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hellerism · 3 years

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Rank Supernatural's showrunners from least fav to most fav and explain why (include any spicy drama and takes).

ooooh hm ok.....gonna have to think about this one

4. miss sera homophobia gamble. this one is just a given; seasons 6 and 7 are widely known as the two worst seasons of supernatural. she is such a mystery to me, bc she tried to permakill cas, but she was the one who convinced kripke to introduce cas in the first place so like...she did that to herself. she’s also written some of my favorite episodes, including dead in the water, so. what goes on sera. my general opinion on her is that she’s a good writer for individual episodes but she should never be handed the reins for an entire show and also she needs someone to check her for the casual homophobia she always sprinkles in for flavor.

3. andrew dabb. i did enjoy parts of his seasons! i loooove dadstiel and their little family, and i think jack was one of the best things to happen to supernatural in a long time. the deconstruction of mary in season 12 makes me absolutely insane. however, his seasons are also...boring. his overarching plots like the british men of letters and aw michael were very underwhelming. season 12 was the first season i watched live and is also one of my least favorites. i also hate whatever vendetta he had against dean like. look how they massacred my boy. and his glorification of john is unacceptable. he deserves jail for lebanon, even if i do enjoy some of the other episodes he’s written.

now, for season 15, i LOVED the idea behind it. i loved the themes of free will, fans taking over the narrative, death of the author, etc. i thought chuck was a great villain, and i genuinely liked how most of it was executed. of course it all fell apart at the very end, and i wish we knew why. i want to know if this was always dabbs plan or if he was forced to change the ending, and if he was forced to change it, what was it originally supposed to be? i just want to know who to blame.

2. jeremy carver. now, his era is the one i remember the least of, but most of what i do remember is very good. season 8 was obviously one of the best seasons for deancas (it’s called season gr8 for a reason) and i do remember enjoying 11. couldn’t tell you a thing about 9 or 10. his biggest crimes were killing off both kevin and charlie (i mean even if he didn’t write those episodes he still let it happen), so i dislike him for that. again i don’t remember much else so i can’t really say more about his era.

other than that i generally enjoy carvers writing. ive noticed he’s written some of the more baity deancas episodes. like he was insane for free to be you and me. im not sure when he switched to actually supporting it but hey im glad he did.

1. and yes, unfortunately, that leaves kripke as my favorite spn showrunner. despite everything his era is my favorite. sure, a lot of the things that were cohesive about seasons 1-5 were by sheer luck and coincidence, but at least they were cohesive. the story and aesthetics were great, sam was an actual character with personality and motivations (early seasons bitchy bloodfreak sammy supremacy), and each season raised the stakes in an organic way so that the danger actually felt real. i like most of the episodes that he wrote. however just bc he’s (sigh) my favorite showrunner doesn’t mean i like him and i’d verbally abuse him if i ever saw him irl.

kripke era suffers from a lot of misogyny homophobia and racism (they all do). even though i enjoyed season 1 it was especially bad to indigenous people, and im sure it does not get better from there. i am not looking forward to the gordon storyline when i rewatch season 2. plus there’s the whole “supernatural is built on the white supremacist ideal that white suburbia needs to be defended from the Other” thing that kripke is responsible for bc he created the show but never bothered to interrogate (except for gordon but im sure i dont have to explain why that did not work at all). the writing for all the women was atrocious and obviously there’s all the homophobic jabs and jokes but whatever we already knew that i can just brush the misogyny and homophobia off. and honestly the casual homophobia is funny sometimes.

tldr: there are no good supernatural showrunners they all suck

#i should’ve been the supernatural showrunner i could fix the show #also sorry i don’t know much about behind the scenes drama i dont seek that out on my own #ask

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incarnateirony · 4 years

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Representation, Authorial Diversity, and more.

“I’ll take some beef jerky and a pack of menthols.”

