOW FOR THE WHOLE WORLD TO SEE that 'yes, we know fans - not the crazy ones, the well-adjusted ones - are writing stories featuring our characters as M/M couples and we value it as an expression of your love for the show’? I think I need the fainting couch.
I missed this - when did TPTB confirm Destiel in season 10?