#(in which i ignore 90% of the canon lore but LISTEN IT'S FINE I THOUGHT IT THROUGH)

[edorazzi]

Page 14 of my Miraculous Mentor AU comic A Matter of Trust! In which Felix begins to explain the history of the Miraculous, and why his and Adrien's experiences are so different! 📖✍️

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[venhedish]

So I have thoughts about 5.20 Hammer of the Gods and I guess it's probably a hot take because I haven't ever seen this one mentioned as a least good episode, but this was BY FAR my least favorite episode of the show so far on my rewatch.

Yeah. Not Bugs, or Route 666 (though that one’s a close second). Oh, man. I just decided to give IMDB a check and this one’s actually well inside the top 50 best episodes by user rating at number 41, so this really is a spicy hot take.

Listen. I get what they were going for here, and I appreciate that as a pagan I’m not really in the target demographic the show was trying to hit. I’ve read American Gods; I feel the vibe. But the execution on this one just really leaves something (a lot, basically everything) to be desired.

When I watch Supernatural, I put on my disbelief-suspending goggles and my ignore-problematic-representation-issues helmet more than with like 90% of the other media I consume because, yeah, there’s a fucking killer story under all those layers of network: CW and every-monster-is-just-some-guy syndrome. But even with all that protective headgear this episode still gave me a fucking concussion.

There are just so many weird plot holes this episode introduces into the show for basically no reason other than to shoehorn more badly drawn pagan gods into the mix. (GUYS though I’m not gonna go off on a tangent about this I promise but I do have to mention the Halloween episode with SAM HAIN the demon as like, peak comedy to my little pagan heart.) Also the issues of turning gods into monsters that need to be killed is not the topic up for discussion either because Supernatural has been doing that since season 1 even though it’s tacky and I hate it, though AT LEAST it’s equal opportunities bad because The Abrahamic God and Satan are just some-guy’d like the rest of them and also are monsters to be killed so whatever! Though can you imagine if they’d put Jesus the Christ in this show? lmao the CW would never.

Okay so here’s my big issue that afaik is never canonically explained sufficiently, though correct me if I’m wrong! A couple episodes before this one, Zachariah is at a bar shooting the shit with a human lamenting getting fired, and he makes a comment about how he’d been working for the Man Upstairs for five or six millennia, which, har har—fun reference to the fundamentalist belief that the earth is only 6,000 years old. But then in this episode, Kali, who, by the way, is way more fucking badass than she gets to be in the show and I resent that, says something to Gabriel about how the pagan gods were here first. So ... where does that leave us as viewers with brains that think thoughts? If the pagan gods came first, then the “Christian” god the show makes use of didn’t create the world, or humans? They were both already there?? So how could Lucifer have rebelled over not wanting to love his father’s second creation, humanity, if humanity already fucking existed??? Like this episode sets in stone that gods like Kali and Odin were here first, and in order to exist, surely they’d need humans to worship them??? So what thE FUCK, SUPERNATURAL? WHY CAN’T YOU BE CONSISTENT WITHIN YOUR OWN GOD DAMN LORE ESPECIALLY ABOUT A THING THAT BECOMES BASICALLY THE ENTIRE PLOT FOR THE NEXT 10 SEASONS OF YOUR STUPID SHOW FOR STUPID BABIES?

But the thing that gets me even more is just how unnecessary this was. Even if Zachariah was making a joke and the angels have existed since, I dunno, the philosophical “beginning,” Kali and the pagans would still have existed first per her line. Like?? Just don’t include that line?? Just make it vague and say something like, “just because you’re the top dog now doesn’t mean you always were,” or literally anything else, UGH.

There’s a reason why American Gods pitted all the gods of historical religion against modern concepts like technology and media, and it’s because when you start trying to debate which deity came first in a world where they all actually exist, you make a big mess.

I’m sorry I thought about this so hard, but I did. I liked the Gabriel/Lucifer stuff we got in this episode, but I want to throw the rest in the garbage. You can make the argument that the reason these old gods are so weak compared to Lucifer is just because they’re members of pantheons that are fading in worship, but Hinduism is practiced by over a billion people! It’s the third largest religion in the world! ARGHHHHHH!

I get it, Supernatural. The whole universe exists in America and everything is fine. Why are you like this? Please seek help.