Been a while since most of you thought about that line, hasn’t it? And for some of you it somehow sends some primitive lizard brain gaydar into overdrive and you can’t really pinpoint why, can you? It makes no sense, that line alone, and how it stands -- but between all of the talk of both Bobo Berens and LGBT media history, including The Celluloid Closet/Vito Russo or the Vito Russo Test, this moment actually puts a pin in a shift within our show, its handling of content formerly completely overlooked by creatives, and the importance of diversifying our writing crews that we all press for.

It was the moment our show leaned, and frankly-- should have been the moment the straights panicked. In fact, some of them did, just before it aired, and then everyone has played at oblivious since.

Before seasons air, we get news on new authors being added to teams, or other workers. Pre-S9 was no different, with fandom finding a tweet from Bobo Berens, our first open-closet LGBT author. I mean, Out And Proud. A true king.

The association if this is the mention of the Bechdel Test, a step aside of Vito Russo.

Now let us begin.

Well first of all I’m just gonna let everyone get a giggle at how Bobo handled the straight male knee coil:

But anyway the response to his initial tweet was a merry go round of concern trolling in the area of “OH DEAR I FEEL SO SORRY FOR YOU PLEASE ALLOW US THE NORMAL ASSBAGS OF THE FANDOM TO TELL YOU AN AUTHOR HOW STRAIGHT THE CHARACTERS ON THE SHOW YOU’RE WRITING FOR ARE” and I dunno, it’s comedy.

Whether or not Bobo was addressing SPN as a new project in particular -- and it, from a dark age of SPN I’ve covered the upheaval during -- this is important. Really, really important.

Let’s say that timeline does overlap Bobo’s, and he did implicitly believe it; he might have had to write them as Straight Guys; but his own deep-seated place in the LGBT community developed resonant text, he made change. Change enough that when his first script was put into motion, the showrunner took one look at it and, for the first time in recorded history, we had note of some sort of intent --

Misha went on to say “so that’s what we played there.”

Regardless of anyone’s misunderstanding about how the fandom riled themselves up prematurely and shot themselves in the foot by lighting a CW exec on fire in the middle of network level board/CEO rotation commotion, or whether or not it’s visible enough for anyone--

this, this moment, this content, created by this LGBT individual led to this first known forward motion of intentful creative subtext. People can hilariously try to argue semantics about it that summarily boil down to “I mean it could be metaphorical jilted lovers it could be this it could be jilted lover bros, it’s just a turn of phrase!” in a loop as they’ve done with this data for six years until it dies every time, but this was it. This was the moment.

There is a nuance in this sort of writing -- how easy would it be for Dean to come up and say, “I’ll take some beef jerky.” Dean’s the meat man, Dean loves meat! We’ve seen it in other, new, straight authors the first time they try to tick off the Dean checklist, but like many lessons, that extra line leading into that smile holds volumes of LGBT history unspoken.

I think several of us Old Gays(TM) have banged on about the necessity of reading the Celluloid Closet, because for as much as people think they’re chasing queer subtext around here, it’s like they have completely missed that there actually is like, a printed, accepted code of conduct on this shit, basically. That’s not exactly what it was released for, but if you’re LGBT and engaged in lit and over 40 like you’ve read and understand and know this.

I’m not going to sit here and over-needle that line; most of you felt it the second your eyes drifted over it; but the sum of it is -- why that, what charming secret comes with that smile, a dean we’ve never seen smoke either, how is this part of how Dean throws himself back before his ex buddy leaves more unseen, *why* is that the hook? These are ironically things that no lit crit study *beyond* excessive citation of Celluloid Closet will really capture. This is a form of queer coding -- not the villainous disaster type that queer coding actually *is*, but the subversive form as it’s begun to be casually addressed in the population with positive, resonant content by authors choked out by IP holders while trying to service an audience. Or sometimes, even starting to accidentally.

