#spn commentary post

[ardentpoop]

many people in spn fandom used to (and probably still) do this thing where they flattened sam into a collection of stale jokes and/or just dean’s docile little brother who is There Sometimes. a wall for dean to bounce his shimmering personality off of

obviously i hated that shit for several reasons lmfao but first and foremost you’re missing out on a character with SUCH a rich inner life. gentle giant who’s actually almost as much of a killing machine as his big brother. monster-freak-abomination since childhood. boy who fought his dad for the right to get a college education. boy who could’ve been a professional writer instead of a professional murderer. dean’s “trusty sidekick geek boy” who is the heart of their operation, who gets the witnesses and the surviving victims to open up. written to be “effeminate” for laughs but it draws discerning women to him. only dean gets to call him “sammy” even though he once hated that nickname in dean’s mouth too; he once wanted to be his own person. violated as an infant in his crib and stalked by dark things that infiltrated his life even when he thought he’d rebuilt it from scratch. the devil’s rebellious meat puppet. fighting for control over his own body for the entire duration of this story. “pathetic infant,” “misty-eyed milksop,” “sweetheart,” but also highly trained and dangerous and sharp-tongued. the bonnie to dean’s clyde, the scully to his mulder, the sundance to his butch cassidy. always “running away” from men who want to control him, including dean. I could actually keep going forever lol

the absolute best thing this show ever produced and you’re just gonna gloss over him like the fucking writers eventually did? couldn’t be me <3

[autisticandroids]

CASTIEL: Stop. What's the point if you don't mean it? You fear me - not love, not respect, just fear.

[youtube with closed captions]

a godstiel pity party. i'd like to thank an anon i got way back in february of 2021.

[sensitivehandsomeactionman]

While I've revisited eps to make gifs, I haven't done an attentive rewatch in many years. So, I rewatched the pilot. The boys look so young 👶😄. There's a ghost story, or maybe there are two ghost stories. One is the obvious, the woman in white. The other is Sam being haunted by his past, with Dean like a link to an older era. He pulls back the curtain to an American Gothic horror tale, with his vintage car, and vintage cassette tapes, and vintage persona. Sam is the modern young man, about to head to the future, but just when he thought he was out...

I wouldn't say Dean pulled him back in. That gentle tug wasn't enough to do it, in fact. Dean has bravado, but is surprisingly soft-spoken and tentative in the way he watches for Sam's reactions like a hawk. Even when he pushes Sam on the bridge, his eyes are wide and hurt, and his hushed, "Don't talk about her like that" is not so much angry as it is a plea.

Sam seems completely self assured. He's worldly, smart, decisive. I feel as viewers we're following him from the respectable suburban world to the bad place. With John leaving a vacuum behind him, literally the empty motel room, both boys seem to fill that space -- Sam immediately connecting with John's research, while Dean dons the mantle of John's protective coat. Pleasing metaphors of inheritance.

Speaking of inheritance, Jessica's death in the same manner that killed his mother is what pulls Sam back in. He's now on the same path as John. He's the one who commands the "we" in "We got work to do." Another pleasing story parallel.

Dean is the older brother, but I'm always struck that at this stage he's almost delicate. The eyelashes, the bracelets, the too big jacket. He's positioned in this trope as the bad boy, yet Jensen always has an inherent good guy quality. He's so funny, but it's like a vaudeville act. He's insanely charming and devil-may-care, but you get the sense he's also down on his luck. He's odd and fun and intriguing.

The desaturation and shadows of the cinematography never get old. J2 are beautiful and immediately as watchable as Mulder and Scully. There are some stunning women and recognizable character actors. Of course some of it seems dated, now even more retro than intended lol, yet the Americana parts are mythic and hold up as a motif. Bonus points for including a public library for research. They're searching for a shade of a father; they can't go home, there be ghosts; home is an empty husk of trauma. Still love this pilot.

