#i would love to return to my writing arc except this semester is killing me rn

[saetoru]

it has been a minute folks🧍🏽‍♀️

[overhighways]

final spn thoughts

the memes have me rolling with laughter, because after a finale that bad all you can do is laugh but, i also can't stop thinking about the fact that they said the perfect ending for dean, the depressed character who finally became stable and built a found family, was to die without any family or friends around besides his brother that really... was yikes...

so i initially quit the show on the episode that kevin died. i had stuck it out thru so many sexist and/or racist deaths and acts of violence on the show but that was kinda my breaking point. additionally, looking back over my old liveblogs and op eds on tumblr, i was getting really tired of the fact that for the 8 or so years of the shows run the brother's had never grown emotionally, and continued a constant cycle of being dangerously codependent but also continuously lying to each other and hiding things from each other which always resulted in some catastrophe, causing them to come into conflict. it was bad writing and a bummer for someone who liked the universe and the characters but wanted a satisfying change in their state of being from the beginning to the end of the narrative.

for a hot second in college i dropped out, because one semester cos i was just so depressed, and in between bringe drinking and smoking i thought i should watch supernatural but i literally only made it like half a season further then my initaly quitting point before being like "wow this is shit and i feel bad maybe i should stop and get help". so i really hadn't thought of the show except for when i saw a funny meme clowning superwholock for about five years now but then all the posts about 5.18 tricked my gay clown ass into sitting down and marathoning all of the episodes i had missed so i could watch the finale live.

and what i have to say is i know they experienced a couple shifts in show runners and head writers over the past five years so it was still inconsistent in quality (its a CW show so like, who is surprised?), but they actually really broadly improved the show i think. i remember that the first 5 seasons or so were more carefully planned and ben edlund provided so much good writing, that i think when edlund and kripke left the show lost its way for a while, and there were moments that were decent, but when they finally brought cas into the bunker and jack was brought in as a main character it felt like they got back on track. they were able to refocus the show on family while also allowing the dean and sam to grow as people and build a much healthier found family. the three of the boys bring in claire novak as their charge, jodi and her hunter family become regulars; the show kind of felt like it was closer to reaching its potential, like back when we all thought bobby and ellen were gonna be forever main characters, and dean and sam would have a family and semi normal hunter lives. so i kind of felt like sam's arc was mostly complete seasons ago, he was a pretty normal dude who was gonna end up with eileen and that was cute and lovely. but for dean i really think it was more complex and the whole final season being about killing god and truly giving everyone full free will to create any possible future they wanted, was gonna tie in more to dean's struggle to define himself outside of the role of his father's blunt instrument and his brother's protector. but instead they establish this amazing free will for everyone, cas literally dies to give dean the chance to finally be free, and then they wrote a finale that essentially says "free will doesn't exist and you will always be bound to certain expectations". like dean dying on a hunt is fine and arguably in character, but to not include any of the family that he painstakingly learned he could have? bullshit. they just completely disregarded all of the character growth they spent the last five to ten seasons giving us. also i find it nearly impossible to believe that sam would not specifically be searching for eileen after literally killing an entire coven of witches to get a spell to bring her back from the dead, so his weird faceless implied wife was confusingly bad writing as well. and dean not trying to get cas back? the dean winchester who had a complete emotional break down every time he thought he had abandoned cas or failed him or let him die? bullshit. jack not immediately bringing cas back to them? bullshit!!

and it felt like a really odd ending for cas, whose entire character arc has also been about learning how to act of his own free will and not be a mindless soldier of god, to just disappear and be implied to have suddenly returned to being... a mindless soldier of god. like i know its a new and better god who is also his son but like... you are telling me cas was really okay with abandoning his friends on earth and just sitting in heaven doing boring celestial paperwork for eternity? the writers threw away the potential narrative symmetry of having dean pull cas from the empty the way cas pulled him from hell, they threw away the potential symmetry of implying that jack brought cas back and having cas appear in the barn and save dean to mirror his first appearance in the barn where dean summoned him... and okay say misha didn't wanna risk covid and flying back to canada, they threw away the ability to literally just have a prerecorded line where cas found dean in heaven and said his iconic "hello dean" line. idk very bad writing. like obviously i had always assumed that at the very best the sbow would end with sam having the most normal life, and dean kinda fucked up but finding peace and dying on a hunting trip, but the execution sucked.

my final addition is that i have read quite a bit about all the drama behind the scenes but i genuinely cannot forgive the show's head writers and producers for queer baiting their audience like that. it would have been one thing for dean and cas to remain implied, but to confirm offscreen that they were in love and never acted on it, mention it only briefly onscreen before killing off their only on screen confirmed queer leading man, and then never resolve dean's sexuality was... quite hateful. and to know that you won't resolve it, but dangle the possibility of a resolution in the hopes of getting better numbers on your finale is... incredibly hateful. my heart goes out to misha, jensen, and berens who apparently worked very hard to get the little representation viewers were granted, and who subsequently were treated very poorly by the show's main writers and the network.

its been a hell of a 15 years...