So you know, you can unironically double down on the simplicity of Dean implicitly probably being a smoker (a possible read of subtext!), and I think this is kinda where the bizarre split happened tbh, because dude bros double down subconsciously into each reading of this kind of coding-- Dean just smokes, or this or that, though it grows thinner by year. Not about why that line is tossed, and how, and does just set off some sort of TV pheremone we all swamp like a bee hive. None of these moments truly mean anything independently. But it is the perspective and voice the text begins to take. The difference between that and “Hey pal [chews on jerky before buying] marlboros and got any pie?” in one moment that knocked everybody around on their ass in the fray of it. And then it all just went gayer from there, as if framed by one sharp moment that set the rest of the tone.

Hopefully you’ve all read my giant post about the history of this all to remember what I mean by accidentally, but even Bobo posted on it before,

That’s all an aside to the general point but worth placing into the edge of the conversation here.

The simple fact is, an activist gay man joined the show, and possibly with ‘keep it straight’ notes wrote some stuff so resonant, due to his point of view in life and the world, that even the showrunner decided to further guide it in that direction. It blossomed a direction.

The direction was small and slow and meek at first, (well, in final product -- don’t get me started at how S10 looks if all the cut scenes were included) with subtext running as dull echoes in Colette (oh look he wrote that too), and maybe more obvious with classic heart songs -- but even this was more structured than “Misha inherited abandoned storyline they scrubbed the romance out of as best they could”, or “Sera Gamble is a dumbass” that just happened to feature great chemistry and some resonant elements, like Bobo mentioned, we all connected with. But to actually constructively choose to incorporate these, no matter how quietly, was... *new.*

And some called it queerbait and I’ve already given history lessons from other angles on why no, but also now why here, definitely, no.

By season 12 we gained Yockey, another LGBT man, another activist in his own way like Bobo, but his less in writing political stuff and more in writing LGBT specialist plays. And everybody loved him, and saw it, and Yockey gets a boat load of praise -- deserves a lot of it -- but sometiems I feel like Bobo gets trampled over without recognition of how he shifted the playing field, the calculated effort he started putting into mastering those accidental resonances into something new, and ultimately to guiding the new author crew, Yockey included, or Jeremy on this newest episode who thanked him.

The same man that picked up Wayward and connected Dreamhunter... back to his own work and moments. The insanity of yelling “HOW DARE YOU LESSEN DREAMHUNTER BY COMPARING IT TO DESTIEL!” when, dead ass, you’re looking at this author who has carefully incorporated work and, with an already resonant story, made another relationship familiar to us by making it similar. Because that’s how writing stories works! But either way, Bobo has been in here doggedly growing the breadth of the legitimacy of queer narrative in supernatural -- to the point that it HAS narrowly, quietly breached into text even if not “loud” or “visible” enough for some people -- and the point where the subtext is so wall to wall and flooding every piece of cinematography in shooting and not just set or lights but complete mise en scene -- a point where everybody OUTSIDE of fandom is just addressing this shit as what it clearly is --

...That’s something that came with bringing the scope of an LGBT male author into the show. Whether you like the volume he’s been allowed to take his work to or not is your own thing, but before yelling queerbait at any creatives, perhaps it’s time to play “sit down children, and learn to appreciate the activists who came before you and how they’re fighting for you right now”. You wanna yell at something, get organized, pelt the CW in a non-aggressive, non-light-on-fire way, do activism like the books Emily put together that are resultingly still on the current showrunner’s desk now 6 years later, but most of all, don’t take a shit all over content you would otherwise enjoy, at the expense of a man in the demographic you’re trying to represent, who has battled, LITERALLY, for both the women and the gays in this show. Wayward was his baby. This slow swing in S9 that turned into a loud din in S12?

