#dabb era jo and eileen........

[mrcowboydeanwinchester]

Logged on bc I was manic about something else but you've derailed me with thoughts of 25y/o Jo and 38y/o Dean

YUP !!! GLAD IT'S NOT JUST ME

i just think. you've got a jo who (to her perspective) seconds ago kissed dean and then died on her mom's shoulder. now, she's back and her mom is still dead and dean, the person she is closest to in this new world, is eight years older than he was last time he saw her. not quite old enough to be her dad, not young enough to be her brother or her lover... their whole dynamic is broken. he doesn't even wear a goddamn leather jacket anymore.

from dean's side of things, he's spent the last eight years feeling inescapably guilty for how jo sacrified himself for him and how the harvelles essentially died in vain. not only this, but he has since progressed hugely in how to treat women and has realised his treatment of jo was super demeaning. and he'd always thought he could never make it better but now he has a chance to and he's desparate to but it's so much harder than he imagined

and (just like with mary) it's looking into the eyes of a person you thought you knew so so well and realising you don't know them at all. jo saw dean as a flirty, rebellious hunter who she had a massive crush on, a guy epitomising the 'live on the road hunt for a living' narrative she was dreaming of achieving herself. now he's some 38 year old dude with a home he keeps meticulously clean and a whole family outside of her. dean saw jo as a younger, unskilled, attractive girl who had a huge crush on him and no stake in the hunting game. now she looks young but not in a fun way just in a sad way and has lost both parents to demons and sacrificed herself for the cause. this is without both of them addressing the fact they are very queer.

their conversations are insane. awkward, cathartic, and insane

#!!!!!!! AHHHHH VIBRATING OVER THIS CONCEPT #once again saying. DABB. ERA. JO #SHE WOULDVE BEEN SO FUN #dabb era jo and eileen........ #jo harvelle #jo & dean #ola answers

[thebuckleydiaz]

thoughts I had in the shower. I know most of this has been said before, but it bears saying again

When Kripke started all of this, it was supposed to be Dudes! Macho. Blood and gore. Dark, gritty monster shit. It was supposed to appeal to a male audience, right?

But then they accidentally found something very different - a bunch of people, mostly women, who watched for hunky dudes and flannel and strong male relationships. I’m not referring to shipping, at this point; it’s really hard to find good representation of male platonic/familial relationships, and they hit the nail right on the head in the early days, and it kept us coming back.

And then... they kind of failed their audience again. Because they realized that the audience was not who they thought it would be, and tried to redirect to keep it relevant to us - and they stumbled their way through it horribly with Bela and Ruby 1.0 and even a little bit with Jo. They continued to botch attempts to cater to the female audience with Lisa and Becky and Anna. In fact, for probably the first 8+ years, the female characters that did land well were probably mostly by accident. Charlie and Jody and Meg 2.0 were never supposed to be beloved characters. But they are.

And the writers misunderstood their audience in what we wanted from the brothers, as well. They spent years dedicated to keeping Sam and Dean feuding, never on the same page. Did anyone actually enjoy that shit? The overall stories were fine, and episodes were okay, but it never felt right.

I didn’t start loving the show again until season 11. The only thing that kept me going until then was some gifs I had seen about later seasons. But s11 felt so good. The brother were behaving like brothers again. Someone finally realized that we were never here for family drama, we were here for ‘you and me against the world’, and they delivered.

And then Dabb steps up and... he gets us, okay? He says ‘you want family, I’ll give you all the family’. Of course, it’s not gonna be easy, but a strained relationship with their long dead mother, and then their adopted, possibly evil, Nephilim were so much more enjoyable to watch than Sam & Dean (& Cas) infighting. And there was almost never infighting, not like there used to be. The drama between the boys the last few years rarely amounted to the duration of a single episode. Because “will they make up” isn’t needed to keep us watching.

Look, maybe I’ve been giving Dabb far more credit than he deserves, but I don’t think I am. The last few seasons have felt so good, and even when the episodes aren’t perfect, I don’t hate it. Heck, I would rather watch the worst Dabb-era episodes over the best Carver-era episodes 99% of the time (Baby gets a free pass and lives rent-free in my mind for eternity).

And we’ve finally got a bunch of great ladies who are full and real and never intended as romantic interests, and I think it’s because they stopped trying so hard. Was Eileen supposed to come back after that first episode? Probably not, but we loved her instantly. Was Rowena’s arc supposed to last more than one season; was she ever supposed to become family? What about Claire, Alex, Jody, and Donna? They almost got their own goddamn spinoff because they hit that sweet spot for found family, but they only got to that point because we accidentally loved them.

Supernatural fans are predominantly non-straight women who are just out here for found family and ass-kicking, and Andrew Dabb is the first showrunner who really drove it home on that.

#original text post #supernatural #meta #idk I'll shut up eventually