#asdsfdfhjkld I will never be free of this show

[elizabethrobertajones]

like? i honestly don't get people (haters and those who stopped watching) who say spn has bad writing? of course not ever episode will be as good, but for a show at it's THIRTEENTH season the writing hasn't let up at all (it's just more simplified), sfter all those years i still find the dialogue utterly fascinating. i really don't get it but maybe i'm just biased :/

Yeah, and the thing is the show has gradually moved from what was good writing for season 1 or 4 or whatever, to whatever makes it still work after 8 or 13 seasons… 

Like, the internal mirroring in season 1? It’s there, it’s good, there’s a lot more than you think and you’d basically have to watch the season twice, once forwards and once backwards as soon as you’re done before you forget all the little details to catch all the stuff. I mean there’s some things which are obvious like the Mary and Jess dying either end of their episode things. And then there’s stuff like 1x09 and 1x17 both having Sam and Dean obsessed with drawing something that they’re trying to capture on a piece of motel notepaper or whatever. Little motifs that barely mean anything but give a sort of coherency and nod to earlier writing, which is basically just stuff you do to assure the viewer there’s a sense of having things under control. 

Cycle all the way up to season 13 and you can have so many nuanced references going on that just the MotW in 13x05 mirrors 5 different season 1 episodes, a season 8 main arc thing, a random season 11 motw, or 7x19 even, for the house full of ghosts thing… and probably some other stuff I can’t even remember now, and that’s before we get to the main plot half, and the emotional arcs. And those references aren’t just in there as a competency check, but because it means stuff and it’s relevant. The parallel to Lucas the mute kid in 1x03 who Dean related to? SUPER RELEVANT to his emotional state now. For like the entire season we’ve had 1x02′s “saving people, hunting things” speech lurking around in Dean’s actions visibly decayed and broken from its original meaning. 1x10 was visually referenced and that is important because of the Sam and Dean at odds stuff, and some of their most important yelling at each other about how they see each other and how John affected them and how they see John through each other happened there, all of which is being recycled in how they’re treating Jack. I could keep going but point is, the writing is good surface viewing, and a really rich soup of past canon references for people who want to analyse it, because just showing they understand the story they’re telling is a huge sign of good writing, and makes me confident to assume they do mean basically everything they imply. 

But on the other hand in season 1 you can really feel scared and alone and confused and like the entire universe around them is too big and filled with evil and they’re small and incompetent and just want to find their dad and go home, and that aesthetic is excellent, but you can’t keep going with that past even season 1, so they start to get more people in their lives, even just passing acquaintances at first, and a couple of settled locations. And the story can’t just be the same simple goals over and over again or what’s the point in setting up a big looming battle between good and evil from the very start if it’s just escalating and deescalating clashes with a few important demons, a 4 episode per season main arc about family, and then a bunch  of monster hunts? For one thing they’d run out of hunts :P So more plot, more characters, and it all starts eroding the original aesthetic because better writing for what they’re working with means abandoning what originally made the show good because it can NEVER make the show good again IN THAT WAY.

And by season 6 the mytharc is all concluded, and you basically have to pick the show up and turn it around, and start telling it all backwards, and make it personal instead, because not only is escalating threat meaningless after the victory in season 5, but they have a massive world full of characters and resources and KNOWLEDGE and you can’t have the Winchesters alone against the world. There’s jokes about how in season 1 they wouldn’t know a vampire if it bit them on the arse but then in season 8 Dean just goes and clears a house of them out for his vampire BFF. Or season 1 Dean vs demons and then just cut to him and Crowley drinking together. Like… it’s experience and competence and also just the story can’t maintain itself if it never explores new avenues where monsters stop being scary for being monsters and start being scary for what they say about the characters… Which 2x03 does for Dean, and everything since has been post-picking up the story and turning it around. I mean, that can happen at any point really, but the season 1 approach to monsters was completely unsustainable because they’d run out of monsters. Look at how werewolves never came back until season 8 and when they did, Robbie retconned the crap out of them so they could be used in different stories. Werewolves who transform unknown to themselves and can be monsters without ever knowing it? Are good for like 1 story only, and that was the one they told in Heart. And until you suck it up and retcon it, you can NEVER use werewolves even as incidental monsters. We didn’t even see them in season 6. 

