#spn vs class

[shallowseeker]

Sam’s “destiny” was to be “king of the rats/riffraff”…and he didn’t really want that.

I don’t exactly have textual support for this but I suspect that Sam would have more readily embraced a Heavenly destiny, because it represents rising above his class background. Whereas Hell represents thriving in a place that is literally beneath him. (Well, it wouldn’t have been him per se…that was a bait and switch trick where he would have been “boy-king” in body only—a sham class rank built to entice his ego into said trap with the lure of false power. But the overall point stands!)

Don’t get me wrong; I support his rejection of Hell. In-text, it’s healthy to reject the nihilism and disinhibited-loss-of-free-will that Hell can tend to represent.

This is more a thought about how he originally associates it in his brain, I think. It’s an interesting thought! And now I’m thinking about how Rowena and Crowley view Hell as rising above…

[scoobydoodean]

How bout that classism-to-incest pipeline, eh? I've been thinking about it all day since you brought it up. It's really quite scrumptious when it's applied to villains, but a bit sad when people misread its implications. (I will always appreciate Adam for his bucking of expectations where this is concerned, though! We love a little guy who sees through it all!)-shal

(Context being: Shal has mentioned a few times that assertions of or "jokes" about incest often have a damaging classist bent (and this gets its hooks into SPN fandom through certain avenues sometimes). I could already see where Shal was coming from in general terms, but the other day I was slapped in the face with it when I stumbled across a post overtly associating Dean and John with "trash" and "trailer parks" (with obvious disdain) calling it a "comorbidity" for an alleged sexual relationship between them. Suffice to say it was sickeningly ignorant and I was gobsmacked by how overtly and unapologetically classist it was and DM'd Shal about it.)

But YES. Zachariah in 5.18. You put this so well already. Angels vs humans tend to represent upper vs lower class in everything down to the angels typical business professional attire (notable exceptions being Alfie and Gadreel which might even be part of why Dean trusts both of them almost instantly). It's common in Supernatural for immortals to blame Sam and Dean for everything wrong with the world when the cosmic beings are the ones actually at fault, which also resembles real life blaming of the poor for society's ills and the economy. This reversal of blame for the state of the world occurs also in the same scene where Zachariah uses accusations of incest to try and alienate Adam from his brothers.

Trust me, kid, when the heat gets hot, they're not gonna give a flying crap about you. Hell, they'd rather save each other's sweet bacon than save the planet.

"They'd rather save each other's sweet bacon than save the planet" is an accusation based on Sam and Dean's refusal to act as vessels... when the angels are the only reason the planet needs saving in the first place and if they simply stopped doing an apocalypse the apocalypse would not be happening.

I also have to mention Zachariah's use of the term "codependent" based on a post I wrote almost a year ago. The term has a sexist history, having been used as early as the 1940s to describe women """"enabling"""" their alcoholic husbands. I think it's easy to connect dots to classism there as well. Codependency and accusations of incest serve as a way of separating our blue collar associated heroes—trying to alienate and shame them for their reliance on community... all because the group is stronger together than apart and their enemies know that.

[isaacsapphire]

Post is from 2018.

Have you seen the TV show Supernatural? I know this is not primarily a media blog, but the reason I ask is because it seems to have a strong conservative edge on screen despite its online fandom being extremely liberal/leftist, and I think it is interesting in that regard. I think I am stereotyping a great deal, but I am trying to understand what is happening.

OK, ngl, I laughed out loud when I saw this. In the specific corner of Conservativeland I grew up in, Supernatural would be ridiculously ‘liberal’ and something something the entertainment industry is Evil and probably run by Satanists. Supernatural acknowledges that gay people exist and aren’t monsters and points out that religion can be evil and even has angels as bad guys (occasionally).  

But there’s some truth to what you’re saying.I haven’t actually gotten around to Supernatural, and probably never will, but being a (slightly lapsed) Who fan, I know a bit through fandom osmosis. I think that it’s partly that SPN is one of a few shows airing that has blue-collar protagonists that are written with any degree of sympathy and realism. 

Blue-collar/redneck/’white trash’ Americans are in a weird position re: media representation. On the one hand, they’re one of the larger target audiences for American media, period, just because there are way more poor Americans than rich ones. On the other hand… TV/movie writers tend to be middle-class and concentrated in big coastal cities. They either have never lived around rednecks, or moved to the city specifically to get away from their redneck relatives. 

Because of this, American media uses rednecks as an acceptable punching bag. Everyone knows that Those People are racist, sexist, homophobic bigots, so clearly we can make them the Bad Guys, right? It’s just kind of expected that you’ll imprint on the middle-class protagonists and understand that haha, the bad guys aren’t bad because they’re poor, poor people are just bigots uwu. If you’re a blue-collar American, especially if you’re from the Deep South, you’re kind of used to seeing people like you onscreen as Token Bigots. If you’re from the Deep South, you probably know a lot of people who aren’t too different from those Token Bigots, so it’s not as rankling as it could be. But it’s still rare that you see a character who’s coded as a redneck who’s also written as a character and not as a “haha-bigots” punching bag. 

I think what you’re seeing- based on my admittedly spotty knowledge of SPN- is that the Winchester boys (and most of their human acquaintances) are unabashedly blue-collar. They’re from the back end of nowhere, they drink shitty beer and watch porn and listen to classic rock and wear flannel; if I’m remembering right Dean at least has a Southern accent? And on a less superficial level… I seem to remember Sam was the first person in his family to go to college before getting dragged back into the 'family business’; Sam and Dean had to deal with a crappy authoritarian father and extreme poverty (because of aforementioned ‘family business’), and Dean’s (sort of) written as a closeted bi guy who acts like a closeted bi lower-class guy, not a closeted middle-class guy. They’re definitely lower-class, and SPN would be a very different show if they weren’t. 

