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thegeminisage · 3 years

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my secret galaxy brain reading of spn s11 is better than yours

or: why season 11 is good actually. this is a long-ass meta, so it's going behind the cut

some disclaimers before we get going

absolutely all of this is accidental. nobody does this shit on purpose. this is ~my interpretation~ or whatever. i'm not actually trying to argue the writers meant to do this lol. what i'm saying is that this is the way to make season 11 make sense in your brain because it makes sense in mine and it's one of my FAVORITES. it could be one of your favorites too if you stop limiting yourself

there is heavy discussion of sexual violence in this meta so read safely etc also spoilers for all of s11 obviously

unless you watched the anime, i've seen more supernatural than you have, so i'm right >:)

for the uninitiated, the basic plot of season 11 is that eons and eons ago, before there was heaven or hell or earth or humans or angels, there was only god (chuck) and the darkness (amara). amara kept destroying what god made, so he and the archangels locked her away in a cage, which removing the mark of cain from dean's arm opened. amara escaped and dean was the first thing she saw, so she spends the season using some kind of thrall over him to make him feel drawn to her and unable to hurt her, and also looking for chuck so she can give him a little payback.

ALRIGHT HERE WE GO

season 11 & sexual violence

you don't need to look very far to find examples of sexualized violence and outright sexual violence on supernatural, but s11 is lousy with it. just to name a few examples:

amara's "thrall" on dean, which we will absolutely get into more later

crowley's jokes about altar boys and the tastes of catholic priests

ALLLLL the pedophile jokes made when crowley was raising baby amara

angels torturing cas and threatening to cut his genitals off, only to send in hannah (an angel who formerly had unrequited romantic/sexual feelings for him) to play good cop(/honeypot??) in hopes of making him talk

the return of lucifer, who possessed sam (spn has a history of equating possession and sexual violence) and is heavily implied to have raped sam in hell, and the MULTIPLE times he menaces sam throughout this season, including forcibly touching his soul

lucifer possessing castiel and using him to enact violence on the winchesters, his loved ones

i absolutely REFUSE to acknowledge the lucifer/crowley stuff but if you know you know

the episode with the kissing curse, using "love" as a means to deliver death

dean's possession in the soul eater episode

the "chitters" monsters involving mating, orgies, and forcible impregnation

you get the idea

i could write a whole essay on almost all of these but for this post we'll be sticking mostly to dean & amara

@marcusantonius pointed out while we were watching season 11 that what amara does to dean is basically speedrun his two major attachments - sam and castiel. she starts out as a baby, someone in need of protection, and quickly grows into an adult who attempts to romance/seduce him. the feelings dean has around amara aren't feelings FOR HER, they're feelings he has for SAM AND CAS that are being TRANSFERRED onto her through means of her power. (this is important for later.)

what amara does to dean is sexualized violence bordering on outright sexual assault. compelling him to feel drawn towards her and to protect her, frequently getting in his personal space and touching his face, and even kissing more than once when he is quite literally unable to resist (it's stated many times that he is unable to kill or even harm her, so he is completely helpless in the presence of someone who makes no secret of her intentions for him, sexual or otherwise).

dean says many times that what he feels for amara is not love or desire or attraction. he can't put a name to it at all - not once in the entire series is he able to properly define this thrall she has over him, which leaves us the audience a little confused (amara asking "what IS happening between us?" in 11.06 as a teenager making sexual advances on a grown man does give me a good laugh, because it was written SO WEIRDLY)... BUT we know that it is definitely sexual in nature, and not at all something dean wants to be happening.

this is addressed kind of strangely in 11.13. the villain of the week is a witch moonlighting as a hairdresser, who puts a kissing curse on her clients. the curse must be passed along like a hot potato - if you kiss someone else, it's passed along to them. if they kiss someone else, it's passed along to them. but eventually, a monster called a qareen will show up in the form of "your deepest desire" and kill you, and work its way backwards to the original curse-ee. in the episode, dean kisses the vic (i'll point out this was also technically done w/o her consent, though it was a very businesslike kiss) to put the curse on himself and protect her. the qareen takes the form of amara, and she gives Dean this little speech:

Qareen!Amara: You're a mystery. I can see inside your heart. Feel the love you feel. Except it's cloaked in shame. When it comes to this, you can’t help yourself, so why fight it? Just give in.

then, at the end of the episode, after dean reveals who the qareen was for him, we get this conversation between sam and dean:

Dean: You seriously think the sister of God is my deepest darkest desire? Sam: She isn't? Dean: No! She can’t be! Sam: Why not? Dean: Why? Because if she is that means that I'm… Sam: Means you're what? Complicit? Weak? Evil? Dean: For starters, yeah. Sam: Dean. Do you honestly think you ever had a choice in the matter? She's the sister of God, and for some reason she picked you and that sucks, but if you think I’m gonna blame you or judge you…I'm not.

the "shame" part of both of these is really what stuck out to me - the word itself isn't in the second passage, but dean's vibes are absolutely filled with shame. to me, this always read as being shame about the sexual violence and about the complicity/weakness that "allowed" that violence to happen.

and as a reminder, sam is just a few episodes past the confrontation with his own rapist (he returns to the cage to speak with lucifer in 11.09 & 11.10, and canonically struggles with what happened there even after the confrontation ends). sam made a point earlier in this episode of making sure the victim of the curse knew it wasn't her fault her husband died, but the fault of the witch who cast the curse. sam is VERY emotionally intelligent, and i honestly believe that he was speaking as one survivor of sexual violence to another here. what he's telling dean is something victims often need to be reminded of: it's not your fault. you weren't complicit, or weak. you didn't have a choice. you don't deserve blame or judgment.

we've had bad guys make sexual threats at both dean and sam many times before this and a few more times after, but as far as i can recall, this is the only conversation in the entire series that even attempts to address the impact of that particular kind of violence on dean. it's short, and strangely written, but nonetheless: there it is.

season 11 & the dean in the closet

for the purposes of this post, i'm not going to go through the entire series and find examples to try and prove dean is bi and has feelings for cas. if you don't believe that then what are you doing here? we're skipping to the goods.

actually, i always got annoyed at people who read the fake-amara's speech in 11.13 (or any of the other times people spoke about dean's shame regarding amara) as being about dean's sexuality, because in my mind it was ABSOLUTELY about his being a victim of sexual violence, which was far more important to me, as it is discussed far less often.

BUT, knowing what we know now (that cas was always canonically in love with dean, and it's all but canon that dean really was bisexual), i'm willing to entertain another notion:

Sam: ...you're what? Complicit? Weak? Evil? Dean: For starters, yeah.

the "evil" bit never really sat right with me as part of the narrative of sexual violence, aside from touching on dean's general self-loathing, but it fits the narrative of being closeted MUCH better. dean, a self-hating homophobic bisexual, would probably use a similar word, if not something heavy as "evil," to describe the way he feels about other men. it's a malevolent feeling. (if you're like me and ascribe to the jackles headcanon that dean resorted to turning tricks to make food money when he was underage, we could also consider the extremely fucked up fact that almost every queer man dean's ever met is someone who hurt him.)

dean is ashamed of who and what he is, and the way he feels about cas. living like that, that's violence. he lives violently day in and day out with that feeling. (and amara knows it. it's worth nothing that she uses cas to communicate with dean MULTIPLE times in this season, both by carving messages on his body and psychically, through his own connection to dean - and when dean "betrays" her to rescue casifer, she's horrified at whatever she sees in his head.)

equating sexual violence to the violence of being closeted

but what's amazing about this weird badly-written little 11.13 conversation (and indeed, the season-long plotline of dean and his shame) is that we don't HAVE to assign it to the purposes of being about sexual violence OR about being closeted. it can be and IS both.

my favorite reading of this is that BEING IN THE CLOSET IS INHERENTLY A VIOLENT AND TRAUMATIC EXPERIENCE. many of the same feelings are involved: shame, guilt, self-loathing. sam's comforting words to dean - that he will not be blamed or judged - are equally applicable in both cases. dean is a victim of sexual violence, and he is also in the closet, and both of these experiences are traumatic ones, and they are intermingled with each other in a big way (again, if you're into dean-turned-tricks headcanon, they are intermingled INSEPERABLY - the sexual violence being one of the direct causes of dean not wanting to accept or address his own sexuality).

the bait-and-switch

the real galaxy brain moment of this whole thing begins at the end of 11.22 (an otherwise lackluster episode that played sam's lucifer trauma for laughs how dare they ugh god whatever that's off-topic but i HATE IT) when amara and chuck finally have the confrontation she's been fighting all season for. she is attacked by witches, demons, angels, and then stabbed by lucifer himself, before she's finally on her knees before chuck, and then we get this little exchange:

Chuck: I'm sorry. For this, for everything. Amara: An apology at last. What's sorry to me? I spent millions of years crammed into that cage alone and afraid...

maybe you already know where i'm going with this. a cage isn't so different from a closet when we're working with metaphors, right?

amara talks about her grievances with chuck many times throughout season 11 - that he was spoiled, that he created the earth to stroke his ego, that he couldn't handle her as she was. and once he finally makes his appearance he tells it his own way - that he had no choice but to lock amara away, that she couldn't stand the things and people he made, that he did it to protect people. but something about THIS conversation in particular - even though it's not written into the dialogue - gives me a particular kind of vibe.

there is something innately, unspeakably WRONG with amara. i don't mean unspeakable as in very bad, i mean unspeakable as in LITERALLY undefinable. it's just like dean being unable to put a name to the pull she has over him. no one talks directly at it or about it, they go in circles around it, but facts are facts: amara simply couldn't be allowed to exist as she was because there was just something innately wrong with her. and it's this conversation in particular, the first one they have together onscreen, that really slams that feeling home for me.

the entire time chuck and amara are talking, the camera repeatedly cuts to dean - he is so visibly upset that the first time i watched this, i was certain he was about to jump into the middle of things and put himself between the two of them. we're meant to believe that dean has trouble hearing this because he "cares" about amara, but i have a different take.

i think it's empathy. real, actual empathy - not the kind of feeling that amara had to force out.

stay with me here. eventually, after chuck tries to lock amara away again, she gets her second wind, attacks him, and leaves him for dead - and as he dies, the sun dies with him, and so too does all life on earth.

in the following episode, the finale, amara finds her way to a park, where she takes in god's creation, visibly upset as she realizes that his flowers die at her touch (again, hammering home the point that there is something innately wrong with her that means she cannot live in this world), and eventually speaks with an old lady feeding the birds.

Woman: Do you want to feed them? Amara: I shouldn't. Woman: I've been feeding these birds going on 20 years now. They're practically family. And I know that makes me sound like a crazy old bat, but...heck. My husband died a couple of years ago, and my son keeps slipping me these brochures for retirement communities - a.k.a. where they send old folks to die, but not to make a fuss about it. Amara: So you hate him. Woman: Well, a little bit. Sometimes. But you know family. Even when you hate them, you still love them.

this speech brings tears to amara's eyes. what's more, she spends this entire section with her hands in her lap. after a season of killing her way through humanity to get god's attention, she is afraid to touch these birds for fear of killing them. she feels empathy for them. she and dean are connected, after all - so as soon as he began to feel true, genuine empathy - so did she.

when dean shows up to kill amara (via a bomb made out of souls hidden in his chest), she immediately clocks his plan. she practically dares him to do it, and - he can't. he is, as always, helpless against her.

what dean does instead is talk to her. more importantly, he listens to her. when she says her brother sent dean here to execute her, he tells her chuck actually didn't want this - that it was actually his very last resort. he asks her if this, the death of everything, is what she wanted, and she tells him all she really wanted was payback. again, dean EMPATHIZES:

Dean: Yeah, that's revenge. It'll get you out of bed in the morning, and when you get it, it feels great... for about five minutes. I've been there. Me and Sam, we have had our fair share of fights—more than our share. But no matter how bad it got, we always made it right because we're family. I need him. He needs me. And when everything goes to crap, that's all you've got—family. Now you might be a—an all-powerful being...but I think you're human where it counts. You simply need your brother.

what's really neat about this section, and the scene before it where amara confronts her brother, is that they mark the first times dean felt any sort of genuine emotion for amara at all - one that she didn't force out of him or one that he felt for someone else that she just took for herself. dean genuinely EMPATHIZES with her - after everything she's done to him and his loved ones, and to the people on earth, dean sees the humanity in her. that's kind of his and sam's M.O., loving monsters into men - the number of non-human adversaries who eventually became allies because of the winchesters’ empathy or liking for them or even just their influence is staggering. cas, gabriel, meg, benny, crowley, rowena, metatron, to name a few off the top of my head - and now amara.

and then we get THIS:

Dean: You don't want to be alone. Not really. I mean, hell. Maybe that's why you wanted me. But deep down, you didn't really want me... 'cause I'm not him.

(emphasis mine)

and here's my galaxy brain take: dean empathizes with amara - TRULY empathizes with her - because they're both queer (or queer-coded).

I KNOW THIS SOUNDS NUTS BUT LISTEN. this weird creepy stalkery hetero "romance" was fake on both sides all along. dean and amara are the same. that unspeakable and innate wrongness lives in both of them. they're self-loathing and furious at god for his failures and callousness, outcasts in a world that isn't for them, a world that has HURT them simply on account of them being what they are. the violence done to amara was done to her BECAUSE of this unspeakable wrongness about her - her queerness, or her queer-codedness - and we already decided this was, for the purposes of this season, functionally the same violating and traumatic experience as sexual violence.

amara's been using dean to try and replace chuck this entire season. it's some weird comphet bullshit tied in with the fact that dean was the first part of chuck's creation she ever saw. it stands to reason then that she was trying to force dean to be with her and love her the way she wanted to force CHUCK to be with her. that's part of why she started life as a baby - as someone he'd protect as he did his own sibling.

so in some weird, warped, very roundabout way, amara was enacting on dean the violence that chuck enacted on her - making him feel the same shame and weakness that chuck made HER feel when he locked her away eons ago. if amara unknowingly replaced chuck with dean, then she also unknowingly took part of her revenge on him. the only way she knew how to love someone was to force them to do it, because the only ways she had ever been loved until now involved violence - until dean and his moment of genuine empathy.

consider this final speech:

Dean: Maybe I can kill you. Or maybe I can't. Maybe if I pull this trigger, we all live happily ever after, or maybe we die bloody, or maybe it doesn't matter, because maybe there's a different way. So I'm gonna ask you again. Put aside the rage. Put aside the hate. And you tell me...what do you want?

dean is the only person in BILLIONS of years to ask her this! one queer to another! and it turns out that and all she wanted - the ONLY thing she needed - was to be understood and accepted by her family. immediately after this, amara summons chuck to their park, and the two of them talk it out in what is genuinely a very moving scene. amara - perhaps because of her connection with dean, perhaps because she's finally admitted to herself that she does still love her brother - sees the beauty in the world now, and feels love for it, and she doesn't want to destroy it anymore.

and at the end, after she's made her peace with god, and the sun has been turned back on, amara says:

Amara: Dean, you gave me what I needed most. I want to do the same for you.

and what do we get at the end of this episode? mary winchester, risen from her grave. dean's family. and - SPOILERS FOR SEASON 12 - though at first mary rejects dean (and sam) as being the same children she remembers from 1983, after a long and rocky road, at the end of the season, they eventually come to a reconciliation where she sees them for who they truly are. it's never ABOUT being queer because this show uses the fucking hays code when it comes to dean's sexuality, but it's still about being queer!!

dean gave amara what she needed - acceptance from her family - and she gave him that back in turn. all it took, the entire time, was one SHRED of empathy from one queer to another. all dean had to do was recognize her - REALLY recognize her - not as a replacement for sam or cas but as who she really was. and he saw himself in her, and the empathy that followed was genuine because it was the most natural thing in the world. in the end neither dean nor amara needed the "romance" they thought they did/were forced to want. they never did. they only needed acceptance and understanding.

supernatural is always about family and the power of love, and this season is no exception.

other great parts of season 11

if you're still not convinced, season 11 is full of other things that make it amazing:

GOD'S RETURN. after SIX YEARS he's back, this is canon, we finally get to hear what he has to say. they did more with him in a handful of episodes in this season than all of season 15

also, something else returns after six years. i'll give you a hint: it glows hot in god's presence. it was last seen being dropped into a motel trash can.

and of course the big one: lucifer and sam. what great callbacks to seasons 4-6 when lucifer and what he did to sam in hell was actually scary and mattered a lot! lucifer returns to being scary in this and i can't get enough of it.

this is also inseparable from sam's arc involving his faith - he begins praying again, having visions again, and is GUTTED when those prayers and visions lead him back to the place of his worst trauma. he gets to MEET GOD this season. it's fucking insane

the inherent melodrama of castiel, someone loved and trusted by the winchesters, being possessed by someone who they hate and who has hurt them. you get all of the sam drama with him accidentally trusting lucifer with his soul and his brother's life, and all the dean drama where he watches the devil run around in his boyfriend. also, misha collins does an uncanny impression of mark pellegrino. it's actually really creepy

somehow, they managed to make metatron, a deeply hated villain by all, ACTUALLY LIKEABLE. for TWO whole episodes. it was NUTS

this season starts off rowena's long arc with lucifer and her lucifer trauma that eventually becomes the catalyst of her bonding so profoundly with sam <3 best friends forever <333

sam and dean bond with a pair of canonically gay hunters who DON'T DIE

billie is introduced in this season and she's super hot and cool and awesome

eileen is also introduced in this season. her arc mirrors sam's so well, it's SO good. i never though i'd care about sam and a girl who wasn't jess, but i care about them SO MUCH it makes me insane. if you don't love eileen you're wrong!

anyway, watch season 11. it's weird but it's really fucking good. THANK YOU FOR COMING TO MY TED TALK

[spn masterpost]

#supernatural #dean winchester #amara #supernatural meta #destiel #in a roundabout way #i needed a 5th tracked tag lol #i stayed up ALL NIGHT writing this but im gonna be a smartie and schedule it to go up at noon when ppl are awake #liz watches spn #liz's meta #liz's spn stuff #liz makes stuff #long post #just in case the cut fails #this meta really is 3800 words long lol #as a bonus it was implied in late season 10 that amara is the older sibling #even though they retconned it and made them twins later #like amara and dean are both eldest sisters.......

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goodluckdetective · 3 years

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So, I’m going to take a moment to explain one of my great frustrations (of many) with the Supernatural finale (and the season in general to an extent). And that is the missed opportunity of using Chuck, a writer, as a villain.

I’m fine with Chuck as a villain and in fact I think it works great. Rob acts it perfectly (you’re doing amazing sweetie) and it makes logical sense. What’s a better final challenge for Team Free Will than a force that is literally trying to take that away from them?

But for a narrative about a writer as a villian, the show never quite seems to run with the metaphor as much as it should. Chuck has an obsession with one type of ending, but we never really (in my opinion) dive into why he’s so obsessed with that outcome other than personal style. There’s not a lot of examination of the roles Chuck casts everyone in, or the patterns throughout his “endings” other than the Cain and Abel angle.

As I see it, Chuck is obsessed with these types of endings because it’s the type of ending he originally wrote. In my mind, Chuck is an author who wrote a novel outline ahead of time, and halfway through the writing process went way off script. Which happens, anyone who has ever written a long piece of fiction knows that sometimes your story takes a left turn where you expected it to take a right. In Chuck’s case, “Swan Song,” the original ending is where he goes widely off script. Sam is supposed to stay in the cage, Dean is supposed to be busy being a domestic heterosexual and Cas and Bobby vanish from the plotline with a half assed hand wave of “they were busy.” But that’s not what happens. The story demands to keep going. And so it does.

In writing, when this happens, you got options. You can either go back and cut the part where stuff got off topic and write what you originally planned (which is sometimes the right choice: not all accidental plots are worth keeping.) Or you can go back to your outline, erase your original plan and write a new one to suit the direction the story is going now.

Chuck doesn’t do either of these. He tries to have his cake and eat it too. He lets his “characters” do things off his original plan, but he keeps trying to force his original ending: one brother dies, the other lives, everyone else is written out and unheard of again. His original ending no longer fits Sam and Dean as they are now. But he’s so obsessed with that ending he originally crafted, his Sean Song that he tries desperately to make it happen. Rock falls, everyone dies except one survivor.