It wasn’t magic. It was a gay author. A gay author that has now climbed to be an Exec alongside dabb and the others and SURPRISE now suddenly everything’s so gay the whole goddamn world is seeing it. Literally SEEING IT, not just guys looking at each other with stories, but intentful, meritful choice in extremely bold cinematography choices that don’t require chasing a post-it on the wall, but instead are shot with care and devotion. Be that 12.19 Mixtape (OH DAT HIS) or 13.5′s Never Too Late (OH DAT YOCKEY. check what antis said to Dabb in his mentions after, even they saw it). Be that 14.18′s het drama PR promo (OH OOP DAT WAS HIS), be that 15.1-3′s entire tension and the openly addressed and so-called by media sources break up (OH DAT HIS), be that 15.7′s low key textuality (to which the new author thanked the elder for guidance, huh), or 8′s heavily shot domestic separation moment loudly filmed in the choicefully hollowed out and dimmed kitchen bereft of family -- this change? This had a moment. And you can find it.

I’ll have some beef jerky and a pack of menthols.

So this has been eating at me ever since this whole topic came into play.

Anyway full circle them trying to ride Bobo to Keep It Straight probably wasn’t their smartest idea ever. We gays are contrarian by nature so tell me to do it again, motherfucker. And now here we are in Destiel Divorce Season 15 as heavily managed by Bobo.

Everyone got so fuckin dramatic when Yockey said he was leaving like, tolling the burial bells of Destiel and-- like??? hello? BOBO? JUST? GOT? PROMOTED? Like Yockey didn’t make that entire platform all by himself, and hell, he didn’t leave without laying out unironic empty space of it. Yo guys, Berens done been here a WHILE to the point he’s now *callbacking his own season 9-10 material wtih him and dabb*. Like. Lmao. Guys. Guys listen. Listen. Think.

Whatever your weird goalpost is I’m not promising anybody’s anything is about to get hit. Whatever clown nose expectations you all have enjoy those and honk those loud and proud but remember most of those are yours. But respect the fact that Berens has essentially cornerstoned an entire queer canon within Supernatural discussion, of which others are included in as they joined.

And yes, queer canon. Not the way fandom throws it around for weird kissing spots, but articles of discussion of queer narratives, of which we can literally draw a wealth of episodes from LGBT authors or their understudies and literally point and go “all of that right there, officer.” Whether it’s visible or textual or undodgeable or marketed enough or glittery enough or whatever for everyone’s very unstable definition of “canon” -- Berens has literally cornerstoned an entire architecture of queer canon within this legacy show.

#supernatural #spn #destiel #bobo berens #representation issues

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carveredlunds · 4 years

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“We break the wheel together”: A meta on why Chuck liked the end of Game of Thrones

It’s hardly groundbreaking to say that Game of Thrones had what is widely considered to be one of the worst endings in television history, right up there with The Soprano’s, Lost, and Dexter. People much more eloquent, intelligent, and entertaining than me have covered what went wrong (I actually had the idea for this whole meta while watching Lindsay Ellis’s video essays on Game of Thrones), so I’m not going to go into what went wrong, why Game of Thrones ruined character’s arcs, had no sense of a satisfying narrative conclusion, had characters act wildly out of character, etc. It’s all been said.

But I do want to focus on Daenerys’s last words, and how they pertain to Chuck. In season 15 episode 2, Chuck infamously said “So, that Game of Thrones ending? Pretty great, right?” A lot of people have already pointed out that this shows what a bad writer Chuck is, because how could anyone like that ending? It was so bad! It must mean that Chuck’s a bad writer too!

I wanna first say that I don’t think that Chuck isn’t a bad writer. He canonically wrote some of show’s best episodes (I know that’s a sweeping statement, but just roll with me for the sake of ease.) The idea that the final enemy of the show is “bad writing”, and Sam and Dean wanting to escape authorial control is very meta, but it does annoy me, because Chuck’s not a bad writer. The in-universe jokes about how badly written the Supernatural books are (see: Metatron saying “Of the metric ton of books I've read in my lifetime, Supernatural didn't even crack the top ten... thousand” in season 11 episode 20 for just one example) are just meta winks for the fandom. Maybe the books are sometimes schlocky -- they’re definitely made to look like Mills & Boon knock-offs -- but with fan-favourite lines like “It never occurred to them that, sure, maybe they never really had a roof and four walls but they were never, in fact, homeless”, how can you say the books are badly written?