[leverage-ot3]

okay I’ve seen a lot of posts about sterling just being crowley and. guys. the implications just hear me out 😭😭😭

bending lore slightly here BUT let’s say crowley’s body was once inhabited by a human and crowley is possessing the body (maybe he kills the initial inhabitant bc he doesn’t care)

but he still has the guy’s memories. he doesn’t bother keeping up appearances with his ‘ex wife’ because he is too busy building up his hell empire. BUT for some reason he can’t quite identify, he still feels something towards his ‘daughter’. he lets the divorce happen and doesn’t feel the need (or desire) to fight for custody, but he can never quite forget her, to cast her out of his mind for good

some hijinks ensue with the leverage team. it’s mostly because even a grind culture demon wants some off time every once in a while, and for him the insurance investigator stuff is more of a hobby. interacting with the leverage crew is very low stakes for him, and honestly, quite amusing. they aren’t on his level power-wise, but that ford character gives him the mental exercise he hasn’t experienced in, well, he can’t even remember

he can feel their frustration and anger when they learn he has become employed by interpol and feeds off it. it’s great, and relaxing in a way he is never able to achieve while conducting hell-related business

one year he gets wind that olivia is in a really bad situation associated with his ‘ex wife’s’ new husband. he’s selling vital hardware to terrorists, and while that might actually be the kind of chaos he would normally support or be entertained by as the king of hell, something feels wrong about letting olivia stay anywhere near that man

he calls upon the body’s adversaries. he wouldn’t admit it, even under duress, BUT he feels slightly fond of them. nate for the three dimensional chess they play, sophie for her ability to charm and disguise, parker for her chaos and slightly unsettling nature (it’s the autism swag and being bad with human interaction but he doesn’t know that lol), hardison for his unapologetic intelligence and eliot for his hardened violent past and take-no-shit persona (he’s fun to tease)

they perform exactly as he expected, right into his carefully crafted plan. and then olivia is under his care and things get more complicated. he keeps her FAR, FAR away from anything related to the supernatural (heh). no one can find out about her, ESPECIALLY not those imbecile hunter brothers (if for nothing else than the embarrassment in revealing he has a weak spot)

not sure how to work it into this post but I also want to add that somewhere along the way he develops feelings for nate and sophie. the frame up job is near and dear to my heart and you can’t convince me that isn’t fighting as flirting behavior. his interpol persona is more of a side hustle so to speak, but he finds it fun (relaxing, even) to fill that role. there aren’t any obligations of other demons, bothersome hunters, or anything like that. nate and sophie are low stakes, except, they aren’t, really. they make him feel things he can’t ever really remember feeling. his heart beats fast when sophie sat in his lap and cradled his face, his hands sweat when nate gives him that certain smug look. he’s exasperated by the way they can run circles around him like no one else has ever before. they annoy him and get under his skin in a way no one else can and it’s infuriating. but also not, at the same time. maybe he likes it

and then the long goodbye job happens

hear me out and suspend your belief here for a second, because I can’t remember if crowley supernaturally knows when ppl die/are dead or not.

so nate is in interpol custody and the interviewer is obviously out of her depth. (most people are, when it comes to nathan ford.) he walks in and pours the man a drink, but he’s fuming. somewhere along the way he came to care about the team. hell and suffering is literally in his (official) job description, but he can admit (only to himself) that he admires what they do. it’s not for him, not anything close to where his passions and interests lie, but he respects their drive and purpose. he is also aware enough to acknowledge that they are a family, a group of misfits that never belonged quite anywhere except to each other.

and nate fucking blew it up, ruined it, because his vice is being so obsessed with the end game that he is apparently willing to let his team, his family, the people that anchor him to reality, die because the ends supposedly justify the means.

not this time. not to sterling crowley

he is enraged. he can admit within the confines of his mind that he cares for nate, for sophie, even for the other three (though nate and sophie have somehow made it a hierarchy where they are more important to him. which he will dissect later in private. maybe.)

nate let them die, he let sophie die, and for what? the black book? hell below, crowley would have made things easier somehow, if he knew that this was where nate’s sights had lied. he would have prevented this somehow. he wants to have prevented this. he doesn’t want any of them dead and is too afraid to check and verify because that would make it real. the idea of sophie (or any of them) somehow making it to hell instead of heaven would probably break something in him he might not be able to reapir fully.

he yells at nate- he’s angry. hellfire burning in his heart because everything is ruined. the deaths aside (however hard it is to set them aside in his mind), nate will not recover from this, not ever. this will be the start of the end, he is sure. a miserable, guilt-ridden existence where he drinks himself to death and nothing will save him. it plays out in crowley’s mind in a thousand different ways that are beyond painful to conceptualize, even in theory.

the story starts to unravel and there is a game afoot. a solemn, miserable, infuriating game because the con is still in session because parker is alive and in the building- which sets another fire alight in his chest. ‘parker even know you got hardison killed?’ he rages for her grief when she finds out. he knows it will double when she finds out eliot has perished, too, because he isn’t fucking blind.

but nate is a brilliant man, lest he forget too quickly. they are all alive, and somehow still the entire crew slips through his fingers. he’s not even angry (he never would have been- he doesn’t actually try too hard to catch them. it’s about the game, not the consequences). he lets them keep the black book because he’s fucking exhausted and honestly, they more than earned it.