And this is the biggest problem with the finale in my mind. Because even though Chuck is “defeated” he still “wins.” He stills gets his ending. One brother dies, the other lives listless without him. All the side characters vanish from the narrative (we saw this in the elseworlds too: Benny died, Cas got locked in a box, Jody and the girls are implied to have been killed off screen. In each one, only Sam and Dean remain). Sure, one doesn’t kill the other, but honestly I never truly bought that was what Chuck really wanted from his ending given Swan Song. He just wanted a tragedy. And he gets one.

Which is wild, because for a show that prides itself on being meta, it seems to fundamentally misunderstand what makes its villian, a villian. Chuck is not evil solely due to his brother murder obsession. It’s his obsession with TRAGEDY. His determination to stick to his own script even though it no longer fits. His unwillingness to see anyone other than his stars as important and everyone else as canon fodder. Chuck is evil not JUST because he treats Sam and Dean like his own favorite show, but because he treats THE WORLD like his own favorite tv show. Everyone exists, everyone lives and dies, solely to push Sam and Dean to their pre-written ending. No one else matters.

And that’s something that could have been wild to properly examine. Sam and Dean fighting back not only because they’re not down with murdering one another but because the world should be more than a stage for their Greek tragedy. That Castiel, Eileen, Jack and all their friends are more than ways to define the Winchesters. It’s a defiance to what Chuck ascribes as important in stories (especially queer ones which tend to be tragic) and says “happiness can be a good story too.” Hope and light and life are important. There is room in the world for stories like ours.

And that’s my beef. I don’t know if I made total sense but in short:

TLDR: Supernatural fundamentally misunderstood Chuck as a villian.

Also,

#iz rambles #spn #supernatural #spn meta #supernatural meta #chuck shurley

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caffiine · 3 years

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A BRIEF PAUSE

From my regularly scheduled content. I’ve got some shit to say, y’all (forewarning for spicy language and spoilers)

I thought about making this post on my fandom subblog but this show and this relationship have been TOO important to me for the past 8 years to not give it its proper place in my life. strap in bc im not sure how long this mf is about to be.

When i started this DUMB show at age 19 tortured soul “empath” dark academia me thought sam winchester was going to be my favourite character. and don’t @ me, i love sam now in his own right (and we deserve some SAILEEN PEOPLE). but after literally less than 5 episodes i KNEW dean’s character and his arc were going to be amazing and beautiful and he immediately became my favourite brother. The nuances of his character i.e. his shell vs his true self were so evident to me even in the first couple seasons. in my humble opinion, he had the most growth of the two brothers.

They all deserve to be happy, but for whatever FUCKING reason dean has the HARDEST TIME OF ANYONE being happy in this show. I know it’s his character. I know it was written that way. But FFS. I kept wondering when they were going to wrap up his emotional arc and stop torturing the poor dude.

then in season 4 they introduced castiel and 1) I thought the new concept of angels as assholes was super cool and 2) I hardcore SIMPED over misha collins (still do). I watched benignly as cas and dean began to form this relationship that seemed pretty special. I started watching the show when it was in its eighth season and I binged the shit out of it for two weeks until I was caught up. By the time I was caught up I was CERTAIN there were some feelings between them and I LOVED it. I am bisexual and I was ECSTATIC for a potential queer relationship between two masculine-portrayed dudes. I went on tumblr to express my newfound theory, only to find out that this was a real THING. “Destiel” was already an idea that had absolutely and intensely BLOSSOMED in the fandom for several seasons already. So many others saw what I saw and saw the potential of emotionally tortured/constipated “daddy’s blunt instrument” dean and the unfeeling daddy’s boy cas “crack in his chassis” Winchester being allowed to be happy together. I felt validated and hopeful. For a while.

Then it was season after season of hopefulness for them to be finally happy with each other while still fighting the ills of their world with sam and the other new members of their family that were added along the way, only to constantly have that hope seemingly teased away at the end every single time. By season 11 and the introduction of amara (not bashing, eventually loved her character and her development too) I gave up. I lost hope. I stopped watching the show. I didn’t want to keep watching my two favourite characters continuously abused by the story they were thrown into.

I know not everyone likes destiel, not everyone thought it was real. That’s chill, idc. Stories are so often meant to be (and sometimes inadvertently) left up to interpretation by the person experiencing and consuming them. It’s what’s so amazing about books and shows and movies that are able to make us feel so intensely about them and their characters. And I felt SO strongly about dean and cas. It was honestly really upsetting to me, the way the show was going with their relationship.

A while later season 13 had been going on and I started seeing some things pop up on my dash. Hopeful things. I did a bit of research and accidentally saw THE SCENE from season 12 and I couldn’t help myself. I restarted it. I watched the whole thing from the beginning again AND introduced it to my boyfriend I think partially as a way to ensure I wasn’t imagining shit (it took him awhile and a lot of me internally screaming during many scenes but by season 9 he was like “uh are they in gay love”). Fast forward to me finally catching up as season 14 was starting. I was still hopeful, somehow. And it happened AGAIN. Season 14 and the beginnings of 15 made me so sad. I HATED what they did with their relationship. I HATED the way it ended. I HATED the way dean treated cas and everyone around him. It felt like the show was taking his whole character arc back to day 1. I didn’t understand. I kept watching for a couple episodes after the big argument and cas left but the luster was gone and eventually I just stopped.

I love this show. It has meant so much to me as a story. So many of the characters are/were very dear to me. I know it’s a running joke with this show about character deaths and homophobia but the strength of the bond I felt was between cas and dean gave me a lot of hope. But it wasn’t enough. I felt betrayed one too many times. And for those of you who kept watching, for whatever reason, I don’t hold it against you. It’s still a beautiful and interesting story without cas and dean’s relationship. But I just personally couldn’t do it anymore.

I hadn’t planned on watching the rest of season 15 when it came back after pandemic hiatus, at least not for awhile. So imagine my FUCKING surprise when I was doom scrolling through twitter during election week on Thursday and I see supernatural trending right along with election shit.

What.

I couldn’t stop myself, I looked and literally SCREAMED and made my boyfriend spill his wine all over our couch. I didn’t know exactly what happened as I hadn’t seen the episode but APPARENTLY all my emotions and feelings had been at least partially vindicated. So I BOUGHT season 15 so I could finish watching where I had left off. I watched 8 episodes in less than 24hrs (don’t judge me there’s a quarantine) and I LIKED them. And it might’ve been bc I knew what was about to happen in 15 x18 but I really felt like the show was getting STRONGER as it neared its finish.

I was so excited for 15x19. I read so many posts from fellow fans, destiel and antis alike. There really weren’t a lot of bad emotions running around. Everyone seemed hopeful and excited like me.

I probably don’t need to go over 15x19 emotions but im going to anyway. I was disappointed. I was confused. I was angry. we are in season 15. The last season ever for this show that has had a HUGE following of fans who have loved it, sometimes unconditionally, sometimes even though it wasn’t the best (and sometimes less than good). A season and show that had just announced YES. CAS LOVES DEAN. ITS REAL. And I shouldn’t have to go over the nuances of why we would expect more after this, with two episodes to go before the show is done forever.

But I will bc im mad af.

Like I said in the beginning. Dean’s character arc has been incredible. His emotional growth – as subtle as it might’ve seemed – has been amazing. And dean has always been an emotional, loving person. he just felt like he wasn’t because the world made him feel that way. And that’s sad, y’all. Dean deserves to realize he DESERVES happiness. And in 15x18, we were finally heading basically directly there. With destiel, yes, but even if you’re anti, what cas said to dean about who he is and why he loves him obviously struck a fucking chord with dean. It obviously changed the way he viewed himself (RE: “that’s not who I am, that’s not who we are”).

But for WHATEVER reason that’s ALL we got in 15x19. One fucking SENTENCE about dean realizing maybe he’s not just built to kill people. And then jack leaves without a single mention of Eileen or cas or Charlie or literally anyone they ever cared about and dean rode off into the sunset alone with his brother while we watched a fucking FIVE MINUTE MONTAGE that made me want to hurl my own body into the sun they were driving toward. And cas is STILL DEAD.

BUT THERE’S STILL ONE EPISODE LEFT AND FUCK ME IF I HAVENT BEEN PAINTING ON MY CLOWN MAKEUP ALL WEEK. SO WHAT DO I WANT????

ONE: DEAN DESERVES HAPPINESS. REAL HAPPINESS. What the FUCK supernatural??? Wasn’t this the whole point of his arc??? And don’t get me wrong I REALLY want that happiness to come from Cas and a real spoken relationship of some sort between them bc it also ties in with my second point but tbh just PLEASE let dean be happy. Dean is a loving person and does everything for love as we JUST FOUND OUT. Dean would NOT be happy with everyone he’s ever loved gone for the rest of his life. I just don’t believe that’s fucking true. h elp him pls.

TWO: CAS DESERVES HAPPINESS. I know we got this whole speech about “happiness isn’t in the having it’s simply in being” but like. Really. Castiel was supposed to be a throwaway character no one was supposed to care about. But we all cared SO MUCH that he lasted 11 SEASONS longer than intended and became a main character and an integral part of the story. Cas has arguably sacrificed more than anyone on this show. His last act was to sacrifice his life to save the man he loved. He knew where he was going. He knew he was finally going to be able to tell dean he loved him and then immediately be taken by the empty where we know now thanks to season 15 that everyone in there just gets to dream forever about their regrets and sadness. HOW IS THAT FAIR. HOW IS THAT A GOOD ENDING FOR CAS. HOW DO YOU EXPECT ANYONE – CHARACTERS AND FANS ALIKE –TO BE HAPPY ABOUT THAT. Its messed up, supernatural. Y’all KNOW it is and I hope to HIGH HEAVENS this is going to be corrected in 15x20.

THREE: give sam Eileen back.

Well that’s all I’ve got in me, folks. I’m absolutely and intensely dreading Thursday. Im scared and nervous and obviously still angry that this is absolutely going to be the opposite of what they promised – another “game of thrones” ending. Some of y’all are giving me hope with your posts about maybe they’re trying to keep the ending a surprise and maybe cas is coming back and how can they not and why else would they have done the second to last episode like that and I hope yall are right.

Either way, im glad I am not alone with my feelings. Thanks yall for the experience of this fandom and show. Let’s stick together on Thursday, no matter our differences.

PS stop calling jensen ackles a homophobe or ill hex you.

#supernatural #destiel #deancas #oh and #saileen #just to make sure theyre not forgotten #dean winchester #castiel #Misha Collins #jensen ackles #15x18 #15x20 #15x19 #i fucking guess #dean x castiel #casdean #castiel x dean #supernatural season 15

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castiel-kline · 3 years

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More thoughts on 15x18, because I’m really struggling with it. (I have lots of feelings, and a lot them are Not Pretty)

Let’s talk about the issue of Cas’s “true happiness.”

First of all, “true happiness” was never in the terms of the deal. The Empty never said Cas had to be truly happy, it only said he had to give himself “permission to be happy.” That ain’t the same thing. I feel like “true happiness” is an unreachable goal. It’s a light at the end of the tunnel that you can never reach because it doesn’t really exist. You can certainly find it in little moments along the way, but it’s not an epiphany. It’s a process. “Permission to be happy,” on the other hand, can be manufactured. It can be, “I feel like crap right now, I hate myself and my life is terrible, but I WILL be happy about watching this movie or hugging my friend.” Example- I did this today. I’ve been in a funk after this episode (hello, crippling attachment to fictional characters!) but I went over to a friend’s house and I met her new dog for the first time. And he jumped on me and I laughed and I thought, well- I still feel like crap. I still have a lot to process. I still have deadlines for actual life stuff looming over me and spiking my anxiety. But I will be happy now for this adorable little fluffball and my friend who I haven’t seen in months. I gave myself permission to be happy.

And Cas in that scene didn’t look happy to me. He looked miserable. He looked like he was two seconds from shattering. We’ve seen Cas genuinely happy before- 14x08 comes to mind, when he laughed from pure joy at seeing Jack again. When he smiled at that little girl in early season 10. Hell, even season 6 Cas looked 1000 times happier when he went in to hug freshly-re-souled Sam than Cas did in *that* scene. When Cas is happy, there’s a lightness to him. It’s like some weight has been lifted. Cas in this episode wasn’t lightest when the Empty took him, but when he was talking to Jack. And that’s saying something because that was a fucking depressing conversation.

And the lines everyone is talking about- “What I want is something I know I can’t have.” and “Happiness isn’t in the having. It’s in just being. It’s in just saying it.”

Oh boy. I saw a post today calling that toxic positivity, and it’s right. Cas basically said I Will Speak the Happiness into Existence Whether I Feel it or Not.

He also said “I wondered what my true happiness could even look like, and I never found an answer.”

First off, honey, true happiness wasn’t part of the deal. But he did say he never found an answer. Which means, presumably, that whatever was going on in this scene wasn’t true happiness. He just dropped the pretense of it, and gave himself permission to be happy at a very strategic time in order to take out Billie and stop her from killing more people. Dean, yes, but Sam and Jack as well. If there was a chance they were still alive, you can damn well bet that Cas was gonna take it. Because he’s a strategist. He was a soldier for millions of years and he commanded Heavenly armies. I feel like that’s not a job Michael or Raphael or whoever else would give to just anybody.

So what if what Cas wanted but could never have was happiness? And he forced himself to feel some so the Empty would come, and that’s why he was so “oh wow I love my friend.” And I’m not disputing that there’s love there. I don’t vibe with Destiel and I think something has got to be reciprocated before it can be canon, but whether it was platonic or romantic or something in between or something different altogether those two definitely had something going on. That is in no way an excuse for Dean treating him like crap for years, but we’ve all looked for the best in people, in things, even if they hurt us or disappointed us or really fucking pissed us off. Kinda like what I’m doing right now LMAO

And if you watch closely, Cas takes a fucking minute after he mentions Jack. He looked like he was in so much pain. His voice cracked when he mentioned Sam. In making the choice to sacrifice himself he was condemning himself to never seeing Sam again. Never seeing Jack again. And Sam and Cas love each other so damn much, and Cas loves Jack more than anything else. That was bound to be hard. Probably one of the hardest things he’d ever had to do.

So of course he focused on Dean. Because he loves him too, even though he probably shouldn’t sometimes, and he mustered up enough happiness for the Empty to come, and found some pride in himself and how he’s grown. I do believe he sort of accepted himself, and let go of some of his self-loathing at the last second. He cobbled together some last-minute peace. I’m proud of him for that.

But I think I hate it, in all honestly. I DESPISE it as an ending for Castiel. It doesn’t do him justice in the slightest. It doesn’t begin to be in that realm. It was a mess, it was poorly written, he felt out of character (the fucking disconnect from Cas in his scenes with Jack this ep vs. this monstrosity... whoa nelly. I have whiplash). But I have to believe that there’s something like this in there, or I will go insane. I’m far too attached to Cas to just let this go without settling on an interpretation that isn’t “gay angel goes to superhell.” Totally valid to cope with 2012 tumblr humor, but dear god am I really struggling with this. It was bad, but I need to take it somewhat seriously for my own sanity.

And he’s dead. He’s gone, probably permanently. And the knowledge of that alone is enough to make me cry (listen... Castiel has gotten me through some crap in my life. I MISS him) and I will forever be angry that his ending wasn’t even about him. So hopefully my analysis helped you a little bit, if you’re in a Cas-loving pit and clawing your way out like me.

I just think the timing of it was too perfect for Cas not to have been aware of what he was doing. It was too deliberate. And though I am all for Cas getting some kind of canonical queerness (even though all the SPN angels are technically canonically genderfluid/nonbinary/non-conforming, somewhere in that broad spectrum), I still think what he wanted but could never have was much more to do with himself rather than Dean. He really didn’t have to die, though, certainly not so terribly. I think I actually preferred his death in All Along the Watchtower. I wouldn’t trade late seasons Cas for anything, though, because (excepting this) he was rad. Killing the game. Dadstiel, Sam and Cas’s friendship- I loved watching those flourish in the late seasons. And everything I loved most about it was done so dirty. I’m just so tired. I wish I could mourn him without being angry and bitter at the writers.

#spn spoilers #kitkat rambles #i just really needed to get this out of my system somehow #lord knows i'm always going to love cas though #spn #don't mind me #spn meta #maybe

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unforth · 4 years

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So I have no idea what The Untamed is, but I keep seeing it show up on my dash. So I kinda want to check it out. Can you tell me if there's actual queer representation in it? Or is it more of a destiel kind of situation right now? (Love your fanfic btw)

ALRIGHT ANON I hope you’re ready to listen to me go the fuck off cause I’m so gonna because I fucking love this show!

Right off the bat, to answer the “is it more of a destiel kind of situation” the answer is absolutely fucking not, nor will it ever be, because The Untamed is 50 episodes long and complete, so where it is now is where it will always be. And where it is now...okay, so The Untamed is based on a novel called Modao Zushi (variously translated but the most commonly accepted is “Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation”). MDZS exists in five different versions - the original novel (complete), an animation (in progress), a comic (in progress), a radio drama (...actually I have no idea if it’s done...) and The Untamed (the live action TV show).

What it is...it’s originally a Chinese BL danmei (a novel, in this case published serially on a subscription website) by an author who writes under the pseudonym Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. It’s xianxia, which is a genre of Chinese fantasy inspired by Chinese mythology, religion, martial arts, and all kinds of other stuff...as a Westerner coming in with no experience, it’s been a LOT to learn the genre tropes and I’m still getting the hang of it, but you don’t need to know anything to appreciate the show - I didn’t, and nor did many of my friends, and we’ve all loved it. It has a wonderful ensemble cast (...okay, well, full disclosure, it has a wonderful male ensemble cast, the women in the novel leave something to be desired, they’re much better fleshed out in The Untamed but I could still wish for more in that regard...) with tons of side shipping potential...like, my favorite character isn’t even one of the two in the main ship, and I’d honestly be hard pressed to even name a top five because I love them all so much, and there’s a side ship I love almost as much as the main ship, and is also so close to canon as makes no difference, at least imo. The plot is pretty well fleshed out (or at least the points that are nonsensical are surprisingly easy to ignore...if you’ve seen Jupiter Ascending it had some of the same feel in that regard, like “parts of this writing are a trash fire but I’m enjoying the overall effect so much that I don’t even care any more”). The sets and the costumes are absolutely fucking gorgeous and if the CGI for some of the monsters made me want to weep it was so bad...well, I was a fan of Hercules the Legendary Journeys in the 90s so I’m prepared to forgive a lot to watch hot guys kick some ass, and speaking of the hot guys...

The main ship is composed of this guy, Wei Wuxian...

He is a quintessential disaster bi and I love him and would die for him. The novel is told primarily from his PoV and even The Untamed tends to focus more on his angle than others.

His other half is this guy, Lan Wangji...

(okay the glasses are NOT canon but how am I supposed to resist that line??). He is rule-following, law-abiding, and I totally didn’t get him at first and now I adore him.

This is full enemies to lovers in the best possible way.

From a Destiel PoV, I basically write Wei Wuxian the same way I write Dean, and I basically write Lan Wangji the same way I write Castiel, and people tell me pretty often that they love my characterizations so...the personality parallels, they are strong.

Their ship is most commonly called WangXian. Are they canon? In the novel, yes. They are canon. They are literally married. They have actual explicit sex that you can read in all its glorious detail (actually I shouldn’t talk it up that much I didn’t personally enjoy the canon sex all that much but that’s a totally different topic). They are the most canon of canon, no holds barred, mano-a-mano, god I wish they’d use lube, I can tell you who canonically tops and bottoms and what their main kinks are, and they are so in love and there are ridiculous declarations at the worst possible moments and there’s a wedding...it’s canon.

Now, China has some pretty crazy censorship laws that include making it an arrestable, punishable offense to make the queer explicit in the TV show. Thus, there is no explicit moment where, in The Untamed, they say, “yes we are a couple and we are in love.” However, the following things are canon:

-they are soulmates (link to gif set by @ohsesuns - the source for these two gifs, I hope you can forgive me just embedding them but someone asked me for a guide and I think just linking might not get the point across/require too much expectation of people clicking through...)

-they have their own theme song...which is called the portmanteau of their ship name (link to gif set by @wangxiians, with two used for demonstration purposes...again, my apologies for embedding them like this, I’ll pull them if you’d prefer) And mind you, in this scene, Lan Wangji just sang their song out loud while a montage played of important moments in their relationship with each other it is the gayest most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

-THIS IS LITERALLY HOW THEY LOOK AT EACH OTHER

-neither has a female love interest or any other romantic subplot or any kind of “fake out” and this is the way Lan Wangji looks every time Wei Wuxian is like, “you’re never gonna get a girlfriend with that attitude” (labeled as by someone named mabomanji on a website called tenor that I’ve never used before...)