And all these changes are happening all the time, and bit by bit things like “can’t have the Winchesters without any reoccurring side characters to help/hinder them” and “monsters aren’t all evil” and “escalate the mytharc at least a notch higher than previously or start over but make it personal” and all these changes happen one at a time for good reasons, until you end up with a show which looks nothing like the original one but still has its DNA. It’s just grown up into an adult version of itself that can carry its own weight. And that’s good long-form writing.

I don’t actually think the writing has simplified, it’s just behaving in a different way now. Season 1 and 2 were pretty raw and full of character dynamic stuff but the main plot was very simple and tropey because it could afford to be because the show was a bunch of world building and a focus on the MotW episodes, and the main plot was a bonus and a mystery to string us through episode to episode, so the main pull WAS the character stuff between Sam and Dean as an identifying feature of the show. But you can’t tell that story over and over where they don’t know what’s happening and it never comes near them until shit hits the fan. For one thing, they blew all their cards ages ago on things seeded into their life from birth that they had no idea about but were always fated to happen, unless there’s something that happened to Dean that’s just been idly ticking away waiting for him to hit 40 for him to be slapped with some ancient curse Millie Winchester activated poking around with artefacts Henry brought home from work or something. Again, once the demon blood reveal comes you basically pick up the show, turn it around, and start telling in the other direction from the build up to that reveal, and we’re still going in that same direction that Sam’s been reacting to since 2x21. That’s the hugest thing to happen in their family history in terms of plot so everything has to loop around that somehow, and new reveals are just “why” ones not “what” ones, in 4x03 and 5x13.

The show the hardcore original couple of seasons fans are longing for is one that wrote itself out of existence with its OWN good writing. Sam and Dean DEMANDED more characters to interact with to show more facets of themselves and for them to be challenged, so they got Ruby and then Cas. The plot was rolling along building up steam so excitingly that it COULD go to an epic fated apocalypse, and sell that our guys were the ones caught in the middle and ready to save the world. They weren’t the same dweebs as season 1. 

And instead you get this INCREDIBLE character writing… Like, Sam and Dean leap off the page as it were right from the start, and without them being good characters the show would never have amounted to anything because Sam and Dean was all the show depended on to start with. And it’s still going on their charisma and chemistry, but it’s FAR from all that now. They get characters thrown at them to see what sticks, and increasingly characters begin to stick. Characters would basically never be seen again originally. And then a few began to show up over and over after Bobby and then the Roadhouse lot, and season 3 had a whole bunch of actual reoccurring characters and stuff like surprise returns for the Trickster or whatever - things that began to make it feel like the world was populated with more than the Winchesters. And by season 8 when the narrative shifts to being primarily character-based and action driven, repeat characters are allowed to show up and stay in ways that they never would have in the past. You get in season 8 Garth, Kevin and Charlie all coming back since season 7 first appearances, Cas and Crowley get their first season they’re actually both in all the way through at the same time, and then there’s repeat characters introduced in that season for its story. Amelia and Benny, and Abaddon and Metatron. It’s CROWDED. The Winchesters are being defined by the people around them and it’s how they react and make their decisions that affects the story. Which allows for delving right down into them and doing masses of character building because all the plot stuff is affected by character things.

And I think Destiel gets so compelling around this time because the shift to emotional storytelling means it’s less what they do and more how what they do affects them and each other. Everyone’s getting defined more by the people around them but Cas and Dean have this whole weird profound thing going already. 