‘now we’re even. tell sophie to drive carefully’. they will never be even, not really. crowley would never admit or agree that being human is the superior state of being, but that have made him feel human in a way he doesn’t actually mind. they keep him on his toes and match him in a way unique to them, they remind him that there are other things than the realm of hell. not necessarily bigger than hell, but maybe just as important in a different sense.

watching the van drive away, something inside him settles. when he walked into the interrogation room that day he thought this was the beginning of the end. it’s not the end at all, not an end to anything. it’s a continuation of their story. maybe, he thinks, a beginning to a new era in it

[sticky-bros]

When Lisa says Dean and Sam have “the most unhealthy, tangled-up, crazy thing I've ever seen,” she goes on to say that she wouldn't bring her own sister back from the dead. This is interesting to me, because I've noticed a few SPN viewers say they would bring their siblings back to life if they could. This is arguably one of the most resonant aspects of Dean and Sam's sibling relationship. It's not really my go-to example of their unhealthy behavior. I wonder why they wrote that line.

[angelinthefire]

I think Dean would both kill Sam for Cas, and kill Cas for Sam, given the the correct and specific circumstances for each scenario. The difference is that he *would* be able to get over killing Sam; he *would not* be able to get over killing Cas.

[aliusfrater]

didn't talk about 6.02 a whole lot in my post about souless!sam's car but i just rewatched some of it and it's making me insane. so. dean's usage of sam's car can also be connected to the narrative's synonymy of masculinity and hunting. if to not hunt is narratively portrayed as a divergence from masculinity then the motherly role dean takes on when taking care of the shapeshifter baby sam had picked up on his hunt is evident of his diverging role from a patriarch within his and sam's relationship, which is inherently identifiable with hunting, and is both connected to, as well as facilities sam's own diversion from his non-role within the structure. when sam's new relationship with hunting, which narratively changes his perceivable masculinity, is considered along with dean's presently more liminal relationship with hunting, the push and pull factors relating to their comparative differences in masculinity is what facilitates the patriarchal structural shift within this episode. and this does ultimately become evidence for sam's soullessness (less so for dean and more so for the audience) and is encapsulated within the metaphorical representation of sam having his own car.

dean's liminality as represented by his conflict about beginning to hunt again is also a super important topic to me because it's something that had been previously represented in sam only. it's a large part of my interpretation of sam within this allegorical patriarchal structure and is, i think, largely responsible for his non-role as narratively portrayed within his more nuanced masculinity—a large part of this nuance being both the dynamics of sam and dean's codependency as well as sam's more personal push-and-pull relationship with hunting. it's very crucial to note that this aspect of sam's relationship with hunting and its implications originates from the apprehension to hunting that's presented within his very first episode after his period of clarity from everything that hunting represents—the cycle of abuse, sam and dean's codependency, familial rot—while at college and while in a relationship with jessica. the same is mirrored within dean's year off hunting within suburbia; this is his version of sam's time at stanford and there are even explicit rejections of the cycle of abuse ("[...] but my dad was exactly like this. all the time. it's scaring the hell out of me.") that thematically mirrors sam's rejection of these parts of what hunting represents with his independence. sam's own helping along in getting dean to realise how his actions in trying to keep his family safe are simply facilitating said cycles also point to sam's contextually soulless rejection of his and dean's codependency; he stresses the inherent inability to keep the family dean has while hunting or having the mental state of one with the overarching episodic connotation that dean cannot remain within this liminality, that he has to choose between suburbia and hunting:

it's also important to note that, in the end, it's lisa that pushes dean back into the life, just as it was jessica's death that had thrown sam back into hunting.

[deancasforcutie]

Kripke knew. that’s the post. Kripke knew

[fandom-hoarder]

They turned reblogs off, but I need this.

[stellernorth]

ben edlund on the french mistake dvd commentary: supernatural fandom is amazing. i don’t know what to think about it. you people are insane.

[ardentpoop]

What do you think when people insist Dean is the only one with feminine characteristics or woman-coded, but that sam isn't?