-DID I MENTION THIS IS HOW THEY LOOK AT EACH OTHER

-oh and they have a son...sort of...close enough...okay it’s way more complicated than that but whatevs I don’t want to spoil all the fun...

-OH MY GOD I ALMOST FORGOT TO MENTION THE HANDFASTING? Lan Wangji constantly lets Wei Wuxian touch the “sacred headband that only family members and loved ones can touch” and at one point to protect Wei Wuxian he wraps it around each of their wrists (source for this screen cap is a set on twitter by krayziewes)

I’m sure at least three people will look at this and be like HOW DID YOU LEAVE OUT THIS OTHER THING and all three things they name will be DIFFERENT because the show is just that fucking gay.

So you ask me, is it like Destiel?

With Supernatural, with Destiel, the show writers, producers, everyone, strings us along, giving us just enough to think we’ve got a chance. The only risk they face in making it canon would be a drop in rating and alienation of some of the fanbase and yet they refuse to do it. I do not believe and have never believed that Destiel will be canon, and my reaction is constant disappointment, because seriously, what would it cost them to show it? Absolutely fucking nothing, especially now that it’s ending now, but they won’t. (okay, that’s just my opinion, I guess the last few episodes will show...but I at least have zero hope.)

With The Untamed...with Wangxian...literally everyone involved in The Untamed risked being disappeared by the Chinese government and actual imprisonment to make the show as gay as humanly possible without quiiiiiiiiiiite crossing the line into explicit queerness. Behind the scenes footage makes it clear that the entire cast and production crew have read the novel. The crew jokingly refers to Wei Wuxian as Lan Wangji’s wife (yeah, sorry, there’s some splashes of misogyny especially in the novel) and the looks on any of the actors’ faces when they’re interviewed and asked about (female) love interests are honestly fucking priceless...but no one can say it out loud, no one can make it explicit in the purest sense, because they risk their livelihoods, their families, their futures, their lives, if they say in reply to that interviewer, “um are you a fucking moron didn’t you realize there WAS a romance in the show and it was between two men?” But everyone with a half a brain knows. It’s not subtle. It’s not a secret. My straight cis male friend who is watching keeps screaming at me about how gay it is and he’s only on like episode 10.

Would I kill for a canon kiss or an actual traditional love declaration?

Yes, of course, I’d love that.

But do I think WangXian isn’t canon in The Untamed just because it isn’t shown in those most simplistic terms?

Oh my god it is so canon WangXian are husbands and they are in love and they live for each other and it’s amazing and I adore theeeeeeeeeeeem.

Wangxian. Are. Canon.

#unforth rambles #the untamed #wangxian #i don't even know how to tag this #i hope you're prepared for my love letter to canon anon #because I seriously could not love these two more #Anonymous

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flowitch · 3 years

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supernatural and lgbtqia+ characters

DISCLAIMER: i love these characters, which is why i watch the show. i do also have many issues with the show and the writers. this isn’t a hate post for the story or the characters, just the way the characters have been treated. do not read this if you are not caught up and do not want spoilers. this is also kinda a mess but i got very passionate about this and wrote it during classes

Dean Winchester

i’m gonna start with my boy dean!! dean is mine along with many other people’s favorite characters because of how complex he is. and one of the things that adds depth to his character is his “journey” with his sexuality.

there are many examples of dean very clearly not being straight, and he is officially headcanoned (and i guess canon now) as bisexual. you don’t even need to include dean and cas scenes for examples of his bisexuality. here is a video showing examples without any cas scenes:

https://youtu.be/rQSPmmuLJB0

now that we’ve established he is bisexual, let’s talk about the contradiction between the writing of his sexuality and character. the one i’m itching to talk about first is the confession scene in 10x16.

https://youtu.be/IqBHkwi13ic

in this scene, dean says, and i quote, if you don’t want to watch the video and don’t remember, “There's things, there's...people...feelings that I- I want to experience differently. Maybe even for the first time.” there honestly is no other way to interpret this. i’ve tried to put myself in the mind of the writers and the homophobes but i genuinely cannot interpret this another way. this is very clearly about his sexuality, being that there were no love interests at the time that this would apply to (not that this would even apply to a straight couple anyway). and not only does this confession scene occur, but sam even comments on how he was in there for a long time and he could always talk to him if he needs to!!!! they could have easily not had sam say anything about how long he spent in there, being that we as the viewers have no clue as to how long he was in there. they wrote that specifically to show that what he said in there had meaning and importance.

the writers and the crew of the show play into dean’s sexuality consistently with scenes, song of the days from the crew, etc., but then deny that destiel or dean’s bisexuality is real. i think a lot of this has to do with the fact that dean has always been considered as a “macho man” who shows very little emotion and has trouble with vulnerability. and that’s true! he absolutely is. but this show had 15 years to allow him to slowly work through his feelings and his issues with his own sexuality and self. the confession is a great example of the writers being almost there and then never speaking about it again.

even if you aren’t bisexual, you can see how much biphobia there is in the world. and as a bisexual woman i can say that bisexuality in men is so looked down upon it’s disturbing. men coming to terms with their bisexuality, especially if they are considered straight and “manly”, always makes me so happy since it’s not as accepted as female bisexuality. and this is another reason why supernatural exploring dean’s bisexuality would have been so incredible. seeing a man on television who has a lot of internal issues come to terms with something so complex and life changing would have been monumental to so many people. the writers had an infinite amount of ways to go about this because of things that THEY wrote, and instead chose to ignore his sexuality and have him not respond to castiel’s confession in 15x18. it’s very clear he was in shock in that episode so i’m not mad, but it is also clear that they wrote it that way to not fully make deancas canon.

dean winchester is bisexual, and the writers wrote him that way. nobody pulled this out of their ass, destiel didn’t become popular randomly and for no reason, they wrote him this way. this is their own writing that they have chosen to ignore and contradict for 15 seasons and it’s disappointing.

Castiel

this entire post is being written on november 6, 2020. one day after 15x18 aired. castiel is now canonically queer, and was already sent to someplace worse than hell. because he was happy. which directly connected to his love for dean. i honestly don’t even have to write cas’ section because that is enough, but i’ll write about his mistreatment anyway.

we knew the only thing that would make cas truly happy would be something with dean. well we assumed the writers would make up some other bullshit, but we hoped that it had something to do with dean. and sure enough, it was his love confession. and what i loved about this was cas starts it off by saying two beautiful things. one, that he knows he can never have what he really wants (dean), but he’s just as happy telling dean he loves him. he doesn’t need to have him to be happy with where they end their story, as long as dean knows. and the other thing he starts off by saying is that he knows how dean sees himself. he lists off all of these extremely kind things about dean and how dean is what made cas care about the world. he is the reason castiel went from an emotionless soldier to a fallen angel that feels deep love for people.

this confession scene although tainted by the fact that he died right after, which we’ll talk about, and the fact that it took this damn long, really means a lot to me. it was so incredible seeing cas be unapologetically open, honest, in love, and himself. he was for the first time since we’ve known him, completely and totally content. he told the man he loves how incredible he thinks he is and how he loves him, and knew he was saving him from billie by doing it. we’ve never seen him that happy. and it’s heartbreaking.

misha summed it up perfectly i think: “Tonight, watching Cas talk to Dean, I got lost in the story and forgot for a moment that I’m the one who plays that angel and I thought, “He’s how I want to be. He’s openhearted and he’s selfless and he’s true.”

this was the first time we saw cas living his whole truth, and he immediately died. in terms of just bad taste, sending someone who just came out to angel hell is very disturbing, but it’s just further proof of the writers not caring about their lgbtqia+ characters. it’s like they gave us what we wanted, but there just had to be a catch, right? these writers very clearly do not care about their queer characters or fans, and what they did to cas here shows that plain as day.

obviously i really do want dean to save cas from the empty to parallel cas saving him from hell, but do i think it’ll happen in these last two episodes? no. first off i just don’t think misha filmed for the last two episodes, but also, the writers have made it clear that they do not care about cas in general, nevermind their now love story. it just does not sit right with me that he got sent to the empty for eternity because he was finally his whole self and happy.

Charlie Bradbury (our world + au)

we have seen charlie bradbury die twice, both times for no reason at all. the first time we saw her die, it was by the hands of a NAZI, and her body was THROWN INTO A BATHTUB. like i said before with cas, that was explanation enough i mean come ON. the second time we witnessed charlie die was in 15x18, (along with the whole world i know bare with me), which we did NOT need to see.

let’s start with the fact that for all of these characters, supernatural creates and writes them wonderfully for the most part. we fall in love with these characters because of the way they were written, acted, and the dynamic with other characters. unfortunately in supernatural, if you are queer or a woman or god forbid both, that dynamic with other characters will be the death of you.

i’m gonna talk about each other her deaths individually. so her first death. the only reason for her death was to further sam and dean’s (mostly dean’s) man pain. although i eat up the reactions of other characters when another dies, this just felt completely unnecessary to me. the writers wrote a fan-favorite character, and decided that the best course of action was to brutally murder her to further dean’s mark of cain storyline. and i loved that storyline! i loved the scene of dean getting revenge for charlie! but it did not need to happen. the only thing the fans wanted was for her to be alive and well, get more screentime and possibly have a girlfriend.

when directly asked why they thought killing charlie was a good idea, jeremy carver said:

“That’s an excellent question, and it, it’s tough just because...any time you have a favorite character on a show...People die on the show. And, and, and...and, unfortunately...So...there’s so many ways to answer that. And I feel, I, I...it’s tough for me to answer. She’s an absolutely beloved character, beloved on the show...And when we’re in the writer’s room...we have to go where the story takes us. And we try and do it without, um...(insert fans booing and the cast laughing at him)...this is the world day of my life. And I’d like to thank everyone up here for the support.” (they were not helping).

not only did he not have a clue on how to answer a question that should have an understandable answer, but then the best thing that he could come up with is “we have to go where the story takes us.” but why would that possibly be where the story takes you? if supernatural had more diversity than straight white males and possibly one woman that dies or is evil, then fine kill off whoever you want even if i don’t like it. but it becomes a gender and sexuality issue when she is not only the only recurring female character at the time, but also the only recurring lgbtqia+ character at the time (minus cas).

now the second time she’s died. mind you this isn’t our world’s charlie. they brought her back for the fans and for the cast/crew that love her and felicia. we’ve established that she’s here living her life someplace. we haven’t heard anything about her for a hot minute, and then they decide to bring her back for 15x18. i was thrilled! i could not wait to see her, and was even more excited when she showed up on my television. and then, even better, we found out she has a girlfriend who she lives with and is clearly happy/comfortable with. and then what happens, may you ask? her girlfriend, stevie, a queer woman of color, vanishes. boom another unnecessary lgbtqia+ and woman death that could have been avoided if they just wrote in sam and dean calling her for help.

later on in the episode, everyone on earth excluding dean, sam, and jack are gone- completely vanished where they stood. charlie of course is among those people. bare with me here, i know everyone vanished and it’s not the same as the first one. but here’s my issue with it: she did not have to come back. i would have rather had donna say “jodie, the girls, charlie, they’re ready to go when you need them”, and then they all vanish off screen. but instead they went through the trouble of bringing her back, showing her happy, having her experience a painful loss, and then disappear anyway. what was the point in having her in the episode?

like i mentioned earlier with dean being representation for bisexual men, charlie was just that for lesbians!! the amount of posts i’ve seen on multiple platforms talking about how much they resonated with charlie or how heartbroken they were no longer having representation on their favorite show is awful. there was a kickass nerdy, kind, strong, loving lesbian on your show not once but twice (au charlie), and you blew it.

Claire + Kaia (Dreamhunter)

this part isn’t going to be long because there are some exceptions: wayward sisters failed spinoff (i’m still heartbroken i want it so bad), kathryn newton’s new status and inability to be in the show, etc.. so i guess this will just be a short thing about wayward sisters and what that could mean for claire and kaia.

they had already established in supernatural that kaia was claire’s first love. we had gotten some really cute scenes with them, and then wayward sisters was finally a possibility. if the show had gone through, which i’m not sure why it didn’t, claire and kaia’s relationship could have been a goldmine. young girls could see themselves represented by characters already adored by supernatural fans. it would’ve shown a beautiful wlw relationship between two young girls who are also kickass and can keep up with their elders/male counterparts.

i can’t pin this on the writers sadly (lmao), but i am still upset that we didn’t get wayward sisters. it would’ve meant a lot to women and to the lgbtqia+ community.

My thoughts

like i said in the disclaimer, i love these characters and the story of supernatural. i always will. but i can’t lie about how frustrating it is seeing women, lgbts and people of color get constantly disregarded and mistreated. the writers had 15 years to get with the times, and the growth of society. stuff that i saw in season one and wasn’t surprised by should not still be happening in season 15. having writers that are all straight white males/women is not enough anymore. it never was. there has to be something for everyone in a show as big as this. it’s not about meeting diversity requirements, it’s about actually having diversity because it’s real. there are no diversity requirements for people in society. these are just people of different races, ethnicities, sexualities, genders, etc. who want to see someone like them represented on the things that they watch. it’s a lonely feeling not being validated by a show that you love.

i might make another post specifically for the women mistreatment and queerbaiting on this show but that’s all for my essay on why supernatural sucks at not mistreating their queer characters :)

#supernatural #spn #spn 15x18 #dean winchester #castiel #deancas #destiel #charlie bradbury #claire novak #kaia nieves #wayward sisters

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misha-moose-dean-burger-lover · 5 years

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Destiel - my shower isn’t working can I use yours 😆

Okay, so where I'm going with this one isn't exactly a meetcute to me, but it also could be, if you are into that kind of stuff, I'm not sure about most things, please enjoy the story ~

***

It's been one hour since Dean's gotten up, and the day already sucks.

Things had been fine till all the noise started. It was eleven, on a Sunday morning, and he had been contentedly sitting on his couch, watching Queer Eye as he had his breakfast of milk, cereal and beer, as one does, and wondering about Sammy's whereabouts, even while he prepared punny punchlines for the latter's inevitable walk of shame - when the drilling had begun.

And Dean didn't like disturbing loud noises - not so early on weekends, and not ever.

Obviously some sort of construction work, or maintenance was happening at the apartment across the hall from his. Dean's brain registered it immediately as the one with the ridiculously cute Lit. Major, Cas-something, and his friend (well, Dean hoped, though they did seem pretty close).

Dean didn't know those two very well, because they'd only just moved in like a month ago - which could've made the drilling sorta suspicion-worthy, if their apartment building had had any good reputation at all. Dean had had his midterms then, so he hadn't gotten to know them much - though Sam had told him, from when he went to the mixer they threw like a fortnight ago, that they seemed like good people.

Dean's interactions had thus been pretty limited with Cas - Sam had only remembered that much of his name, for the stupid giant head he has, and Dean couldn't even be sure that it was correct, they'd never conversed so he'd never had a chance to use it - but that's what he calls him when he thinks of him in his head.

And he does. He knows Cas studies Literature, because he's seen him with Professor Moseley. And he knows Cas liked honey, because his friend, Balthazar had come to ask if they had any, because 'his roommate needed it, and was too anxious to initiate social interactions', Dean remembers, in a sarcastic accented drawl. And he knows that Cas runs in the mornings, and that he -

There's a knock at his door, which brings him out of his reverie. He sets down his tray, and went to open the door, expecting Sam - silently regretting using some of the last minutes thinking about his gorgeous neighbors, instead of what all he'd say to get Sam all riled up, when he showed up in last evening's clothes.

But it isn't Sam. It's Cas - or, to play on the safer side, Dean was going to pretend he didn't know his name at all; that would be better than to call him by the wrong name because what kind of asshole does that?

"Hello!" From the other side of the door, Cas - or whatever the fuck his name is, Dean keeps calling him Cas, because he has been doing it in his head, for a month now - breathes out, in a beautiful goddamn baritone. He's looking straight at Dean with unbelievably blue eyes, and Dean's never stood this close to him, in actual reality before.

So, undoubtedly, he is too busy gawking at Cas, to respond to the greeting - but he can't be blamed. Cas is breathless, and sweaty - from the way his fitted grey tshirt sticks to all the right places, and how sweat glistens on his forehead and plasters his black hair to his head. If Dean had ever been able to get Sam's nagging, 'You're confusing reality with porn again' out of his head, his brain could've conjured up some really interesting scenarios.

He stands in front of Dean, dressed in only a tshirt and what are clearly running shorts, and suddenly Dean's aware of the fact that he's wearing flannel pajamas, which are also Sam's, if that isn't embarrassing enough by itself - since he didn't wanna do laundry, and which are hatefully too big for him - a white shirt that has Donald Duck on it, and his fucking heart on his sleeve.

"Uh." He begins, eloquent as ever. "Hey there."

"Do you," Cas's lips twist into some sort of a frown. "Think I could come inside?"

"Yeah. Yeah, sure." Dean mutters, making way for him to enter. The passage is wide enough for there to be zero contact between them, as Cas shuffles inside and Dean reaches forward to shut the door and lock it behind him - and for the first time, Dean wishes he lived in a skimpier apartment. "What's up, dude?" Dean asks, trying to get a hold of himself, as he stares at Cas tentatively, waiting for him to make the next move, as he tries to figure out how to keep looking at him before coming off as creepy. As one does.

"I - well, I -" He begins, and then stops abruptly, holding his hand out to Dean. "I'm Castiel, by the way, and I live across you."

Dean nods, wetting his lips, as he shook his hand. "I, uh, know." He says, uncertainly. And then realizing he hasn't introduced himself either, he hurriedly adds. "And I'm Dean. I live across you, too."

Castiel smiles at him, in spite of the lame joke, and Dean is grateful, because he was about to start looking for a hole to bury himself in. Then, Castiel starts speaking too, and Dean shifts his focus between his words and the way his voice sounds, to keep up. "As I guess you've probably heard, Balthazar is getting some repairs done at our place. I didn't know it was today until right about now, but this thing might take time. Shelves to be made, showers to be fixed, fire alarms which actually work to be installed -" Dean snorts at that, then is instantly appalled at himself, because that's the most unattractive way he could laugh, fucking get your act together, Winchester. "And so on. I'm sorry on both our behalf, because the noise must be disturbing, and -"

"Nah, nevermind." Dean interrupts. "It's not a big deal." What else is he supposed to say? 'I wanna kill myself because of it, so please don't need a new shelf, ever again?' Pfft.

"You're very understanding," Castiel smiles once again, and it's a polite one - and Dean is suddenly hit by the realization that that is perhaps what Castiel is here for. To be polite and curtesical about the fact that they're disturbing the whole building. Not because he wants to have anything to do with Dean - perhaps he did this with everyone on all the floors, and gave compensation-cookies, but then ran out of them before he came to Dean, but didn't think Dean was worth that much of an effort.

Dean's subconscious does make an effort to put a pause to the annoying workings of his mind, but as always, the other side triumphed. And then Dean stands there, feeling ridiculous about himself having internally made such a big deal of something like this.

But then, Castiel start speaking again. "And, I know this is such an idiotic favor to ask for -" So there is more, thinks Dean. "And you are allowed to turn me down, okay?"

"Ask away, dude," Dean tells him. I'd literally bend over on the centerpiece for you, if you asked nicely, he doesn't say, because. Well. Boundaries and crap.

Castiel seems to be gathering his words.

Dean wonders what it could be.

He hasn't wondered far, when Castiel finally lets it out. "I - I just came from my run, and I really think I need to shower. And my shower isn't working, could I use yours?"

Dean is stunned. He didn't think things like this we're supposed to happen in actual frigging reality. Castiel - the totally hot dude from across the hallway was asking to take a shower in his apartment. Dean's brain was practically stuttering, at this point.

"Dean?" Castiel echoes.

Dean's brain goes around the roundabout, and starts to take the route back to a safer place. It's obviously not like Castiel is going to be in the shower, and then asking Dean to join. That, now that would be something that would honestly throw him off. But this is cool, right? The guy has a reason. (And no porn has such legitimate explanations, okay?) So perhaps Dean should go looking for his brain in the gutters, and respond.

"Yeah. Uh, sorry about that." He shrugs, and then nods. "You know what? Sure. You can. I mean, why would I say no, you know?"

Castiel blinked at him. "Are you sure?"