As we go through all that the story becomes more and more self-reflective. 6x01 and 8x01 both reboot the story in weird various ways, going back to the pilot for inspiration. 6x01 just again is about picking up the story and turning it around and telling it in another direction, but 8x01 gets really meta about it… Dabb era snuck up on us because it starts somewhere in the middle-end of season 11, but the end of season 11 is another pick up and turn around moment, but instead of re-telling it begins to completely deconstruct and break down everything that the story had been previously defined by. Which means in many ways the drift back to trying to tell simpler episodes with season 1 themes and style makes it look simpler, but after you stick out 12 years of the show and then get to it, if you look at what they’re doing, part of the reason why the episodes feel SO good, is because there’s a deep intelligence to it all, at least in storytelling terms. Finding what is fresh by taking the things which are worn down and tiresome and trying to do something with them. Subtly, in season 12… A bit louder for the people in the back in season 13 :P But there’s a clever purpose behind it, and the episodes are engaging for other reasons and as a bonus we’re seeing the characters in ways we haven’t really seen them before. Or as we haven’t seen them for a long long time. 

I think a lot of intelligence in good writing is not forgetting the beginning of the story halfway through or at the end or anything. Which is a serious problem when the show is so long. It’s why you sometimes get lines like in 5x21 where Sam and Dean have an exchange where they talk about remember when we used to just hunt Wendigo (*takes a shot*) or in 12x06 why that was the monster they had that game about… It’s meta commentary for mentioning it to go back to the start, to examine their lives (as we were doing to Asa) and remember how it all began. To get a sense of context and continuity that these are the same guys from the start of the show, who have been through *all that* and are still here, being themselves, in their further adventures. 

I think the style has obviously, necessarily, changed a lot but I don’t think it’s simplified anywhere, just that the changes and evolution it’s been through means that the way it’s told now is different, in this case blending nostalgia with trying to convince us we need to keep watching, still, after 13 years, for some of the weird ideas they have going forwards… I think that involves a LOT of character emphasis like being able to take most of 13x01 to mourn Cas when we know he’s coming back, or this whole grief arc, really. Or look at the evolution of Dean worrying about Cas in season 8, 11 and 12 when he’s missing/possessed and how each time it was significantly louder and more important as what Dean was dealing with and how it was affecting him and how important it was to the narrative as a whole. It’s like someone saying a sentence over and over but repeating it with different emphasis. And louder. And the longer the show goes on the less it can rely on one type of telling and the more it has to rely on the other, although I sort of feel like season 13 is hitting a point where I’m not sure where else they GO from here :P 

It’s flipped right back to season 1 in a way, that there’s very little “main plot” intruding on them, right now, except via grief or having Jack around, which of course just elicits a bunch more character development and emotional arc stuff. But the entire history and complexity of the show is still there, so a regular MotW can turn into a chat with Death, who talks to Dean about cosmic matters. Their world is never not going to be huge now after it’s been escalated so far, but on the other hand, you can go back to that season 1 feeling where character development was basically all they had lying around… It’s all massively complex, but on a sublime lower level to what’s going on in the main plot. 

Same as last year, the plot stuff all just served the emotional arcs and it could be literally anything as long as it gave the right nudges to the characters. So far this season it’s been going much better, probably because it feels simpler and there’s been less direct main plot nonsense going on and letting the characters breathe and deal with the emotional stuff… 

Idk, tl:dr I sort of feel like everything season 11 onwards has just been rewarding fans of the show who kept watching that long, made by people who love the show and are delighted it’s been around this long… Like, if anything, the writing might seem simplified because they’ve written so much show that it’s like a self-fuelling self-nostalgia perpetual motion machine for the last couple of seasons. But the very fact it seems easy and simple is betraying how intelligent some of the writing actually is, because at no point has it let up on the depth it’s written at, and with more show it just means MORE stuff to mirror, parallel and build off of. The writing is probably proportionately better than it ever has been because it’s not a level playing field, it’s a MASSIVE MOUNTAIN of past canon all the new writers have to wrangle, learn, and love before they can start writing. And they show that they HAVE and produce great episodes out of it.