I think you can guess my answer lmfao.

when ppl talk abt dean like that I find it incredibly irritating as it is based on superficial and demeaning ideas of “femininity.” bc truly what the fuck does dean as a character have to do with social expectations of womanhood. his role in the story is Head Of Household which he inherited from john. in terms of samndean’s relationship dean is the partner who calls the shots and who determines when sam should be considered trustworthy/“good” by the audience and by other characters like bobby and cas. he’s the domineering husband (to sam, for most of this story) and the abusive father (very true for jack, also kind of true for ben if you’re paying attention) and he started metamorphosing into his Own father from the very beginning. he makes himself big and rough and mean because that’s what he thinks he’s supposed to do to protect His Family (mostly just sam). he makes decisions abt sam’s body for him bc sam’s body tacitly belongs to dean, no matter how much sam initially fights this reality. he views women as either sex objects (his neverending conquests) or helpless lambs who need protecting (see how he talks abt jo or claire, for example, or even just the female victims he takes a shine to throughout the early seasons). as soon as a female antagonist displeases him she’s a Bitch and a Skank and a Whore whom he’s desperate to stick his knife in.

fyi dean being super misogynistic is delicious to me and very important to the narrative but most people straight-up edit it out which is. wild. you’re pretending THIS MAN isn’t a woman-hater? THIS MAN???

anyway yeah a male character isn’t Mommy-Coded for preparing a meal or tending to his sick partner lmfao. he isn’t One Of The Girls bc he occasionally deigns to pierce the suffocating shell of his toxic masculinity to indulge in shit that he’d call Gay if another man did it around him. you’re being sexist and ignorant when you talk like that lol. people who use that language for sam are more often than not doing so bc his narrative is deeply and painfully relatable to women bc at its core it is abt his lack of agency over his own body and his own life. people who use that language for dean are just being fucking. silly. and I would guess they don’t have strong opinions abt the show’s actual female characters and how it treats them.

[manichewitz]

can’t stand it when ppl on this webbed site are like “stop tagging my posts as your favourite ship!!! ew i dont care about your fandom!!” back in the day you couldnt post anything on here without someone reblogging with a supernatural gif. be grateful

[fandom-susceptible]

Supernatural Rewatch Liveblog S1E5 Bloody Mary

These guys really just park and sleep anywhere huh.

I'm so fond of Dean. You kind of expect him to be the "bury your emotions" manly man type at first but even this early, he keeps checking on Sam's mental and emotional state. The caretaking is so strong with this boy. man. god he starts the series at 26, I keep forgetting because Jensen's so baby-faced compared to later.

(brief side note, Jensen Ackles played Dean Winchester for so damn long he rolled out of bed forgetting he wasn't the character and has lines on his face from Dean's expressions instead of his own. You really cannot blame him for wanting out at the end of the series, even if it meant a shitty ending.)

Sam was actually pretty good with Lily (the little girl) when they talked at her dad's wake, and I'm just really soft because he was doing the same thing with her that Dean did with the kid from episode 3.

You know it really hits sometimes that these men are seriously psychopaths, standing around listening to people talk about these horrific deaths and murders and just not even twitching about it.

Why did they tear off the paper on the back of the painting? It. There's pegs on those. they could just remove it like normal humans and leave less of a trace.

Why the hell is Sam like "same handprint" about the bloody handprint? It's. A smeared bloody handprint? of course it looks the fucking same.

I love the effects of them driving with the fake background. The lighting isn't even right. Does it stay this bad?? I don't remember it being this bad.

It hurts me that Dean was so willing to be just like do it, blame me, hate me, make it my fault, just don't blame yourself about the Jessica shit.

Why didn't they just steal the mirror? So there wouldn't be other ones for Mary to hide in? And they wouldn't be hanging around for the security to come find?

Dean getting that action hero punch to the mirror got me though, fuck I love him.

Can we also talk about Sam being all maudlin, oh I have to do this, I'm the one with a secret where someone died, it's all about Jessica. And Dean too, Dean believed this! You idiots. You literally live in secrets where so many people died. Dean cannot have told every single story of every single hunt where someone died while Sam was away. Literally either of you could have done this, it is not a surprise she could target both of you.

They smashed so much glass for this episode.

"This gotta be like what, 600 years bad luck?" about 15 and then you die.

They should have been pulled over so much for sheer bad driving.

"There's some things I need to keep to myself." Sam says, thus condemning them to like three more seasons of insanity with him and his fucking curse when they could have started dealing with it right now.

[castielafflicted]

Please understand that I am kicking my feet in excitement every time someone new follows me or reblogs my posts!!! I haven't been active in an actual fandom in so long and even then it was never like this. It's a sense of community that I was too scared to feel at 17, but now am delighted in.