"Of course." Dean nods, way surer now that Castiel looks insecure of ever asking. And Castiel gives him a small smile. "Thank you."

A moment passes, and they're simply looking at each other, and Dean is obviously trying to alternate gazes between his eyes, and his lips. Then suddenly, Castiel clears his throat, and raises his eyebrows with a slight tilt of his head and Dean returns to the present.

"Right!" He swallows. "Right now. Okay, yeah, okay." He doesn't really know what to do for a moment there, but then he looks at Castiel, who's sporting an absolutely adorable gummy smile.

"You do know you don't have to do anything, right?" He supplies, somehow reading the tension in his body. "Just, uh, direct me towards your bathroom, please."

And Dean's brain stops short on the verge of short-circuiting - he doesn't know why, okay!? - and he just nods. "Yeah, uh. Sure. That's smart. It's this way."

When Dean has shown Castiel to the bathroom - the one attached to his bedroom, and not Sam's - he instantly fetches a towel for him, too. Kind of a 'I'm not always as slow as I just was in the living room' gesture, and Castiel accepts it with a smile. "Thank you, again."

"It's not an issue, seriously," Dean promises, still hovering, even though he's shown Castiel to the bathroom and handed him the best towel he owns. "Oh, right." Dean suddenly steps into the bathroom, remembering - Castiel follows him in, like he's obviously supposed to, but now it's just the two of them in that confined white-tiled space, and Dean's mouth feels dry. "About the, uh, thingy? Contrary to what you may infer from the symbols, left is hot, and right is cold. We actually installed it wrong."

"Oh," Castiel takes it easily. "Thank you for telling me that."

"Yeah." Dean checks himself, and then the space around him, and is sure he's done all he can do - to help Castiel, to embarrass himself, etcetera - and he takes his leave. "I'll, uh, go now. Enjoy, I guess."

And he hears a bit of a chuckle behind him, as he practically rushes out of his bedroom and back to the living room, where he sits with his legs folded on the couch, and screws his eyes shut - trying to focus all his energy on going back to a happier timr, where he hadn't said 'enjoy' to Castiel, before leaving him in a fucking bathroom.

Dean tries to not think about it - he really does. He tries not to listen to Cas showering, and tries not to hear Castiel's almost-mute (maybe non-existent) humming, and he tries so frigging hard to not imagine a very naked Castiel in his shower. Or what he might be doing, and - OH, that is another level of gross, even for him.

And because the world is so fair to him, he manages to stop thinking about it - for one goddamn moment, before he's now thinking of worse things. Like all the kinds of things there are in his bathroom. Fuck, there's probably some gross hair in the drain from when he shampooed a few days earlier. There's that one crack in the tiles, where Dean had fallen - one very, very complicated afternoon. And, Jesus fucking Christ, there was lube on some rack somewhere.

As Dean sits on the couch by himself, regretting all of his life choices all at once, and wondering how much easier it would be if he flees to Alaska for the rest of the time Castiel is at Stanford - he tries to tune out the sounds of the water to the backdrop of Queer Eye - and all the drilling, obviously, but he still notices when the water is turned off.

It couldn't have been more than ten minutes, if he's being honest, but it feels a lot longer. Sighing, Dean throws his head back against the couch, and rubs the palms of his hands against his eyes -

And that's when Castiel yells for him.

Dean is thrown off at first, but then he's rushing, because why the hell would Castiel be asking for him now - when he's clearly just finished showering - if it wasn't something important.

So Dean crosses the living room with large steps, and is going into his bedroom when he sees Castiel, standing in the doorway of the bathroom - completely naked, except for the towel around his waist.

If Dean had thought he'd been having trouble looking away before, well, he certainly had no chance against this. Castiel's arms were a feast for his eyes - his fucking biceps would've been as big as Dean's, easily. His entire torso was lean and muscled, and his shoulders combined with his pecs were something that would certainly feed Dean's fantasies for a long, long time. And all the running had certainly paid off, because he had these beautiful fucking calves, and all his -

Shit. Dean is extremely not okay, when it comes to this guy. He needs to stop.

"Dean." Castiel's voice hits him with a jolt, and Dean's eyes turn up to Castiel's - wishing with all his heart, that he had not caught him checking him out. "I'm so sorry."

"What?" He blinks. What had he done? Wait, did he somehow break his shower, because Dean kind of had feelings for that shit.

"I need to ask another favor of you," Castiel looks truly apologetic, like it pains him as much to be asking Dean to do this - as it pains Dean to not go back to staring at him. "And this one is all sorts of dumb, but I -"

"What do you need?" Dean cuts him off; the apologising routine was cumbersome.

"My clothes, from my apartment. Mine are drenched from the run." He emphasizes. "And I was about to go get a towel and a change of clothes before, but then you handed me that towel, and I was too distracted - I mean, I wasn't thinking of it then, and Dean - I obviously need clothes." With his jaw fucking dropped, Dean waits for him to finish. "And I don't think I should go into my apartment like this," He looks down at himself. "There's other people working there."

Some part of Dean wants to hang onto the part, which hints that Castiel is fine being this way in front of Dean - but not in front of those workers, but then he instantly realizes that's dumb and nothing romantic at all. There is no comparison.

"Dean." And now, he's giving him a full on puppy stare. Sam-level. "Would you please -"

"Wait." Dean hears himself speaking, though he's almost sure he's not thinking those things through. "That's not smart. I wouldn't know where your stuff is, and I'm not going to pick out pants and shirts for you. It would be easier if you just wore something of mine. We're basically the same size." And this time, Dean has somewhat of an excuse to space another glance to Castiel's naked upper-body.

"But," Castiel looks like he might try to protest, but then he doesn't. "I do think that is the smarter option. I just hope you don't mind."

It's better than me playing dress-up on you, Dean thinks. 'There's no way I'd survive looking at your wardrobe, even.' But he keeps it to himself. "I don't. You can, uh." He leans in and slides open one door. "Pick anything from here."

"Okay." Castiel swallows. "Thank you, Dean."

"Yeah." And it comes out a little bit strangled, because now Dean has another thing that makes him feel suffocated, but in all the best ways. Castiel, in his clothes. And also because he's still staring at him, a little bit.

"Thank you for everything, Dean." Castiel sighs, and Dean - for a fleeting second - imagines that he's gonna get a hug but then it's like they both remember in the same instant that Castiel doesn't have clothes on.

Now that would've been a surefire way for Dean to have finally gotten the attack he's been on the verge of, since the moment there was a knock on his door.

Almost an hour later, Sam stumbles back in. He might be in last night's clothes, but he looks tardy in the 'all-night-group-study' sense, and not the fun sense - and Dean wouldn't put it past his geek of a brother.

But Sam comes in to find Dean has a guest over from across the hallway - and the-Cas-guy is wearing Dean's AC/DC shirt (or maybe Sam's just sleepy) and they're having grilled cheese while sitting too close on the couch, as they watch Queer Eye.

(Dean fills him in later, that because Dean had kinda helped Cas out that day, he says with a bit of a blush, Cas had offered to make him breakfast to repay him; but Sam knows that's Dean's cereal bowl in the sink, but he can easily imagine how Dean must have leaped at the the offer of a second breakfast, as long as Cas, the cute guy Dean hundred-percent has a crush on, offered to make it - and in turn, stayed some more.)

***

I'm finally back to destiel! It took me a while ;) but I found my way back ~ this was so fun to write, and I almost lost my draft for a bit there and then it came back and I was like, THIS ISN'T SAFE IN QUEUE, POST IMMEDIATELY (≧∇≦) Anyways, thank you @petrichoravellichor for the prompt! I keep thinking, I'll do the cookie fic next, and there's this huge hype around it, and then I think that maybe I'm not ready yet and I start creating something else Ψ(￣▽￣)Ψ The next is gonna be Sabriel, I think!

This time, I'll just tag the list as it is, because it's destiel: @ctrl-alt-design @emmii4 @awkward-penguin-in-a-trenchcoat @styggtroll @petrichoravellichor @all-or-nothing-baby @moderatelypanickedbiromantic @elvenlicht @legendary-destiel @noemithenephilim @galaxy-charm @trenchcoatsandfreckles @naitia @ladywaywarddsc @zoerayne2426 @thekidsmaybealright @hellfire37 @3dg310rdsupreme @impulsivedandelion @iamcharliebradburylevelperfect List is Open! Send me messages, I guess, if you wanna be added/removed.

That's all for today! Maybe leave me a comment to gush about. Hope you all have an amazing day ~ Keep it sailing ~

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remythologise · 3 years

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Hello! I found your blog via you amazingly summarizing all that's going on with the spn drama. Due to my schedules, rl stuff, some of the arcs that didn't vibe with me, my availability to find a place to watch...the rollercoaster I was used to with this fandom was more me binging it in a weekend to going months to over a year without watching it. I still haven't watched the last season(but with a fandom this big it's pretty impossible not be spoiled so I more or less know what happened) BUT oh great one I ask of thee for more information if you have it...other than being busy and whatnot, I'm not really one to keep up with the actors as well. So could you also maybe do a summary of all the stans? I'im seeing terms I haven't seen before. Who is Kelios(sp?)? Hellions?? probably messed it up but like...I guess what are the name of each legion? Who do they have alliance towards? What was their desires? Que paso?!?!?!?

Hi there! 'Some of the arcs that didn't vibe with me' me emotionally quitting Supernatural in Season 7 after they killed Castiel 😂 Anyway I totally get it, I went through the same culture shock mid-last year when I got back into SPN and tried to find where fandom was at! There's really a LOT of lore and content after 15 years though so I'll just do the broad brushstrokes based on my impressions and personal stereotypes PLEASE remember this is oversimplifying groups and individuals to tendencies and I'm very biased! Also important that there are sub-factions within sub-factions - again, I'm simplifying here!

I've also linked to the 'Super-wiki' in terms of some definitions because the Super-wiki has pages for them where the Fandom-wiki does not. Great introduction actually - only in the Supernatural fandom. There are two Supernatural wikis. One, through curation and twitter activity, supports BiBro/Wincest factions and does not support Destiel users. One is more neutral or Destiel-friendly (I don't know that the Fandom wiki has a personality/social media presence per se). You cannot make this up. There is a factional war... within use of fandom wikis.

Destiel faction

People who primarily ship Dean/Cas, love Castiel and (often, although not always) Jack, and the 'found family' of Supernatural as well as the brothers, and like the post s3 seasons too. Hated 15.19 and 15.20 for killing Dean and ignoring the other characters/narrative arc of the show. Nicknamed 'Destihellers' by the Wincest faction as a derogatory term, 'reclaimed' and shortened as 'Hellers', a nickname they use affectionately to describe each other. See more info on nicknames here.

Sometimes also ship ‘Cockles’ (the ship between Misha Collins and Jensen Ackles) although generally speaking they're more respectful of the wives of the actors than J2 shippers, who are notoriously responsible for... a vast series of insane-fan misdemeanours. Historically most were also good at keeping RPF to themselves and not harassing celebrities with it directly, although recently, particularly with younger twitter fans, that has not been the case.

Sub-factions:

The ‘Desticule’ or ‘Destiel tumblr’ - general grouping of Destiel-shipping tumblr users around 20-30 years old, usually LGBT+, most who came back to the show post-15.18 after leaving it for various reasons including getting sick of the queerbaiting. Funniest bitches alive etc. and responsible for the best text posts you’ve ever seen. Can also start stupid discourse and in-group drama when they’re bored.

'POLOL' - People of Lots of Letters, a discord group (of tumblr and twitter users) that ran on the assumption Andrew Dabb was playing a hugely intricate game of 3D chess to do with gnostic symbolism among other things, and would make Destiel canon. Have since had their own factional sub-wars and fallen apart a bit. Some of their meta was and is good and interesting! Some of it was wildly off the mark. Now generally insist that Dabb/the writers were all pushing for Destiel canon and the network is entirely to blame.

Twitter fans (TikTok edition) - younger fans around 18 and younger who (FOR REASONS BEYOND ME) started watching the show around 2018-2020. Definition of 'stans'. Tend to be very loud and aggressive on twitter when Events Happen, which like. I do get, because they've grown up in a completely different media environment and this kind of Dinosaur Politicking around LGBT+ issues is beyond them. Fancam central. Anyway stream #CASTIEL for clear skin!

Twitter fans (AO3 edition) - older fans around 30+ who kept going with the show but either don't have a large tumblr presence or just prefer twitter. A lot of fic writers, GISH-ers, and BNFs in this group. Some of them are very cool and reasonable in their opinions, some of them act like the younger stans. Some of them too accepting of what happened wrt 15.19-20 in my opinion, because, in contrast to the younger twitter stans, they grew up expecting Destiel to NEVER be canon or respected. 'Can't believe we got this far' etc.

Multiship faction

Multishippers or shippers of things not as large as the two main behemoths . Sub-factions based on shipping, e.g. Megstiel and Sastiel. I don't think these groups are very large though, and seem to have very little influence in the Discourse.

Wincest faction

LARGE overlap with the 'BiBro' faction and their opinions, which I'll get to. Ship Sam and Dean romantically. Often pretend to be BiBros on places like twitter and reddit in order for outside groups to take their opinions more seriously. 'Wincesties' etc. are derogatory nicknames given by the Destiel faction.

Sub-factions:

Multiship fans - ship Sam and Dean but respect Castiel/the 'found family'. Politically overlap with the faction of multishippers, I think. I don't have a lot of insight on this group of people honestly, but I know they exist.

Bronlies - the typical BiBro and 'Wincest' shippers most people think of, twitter user 'Kelios' is one of the would-be ringleaders of this faction - typically tend to be older white midwestern women. Historically have been pretty nasty on twitter (leading to Robert Berens, writer who made Destiel canon, occasionally subtweeting Kelios). Also tend to ship 'J2' - and take it very seriously as a legitimate thing that is really real. This is called 'tinhatting'.

BiBro faction

People who think the show should JUST be about the brothers, love Supernatural s1-3 and everything after it should have been just like Supernatural s1-3. Hate Castiel, Jack, and the 'found family'. Largely loved 15.20. Go to literally any comments section on any Supernatural article and You Will Find Them complaining about how the show should just be about the Brothers. Tend to be older, straighter, and more conservative/Republican (and male) fans. (I am aware that the definition of 'BiBro' used to refer to people who just liked the brothers but there's no definitional difference now in the discourse.) The Wincest and BiBro faction are generally much more wealthy than the Destiel faction (they being younger and more diverse/queer/left-leaning in general) and would be the biggest revenue generators at conventions etc.

Sub-factions:

Reddit bros - literally anyone who visits r/supernatural. Well, that's not fair - there are people who post reasonable opinions on there, but it's pretty rare and they get downvoted a lot. Like to talk about 'toxic Destiel fans' 'ruining the show' and how Dean is a straight man who is straight and could never possibly be gay. Might even think the confession was platonic despite all evidence to the contrary. I'm Not Homophobic I Have Gay Friends, But No Gays on MY Show!

Old Guard - group of older fans who overlap strongly with the Wincest faction, but might not necessarily ship Wincest.

GA faction

'General Audience' - These are the group of audience members that aren't 'online' so to speak; most watch the show on TV as a Casual Viewing Experience (are therefore also sometimes referred to as 'casuals'. Mostly their opinions tend towards BiBros, but they have a vast range of baffling views thanks to being Not Online and usually Not caring about Supernatural that much or thinking that deeply about it.

Sub-factions:

People who simply watch Supernatural on TV and then don't think about it very much after that.

I said they weren't 'online' but that's not entirely true; I'd probably classify people on Supernatural Facebook Groups as GA, along with friends of friends who post statuses about how 15.20 was a neat finale that wrapped up the series.

Conclusion

Supernatural is famously the show that appeals to both Republicans and Democrats, literally All Orientations, so there's a WIDE range of factions. However, most warring online boils down to Destiel vs. Wincest/BiBro - the war that started in Season 4 and has simply never ended. In terms of the 'actors' and their stans, in general, Wincest/BiBro fans love Jared, like Jensen, and dislike Misha. Destiel fans love Misha, like Jensen, and dislike Jared. Of course as with everything, there are variations and this is just a generalisation. But that's the summary of it, from my perspective!

This didn't even get into Sam girls, Dean girls and Cas girls. God. Anyway.

Hope that answered your question, anon!

#for some reason read more does not work on my blog main page now? you'll have to click the permalink #season 17 time for a theme change tumblr has broken this one too much sigh #ask #anonymous #this might be the most controversial thing I've ever posted or I might escape with nobody noticing it. Only Two Outcomes #didn't mention any other factional ringleaders because well #I value my life etc.#unironically who will fund me writing the PhD on supernatural fandom etc. etc.#the graphs. the statistics. the sociological insights #kira for ts #supernatural spoilers #spn spoilers

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ambthecreative · 3 years

Text

DESTIEL RANT! Unpopular Opinion Time - The Scene was NOT Homophobic

Wow. It’s BEEN YEARS! And yet here I am again! I have returned to my Tumblr roots, rambling about Supernatural again! I have come full circle! Summoned by three words spoken by the Angel of the Lord we all knew and loved. But lets get down to business. Everyone’s going crazy. They either loved it, hated it, loved/hated it, hated/loved it, etc. Even people who never watched an episode felt the need to add their two cents without any context or with extreme bias. So here’s the observations from a former Supernatural Fan and intense DESTIEL SHIPPER, but also one who has stopped watching it cause omfg it sucks so bad now. My bias comes from both angles and thus neutralizes each other out xD Obviously, spoilers for Episode 18 of Season 15 of Supernatural lay ahead. ~~~

(TL;DR: The scene wasn’t bad because it was forced or homophobic. It was neither. The scene was bad because of long term poor plotting, repetitive character arcs and horrendous timing and execution. That said, my shipping heart is just happy that it happened at all. <3 ) ONWARDS! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Lets just get to the point. At first glance, that scene looks extremely homophobic and when it was first described to me (I haven’t watched the show since Season 9), it appears that is indeed the case. And you can make a STRONG case for it to, if you watched that scene and knew of all the fucking queer bait we had to live through before getting here. But I watched the entire episode. And I think this is key. Cause while it’s easy to say its all homophobic, that’s not actually what was happening. The truth is, the episode is a set up for the ending. Sure it seems to be framed that Castiel is sent to the Empty for being gay, but that’s the bias talking. Contextually, Castiel is sent to the Empty for being Truly Happy. Also EVERYONE dies. Funny how no one is up in arms that Charlie’s GF got poofed at the very start of the episode. Not gay enough for it to count? Like she literally made her girlfriend breakfast and they were flirting, and boom she was gone FOREVER, not sent to a place where people have come back from before, but with NO EVIDENCE of them being alive at all. Dead. Gone. But no one says a damn thing. And then EVERYONE died. THEN Cas died. And yet everyone got like temporary amnesia and its like, “CASTIEL WAS KILLED FOR BEING GAY!!!” That’s...not what happened tho. What’s really sad is the moment with Castiel was actually a GREAT plot point/twist, if only they had done it better. NO ONE would be saying SHIT if Castiel had been a woman. NO ONE. Or at least, they would mostly see it as tragic than anything else. But because Castiel is making a homosexual love confession, it must BE because he’s GAY! It’s really ironic. Judging that scene as homophobic is ACTUALLY homophobic* (not really, but i can’t think of a better word). Or at least you’re judging the scene by their sexuality and not by what is actually going on. Now I remembered something after thinking about this scene for a while. THIS PLOT POINT HAS HAPPENED BEFORE IN ANOTHER EVEN MORE ICONIC SHOW!!! Now bear with me cause I never watched the whole thing, only the bits and pieces my roommate shared with me. But the whole “I am cursed to suffer a terrible fate if I ever experience true happiness” has been done before. And where was that?

Spoilers for Buffy by the way. SO! To all those who are still trying to spin this as platonic, you need to watch more shitty afterschool 90s supernatural TV shows. In season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Buffy’s good vampire boyfriend, wakes up evil because he had a moment of true happiness. And this dooms the couple. NOW. Do you call this...heterophobia???? Oh I hear you! “But Angel didn’t die and he and Buffy got to be romantic and actually have sex before that shit went down! Not the same thing!” TRUE. I didn’t really bring this up to make an argument that the scene/show isn’t homophobic (or at least they are very uncomfortable with it), but rather I wanted to make a point that the PLOT POINT is not at all homophobic and is actually really awesome. The issue with the scene is the execution. That moment between Cas and Dean should have happened SEASONS ago or at the VERY LEAST earlier in this FINAL season, and not right at the very end. The other reason why it worked so well with Buffy is that they had plenty of episodes afterwards to go into it, have Buffy react to it, and deal with it and such. Meanwhile SPN, still BLATANTLY uncomfortable with handling this sort of thing, decided to put Castiel away in a dark closet and then put forth an end the world plotline by killing EVERYONE so Dean is too busy to actually think and talk about it for any real length of time XD. I wouldn’t use the word homophobic for it, because it wasn’t used as a joke, it wasn’t used to demean gay people, it wasn’t meant to say “if you are homosexual, you go to hell.”