ANYWAY. That was kind of a tangent, because I wanna talk about Chuck saying that he liked the ending of Game of Thrones. He could have meant any number of things, but one of the storylines of the finale was Dany being “put out of her misery”. Dany, a once-fan favourite character who did a total heel-turn and became a villain in a “twist” (sound familiar?) only to be murdered “for her own good”. Why on earth would Chuck like that? A lot of people have pointed to his mistreatment of women throughout the show’s history, and sure. Maybe Chuck enjoyed the ending of Dany’s arc because he enjoys watching women getting stabbed. (Ew.) That’s a possibility. But another possibility is that Dany’s descent actually mirrors Chuck’s own descent into villainy. Maybe it’s telling that he liked the way her storyline ended. Maybe it mirrors the ending he wants for his own story.

For those not in the know, or those who’ve mentally blocked out the Game of Thrones finale, here’s a quick summary: In the penultimate episode of the show, Dany flew a dragon over King’s Landing on her way to take the Iron Throne. She burned helpless peasants alive in the process, despite the fact that they had rung the bells to signal their surrender when she showed up. She gives a speech to her army about how they’re going to “liberate everyone”, saying “Women, men, and children have suffered too long beneath the wheel. Will you break the wheel with me?" (”Liberate” is code for “murder if they don’t join me”). To stop her from becoming a tyrant, her uncle/boyfriend Jon Snow stabs her and lets her bleed to death in his arms. It’s framed as an act of mercy, because Dany is an insane and evil dictator who needs to be stopped “for her own good”. She went Mad With Power.

“We break the wheel together,” are Dany’s last words. And it’s not until I looked at those words again that I drew a comparison between them and the last few lines of The Stand by Stephen King: “Life was such a wheel that no man could stand upon it for long. And it always, at the end, came round to the same place again.” Chuck is so old, and, by this point, clearly cynical and disillusioned with his own creation. He’s seen that wheel of life turn around again and again. He’s built so many universes, and now, he’s obviously bored. He was willing to let Amara destroy the world in season 11. He’s now actively destroying entire universes himself. He’s done with this story. And the first line of that quote doesn’t hold true for Chuck, anyway. He’s always stood upon that wheel. He’s God. You don’t get more unchallenged than that. I could write a whole other meta on his canonical reasons for choosing to end the Winchester’s story, but right now, I want to focus on one, and it ties back to why he might have liked the ending to Dany’s story in Game of Thrones.

Billie tells Team Free Will, “You are the messengers of God’s destruction”. She doesn’t tell other Sam’s and Dean’s this. Other Sam’s and Dean’s aren’t the messengers of God’s destruction. This Sam and Dean are. And, coincidentally, theirs is the one universe that Chuck leaves un-destroyed. He has all his powers now. He could wipe them out with a meteor strike, the way he destroyed Earth 2. He could kill them so easily. But, like he says to that poor Radio Shed employee, this Sam and Dean are his favourite versions of the characters. They “challenge [and] surprise him”. So, is it a coincidence that Chuck left this Sam and Dean alive? The only Sam and Dean who can, presumably, destroy him? It’s hard to say. In season 15 episode 12, there’s this exchange:

DEAN: So, Chuck doesn’t know what’s inside the book?

BILLIE: No one can read their books unless I let them.

Which... I guess we have to buy as truth. For some reason, Chuck (who is, at this point, omniscient) doesn’t know what’s inside his book. You could argue that this goes way back to what Death said in season 5 episode 21, that, “in the end [he’ll] reap God too.” So, Death (now Billie) has powers beyond even God. So, Chuck doesn’t know that this Sam and Dean in particular are the messengers of his destruction (it’s not even clear what that means at this point. Will they kill him themselves? Surely he can’t die, or he’ll take the universe with him?) But he still kept them alive, because they’re his favourites.

