#piss poor reading comprehension and lack of critical thinking tbh. folks are criticizing without actually *engaging* with spn

[mybrainproblems]

every day i see Takes and i am being so goddamn brave right now

ppl really need to be taking into account that their watch/rewatch is taking them through material that is 5, 10, 15+ years old and some of that comes with "period typical" warnings. and "period typical" means that some of these creatives have demonstrated in meatspace they've grown and changed. and when you contextualize it in its own time period and look at contemporary media, spn is pretty par for the course and up against shows like house md (which is a trash fire of bigotry) it's not even that bad. bc the thing is that spn has always, from the pilot, had a beating bleeding heart on its sleeve. its missteps are bad and i'm not excusing that, but spn's issues with racism and misogyny rarely feel like they're coming from a conscious place. (except gamble who has major "white woman who crosses the street to avoid a black man" vibes. tho, charmyder and some others seem pretty cozy about their prejudices too and did not show much growth.)

and while i don't think that unconscious and unexamined bias merits forgiveness... i look at house md (which has a substantial fandom overlap) and see how it makes the conscious choice to take the most offensive route possible at every point. to constantly make racist, sexist and misogynistic jokes. to make plotlines out of acephobia and transphobia being totally okay and justified. and somehow THAT gets a pass from hypercritical ppl overlapping from spn fandom? tbh i'm pretty disgusted with that aspect of the fandom.

that's a bit of a derail from what i'm trying to say here but it's exhausting! and it shows just how performative some ppl's criticism of spn is. parroting that something is Problematique™ without actually looking at it yourself and trying to understand it in the context of when it was written and aired, and not putting in the work to consider the impact of that makes it difficult to actually understand what the show was saying and why certain things happened the way that they did. which fucking again, is not me excusing it (i feel like this is gonna get a "how dare you piss on the poor" response if i don't keep saying this), but spn was such a long running show that context is needed to do a reparative reading and accurately and adequately critique the show's issues.

it's so easy to write off kripke and some of the other writers based on their early writing on spn (and some of it is horrible), but then you look at what they've done since then and you can see them grow and change and also see that they've gained the skill needed to approach things with nuance that they were not capable of with spn. a lot of them experienced growth both as humans and writers and i really wish ppl would actually look at that vs just saying "this is awful and i'm going to gnash my teeth about how awful it is and have a bad time engaging with something that sparks no joy."

if you cannot put in the work to critique spn accurately and accept its faults and recognize that it is of its era and creatives who worked on it have grown then i just don't know what to tell you.

maybe just find a different fandom.