That’s not it at all. The only reason people think that is because they’ve been hurt in the past so many times, by religion and government and truly homophobic media, and this scene triggers that hurt. HOWEVER, if you look at that scene without that lens, it’s more cowardly and insecure, than homophobic. Cause at the end of the day, that’s the whole problem with Supernatural. They never commit. Their writing is lazy and weak because they don’t have the writing chops to actually GO FOR IT.

They are constantly at war with the writing, the ratings/money, and the general public views. They constantly add poc and homosexual characters, but are too afraid to actually do anything with them in fear of doing it poorly and upsetting people (and honestly, it’s a valid fear XD). I stopped watching Supernatural cause the writing is HORRIBLE. It has nothing to do with homophobia and everything to do with the fact its all over the place, there’s no stakes, the power escalation is shot to hell, they keep saying SIKE when they do kill people, no changes last forever, and it should have ended SEASONS ago. Its BAD. But in regards to homosexuality, the fact that they used a plot point that the legendary Buffy the Vampire Slayer used but used it on two characters of the same sex is actually AMAZING. YES it was CRINGY. The handprint was cringy! They were trying WAY too hard to make it different than the other 1000000 times Castiel died for Dean. But it was their poor plotting, their overuse of killing and bringing back people, the fact Dean and Cas never actually even toyed with the idea of romance openly in the entire show, that caused this scene to not shine as brightly as it could have.

THAT SAID.

HOLY SHIT CASTIEL LOVES DEAN! THATS AMAZING!!!! Ahem. Another reason why people get this scene so wrong is because they think writers are actual Gods. We are not. They are flawed and they are many and this show had WAY too many showrunners. AND IT SHOWS. But you know whos constant? The actors. Dean has never really changed. Jensen played him exactly as he’s always played him. ALWAYS. Any person who got mad that Dean didn’t sob or kiss Castiel needs to take off their gay fucking glasses and respect the fact that THAT ISN’T DEAN. HE’S NEVER BEEN THAT WAY. EVEN IF CASTIEL WAS A WOMAN HE WOULDNT HAVE ACTED THAT WAY.

Also Dean has been so BLATANTLY straight this WHOLE time. Now I’m not saying that the romantic feelings were not reciprocal. I’m saying we don’t fucking know XD Hell DEAN might not know, and honestly that would be the most realistic and best way to handle that. Do you know how FUCKED UP it would have been if Dean broke character and suddenly came out as Gay and totally fine with that and just acted like he’s been gay this WHOLE time even when it’s so obvious that he was not?!! Its like - Respect Homosexuality, but Disrespect all other sexualities. You can’t just force Dean to be Gay and Comfortable With That Fact (tm).

You can’t. And to expect and force Jensen Ackles to play his character, that he’s played for years that way, to tell him to fuck off how he’s BEEN playing him cause it’s not good enough anymore even though everyone ATE IT UP before Castiel came on screen, is an INSULT to him. I do think he can realize it. I think he can lean into it. I really do think it’s possible to do it in a way that’s realistic and still in character with how Jensen has played him all these years. But now, you’re all fucking entitled little nutcases if you think that Dean should bend to your fanfic fantasy as being head over heels in love with a man without any issue at all when there’s absolutely nothing in his backstory, childhood, or ANYTHING that would explain why he would be that way. I’m old as fuck, but you know how Dean SHOULD play it? Like Heath Ledger’s character in Brokeback Mountain. He didn’t exactly showed his emotions regarding the love of his fucking life immediately, now did he? BUT THAT SAID THIS ISNT BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN YOU HORNY FUCKS XDD Ahem. That’s also a reminder for myself XD ANYWAYS!!!

TL;DR: The scene wasn’t bad because it was forced or homophobic.

It was neither.

The scene was bad because of long term poor plotting, repetitive character arcs and horrendous timing and execution.

That said, my shipping heart is just happy that it happened at all. <3 The End. That is all

#supernatural #destiel #castiel #dean winchester #season 15 episode 18 #s15e18 #despair #spn #spoilers

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fandompitfalls · 3 years

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The Road This Far

Originally posted 1/13/2021

I think we can all agree, 2020 sucked. While individual things happened to brighten our days, as a whole, the entire year beginning in March all around was horrible.

One of the things that sucked was the sudden lack of new media content. Movies were pushed back, television shows stopped production, Podcast formats changed a little. 2020 impacted a lot of things. And one of those things was the final half of the final season of the 15-year long cult classic television show Supernatural.

The show, which should have ended with a bang in May of 2020, halted production with seven episodes to go. The once all-star cast that was supposed to return for the Series Finale was scrapped due to the global pandemic and instead concessions needed to be made and the final episodes were scaled down for safety reasons.

I’ll give a brief rundown of the final two episodes. While the final three were the ones that raised a whole heap of controversy, I’m not going to bother with episode 15x18 for the moment, because while I think it was poorly done, my reasoning is different from others and honestly, that could be a blog post all its own.

Warning: Below this (for the 5 people on the planet who haven’t either watched it or heard about it somewhere) will be spoilers for the final two episodes.

Episodes 15x19 “Inherit the Earth” and 15x20 “Carry On” were the quintessential Series finale and epilogue a show this long running needed.

The opening of “Inherit the Earth” finds everyone on Earth Prime (inside joke) gone, disappeared. The Rapture has come, and it seems that only Sam, Dean and Jack are the only ones alive. And a dog named Miracle (who I feel was the shows rally cry and the one I was invested in. I mean dammit Chuck, you Thanos-ed the world but then you took that adorable dog away from Dean. I hope you go DOWN!)

Jack feels a presence and is led to a church. Inside they find Michael. Archangel Michael, still in the body of Adam. He’s hidden out from God’s wrath and wants to help the Winchesters take down God. In the previous episode, the brothers get Death’s book, but only Death can open it. They’re hoping that Michael can override the lock, but it doesn’t work. Dean gets a call from Cas asking for help and to open the bunker door (obvious red flag because…Cas is gone, but okay…) Outside is not Cas but Lucifer with a reaper. Lucifer wants to help get rid of God. To do that, he kills the reaper he has hostage thereby making her the next Death. Death opens the book and begins to read.

Meanwhile, Lucifer and Michaels big show down seems to be just smack talking back and forth. When Death comes back and begins to read the passage of the book that tells how to stop God, Lucifer stabs Death, killing her and takes the book. Surprise, it seems he was playing for both sides of the team. Who didn’t see that coming? Lucifer pulls a “join me” speech to Jack giving Michael the opportunity to kill Lucifer by metaphorically stabbing him in the back.

The four then make plans to stop God. Going out to a particular spot, Sam begins to cast a spell he says he found from the book. Chuck appears, having been warned by Michael (remember that stab to the back?). Michael’s reward for serving his Father is death. Chuck snaps him out of existence and then turns his sights on the Winchesters. In true final Big Bad mode, instead of snapping them out of existence, he decides to beat them both into submission. But the Winchesters will. Not. Stay. Down.

In the plot twist that Chuck did not write, when Death made Jack into a bomb and sent him to the Empty, the explosion had a different sort of effect. Basically, he’s become a metaphysical power vacuum. When Lucifer and Michael were fighting in the Bunker, Jack was absorbing their power. Each time Chuck punched one of the Winchesters, Jack absorbed the power until finally Jack was powerful enough to confront Chuck. With one hand to the face, the power transfer was complete and hosannah on the highest, Jack becomes God, leaving the now very much human Chuck to fend for himself.

Raised by the Winchesters and having Castiel as his surrogate father figure makes Jack the chilliest supernatural being ever. He snaps back everyone (including Miracle) and tells the brothers that he is keeping a hands-off approach. He’ll be there but humans are responsible for their own outcomes from now on. He disappears and the episode ends with the Winchesters riding off into the sunset.

Episode 15x20 “Carry On” picks up five years after. Miracle is living with the Winchesters at the Bunker and they’re just going around living their lives. Still hunting monsters, saving lives. Dean even gets to a pie festival, a nice nod to Dean’s love of pie. Everything looks like it’s back to normal.

They come across a suspicious death and kidnapping of two children, one that Dean recognizes from their father’s journal. They find it and discover that it’s a nest of vampires that only hunt once every couple of years, keeping their victims alive to drain them dry.

The Winchesters go to where the nest is and find the vampires and the kids. Sam gets the kids to safety while Dean starts taking on the nest. During the fight, already there’s hints that this is not going to be a normal battle. The Winchesters are down more than they’re up and not fighting as a unit. Sam is knocked down several times and while they managed to kill the nest, the final vampire grapples with Dean and slams him up against a post, where there was a piece of reverb sticking out. Sam cuts the head off the final vampire. That’s when he realizes Dean had been stabbed and moving him off the spike would do more damage. Dean asks Sam to stay with him, knowing his journey is over.

With the exchange of power form Chuck to Jack, the Winchesters are no longer God’s “Chosen Ones” anymore, meaning they are just like all the other Hunters who have come before them. Their lucky charm is gone. In what is arguably the most emotional scene in the series, Sam stays with Dean until he dies.

Sam returns to the Bunker and gives Dean a Hunter’s funeral. He only remains at the Bunker for a bit longer until he gets called to a job and leaves (with Miracle) the bunker forever.

Dean wakes up in Heaven and has a talk with Bobby on the porch of Harvelle’s Roadhouse. This, I think was part of the things they had to work around. As much as I would have loved to see Ellen and Jo greet Dean (I think it would’ve been extremely emotional), I also understand why it wasn’t done. Bobby explains Heaven. Where it was once a line of doors where souls were destined to relive one memory over and over, it is now the Paradise it was promised to be. The woods and open country are host to (almost)everyone Dean knows and loves; His parents, Rufus, Ellen and Jo, other Hunters who have been his “family” along the way. It’s almost perfect. Dean tells Bobby he’s going for a drive and climbs into Baby. The song, poetically, on the radio is “Carry On” by Kansas and Dean drives.

The montage bounces then between Dean driving and Sam living his life. You find he was married and became a father to a son he named Dean. The years fly by as Dean drives and it is understood that Sam finally had the life he wanted from the start, the family, the son he plays ball with and help with homework.

The final scene is an older Sam on his deathbed His son comes to him, holds his hand, tells him he loves him and it’s okay to go. The scene changes to Dean stopping on a bridge overlooking a river. He gets out of the car and hears a noise behind him. It’s Sam. The two brother’s hug and then go to stand by the railing of the bridge and look out…together.

The End.

Even knowing that this was the pandemic ending and not the ending they planned, I enjoyed these final two episodes. Like I said, episodes 19 and 20 played like a finale and the epilogue.

The story of Supernatural has always been about the Winchester brothers. From the beginning, during the middle and at the end, the story was always going to begin and end with Sam and Dean. Everyone else in the story were just side characters.

It was not surprising to me that the very vocal majority hated it. I had a “been there, done that, bought the tee-shirt” moment when I began to scroll social media and watched post by post of people who shouted that they felt cheated and that this was not the ending they were promised. Even people who never watched the show and should’ve known better where shouting for something that was, quite obviously, never going to happen.

I waited this long because, I was busy with something else and I wanted to wait until I thought through everything before I put down my thoughts. So a month later, I watched two videos on You Tube, from Destiel shippers discussing their thoughts on the final season. I won’t name names.

The first video was almost two hours long and was from a person who admits they left the fandom for a while. While a lot of things I could sympathize with, they brought up the term queer bating multiple times (I am not going to get into the criticism of queer baiting because, this post is already too long, and I plan on writing a blog about that later) as well as the dangers of bringing fandom theory into creator spaces.

I am of the firm belief that fandom content should not be brought into creator spaces. Not only do most showrunners have their own ideas for the shows, but there is also the inherent risk of ego stepping which could lead to drastic changes being made to shows in ways fans weren’t expecting and don’t like (I see you Jeff Davis). It can also lead to legal issues, especially if during one of these and idea coming from fandom space nudges it’s way into the creators’ mind and there is unintentional plagiarism. It can happen and is a reason that most creators do not read fanfiction or discuss fan theory until after the show is over.

The other reaction video mentioned they were disappointed (and I saw this in other spaces as well) of Castiel being in Heaven but not seeing Dean. I have a theory about that. In Episode 19 at the end, Jack states that unlike Chuck, he has faith in the humans, and he plans on being strictly “hands off”. Our fate is in our own hands now and we can do what we want. Where Chuck liked the accolades and often sent angels to do his dirty work on Earth, especially when the Winchesters weren’t doing what he wanted, if Jack is implementing a “Hands off” approach, this could also mean that the remainder of the angels (old and new) were given instructions to remain “Hands off” as well. They have their side of Heaven which they are rebuilding and reorganizing, but they are to stay on their side and never the twain shall meet. Angels were never meant to walk among the human races. This is maintaining the status quo. Dean knows that Castiel is in Heaven once more but is content with that knowledge. Once Sam appears to him on the bridge, Dean has everything he wants; his brother, his family, and a quiet life in which to settle. At last, Sam and especially Dean have found their reward.

As the song goes, there is peace when they are done.

#FPBlog #Supernatural #the final episodes #review #spoilers

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hearthmistress · 6 years

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Four Times Dean Winchester Guesses Wrong

Pairing: Castiel/ Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester/ OMCs, Aaron Bass/ Dean Winchester (attempted)

Tags: Bisexual!Dean Winchester, Growing up, coming out, self-acceptance, homophobia, homophobic language, brief violence, 5+1 things except it’s 4+1 because i didn’t want to write another scene

Word Count: 2,091

Summary: Dean Winchester is a man of many talents. Gaydar is not one of them.

(Read on A03)

1. He’s a small nerdy-looking dude, thin without the trace of the typical high school boy’s need for alpha-maleness. He wears glasses, plays in band, and is called gay and a faggot by the football team on a regular basis.

And Dean thought he would be a safe bet.

While Dean might pretend to cheer with the other guys and doesn’t do anything to interfere, he’s secretly attracted to the nebbish guy named Thomas, whose dark hair and blue eyes and inability to go through the day without getting his books dumped into the trash, replaces his fantasies of big-boobed models in his morning showers.

By seventeen Dean knows that being attracted to dudes will ruin his life. His father, his brother, Bobby — they would all look at him differently if they knew. Would look down on him for being this way. So he keeps this part of him to himself and learns to play it safe.

Thomas looks safe.

So it takes him by surprise after he rescues Thomas’s books from the nearest garbage bin and offers to take him on a date that Thomas looks at him with open disgust, the thankful expression replaced by hatred and horror.

It’s the first time in Dean’s life that he’s ever seen this reaction directed at him by another human being. Of course, it certainly won’t be the last.

He corners Thomas the next day and threatens the dude, swearing if he hears anything about what happened the day before, he’ll pay, because Dean Winchester isn’t some fucking queer.

Three days later, Dean finds himself behind a bleacher, sucking the cock of one of the jocks who trashed Thomas’ books in the first place.

2. Dean’s nineteen and should know better.

He’s been in this life since he was four years old and because of this, he has grown up tougher and older than his years. He has killed beings (not humans, just sick imitations of them), has hunted, and has travelled across the country more times than he can count. He’s faced monsters, had limbs broken, and has seen more than any of his peers, and there are permanent markings across his young body that can prove this.

Yet, this is the first time he’s ever been truly scared for his life.

This is his mistake. He should know that bars like this — bars filled with tough bikers, road-weary truckers and seasoned hunters — are not the places where you stick your neck out.

But he swears the guy was flirting with him.

The dude is in his late twenties, maybe early thirties, is built like a lumberjack with blonde hair and tough brown eyes and he’s clearly flirting with Dean.

Dean knows the signs — the constant glances at his lips, the offer of another drink, the way he laughs at all of Dean’s dumb jokes. The guy wants to get with him, and Dean, with Dad and Sammy both busy on a case, doesn’t mind that at all.

But when they exit the bar together and Dean leans over and kisses the guy, he gets smacked in the face.

“What the fuck are you doing? You fag!”

He’s heard the term thrown at small thin dudes who like theatre, has heard his father curtly use it when passing certain men, has heard it tossed around locker rooms for the entirety of his high school career, but it’s never been directly aimed at him.

He would be outraged, but the guy lands another punch, catching him off guard, and Dean is on the ground before he can protest. Another blow is aimed at him and he can feel blood on his face and the air leaving his lungs. He can’t see out of one of his eyes and there’s the taste of iron in his mouth. The man starts kicking him and Dean doesn’t react, doesn’t do anything, just curls up into a ball, crying out for help. If his dad could see him now…

The guy keeps kicking and Dean thinks, honestly thinks, he’s going to die here in some alleyway behind a skeevy bar, not by a monster, but by a human. But the guy grows tired and Dean is left curled up, moaning and thoroughly bruised. He’s pretty sure a rib or two is broken.

He tells his dad that he got jumped after cheating in a game of pool. His dad tells him he deserved that and Dean wonders if John would have the same response if Dean told him what really happened.

3. It’s the first time that he’s worked a case completely on his own. Sammy’s gone and Dad keeps disappearing, keeps leaving Dean with nothing better to do. Dean scouts out a haunting, something simple, something he can’t fail at, so he can prove that he can do this, that he can make his dad proud.

Of course, it all goes to shit.

Not the case itself, which is surprisingly easy. It’s the afterwards that gets a little messy.

The guy whose apartment is haunted is grateful, like really really grateful. Once Dean comes back, dirty and smelling of gasoline and decay, the guy, David, offers him a drink.

“You do this all the time?” David asks. “Like you burn bodies?”

“Only if they’re causing trouble,” Dean says, taking a swig of his beer.

“That’s so cool, man. So cool.”

Maybe it’s the alcohol (it’s probably that), maybe it’s because David makes him feel good about what he does, makes it worth it, and maybe it’s because he’s kind of adorable, geeking out like this, Dean leans forwards and kisses him.

David freezes beneath him and Dean pulls away, disappointed and worried, waiting for the slurs, for the shouting to begin. David just looks puzzled though, a little stunned.

“Oh god, I’m sorry, I didn't mean that,” Dean rushes out.

“No, no. It’s okay,” David reaches out (and Dean pretends he doesn’t lean in, doesn’t crave the touch). “I’m not mad. I’m just processing this. I’m just surprised that’s all. That you would want this.”

So Dean leans in again, but David pulls back.

“I’m not gay,” he says kindly, but firmly.

“I’m not either.”

“I’m also not bi.”

“Bi?” Dean asks, the term feels foreign and uncomfortable rolling off his tongue. David’s face lights up as he explains what it means, what other terms means, how the capacity of human love is not contained in just two little terms.

Dean might not have gotten laid that night, but he learns. He practices the word “bisexual” in the mirror, looking at himself, in his mind going over and over the term till it becomes as familiar on his tongue as the taste of greasy roadside burgers and convenience store pie.

Sometimes, when his dad is gone, Dean even says it out loud.

4. This time it’s not Dean’s fault.

The dude was definitely flirting with him- and not like the knock three times on a bathroom stall door, quick glances in the park, kind of flirting.

No, this guy, this tiny dude, clearly has the hots for Dean. He’s been giving him the old goo-goo eyes, discreetly glancing away but also saying, “come talk with me” while Dean was trying to interview two seniors about a dead Rabbi. Plus, the guy went on about how they had a “little eye magic” and Dean’s flustered because never in his life has anyone dared to outright flirt with him like that (outside gay bars and truck stops, of course). There’s not two meanings about this, this guy is into Dean.

Until he’s not.

Turns out Dean’s gay thing is way less gay than he thought.

“So let me get this straight, you’re…” Dean waves his hands around the general area of Aaron.

“Like I said, I was tailing you,” Aaron replies, pushing a stein of beer towards him. “Gotta say, kind of didn’t expect it to go down that way, thought you might punch me for flirting with you.”

“You couldn’t tell? Like it wasn’t obvious that I… I like dudes too.” There’s a panic bubbling inside, a worry that comes from a life of not only hiding his sexuality, but everything else about himself.