He could go anywhere. He could make a new universe. He could do anything at this point, because he has all of his powers back. But he chooses to slowly “unwind worlds” from the comfort of Earth 2, before destroying that as well, and now, presumably, when the show returns in the Fall, he’s going to go back to this Sam and Dean’s world, to have a final showdown with them. And, even if he doesn’t know that these particular Winchesters are his destruction, even if he just happened to leave this Sam and Dean alive, even after killing every single other version of Sam and Dean, I think he still wants to lose this final battle. I think he wants them to kill him, the way Jon killed Dany.

He’s bored, he’s tired, he’s obviously disillusioned with his existence. And he knows Sam and Dean. He’s been writing them since day 1. He knows that there’s not a being they haven’t defeated, a monster they haven’t bested. And, yeah, he might think that he can win, because he’s God, but he’s still putting himself on that collision course with the Winchesters. He’s still taking that risk. And when you add Jack to Team Free Will as well? Jack, who might be powerful enough to at least have a good shot at beating Chuck.

Now, I know I’m not the first to suggest that Chuck has set himself up as the final Big Bad so that the brothers can defeat him and ride off into the sunset, having no more villains to defeat, having freed themselves from their creator’s control. I know that other people have suggested this, and I’ve loved this theory ever since I saw it, because it means that Chuck is still the guy we met in season 11, the God who was ambivalent, sure, but who still loved Sam and Dean, in his own way. It would mean that his character hasn’t been totally retconned for the sake of the season 14 finale twist. All the evil things he’s done -- sending Kevin to Hell, using Lilith to get the Equaliser, torturing Sam, controlling Eileen, etc., were all just shorthand ways to make us, the audience, view him as the villain.

If you rewatch this scene, there’s something strange about Chuck’s line delivery when he says this:

“Sam's visions -- they weren't drafts. They were memories. My memories. Other Sams and other Deans in other worlds. But guess what. Just like you, they didn't think they'd do it, either. But they did. And you will, too.”

Now, I am probably might be reading too much into this, because I’m squinting for any sign that Chuck’s not been totally rewritten as a sociopathic villain, but he sounds almost... sad? He sounds disappointed. Like he’s seen this story play out time and time again, and he knows the outcome, and he’s sad about it. But then comes the Radio Shed realisation -- that this Sam and Dean won’t behave like all the others. That they might get a different ending. Because he still loves them, in his own weird way, and he wants to give them a different ending. This ending, where they face the Biggest Bad they’ve ever faced, and win. Putting aside whatever Becky read (which Dabb has said will have a pay-off), I think Chuck is planning this as the final ending. I think he’s known for a while now that he wants Sam and Dean to kill him, or trap him.

It wouldn’t even be the first time he’s done this. Back in season 11 episode 21, he said to Dean, “I won't be dying. I'll be caged. I trade myself for everything I created. It goes on.” If you see his suicide mission in season 11 as a legitimate mission, and not as a part of his bigger overarching Evil Scheme (and I do want to believe that he meant to sacrifice himself, at the time) then he was willing to sacrifice for the good of humanity. And I am sure that’s what’s happening here.

I think that Chuck is setting himself up to fail. I think the reason he likes the ending of Game of Thrones -- the ending of Dany’s story -- is because it mirrors his own planned ending. An all-powerful tyrant goes Mad With Power, and is put out of their misery by the show’s protagonist. I don’t think that Chuck just likes the ending of Game of Thrones for all the reasons that have already been talked about -- because it was “bad”, because he represents a controlling writer who doesn’t listen to their fan-base, because Supernatural wants to make a timely in-joke for their audience. I think he wants Sam and Dean to do what Dany wanted to do. He wants to break the wheel, and topple himself once and for all.

#spn #supernatural #spn meta #spn speculation #chuck shurley #sophie speaks #sophie talks about spn #this got so long i just had to stop

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