[angelinthefire]

I actually have a basic philosophical aversion to any discourse around whether character A just sees character B as "useful", and have for a long time. (I'm speaking vaguely because this could apply to Cas, or Jack, and also Kevin, and probably some other characters who aren't explicitly enemies too).

Because

Back around s5/6 (back when different sides of Fandom would interact more) Cas haters would come up arguing that Dean doesn’t even like Cas, that he sees him as another monster, etc. And when casgirls would come back with examples of Dean obviously being friendly, their response would be "he's just doing that because Cas is useful." This would happen repeatedly. Like if you weren’t around at the time, you need to understand that casgirls were constantly on the defensive. And how frustrating it was to be called "delusional" as a matter of course. When the Cas haters couldn't even recognize the most surface-level read of a scene, that Dean is being friendly towards Cas because he feels friendly towards him. And that they had constructed this - frankly, insane - narrative where the main character manipulates a major recurring character into thinking they’re friends because he had useful powers. Like, who would want to write a show like that? Who would want to watch it?

So that's my baseline that I come to this issue with. And the thing that I carry with me in all my interpretations is that the main characters care about each other on at least some basic level. Because otherwise, what is the point? Literally what is the point of these relationships, why would we care about them, why are there stakes in the characters fighting and making up again, why are we supposed to enjoy watching it?

And I'm not down with how I've seen it presented in fics and in posts that either A cares about B as a person, or A wants B to be useful in a fight and these are two mutually exclusive things. This is a show about killing monsters and saving the world. The main thing that characters do together, the way they build and show camaraderie, the way they self-actualize even, is by killing monsters and saving the world. It is therefore inherently a good thing when characters can participate in that, and an obstacle to the plot when they cannot. I think that's just something you've got to take for granted when approaching the show. Furthermore, being "useful" is not just for the sake of the character asking for help, it's also for the sake of the character doing the helping - they're contributing to saving the world, they're being heroic, it's generally framed as a positive step in their character development, etc. Like I don't understand it being framed as a one-sided exchange.

It's also important that this is a show that's obsessed with its own masculinity. Even if it developed a small amount in later years, that kind of masculinity where using an umbrella is seen as too gay, that's what the show is fundamentally rooted in. So it's to be expected that characters don't show affection in a normal way, that they can only do so when the world is ending, or they're dying, or they're breaking down, etc. That it happens in these big emotional bursts -- that also happen to coincide with peaks in the plot, when it's necessary for characters to band together and fight.

There's a sidebar about the loss of angel powers. It's been over a year since I've actually watched the show, so I'm not sure if the show itself contributes to this. And I'm pretty sure that Misha has made emo comments about Cas feeling useless without his powers. But I absolutely hate the "Oh no poor Cas (or Jack) feels so useless without their powers they have such low self esteem" thing. (Like Cas does have self worth issues but that's another point). Angels losing their powers is akin to a person suddenly losing their arms and their sight. It's entirely normal to feel shitty about that, and yeah, to probably deal with feelings of uselessness.

It being a normal response also means it's not the fault of the Winchesters or whoever else that whatever angel character feels useless. This is something that I see in fic way too often. Like Cas thinks he’s so useless and such a burden that it's not even clear that he knows Dean likes him, and it's all Dean's fault that he feels that way. Which, at bottom, does not make sense. Like, these characters need to realize that they're all friends, otherwise, on a very basic level, none of this works. Again, there’s nothing to be invested in, nothing to care about. (And obviously depression does things to your brain, makes you feel like a burden, makes you worry that no one actually likes you. But that's not how the fics I'm complaining about are written).

Aside from the fact that there are actual examples of the characters helping/caring/confiding/spending time with each other, and acting like they know they're friends. Despite the masculinity diseases.

If there is a problem of a character not feeling useful I tend to take it as a problem of the show elevating the position of hunter above all else rather than as an absence of basic friendship.

The one exception that I'm willing to grant, where feelings of uselessness come from a broken relationship, is Dean and Jack at the end of s15. Specifically. That's it.

But yeah, I generally cannot stand "usefulness" discourse.

[stellernorth]

sera gamble on the jus in bello dvd commentary:

We knew we were going to reveal the new up-and-coming demon leader and we had him on the board and we were calling him Zarkowi actually because we didn't know what he was going to be. We just knew that he was gonna be like the new guy that steps up. and and then Eric and I had a conversation that happened over several days but we were trying different things and I kept saying, think, I think, it should be a woman this time, and you know, we call her, like we could, we could make her Lilith, and and then we went back-and-forth about well. Should it be a woman or should be a little girl and I'm always like nothing creepier than a little girl