“Not ‘til you hit that table,” Aaron chuckles.

“Just my luck,” Dean mumbles.

“Dude, I’m sorry if I led you on. I honestly just panicked and that was the first thing that came to mind. I’m cool with it,” he quickly adds when he sees Dean’s face, which is probably red. “Actually I’m flattered that you would be interested. You’re a really attractive guy! Like if I swung that way, I would.”

“Well, you don’t.”

“I don’t,” Aaron confirms, his voice friendly, with no hint of judgement or disgust. “And to apologize, I’ll buy you another beer.”

It could’ve been worse, hell, it has been worse, so Dean accepts the beer and lets an evening of small talk and chatter wash away any of the embarrassment he has left.

+1 “I’m indifferent to sexual orientations.”

Dean remembers hearing that line on the news, loud and clear, and thinking, “but what does that mean?”

Does it mean Cas is above sexual identities or does it mean he doesn’t care about what humans decide to label their sex lives. Not that he really has time to process it, what with Cas being God and all.

And after that…

Well, maybe he thinks about it, wonders what it means for him, but he also places it in the back of his mind, something he can figure out later. Maybe once the world isn’t about to be taken over by ancient dicks, maybe when Cas isn’t, you know, dead.

And it pops into his mind as an angry thought, a bitter reminder when Cas does come back from the dead, this time married to a woman and looking at Dean like he’s a stranger and it hurts, it fucking hurts, because all Dean can think is but what does this mean for us? The question weighs heavy, and when Cas really comes back, Dean feels like he can breathe again, that he can stand up and deal with the world, but course, Cas decides to take all that hurt, all that crazy and put it back into him, and Dean is left, once again, with questions and uncertainties.

There’s a moment, he thinks, where he might have his answer, but it’s gone when Cas decides to stay behind, letting Dean and Benny escape, and now Dean’s left with nothing.

And so, Dean learns to accept that some questions can never be answered, not for him anyways.

But then, he gets his answer.

It happens once everything has died out, when there’s no leviathans left, when Cas isn’t dead or Emmanuel or crazy, when the gates of hell are closed, when there’s no mark of Cain burning on his skin, when there’s no heaven or hell on their backs, that’s when he gets his answer and he no longer has to guess. He’s leaning against the counter, making a sandwich, when the question comes back into his head.

“I’m indifferent to sexual orientation.”

It makes him drop his knife and turn to Cas, who has looked up quickly from the clatter on the counter.

“Dean?” he inquires, although most of his attention is still on the book in front of him. Beekeeping, maybe? Cas has been talking a lot lately about getting some hives, but Dean’s not sure if he’s joking or not.

Dean’s not really sure what’s going on with Cas. Sure, he’s living with them and all that, but is that what Cas really wants? Is he just staying here because of some misplaced loyalty to the brothers? Because he has nowhere else to go? And what did Cas mean all those years ago?

“Dean,” Cas repeats, clearly amused.

“Huh? What?”

“Are you okay?”

I’m fine, is what he plans on saying, but instead it comes out as “Cas-do-you-remember-all-those-years-ago-when-you-were-God-and-you-said-you-didn’t-care-about-sexual-orientation? What-did-you-mean? Like-do-you-care-that-I’m-Bi? Does-that-matter-to-you?”

Cas smiles, rising from the table and stands next to Dean.

“It means that I’m an angel and that we do not have genders, don’t understand the concept of sexual orientations or identities. It means this…”

And Cas leans over, gently grabbing Dean’s chin, and kisses him, kisses out all those self-doubts, all that self-loathing, kisses out any questions that might still be in Dean’s head.

Cas pulls away, taking the sandwich-filled plate with him.

“And that means,” he says, taking bite of the sandwich, “that you don’t have to guess about us.”

#destiel #fan fic #destiel fanfic #deancas #dean winchester #bi bi bi #spn #my writing #i only used italics once which is a record for me #where's my medal for that

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[Transcript] Season 1, Episode 2. Flashback Favourite – Supernatural

Supernatural came to an end in 2020. We look back at 15 years of the show and discuss why we loved it. Spoilers ahead for the finale of the show.

Listen to the episode on Anchor.

Read more about Supernatural here: Best Supernatural episodes Best Dean moments Best Sam moments The food of Supernatural Revisiting the Destiel scene on Supernatural

[Continuum by Audionautix plays]

Ron: Welcome to the second episode of Stereo Geeks! Today, we'll be talking about Supernatural. I'm Ron.

Mon: I'm Mon. In 2005, the world was introduced to Sam and Dean Winchester and their family business—hunting monsters. This year, in 2020, we said goodbye to the Winchester brothers and their lasting legacy. In this Flashback Favorite, we talk about Supernatural.

Mon: We’ll be discussing the entire series, including its finale, so there will be spoilers ahead.

Ron: We didn't we didn't start watching Supernatural in 2005.

Mon: No, I was too scared of horror stuff, so I refused to watch Supernatural

Ron: But I do remember us seeing the ads. I was quite intrigued. We eventually started watching it around the third or fourth season?

Mon: Yeah. I think it was after Mark Shepard attended the first Comic Con in Dubai.

Ron: That was in 2012.

Mon: He talked about it. And then we started following the show in earnest.

Ron: And then we went back to the first season and started watching it again. And yeah, it was quite the experience!

Mon: It's draws you in, especially with the dynamic between Sam and Dean Winchester.

Ron: Yes, the two brothers are similar in many ways to us.

Mon: Yes, I think so.

Ron: They're sweet. They're funny. They're sarcastic. They get into trouble a lot. But they always come back for each other.

Mon: And I like how it's always the little moments, which I like the most about their character dynamic. And the way they fight with each other. They get angry but then they have their backs, supporting each other at every turn.

Ron: That's exactly how you and I are. We fight. We get angry with each other. And then there's just a reason for us to come back together.

Mon: Absolutely. The show has been problematic at times and has a lot of issues. And we will touch on some of that in this episode. But honestly, it's really that central dynamic that keeps us coming back.

Ron: It's not just Dean and Sam that carry the show. We also see them grow their family. In the sense that they bring in Crowley, who is, for a long time, the King of Hell. Castiel joins them in season four, and he becomes an integral part of the show. He also becomes their family.

Mon: He's like a third brother.

Ron: He is a third brother. But, as we learn, he feels a lot more than that.

Mon: What do we enjoy about Supernatural the most?

Ron: Sam and Dean! Well, I like the fact that when we first started watching the ads for the show, we had very clear divide. I very much liked Sam, and you were very drawn to Dean.

Mon: I liked Dean because he’s snarky.

Ron: I liked Sam's sweetness. He was very sweet. He still is very sweet. He's also very much a younger brother.

Mon: He always needs to be protected and taken care of. But he's always very earnest. He's more responsible.

Ron: And he has a particular way of doing things. Whereas Dean is very much ‘let's just go and do something’. And sometimes, he doesn't plan. But Sam is very booksmart.

Mon: He's very meticulous. He's very organized. Dean is much more of the doer.

Ron: Sam is the researcher. And I am the researcher.

Mon: Yeah, I do.

Ron: You do things, I research things. So, that's definitely one of the biggest draws, that we saw parts of our personality in these two characters. But it was also the stories.

Mon: Yeah, it was very entertaining. We had so many different kinds of creatures from myths and legends. I would say I preferred when there were mostly vampires and werewolves. When the show really went into the biblical stuff? I've always struggled with it.

Ron: I guess I agree with that, as well. I do like how they handled the biblical elements. Angels are dicks. Demons can be friends. Those are unexpected ways of handling these elements. I really enjoyed that.

Mon: I think they worked really hard to subvert some of the expectations of it being seen as a religious show. I remember seeing an interview or something a long time ago, where Jared Padalecki was saying, when he saw the script, it was talking about angels and demons. He said, Oh, my God, is this becoming a religious show. But it wasn't. It was still the same show, just different characters and creatures being added to it.

Ron: And they really expanded their roster. Initially, the main antagonists were demons, and I enjoyed the way they were bringing in that kind of mythos. But I like the other kinds of creatures that they brought in from around the world.

Mon: I think we learned more about their interpretation of djinns and other creatures who, you know, you really had research!

Ron: Yes, we don't know that much about all the other places outside of India. We do know some of the legends from the United States and from the UK. But it is good to see some elements from South America.

Mon: There was that episode with the Japanese ghost, remember? Who's tied to that beer or wine? That was a funny episode.

Ron: Ma Kali ends up in one episode, played by Rakesh Sharma, who is very cool. So yeah, that was fun. Not many Indian elements in the show, but still enough to for us to enjoy.

Ron: But we need to talk about the fact that the show was supposed to end in season five.

Mon: You can clearly tell the demarcation between when they had a full plan and when they went off the rails. Eric Kripke, the creator of the Supernatural, he had a five year plan, and it was supposed to end with Sam making a sacrifice and taking Lucifer down with him to hell, and essentially saving the world. However, the show was renewed for another season.

Ron: Which is usually good news!

Mon: Unfortunately, that means that Sammy came back and they had to come up with a whole new plan. And you can see how varied and inconsistent the stories and seasons are from that point on.

Ron: I think season six still works. They had soulless-Sam, which was a very interesting interpretation of the character. But season seven, you can that it was laboured.

Mon: I don't think anybody thought the Leviathan were interesting or scary creatures. And it was probably the most forgettable season, aside from maybe a few episodes here and there.

Ron: True. Dick Roman as a villain would have worked in 2020. The corporate douchebag definitely is a villain right now. In season seven? Not so much.

Mon: You're right. And he didn't have that kind of charisma. They didn't pad up that mythos. It really did that season a great disservice.

Ron: And remember, this is the season where Bobby died.

Mon: Oh, really?

Ron: Yes. He died at the hands of Dick Roman. When we look back at it now, Bobby, who was basically Sam and Dean's adoptive father, going down to somebody like Dick Roman is so unfair.

Mon: Oh, wow, that is unfair. And then we move on to other seasons, which honestly, they're a blur from eight to 15. They really are a blur. We had purgatory, that was an interesting the concept. I loved it. Dean being stuck in purgatory, fantastic concept, and him befriending a vampire, Benny? Dean, of all people, who hates anything which is not human, almost sacrificed himself to bring a vampire back to Earth. That was quite an arc for him.

Ron: It was a great way of changing the character. And it cemented Dean and Cas' relationship while they were in purgatory. Despite the fact that they were separated for a very long time, Cas comes back to him when Dean prays to him. It is a very beautiful moment. And now that we know how Cas felt. A lot of people have been pointing to that moment saying, this was one of the one of the earliest indications about how Cas really felt about him.

Mon: Actually, that does make sense. Because Cas bends every possible rule in the angel-rulebook to save Dean and Sam and the rest of the Winchester family.

Ron: Yes. Cas was obviously a rule follower for a very long time until he met Dean. And then his entire concept of what was good and bad completely changed and it's quite touching.

Ron: Of course, the show wasn't without its problematic moments.

Mon: In the early seasons of Supernatural, I have to argue that Dean may have come across as a creepy dude. Just because he has that sweet face and general charisma, and of course, he has a good heart. He would lie to a lot of the people he would meet to get his way.

Ron: I actually don't remember that. I'm kind of relieved that I don't.

Mon: He used to go around telling ladies that he was a producer or something. That is textbook, 101, creepy guy behavior.

Ron: The problematic elements that I was thinking about was the fact that they do not have enough people of color on the show.

Mon: Okay, we are talking about systemic problems.

Ron: And also, the ladies on the show almost always ended up dead.

Mon: They're all dead. We don't have any in the finale.

Ron: If you go back to the very first episode, not only did we lose Mary Winchester in the past, we also lose Jessica, Sam's girlfriend. Later, we lose Jo, and her mom, Ellen

Mon: They are fellow hunters and were series regulars for a while, but they died in a blaze of glory.

Ron: Later on, Charlie joined the show, played by Felicia Day. She was pretty much a little sister for them

Mon: Charlie was the first queer character of note on the show and she was a regular for several seasons

Ron: She was a great character. She brought out such a wonderful side to them. Made the brothers very protective. They were very friendly. They enjoyed having her around. She's so smart. so helpful and Then she died.

Mon: She got killed by the least-memorable characters on the show ever! It was an ignominious death because she was killed by Frankenstein's descendants. Let's not even go there.

Ron: Very unfortunate.

Mon: Apart from Charlie, there were very few queer characters on the show, in latter seasons. We did see a few more but they were never there for more than an episode.

Ron: Dean did pair up with a couple of hunters, who we learned during the duration of the episode, that they were a married couple. They were also two men of color. So, it was a bit surprising considering the show had been not very friendly with queer characters before.

Mon: They were downright homophobic time to time.

Ron: I have to agree with that. If you remember the Supernatural convention episode, where a pair of Sam and Dean cosplayers turn out to be a couple. Dean did not look happy.

Mon: Yeah, Dean was very homophobic in the earlier seasons. But I think he got over it.

Ron: I hope that that was a criticism from the fans that the show actually understood and they worked towards overcoming. But I feel like now, when we rewatch older seasons, there will be elements that will be a bit more jarring than when we first saw them.

Mon: I worry about watching a lot of stuff from a few years ago, simply because there are so many elements which may have been considered the norm, but right now would be horrible to watch.

Ron: The show tended to focus mostly on white, male characters.

Ron: If you look at the posters for last maybe seven or eight seasons, there were only white men.

Mon: There was Sam, Dean, Cas, and Crowley and then it changed to Sam, Dean, Cas, and Jack.

Ron: There was room to change that. But the show never seemed to take it.

Mon: I don't know if it was because they were just blinkered or they just didn't care. But they didn't try hard enough. We started seeing more characters of color among the extras, among the episode regulars but even then, we could probably count them on one hand.

Ron: Unfortunately, that's been a problem with not just Supernatural. A lot of the CW shows, and a lot of shows in general.

Mon: Especially genre shows.

Ron: They do skew very white and male.

Mon: All that being said, I think a lot of Supernatural fans love the dynamics and the character arcs. Which is why it's lasted 15 seasons. It has attracted fans from all over the world, across races and orientations, which is a testament to how hard they've tried to make it an entertaining show.

Ron: It's definitely entertaining. Mainly because Sam and Dean find new ways to get out of situations.

Mon: There's action, there's drama.

Ron: There's a lot of heart. And I think that's why people like the show so much. That's why we like the show.

Ron: A great story can attract people, but great characters keep them watching.

Ron: What are some of your favorite episodes?

Mon: I started with ‘Mystery Spot’. That was the first full fledged Supernatural episode that I watched. It was probably not the best introduction because it was hilarious. But it was a great introduction to the two characters, and the differences between Sam and Dean. Dean's antics and his many, many deaths in that episode were just too good. Sam's reaction to having to relive that particular day. Brilliant. Also, the final arc of the episode is Sam desperately trying to figure out a way to save Dean, which gave me an inkling into how interconnected and dependent there relationship was. And also that it was the first of many, many resurrections after.

Ron: ‘Mystery Spot’ is also one of my favorite episodes, it is absolutely hilarious. But another episode that was also very funny was ‘Yellow Fever’.

Mon: That episode, it's just too good.

Ron: Jensen Ackles kills that episode. He is so good.

Mon: That guy has so much range. He can be so emotional, so dramatic. And yet, so funny.

Ron: He has excellent comedic timing. My favorite moment is always going to be him finding that cat, and losing his mind screaming.

Mon: I cannot not laugh at that. Even now, just thinking about it is making me laugh. And he makes it work. He really makes those silly moments, that slapstick humor work.

Ron: What are the other ones that you like?

Mon: Something that I have always found interesting, especially in the latter half of the series, they've tried to shake things up a bit, do things which are unconventional.

Ron: One of the bolder and probably more successful choices they made was the ‘French Mistake’.

Mon: It’s the first time they went meta.

Ron: Apparently, they were quite concerned about how people would react to it. I have read some pieces about how ‘French Mistake’ doesn't work. But as fans of the show, ‘French Mistake’ definitely works!

Mon: Yes, I recall reading about Jared Padalecki talking about how when he and Jensen Ackles were called into the writers’ room, they were quite worried. And then they found out that this episode was going to be transporting Sam and Dean into the real world, where they will become Jensen and Jared. And it was basically a caricature of all these actors, they loved it, how the episode turned out, it was hilarious. It was funny. It was a joke-a minute. And it worked.

Ron: Everybody plays these really odd versions of themselves. Misha, is so good as this mousy outsider who doesn't quite fit in. It's brilliant. I definitely love that episode.

Mon: We have seen it so many times.

Ron: It's actually embarrassing, the amount of times we’ve seen it but I don't care because it makes me happy.

Mon: Two of the more unconventional episodes, which really shouldn't have worked, but are brilliant, and I would say the top two episodes in the entire series, and they are ‘Baby’ and ‘ScoobyNatural’.

Ron: ‘Baby’ is an episode where the entire story is told through the car's eyes. It's amazing.

Mon: The camerawork, the story itself. It's everything and they don't miss a beat. There's action in there, there's drama, there's bonding between the brothers. It's so beautifully played out because baby has been a character in the show for a very, very long time.

Ron: The season five finale did something similar. It made the story about how baby had seen Sam and Dean grow up. But this episode took it one step further by showing it from her point of view. And it was just so engaging. It is beautiful.

Mon: It was really beautiful, especially because sometimes a gimmick is just a gimmick. But this is not. This was a story seen from the point of view of an unconventional character but a very important character in the show.

Ron: And anybody who's watched the show from the very beginning will love this episode, because we love the car.

Mon: Yeah, that's for sure. And what about ‘ScoobyNatural’? When I heard about it. I was so scared.

Ron: I didn't want to watch this episode. We grew up watching Scooby Doo. We enjoyed the show, but it was very much a child’s show. We didn't think that we would actually engage with it as adults. And then ScoobyNatural came along, and we completely changed our mind.

Mon: I don't know how they made it work. It is so good. It has the ethos of Supernatural, but it maintains the tone and style of the original Scooby Doo cartoons. I think it's a testament to the fact that it's just entertainment. That's all that it is. And it still got those character moments, not just for Supernatural fans but for Scooby Doo fans. It was so good.

I love the fact that they were still able to include those silly little Scooby moments, like them running through the doors in the corridor, them getting scared by a ghost which is actually a human being. And the main story itself is in line with how Scooby Doo episodes used to be structured, but it still has the ethos of Supernatural.

Ron: The way they marry these two completely different shows, which are intended for different audiences, is just so incredible. And it's one of our favorites.

Mon: I can't imagine anyone who’s a fan of both the shows to go into that particular episode and not come out loving it. I was definitely worried about this very odd marriage of concepts. But while it was that, it was so entertaining.

Ron: I think our top five favorites from Supernatural are always going to be the most entertaining episodes and ‘ScoobyNatural’ has to be on that list because of that reason.

Mon: Well, let's talk about how confusing that finale was.

Mon: Well, a lot of people were confused by the ending of season 15, episode 19, because they had a little montage saying goodbye to all the characters who had appeared on the show. And Sam and Dean were basically riding off into the sunset.

Ron: It felt very much like a finale.

Mon: The boss fight had happened. Chuck was gone. Jack was God. What else did you need? But there was still one more episode. We were all confused. A lot of people on the internet were confused. You and I definitely were.

Ron: We actually had to Google it.

Mon: We were certain that we had got it wrong. Anyway, the next week, there was the actual finale, which started off as any other Supernatural episode. It began with the boys in the bunker, going through their daily routine, eating food, being silly, Dean finding a pie fest to enjoy some pie. And then they ran off to hunt some vampires. Everything was going just like the old days. And then Dean got impaled!

Ron: And you and I held hands and cried silently, because we could not believe it was happening.

Mon: So, this is how they set up the shot. You saw that giant nail sticking out of the pylon. And I was convinced, like most people, that yes, Dean is going to use that to impale the vampire so that Sam can cut off his head. And then when somebody did get impaled, I was like, yes, they caught the vampire. No, I was wrong. It was Dean who was impaled. And there was no getting out of it. It was such a shocking moment.

Ron: And we realized what had happened before Sam.

Ron: Because Sam didn't see that nail. So, he cuts off the last vampire's head, and he's just asking Dean to come along. And Dean can't, he's literally stuck.

Mon: Okay. I found that scene overlong, but it was literally made so that it would eke out our emotions along with the characters’ emotions.

Ron: I agree, because Dean's death speech would make a Bollywood film proud.

Mon: It lasted 15 minutes.

