#tbh this doesn't even crack my top 10 list for favorite cas episodes

[messier51]

why does the fandom dislike s9e03 (I’m no angel)? its my second favorite cas episode and i got into spn in season 12 so i wasnt around when it aired

K so like, feel free to take this with a ring of salt or whatever you want because if you enjoy a thing that’s cool, to each their own. (Yes, this is a disclaimer of sorts, but I mean it genuinely, that this is not intended as a judgment of anyone who likes the choices that were made here or like, in most media.)

Also, it’s been 5 years since I’ve watched this episode so if/when I get details wrong, it’s cuz I didn’t like the episode enough the first or second time I watched it to rewatch it again. Here are my initial reactions. (I will also note that I was fairly optimistic about this episode prior to it airing, despite a lot of pre-episode angst about the promo pics with Cas and April kissing. There’s a bunch of stuff in my 9.03 tag.)

@justanotheridijiton also spent some time combing through @defilerwyrm ‘s old Monday Meta Digests from way back then and you can find a bunch of really great meta, including stuff from 9.03 in this post and this one.

A few more notes for context–back in season 7, 8, and 9 there were a lot of meta writers. Like, 10+ posts in the #spn meta tag (do people even use tracked tags anymore) a day during spn seasons and way more than that the night of the episode. There are some great meta writers in the community now! But there were probably 5 times more 5 years ago. And I don’t mean 200-word posts with random speculation, I mean 2000-word essays with citations and full arguments (in the persuasive way, not the _discourse_ way) so when I say that we didn’t much like 9.03 I’m specifically talking about the meta community on tumblr, but it was not a small thing.

So if you want to know all the gritty details of fandom reactions to stuff in real-time to 9.03 and early stuff, seriously, go read the MMD posts linked from Mel’s posts.

But, here’s the tl;dr version from the bits I remember best because they rubbed me and/or other people wrong in ways that I can remember:

- As a general rule, ERL&BB are pretty lousy writers. They have a lot of tell and not much show, and they always seem to include plot points that look explosive and huge from a distance but when you examine them they’re pretty shallow and hype-driven as opposed to meaningful and/or character-driven. They also seem to write Dean and Sam a lot like season 1 Dean and Sam, as if NO CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT EVER HAPPENED. (Thanks, I hate it.)

- In 2.01 (In My Time of Dying) Tessa the Reaper is possessed by a demon (Azazel). If Reapers are angels, this makes no sense. Like, none, whatsoever. So a lot of us were pretty fucking grumpy about that.

- Castiel sans-grace is depicted as more sexually aroused by people (specifically boobs, in one of the worst scenes ever shown on this show–was there ANY REASON to zoom in on the boobs?? how cringey can you  get) and/or sexually attracted to people specifically as one of the side effects of being graceless. Except that we know (and I am 99.99% sure that there are examples cited in the MMD links so I’m not gonna go digging on superwiki or HotN for more) Cas has been sexually attracted/interested in people before and more generally, both Balthazar and Gabriel were very clearly canonically allosexual with all of their respective grace intact. Therefore, you don’t all of the sudden take a supposedly non-sexual (see later point about ace HCs) angelic being and “turn them into a human” and HELLO now they want sex. Which was what the narrative was saying: Cas is Human Now, and you can tell because he poops, he eats, he brushes his teeth, and he wants to fuck boobs. (And why all the heterosexual gendered stuff with angels anyway they are ??? NOT HUMAN)

- Tangentially, other very smart people will disagree with me when I state without equivocation that Cas was not and can never be Human. Even without his grace he is an angel, he just doesn’t have his grace. Just like Anna was an angel before she got hers back. The grace changes how they sense the world, for sure, but it doesn’t define them as angels/not. Or else, Cas-without-grace would be Jimmy Novak, and he’s very obviously not.

- Asexual Castiel was also a really popular fanon Thing at the time and so a number of people were unhappy with 9.03 purely on these grounds. I think it’s an interesting HC (and personally I don’t think the text supports it, but I support anyone’s right to explore it so like, does it matter? no) and the Cas/April thing doesn’t mean that a person can’t still hc this, because lbr, not all of us aces are celibate. The problem here is more in the implication that Fallen Cas = Human = HE WANTS THE SEX. Sexual attraction is not a requirement of human-ness and this is a major issue (esp when so many ace/ace-coded characters just happen to be aliens or robots or whatever).

- IIRC some of the meta posts at the time discussed survival sex and how Cas wouldn’t have turned April down because he was homeless and hungry.

- Because April was not honest about her identity and used sex to get Cas’s compliance (and kill him) this is a form of rape.

- There were a lot of arguments about whether this also means that April was a victim of rape as well; she gave consent to being possessed, but where is the line there? And does consent to possession mean consent to do anything? Is the consent meaningful if a human can’t possibly understand the full scale of what possession by an angel means? If April can’t say ‘no’ at any time to revoke the possession then how consensual is the sex that her body is involved in? The answers to some of these questions might not be fully damning but the meta community had a LOT to say and the episode…. let’s just say it doesn’t even try to consider any of them to the extent that it handles all of it very poorly.

In conclusion, it’s a poorly written episode with really shallow writing cheats to “show” something that wasn’t really all that important to show other than for the titillation of sex and violence. Cas makes like, zero choices that affect the storyline in any way and it’s fucking boring, he just reacts to being graceless and alone. And the only woman with a significant part in the episode doesn’t talk to any other women and ends up being evil AND dies. Gr9 job there bucklemings, way to be awful.

#supernatural #9.03 #i'm no angel #wank for ts #replies to asks #anonymous #aj has opinions #the dreaded buckleming #tbh this doesn't even crack my top 10 list for favorite cas episodes #it's probably in my bottom 10 spn eps of all time #also the first ep the bucklemings wrote was about a *racist truck* #seriously #the only reason they're still around is nepotism is2c #Anonymous #replying to asks #rape mention for ts