Ron: I think it was a very, very long scene. I was literally thinking to myself, how are you not dead yet?

Mon: He hasn't bled out. He hasn't gone ashen. That being said… the tears! It is a tearjerker.

Ron: There's a lot of emotion, on screen and off screen.

Mon: The restraint that the two actors showed as they delivered their lines was brilliant. But then when they finally… we're coming to the close of the scene, and the two of them, they touch heads, they hug each other, and then they really just let it go, let go of their emotions. Fantastic. It was a roller coaster ride.

Ron: Can I just say that Jared Padalecki has been astounding this season. From the very first episode of season 15, it feels like he's not actually acting, he's just there.

Mon: He's so natural. That scene where he’s half-sad, half-angry at Dean? That scene in the car when he's so furious at Dean for lying to him about Jack. Amazing. He should be given an Emmy just for that scene.

Ron: Because that kind of scene can be easily overacted. We have seen that kind of scene being overacted even on Supernatural. But everything is much more restrained. Much more organic this season. And especially the second half, which obviously had to be shot during the pandemic. You could see that they didn't have the kind of time or the luxury of reshooting sections. So they did their best when they had the opportunity.

Mon: I wonder if the break because of the pandemic also helped them reconnect with the characters and reconnect with their own talents, which is why the latter half just felt more natural?

Ron: I have to agree with that. In fact, I read that Jensen and Jared didn't actually get holidays for most of their run on Supernatural. So, the enforced break from the pandemic would have given them an opportunity to just reconnect with themselves.

Mon: I'm not surprised, actually. The schedules they have are insane on The CW.

Ron: So how did you feel seeing Dean die for good? Since Dean is your favorite?

Mon: Shocked! I couldn't believe it. No, seriously. You remember when the ads came on? And I was like, ‘no way did they kill Dean. No way!’ And I went on and on, because I was sure that this can't be happening.

Mon: My one argument would be that at one point, Sam says, ‘okay, we'll figure it out. We'll find a way to resurrect you’. And Dean says, ‘no, no more resurrections’. I feel like they needed a stronger line over there. Perhaps one that says there are no more resurrections anymore. Something to say that the world has reset. Because when you leave an opening, it seems really sad. And we'll get into why it seems even sadder that that if Sam had the option to go and resurrect him, why wouldn't he? So, I would argue that that's the only point where I really needed a stronger hand in the script.

Mon: But it still didn’t diminish the impact of what happened to Dean. He goes out exactly the way he thought he always would. In a fight, dead at a young age.

Ron: That is actually even sadder when you say it.

Mon: That's precisely what he says to Sammy, that this is how I was always meant to go.

Ron: Dean's trajectory was always going to be a young death. But it doesn't mean that that it doesn't hurt.

Mon: For sure, for sure. And I think because we were all expecting a happy ending and we will talk about the happy ending soon. We were all expecting a happy ending for these two brothers who have fought so hard for each other and for the world, that it comes as a real shock that the creators went for it. The world is cruel.

Ron: This is true. The world also goes on, no matter who you lose. I feel like this episode hits different because of the pandemic.

Ron: People have lost a lot of people. I don't think there's anybody who doesn't know somebody they've lost. We people who are gone now because of COVID. And everybody else is left behind. I think the finale was trying to tell us that people die. And the people who are left behind are grieving in their own way. But they don't have a choice.

Mon: And they go on with life, which is what we see Sam do. From the montage that we see, it seems obvious that Sam has lived a very full life. We can't know for sure whether it is a very happy life. We can just hope.

Ron: From what we see, Sam does have a happy life. It just has a Dean-shaped hole in it.

Mon: Well said. Who do you suppose Sam's wife is?

Ron: I don't know. I really, I really wanted to see who it was. You see a shape in the back when he's playing with baby Dean. But I couldn't tell who it was.

Mon: I feel like because they cast an extra with long dark hair, she has to be Eileen. I'll tell you why. When Sam gets a call on Dean's phone for another case, the person specifically says Donna mentioned that you can help. Which means that Donna is back alive, which means Eileen is alive. And we know that Eileen and Sam were together before she disappeared, thanks to Chuck. So, I think Sam and Eileen had a happy life together, had baby who becomes grown up Dean. But as you said, there's always going to be that Dean-shaped hole.

Ron: And we know that Sam still misses Dean, because, well, he calls his son Dean. But he keeps the Impala. He does not drive the Impala. He leaves the bunker. And we see a much older Sam rip of the cover from the Impala. And when he sits inside, he is so full of sorrow and anger. And it's a great scene. It's so moving and all I could think was so many years have gone by and he still misses Dean. That is never going to change.

And I also like the fact that obviously, young Dean has been told stories about his lovely uncle. Because when Sam is on his deathbed, he is still holding on like Dean did. And young Dean then tells Sam the same thing that Sam told Dean so that he could go.

Mon: I think the episode was actually really good.

Ron: It's been very frustrating seeing what's been written on the internet about it.

Ron: I know people have different points of view about the show. The fandom is varied. The fandom has different reactions to it. There are a lot of people who stopped watching the show, understandably, after season five. It was a bit of a slog at times, but we hung on and this season finale, it rewards people who stayed throughout. Because there are a lot of moments in the last two episodes that call back to moments after season five.

Mon: One of the things that really worked for me with the finale, especially with Sam and Dean, their history really comes to the fore. The finale was a celebration of the central love story of this show, which is Sam and Dean and them being brothers for life, irrespective of how their lives actually turned out. The fact that Sam spent probably half his life without his brother, it is still a celebration of how much they loved each other, how much people in reality continue to love the people that they've lost.

We also have to remember that this finale was shot in the middle of a pandemic. There are going to be constraints, and you can see it. There is no way that the original finale, whatever storyline that they planned to go with, would have had such a limited cast of original characters.

Ron: Very true. There were also a few makeup moments that were very strange.

Mon: Let's be honest, Sam's old wigs were terrible.

Ron: And there was absolutely no makeup on his face.

Mon: It's like he grew old, but he didn't. Where can we get that superpower? That being said, Jared Padalecki, the way he held himself as an old man? Brilliant. He was trying so hard to make the lack of makeup work and the lack of a good wig really work for him, to show how many years had passed.

Ron: That scene in the Impala is the one with the bad wig and the no-makeup, but it still hurts when you see him so upset and still missing his brother.

Mon: What I feel is sometimes some people get so stuck in the technicalities of moments and scenes that they lose the bigger picture. We all want everything to be perfect. But if you're going to lose the essential message, the essential feeling, then maybe you’re missing the whole point of why this finale exists?

Ron: There were way too many people weighing in on the finale, making memes about the Impala going to heaven and not Cas. And I can't help but think, did you watch the finale?

Mon: I did not know people were doing that. They literally talk about Cas being Jack's right-hand man. He helped shape the new version of heaven. How are people not seeing that? And I understand some people's grievances. Let's briefly mention the Destiel moment from Episode 18 of this season. Cas and Dean are running away from Death. And the only way for them to survive is for Cas to sacrifice himself to the Empty.

Cas knows that the only way to successfully call the Empty, he has to be at his happiest moment. And he is the most happy when he confesses his true feelings for Dean. He says he loves him. So finally, after several seasons of the two of them making goo-goo eyes at each other, we know that Cas actually does romantically love Dean. And then he dies. And Dean doesn't react. Dean’s only reaction is that he starts crying, and he's alone, and he's despondent.

Ron: In my reading of the scene, Dean did react. He didn't tell Cas that he loved him. But his reaction when he lost Cas was unlike anything that we had seen Dean do before.

Mon: I couldn't agree more. If people want him to say, ‘I love you’, then, Dean has to accept that he's going to lose Cas forever, and he wasn't in the mood to do that at that time. But he does lose Cas. So, when we go back to the finale, and Bobby tells Dean that Cas has helped create a version of heaven which is actually heaven. Then, Dean makes this characteristic Dean-smirk because he's kind of saying to himself, yes, okay, Cas is alive, Cas is around, so yeah I get to meet him again. That's how it is. We don't get to see Cas in heaven, but no, Cas is there in heaven. I don't know what people are reading into the scene for them to think that Cas didn't make it there.

Ron: It was very, very frustrating.

Mon: I understand the frustration that they would have wanted to see more of the guys in heaven. Dean and Sam meeting these people who are their family, including Cas, Jack, their mom, their dad, I get it. But it was shot in the pandemic. We got a full-fledged season, a beautiful finale, which dragged a little bit, fine, but we got a finale, which does justice to the characters. And it hinted at what more we could expect for their lives in the future.

Ron: One of the things that I've been reading is that Andrew Dabb, who has been the showrunner since Eric Kripke left, he has been working very hard towards resolving some of the storylines from earlier seasons.

Mon: That makes sense. Because we do see a lot of characters returning in latter seasons. I guess that makes sense then.

Ron: Yes, that's what he's been doing. His idea for the finale seems to have been, we started Supernatural with the two brothers, we end it with the two brothers.

Mon: That moment when Dean has had a great ride in baby and she's on the bridge, he's just enjoying this beautiful scenery, and he just knows when his brother's behind him, and the look on Sam's face, and the body language that finally he’s got to be with Dean?

Ron: It's been what we’ve been waiting for, not just in the finale but the entire show, for the two of them to get their ending. The thing is that the two of them have been to heaven before. And it is very different. Heaven under Chuck was you reliving your favorite moment, which as we saw in 12 Monkeys recently, that’s not really anybody's idea of heaven. Tasting sushi for the first time is amazing, but tasting sushi for the first time for the hundredth time? That's not so great.

Mon: Everything loses its charm. With Jack's version of heaven, they're making new experiences for eternity. That's the best kind of happy ending that we could have thought of for the Winchester brothers. That is absolutely why this finale was good. Could the finale have been better? Of course, everything could be better! The whole show could be better! But this is what we got. And in a way, it's so sadly realistic. It's tragic. But they always intended it to be a happy ending.

Ron: Absolutely. And it has to be said, this is what happens to real people. Sam and Dean were able to continue living, despite going to hell, going to heaven, despite going to purgatory. The amount of times that they died and came back.

Mon: It was a joke by the end. It was rightfully a joke because there was no ending for them.

Ron: But we know why, it's because they were Chuck's favorite characters. But that also meant that they were Chuck's favorite marionettes. Freedom meant freedom to die, as well. And as difficult as that was for Sam to process, I think it is also a realistic approach that we probably needed in 2020. That was the best way to do it in 2020. Had it been the two of them growing old together, I think that's what the fans would have wanted, that would have been great to see.

Mon: We don't have to like it but I would just say it is a choice made by the creators. Ron: I think it was the right choice.

Mon: Let us know what you thought about the Supernatural finale and how you would have written, Sam and Dean's ending differently.

Ron: You can find us on Twitter @Stereo_Geeks. Or send us an email [email protected]

Ron: We hope you enjoyed this episode. And see you next week!

Mon: The Stereo Geeks logo was created using Canva. The music for our podcast comes courtesy Audionautix.

[Continuum by Audionautix plays]

Transcription by Otter.ai and Ron.

#supernatural #supernatural finale #flashback #podcast #geeks #stereo geeks

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words-writ-in-starlight · 7 years

Note

So your rant on Supernatural? Also I fell in love with the story you're talking about and basically want to know more. Sorry.

My buddy, you have made An Error, but let’s do this shit. To any SPN fans who have wound up herethrough Ye Olde Search Function, I encourage you to stop reading now.

I watched up to about halfway through Season Five before Idecided that I could Do It Better (I think this is the novel you’re talkingabout, anon, unless it’s Earth is where the trouble comes from), and draggedmyself up to about halfway through Season Seven before I packed it in and gaveup, resigned that the parts of the show I loved were about four to five seasonsdead. So like that’s the information I’mworking on here.

So, obviously, lots of people have lots of legitimatecomplaints about Supernatural,including treatment of queer characters, characters of color, and women, aswell as their fairly rampant history of queerbaiting. And lots of people have covered this in morecompetent detail than I could ever manage, so like google “sexism in Supernatural” or something and you cando your own reading there. Hell, if youwant to do it the lazy way, you can knock out two of the above with this onearticle in friendly, easy-to-read Buzzfeed format. To the nominal credit of the people involved,I will add that the cast seems acutely aware of these problems and finds itdistasteful, HOWEVER the problems persist and therefore that credit is minimal. Anyway. These things are covered much more thoroughly by many other people whoare far more cogent than I could hope to be, so I’m going to leave those alone.

Instead, my rant is mostly summed up as “YOU CALL THIS SHITSTORYTELLING.”

So there are four basic parts to this rant, or rather fourbasic flaws that form the fundamentally weak foundation of Supernatural as a narrative.

Failure to commit to a single cohesive narrativearc, also known as “SOME OF THAT AND SOME OF THAT AND SOME OF THAT AND SOME OFTHOSE” syndrome

The persistent and erroneous belief thatcharacter death = character development and narrative progression

Inability to commit to a major change ofparadigm, also known as out and out narrative cowardice, which I personallycall “flinching during Plot Roulette”

Total incapacity to put their characterizationwhere their script is regarding the Winchester brothers and the other major players

*cracks knuckles*

POINT THE FIRST

Right, so first it’s the story of Sam having strange powersand their dad being MIA, which segues pretty naturally into the story of Sampotentially being the Antichrist, and then there’s Dean’s sacrifice of his soul,which at very least holds up even ifit sort of acts like the previous plotline about their dad’s soul didn’t happen. Upuntil this point, I was pretty comfy. Ihad some complaints covered below, but I was copacetic. Season Three is largely about getting rid ofthe contract on Dean’s soul. Okay, seemslegit, you have a tangible problem with potentially serious consequences. Now, having had not one but TWO seasons whichwere easily summed up with ‘so Sam is mebbe the Antichrist or at very leastAntichrist-adjacent,’ I made what I thought was a logical leap and went “well,gee, if I was mebbe at the very leastAntichrist-adjacent, I would leverage the fuck out of that to do somethingabout my apparently beloved brother’s soul.” Even when they didn’t go withthat (news flash: I wrote that novel mydamn self and amazingly it worked out 100x better, narratively speaking,because it’s fucking logical), I wasstill kind of like “gosh sure is a good thing they remembered that they spenttwo entire seasons building up to Sam mebbe being Antichrist-adjacent.” And there’s the whole drama with Ruby which Ijust…am very uncomfortable with for a lot of reasons, not least of which isthat it’s a very thinly veiled endeavor to rehash the same ‘Sam being afraid oflosing touch with humanity’ plotline as Seasons One and Two but without havingto worry about really altering the paradigm, see Point The Third, and alsobecause it’s really intensely literal about the concept of having a femalecharacter exclusively as a prop for consumption. And Castiel shows up and a thousand ships arelaunched, blah blah blah, and then after the end of Season Four…we never hearfrom Sam’s powers again for more than a couple lines.

As of about Season Four, the focus of the show abandons Samand shifts tangibly onto Dean, who is now The Interesting Character because hehas Been Through Hell (literally). Furthermore, we are now given Dean’s POV on any quandry between him andSam, which is a personal complaint because I honestly just think it’ssloppy. Season Four is mostly dealingwith angels being assholes, which is really not as original as SPN likes tothink (Good Omens did it first and Good Omens did it better, get out of myface), plus Dean being the Righteous Man and the question of the oncomingApocalypse (sure is interesting how we spent two seasons building up to Sambeing Antichrist-adjacent). The Apocalypseis less oncoming and implied to be more ongoing by the end of Season Four. So Lucifer escapes and Season Five is prettymuch About That, involving the fairly unhelpful description that Dean isMichael’s ‘sword’ and they’re the true vessels of Michael and Lucifer,culminating in Sam being locked in the Cage because presumably someone realizedthat, hey, we have two maincharacters and we must make them both Interesting Characters. Season Six is 50% about finding Sam’s souland figuring out how he got out of the Cage (sure would be helpful if we’dspent two seasons building up to Sam having inhuman powers and beingAntichrist-adjacent) and 50% a wickedinexplicable plot about the Mother-of-All and some kind of fucking jigsawmonsters and…Alpha monsters? But thatnever really gets explained in a pertinent way except that they needed to anteup because they beat the Devil at theend of Season Five. Oh, and a bonus 50% of some bullshit withCastiel and Crowley and ~Scheming~. Andthen Castiel gets possessed by Leviathans (?) from Purgatory, which he openedwith Crowley (??) who he then betrayed (???), and Castiel decides He’s God Nowand also dies (????), and somehow these metaphysical more-powerful-than-angelsbadder-than-Lucifer things are sensitive to fuckingBorax.

And it was at this point that I stopped the show in themiddle of a fight scene like 1/3 through Season Seven and actually said outloud “Gosh it’s almost like you needsomeone who’s Antichrist-adjacent to help you out here” before turning off the TV. And then I stopped watching and got better taste in TV and blew throughwriting a 250K novel in 18 months of being a full-time student because I waspowered by pure bitter spite.

Now, here are the two major things that matter about thiswhole deal. First of all, the firstplotline is the most reliably coherent, although some degree of cogence lastedup until about Season Five—we understand why Lucifer wants out of Hell, weunderstand to some extent why Dean and Sam matter on the cosmic scale, we getpretty bored of watching Castiel do heel-face and face-heel turns like he’s ona Lazy Susan but like logistically it all makes a reasonable degree of sense. That being said, the whole plotline ofSeasons Four onward would make a lot moresense, would it not, if they remembered that they’d spent a good solid twoseasons and change (Season Three, intermittent, Season Four, major) designingan Antichrist-like character who is now the last survivor of that batch ofexperiments. Then, instead of having Samand Dean just be Inexplicably Special, you have Dean (who can still be theRighteous Man!) acting as the foil for Sam being forced into increasingly darkchoices, and Sam who’s a viable candidate for Lucifer-puppet because he’s partdemon. Or, alternatively, Sam whomaintains his stance as the gentler of the two despite his demon blood, which would add a lot more depth to Supernatural’s fanatical hardon for theAngelic Asshole trope. Honestly Irewrote the entirety of this show one time, predicated on the assumption thatthey actually went with the idea of Sam as the Boy King, and I think it wouldbe much less haphazard. (Basically: hey,what if Sam actually used his status to strong-arm Dean’s deal into beingdissolved, as it’s implied that he’s totally capable of doing that and totallywilling to sacrifice his own humanity for his brother, and then Heaven sentCastiel to kill Sam, which would add a fuckton of legitimacy to Castiel’s LazySusan and Dean’s antagonism. But no. Instead there’s monsters whose only vulnerability is fucking Borax.)

Second, and far more critical, is the total failure tocommit to a single plotline. Okay, Sam’sstatus as the possible Boy King is a major plot point for two seasons, not somuch for the third season (he literally…a demon straight up tells Sam that he could have an army if he took up hisposition and it never occurs to himthat he could use that to help Dean), more so in the fourth season, and then itnever comes up again. Even when it is unarguably pertinent to thesituation—Lucifer! Fucking Luciferpossesses Sam and drags him to Hell and he comes back soulless and yet none of the writers ever, not once, went “Gosh, maybe we should remember those seasonswe spent developing Sam into sort of the Antichrist? Maybe including at least a minor nod to thator somehow wrapping up the plotline would help cohere our current trainwreck ofa plotline?” Nope, it’s just left as aloose thread, flapping in the breeze with all the subtlety of a limp dick. It’s like Supernaturalis actually a Frankenshow of two shows with the same characters but totallyunrelated plotlines—maybe when Lucifer escapes he shunts them all sideways intoan alternate universe and there’s another show somewhere with a Dean whosebrother has never been even a little bit demonic and died through normal huntershenanigans suddenly having to deal with Sam the possible Antichrist, andthat’s the show that an alternate me is still watching.

And this is an ongoing problem. Sam’s powers are just the major point that Ialways latch onto, because, first, I always think the phenomenon of “well fuckme sideways I might be obligated to end the world and ain’t that a messy thing”is pretty great (I really, reallylike Hellboy), and second, IT’S FOURSEASONS OF WORK YOU CAN’T JUST ABANDON IT. But seriously. Just. Throw a dart, you’ll hit a loose end. Because Supernatural is theequivalent of that one fucker we all hate in sitcoms—you know, the guy who’sdating a great girl he totally doesn’t deserve, but he can’t ~commit~ sothere’s all this ongoing Drama™. Exceptthat in Supernatural, not only canthey not commit, they accidentally defeated their biggest gun—the literal Devil—less than halfwaythrough their series! Whoops! Quick, someone call up Satan’s cousin twiceremoved who’s even worse and more evil than he is! And sensitive to Borax!

No, no, I’m kidding. We all know that Satan’s cousin twice removed, who’s even worse and moreevil than he is, is actually named Metatron.

Fuckin’ Supernatural.

POINT THE SECOND

I know this is going to come as a shock, but rampantcharacter death does not actuallyqualify as a legitimate way to progress your narrative or develop yourcharacters. In order, the major players(nominally on the Winchesters’ side) who die or seem to die in the first fiveseasons are Sam’s girlfriend, John Winchester, Ash, Sam, Bela, Dean, (Deanseveral times in Mystery Spot), Ruby,Castiel, Jo, Ellen, Sam, Anna, Sam, Dean, Gabriel, Castiel, Bobby, and sort of Sam with the whole Cagething. And those are just the peoplewith arcs that extend over more than a season (except for Sam’sgirlfriend). It’s entirely possible,even probable, that I missed some. Thatdoes not include the one- ortwo-episode characters whose deaths we’re supposed to observe as emotionallywringing, nor does it include the frankly vast numbers of civiliancasualties. So, for the ease of reading,we’re going to divide ‘character death’ into ‘reversible character death,’which is largely the prerogative of the primary trio, and ‘permanent characterdeath,’ and we’re going to talk about why there are real problems with the way Supernatural treats both of them.

First of all, the problems with reversible character deathare obvious—there are no fucking stakes! Like, arguably the stakes are ‘the whole world,’ but obviously not (seePoint The Third), so practically speaking the stakes should be life or death, because the show tells you that the stakes are life or death. Now, sometimes resurrection is an importantplot point, I get that, in my spite novel there is, in fact, aresurrection. But here’s the thing. Either you have to straight up establish arevolving door policy and change your stakes (example: the show Forever, where the point is that the MCis immortal and would very much like to not be immortal anymore), or you can only use that resurrection once. You use it once, and you still get theemotional gut punch of “Oh God, they’re dead”and the flood of relief when it proves that they’re not dead after all. You use it more than that, and the audiencebecomes complacent that, well, you won’t reallykill them. By the time you’re on a levelwith Supernatural, it just…doesn’tmatter? A major character dies, but youraudience has already hit compassion fatigue because of the death rate, whichI’m about to cover, so there’s not really any oomph to it.

The problems with permanent character death aresignificantly different. Now, I myselfam a Happy Ending person (like…the world sucks …let me have my happy fiction),but even I recognize that a certain percentage of the characters in a story orshow like this one are basically just cannon fodder (it would be great if itwasn’t so consistently the women, POC, orLGBT folks, but whatever). Theproblem is that it’s constant. And not just “well that person’s a corpsebecause that’s what vampires do to people” or “some kid pissed off the localspirit and now they’re six feet under,” it would be totally fine and reasonableif that situation was an every episode thing (it…kind of is, that’s kind of thepoint). But every few episodes, we’reexpected to get attached to a one-off character and then be deeply affectedwhen they die. Take, say, Season Three:you have the hunters Isaac and Tamara in the first episode, Casey and FatherGil in the fourth episode (some flexibility as they’re demons, but we’resupposed to be shocked and horrified that Sam kills them both), Callie in thefifth episode, Gordon in the seventh episode (again, we’re supposed to behorrorstricken that Sam kills him, even though it’s clearly self-defense), all the civilians in the twelfthepisode, Corbett in the thirteenth episode, and finally Bela, who admittedlyhas had some nominal presence for a while. This does not include any Winchester trauma, which you’re always supposed to be deeply affectedby. I’m sorry, but after a season or twoof being expected to work up that kind of emotional upset between five and tentimes over the course of thirteen to twenty episodes, your audience is going toburn out and start to lose emotional engagement.

So, basic summary: the Anyone Can Die trope does not playwell with main characters who are on a Revolving Door of Death, because itmeans that minor characters don’t matter because Anyone Can Die, while majordamage or trauma to the main characters doesn’t matter either because they’reon a Revolving Door. You can’t kill yourmain characters once (or more!) a season and expect people to still…worry aboutthem.

On a more strictly structural note, using character death asthe primary way to drive character development is just fucking lazy. It’s just an indicator that the writers don’tactually know how to progress their character development in any other way,which is a major problem because, since they only develop the charactersthrough the deaths of others, they have to hit the Personality Reset buttonfairly regularly to make it look like things are actually happening to thepeople who are supposed to be developing. Which, in case you were curious, is why you feel that overwhelming senseof déjà vu when the Winchesters getinto a huge blowout fight about ‘don’t sacrifice yourself’ in about thethird-to-last episode, followed by one of them sneaking out to sacrificethemselves, followed by the other onebeing angry about it. It’s the samegoddamn script, it’s just that Sam’s hair is probably longer and Dean isprobably scruffier. Furthermore, thefixation on developing characters with the deaths of others means thatbasically every character is fair game but NO ONE’S DEATH HOLDS MEANING,because of the above, which means that SPN’s ‘character development’ turns intothis recursive self-congratulating circlejerk of killing someone, developingSam and Dean accordingly, and then somehow regressing them so that the writerscan do it over again and be proud of themselves for Such Dynamic Characters,Much Develop, So Change, Wow.

And I feel like the reasons that character death =/=narrative progression should be pretty clear from the rest of this rant, butbasically if you’re killing someone to progress your plot, it needs to be asolveable death (emotional payoff is what makes walking away from a booksatisfying, such as catching a murderer) or a terrible tragedy that drives thecharacters to great acts or both. Supernatural is basically a horror/fantasymurder mystery, so it would be fine if they stuck with that model, but theykeep trying to sell the deaths of any number of major players and many many minor players as this greatand terrible tragedy that’s pushing the Winchesters forward. And like, I’m sorry, but if you commit withinthe first episode to a dead mother anda dead girlfriend and a missingpotentially dead father, you’ve already pretty well maxed out your terribletragedies. Find a different motivator,or else it looks like your characters just leave huge amounts of collateraldamage and refuse to take responsibility. Or, alternatively, it looks like the individual deaths don’t matter toyour main characters, which is NOT going to help with making your audience giveeven a single fractional fuck.

TL;DR: Character death is a powerful tool that rapidly losesits weight and import if you overuse it, and can make your audiencedisinterested and emotionally detached if they’re expected to care every time. Slow your motherfucking roll, stick to aMAXIMUM of one resurrection per character unless their immortality is anexplicitly discussed plot point (at which point their deaths need to not mattermuch anymore), and remember that you can progress your plot in literally anyother way before you go for a shock-value death.

POINT THE THIRD

Don’t be a little bitch in your writing. Honestly it’s that simple. I’m gonna get into it some more, but that’sthe gist of it. If you already know whatI mean, great, skip to the next point, because the TL;DR is “don’t be aninfant.”

This is something that plenty of shows are guilty of(Merlin, anyone?), but SPN is terrifiedof actually changing the paradigm. Theshow must always include a certainlist of things:

The Winchesters in the Impala, which, sure, I’llgrant you that

A home base, also totally reasonable

Monsters to fight, fair enough

A masquerade (meaning ‘civilians do not knowabout magic’), which should honestly have broken down after, like, Season Twowhen they accidentally release massive numbers of demons into the world

A world to have the show happening in, which isa problem since they started theApocalypse in Season Four

Now…listen.

It’s fine, even necessary, to have some fixed points in anarrative. It offers a way to anchoryour characters against the ongoing changes that the plot demands. That, however, is very different from beingtoo much of a coward to alter the paradigm of your story when the major driving force is a change ofparadigm.

The first major change of paradigm they cop out on is Sam’spowers. If Sam was the Boy King, thishypothetically Antichrist-esque position in the cosmic dichotomy, that would radically alter the dynamic. Sam would automatically be the most powerfulbeing in any given room unless he was in a room with a respectably high-rankedangel or demon, and he would certainly be able to go toe-to-toe with most oftheir targets on their own terms. Telekinesis is an exceptionally goodpower, guys, like, as powers go—even disregarding his position in thehierarchy, Sam would be pretty strong in his own right. Which, I’d like to point out, can be a reallythrilling change to a narrative, because it means that you have this additionallayer of ‘well, how do we deal with the fact that Sam doesn’t like being this strong, how do we dealwith the way demons and monsters have started to view him as more us than them’ and would give a much more legitimate basis for the questionof humanity that they shoehorn in later with the Ruby plotline. Buffyhas its flaws, but at least it frequently brings up ‘hey, Buffy might be ostensiblyhuman, but she operates on the level of her enemies more than on the level ofher allies’ as an issue that she thinks about. But they don’t do that in Supernatural,they bail completely on the Sam plotline because they panic about theimplications of having such a powerful character. And then they bring in fucking Castiel likethat’s not exactly the same problemcloaked in ‘well, noninterference.’ Like, please, that ship has fucking sailed,choke down your anxiety and figure out how the rules of your powerful characterwork, and then let them be powerful. It’s gonna be okay. Deepbreaths. If you make an OP character,that’s fine, you just have toactually deal with it rather than having their powers be an asspull every timethe main characters are in Real Trouble (*angry sigh* Merlin).

The second one they balk at is the unveiling of thesupernatural world and oh my God it is constant. But let’s deal with the biggest and mostimprobable of these here: Season GoddamnTwo, where they bust open the doors of Hell and unleash some thousands ofdemons into the world. Like, is that asmany demons as it could be, in comparison to your six to seven billionhumans? No. But it’s still a huge population and is implied to be accompanied by a huge uptickin various other supernatural happenings and is furthermore really visible. The Devil’s Trap is suggested to pass throughat least a couple towns and it’s a big flashy event, so like…sure, maybe peoplewrite it off as swamp gas or what have you, but sooner or later people who havehad demons exorcised or seen some vampire/werewolf/etc shenanigans and lived totell about it are going to start running into each other. They start hearing people say “it’s likeshe’s a totally different person” and they take that seriously rather thanwriting it off. They were maybe saved bya hunter who confirmed that the supernatural exists and they maybe tell thatperson that, hey, something like that happened to them, maybe they could cometake a look around. Maybe they couldcall the person who helped them out. Andyou end up with this fucking Ponzi scheme of The Great Truth, where each personwho’s in the know finds one or two more people who’ve seen evidence and brings them into the loop, and then they find one or two more people who’veseen evidence. And for every personwho’s determined to call it bullshit or think they’re insane, you’re going toget one who saw that person turn intoa hairy monster and murder someone, or who waspossessed by a demon, or who witnessedblack smoke merge with their spouse and turn them into a killer. So you get this whole rickety network ofamateurs who’ve…kind of learned the thing. And like any Ponzi scheme, sooner or later it collapses.

Basically the point is: there is a limit to the parts permillion of The Great Truth that can be present before that shit becomes commonknowledge. Look at any availablegovernment conspiracy for confirmation. The more people you tell, the looser the rules of ‘secret’ become, so ifyou have a big flashy visible disaster that involves drastically increasing the number of uninitiated civilians who areaware of The Great Truth…you’d better be ready to deal with that. What I’m saying here is that by Season Seven,you’ve not only had this whole demon situation for a while, and increased those numbers several times with variousdisasters, but you’ve also had at least one big flashy disaster in a city. So the Winchesters should pretty much be ableto walk into a given town and wander into the church or the bar or somethingand go “So, I heard there’ve been some weird murders” and have at least oneperson come up to them later and be like “Yeah it’s a ghost here’s all theinformation but I have no idea how to get rid of them.” And when the Winchesters go *gasp* “How do you know The Thing” theperson should look at them like a fucking moron and go “It literally rainedblood last year, everyone in this time zone knows The Thing and also it’sevident that the end is pretty seriously nigh, so get on that.” Commit to your big flashy disasters, youcowards, or at least have the decency to make it an ongoing Sunnydale joke.

Far more crucial is the fact that they bail on the end ofthe world…let’s see. End of Season Fouris when the Apocalypse properly gets underway, so they balk at the end ofSeason Five (Lucifer and the Cage), end of Season Six (Mother of All andPurgatory), and like minimum once bythe middle of Season Seven (Godstiel) as well as at the end of Season Seven (Leviathans, I am now past where I kept watching),end of Season Eight (Metatron, angel tablets, falling angels), presumably endof Season Nine from what I understand of the summaries online (some…war onHeaven nonsense), and based on the trend I’m guessing that Seasons Ten throughThirteen keep to the model, do youunderstand my point here. Thesearen’t even all the near-Apocalypses that they avert. Off the cuff, I can think of the Croatoanvirus (…twice? Three times?), as well asthree out of four Horsemen within episodes of each other. They’re probably averting the Very Seriousand Catastrophic End of Days two or three times a season by Season Five, and that number only goes up. This is very similar to the character deaththing: quite simply, if the audience is expected to get that worked up multipletimes a season, and brace for thatkind of disaster multiple times a season,you are inevitably going to bore them. Yourplot has to be intensely recursive sothat you can ‘reset’ and avoid a new Apocalypse the next season, which getsboring, because it feels like you’ve been there before, similar to how usingcharacter death to advance character development demands that you hit thePersonality Reset button on the regular.

Furthermore, repeating the same level of disaster over and over and OVER again means that it starts to lack emotional weight, and yourcharacters start to seem really, really stupid if they don’t start to treatthings accordingly. One of the things Ithought of constantly during thelast, say, season and a half that I watched of Supernatural was a quote from Buffy,specifically from Riley who I usually very much dislike but who NAILED thisparticular thing. “When I saw you stopthe world from, you know, ending, I just assumed that was a big week for you.It turns out I suddenly find myself needing to know the plural ofapocalypse.” And that’s the running jokein Buffy! That they literallydeal with an Apocalypse every few episodes, and they lampshade it, and thecharacters respond accordingly—Buffy and the Scooby gang start to act cavalier,almost unimpressed, about each new disaster. Like “well, we saved the world, I say we party.” That’s a direct quote from Buffy (IN SEASON ONE NO LESS), and Supernatural could stand to take a pageout of their book with that one. BySeason Seven, the Winchesters seem like they have somehow missed out on thelast decade of their own lives because they always act so shocked and horrifiedthat somehow someone could try to endthe world. Like! Yes, yes they could and yes they would,welcome to the party boys! Please try toget in touch with your own history on this subject!

So the highlights here are: don’t be a fucking baby aboutyour writing. If you’re writing toward abig paradigm shift, you need to recognize that you’re playing Plot RussianRoulette, and you have to pull the trigger. Change the paradigm of your narrative and deal with the fallout like afucking adult, you tepid fools, you limp-necked cowards, you ink-stainedwalnuts.

POINT THE FOURTH

Listen very carefully. Do you hear that? It’s the soundof the Winchesters promising eternal brotherly devotion and saying things like“you’re my brother, man” and vowing to always have each other’s backs.

Now wait a moment longer, and listen very carefully. Do you hear that? It’s the inevitablesound of the Winchesters stabbing each other in the back and/or throwing eachother to the wolves because they’re feeling pissy, and then getting a whole(static! See Point The Second!) “character arc” about how distraught they are.

All right, y’all, I don’t have siblings so maybe I’m wrong, but I do write a lot and I think I’m right, and you should probably put yourcharacterization where your script is. If your primary relationship that you expect people to care about isfraternal devotion, you should maybe nothave those people cheerfully feed each other into metaphoricalwoodchippers. Like. Okay, maybe you get ONE chance to have adramatic falling out. ONE. And then when they repair the relationship,they need to actually sort their shit out and not keep having the exact same dramatic falling out because thatshit gets boring and is a sign of lazy writing and—shocker!—lack of character development. Next time they fight, it has to be aboutsomething demonstrably different, notjust the same issue with a new set of tits (c’mon y’all, this is Supernatural, it’s always a set oftits).

Let’s do a real fast recap. There’s a one episode plot in Season One about the two of them fallingout over the question of whether they should follow their father’s orders. Dean spends a good percentage of Season Twotaking his guilt over their dad’s death out on Sam, but we’ll give a passbecause they explicitly acknowledge it and take steps to resolve theproblem. A major plotline develops inSeason Two that hunters have started trying to kill Sam, and Dean reliably,consistently has his back. Props. Season Three is kind of a mess (if you have a big visible semi-Apocalypseyou should probably deal with it, see Point The Third), but whatever. Pertinently, Dean’s big ongoing concern isthat Sam isn’t acting like himself, because he’s being much more ruthless(something Dean has consistently told him to do), while Sam’s ongoing concernis that Dean is being reckless (justified, he has a death sentence onhim). Season Four is when things startto break down. Castiel shows up and Deanresponds with aggression, Sam gets his rehashed ‘humanity’ plotline with Ruby,there are a lot of really incredibly poor decisions made and a lot of lies toldwith minimal regard for the trouble that’s gotten them into before (@Sam). There’s a fight that includes Dean callingSam a monster, which has been canonically identified as the thing Sam is mostafraid of, and acting like this whole demon blood thing is a terribletremendous shock, despite the fact that Dean…knew and totally failed to reactin any way except to penalize Sam (for trying to save him! Much like Dean sold his soul for Sam! And got pissy about Sam being pissed offabout!). Cue Lucifer. Apocalypse, possession, Horsemen, etc, etc,more Lazy Susan Castiel, infighting about who should say yes to what in orderto save whom, whatever.

And then Sam apparently dies in the Cage and Dean…goes offto get a nice white picket fence? Um…this is not consistent with the characterization of a dude who soldhis soul to resurrect Sam literally just three years ago. Their falling out has never been intenseenough nor consistent enough to justify this. Even if you say that Dean’s honoring his brother’s final wishes by nottrying to resurrect Sam or anything, Dean should be drinking himself to deathor something similarly dramatic, because allthe drama in this show comes from the relationship between the Winchesterbrothers.

Basically, here’s the problem: the show spends a lot of time and effort on telling youthat the Winchesters would die for each other. And while they do use that trope a lot (John dies for Dean, who dies forSam, who sacrifices his humanity for Dean, who risks his life for Sam, whojumps into the Cage for Dean…), they seem to have forgotten that, generally,you’re only willing to die for people who you actually like. Like, peopleto whom you are genuinely emotionally attached,not just people who are your family because Blood Is Thicker or whateverbullshit you’re trying to pull there. And by Season Five, I’m just…not convinced the Winchester brothersactually like each other anymore. Andthat never gets dealt with, they just expect you to believe that the Winchsterslove each other because the show says so,and listen, I hate the saying of ‘show, don’t tell’ as much as the nextperson who’s suffered through a college writing class, but honestly. Supernaturalneeds to stop telling its viewers that Sam and Dean care about each other andactually…demonstrate that shit on a regular basis.

Example: there’s the incident at some point where someoneplants a phone call on (I think) Sam’s phone, apparently from Dean, telling himthat he’s a monster and he should go do an incredibly stupid and dangerousthing because the world and Dean would be better off if he was dead. Which Sam then believes and listens to. This seems totally justified based on therelationship they’ve had for the past season. Pro tip, kids. If your majordynamic includes two people who readily and easily believe that the other isliterally calling them an inhuman abomination and telling them they should justdie, that…that is not a Loving Affectionate and Devoted Familial Relationship. And if you’re pitching it as one, A, you needsome therapy, probably urgently, and, B, your audience is only going to stickit out for so long before they give it up as a lost cause.

The point of this whole thing is that you better be ready toput your money where your fucking mouth is, and keep your characterizationsconsistent with what you’re telling the audience.

ANYWAY.

The ultimate TL;DR here is that Supernatural’s storytelling is approximately as competent as thenovel I wrote when I was eleven, which I have hidden in a deep dark hole neverto be seen or discussed ever again. Less competent, even, because at least Icommitted to a single individual plotline and dealt with the fallout of majorchanges to the universe. And it’sfucking tragic, because this was a show with some real potential buried underall the chaos. If you ever want my fullrewrite, please do ask and I will tell you, but this is now over 6K words andon its tenth page, so I’m going to stop now.

Long story short? Supernatural: What The Fuck.

#right so i've been formulating this for four years #sorry folks #you are the unfortunate casualties of my exasperation #sorry it took so long to answer this my dude this is a very lengthy answer though so i hope that makes up for it #i'm pretty annoyed #rant tag #i spend a lot of time thinking about what makes a story work and shocker it is not these things #these things are a problem #i can do a post about my actual rewrite if anyone's interested #starlight writes stuff #the inevitable supernatural tirade #the graveyard of shows with potential and terrible execution #anonymous #asked and answered

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