 "Blue-collar” is nearly always coded as “conservative”, especially in the media. This isn’t necessarily the case- there are plenty of liberal and moderate rednecks out there, just like there are plenty of college-educated left-coast-dwelling conservatives. But there is a lot of overlap between ‘redneck culture’, ‘prepper culture’, ‘paranoid libertarianism��, and ‘religious conservatism’, so generally a signifier of one in the media is supposed to signify all the rest. When you combine that with the anti-government paranoia that most cryptid/monster/alien shows have going on (just from the nature of the premise), SPN reads as really, really ‘conservative’- even if none of the writers are. 

Part of the draw for my old SuperWhoLock friends, beyond the shipping, was that the Winchester Boys were written as lower-class Americans and were written so in a relatable way. Sam having to choose between law school/the chance at a better life vs. helping his family, or Dean struggling with toxic masculinity vs. his natural self, implied-queerness and all, were both really relatable to these fans- especially the ones from a blue-collar/working-class/redneck background. The fans in question were liberal as hell, but they came from the same kind of world Sam and Dean lived in, and  they found Sam and Dean to be a lot more relatable than, like… the middle-class kids on Glee, or what have you. So they liked the show as a basis for fic/art/RP because of that, even if they were intensely critical of some of the Bad Writing/Problematic Elements.

I also think SPN kind of suffered from the My Little Pony effect; a group of people who were never supposed to be in the audience for SPN became the biggest fans of the show, and eventually wound up driving out most of the “original” target audience to the point where the writers started writing stuff aimed at the ‘new’ audience instead. So a show that was originally aimed at straight white vaguely-conservative guys ages 18-45 slowly turned into something aimed at Tumblr Fangirls ages 15-30.    

Having never actually seen SPN, I can’t say if there’s more to your impression than that. But from my position on the sidelines, that’s my take.    

[silviakundera]

Ok, upon request my thoughts on Bad Buddy, a good queer romance drama that doesn't get much if any international exposure outside the circle of Thai BL fans. Full spoilers.

after consuming literally dozens of BB videos, the best trailer to the drama imo is actually the talented samyvids' "Just My Type" songvid. Perfectly captures the setup.

* the hook: 2 boys raised by their feuding families to be rivals end up attending a university that has a childish Jets vs Sharksesque historic rivalry between the science/engineering vs artistic/architecture majors. Despite these 2 barriers, the boys stumble into a secret bromance and then into love. Secondary couple here is f/f, though it's basically just soft girls meet cute then getting together (no conflict).

* Comedic and light-hearted drama that doesn't take itself too seriously, while also swerving into the appropriate amount of angst for its set up.

* This '20-something bros in love' dynamic reminds me vividly of what a lot of SPN J2 RPF and Hockey RPF has tried to capture. The 2 leads feel like your prototypical good natured university bros and falling in love never changes that. Friends AND Lovers is a challenging dynamic to capture imo but Bad Buddy succeeds

* It helps the Bros In Love vibes that the actors look less primped & polished than many other asian BL productions. They seem like guys you could have actually had in your classes in uni.

* If you welcome the drama's tone and just vibe with it, I think it successfully executes 4 popular romance tropes:

- rivals to friends to lovers

- forbidden (hidden) love

- fall first vs fall harder

- golden retriever bounding around paw cleaning cat

* If you are going to sell me on a modern day romeo & juliet esque queer rom-com, without the bloodshed, then you BETTER put your money where you mouth is and make their love actually forbidden.

* Thankfully, Bad Buddy understood the assignment. It's not just a misunderstanding. Their parents truly do have a feud and they truly are forbidden to even be friends, forget a romantic relationship. 2 kids obligated to be enemies since birth, bound by this twisted shared experience that no one else understands.

* Pran falling first, with enough time to comprehend how cruelly impossible they are. Pat falling late, fast, and hard - too impulsive to consider the consequences and wearing his heart on his sleeve.

* Both characters won me over quickly:  cautious & restrained Pran who likes order, chaotic Pat who craves his attention

* Love that the dramatic tension & hiding in all the early episodes isn't revealed to be pointless. If there was no consequence, then it removes the poignancy of its classic rooftop kiss scene. Prans' fears must be justified in order for the angst to stand up in a rewatch. Pran's friends DO reject him at first. Their parents DO refuse to accept the relationship, including his mom considering this a personal betrayal.

* Prans' fears are painfully rational and everything he is scared of does have to be confronted. But that also gives romantic weight to his decision to give in to the feelings and accept the consequences.

* In the way that scifi authors will try to explore sociopolitical topics through allusions & metaphor, and that Hunger Games author keeps writing dystopian YA whenever she gets heated about politics, Bad Buddy does a good job imo of using the feuding families setup to address the reality of existing in a homophobic and transphobic society while being queer -- demonstrating it in a way that straight cis people can relate to. And approaching from this angle allows the production to tell that story with a certain emotional distance for queer viewers who have experienced such struggles.

* The bittersweet ending sells me completely on this drama. Closeted but not. Open but not entirely. Accepting that you can't change the world and make all your family & friends & coworkers accept your truth... but refusing to abandon them OR your truth. It's a decision so many queer people have made over the years, in different countries and decades. And it's tinged with hope.

* Let's acknowledge that indeed there is tons of product placement in this series. Sometimes to hilarious ends. But frankly, without this sponsorship the series would not exist. So I'm very grateful to suffer through the marketing that helped fund it.

* Available streaming in multiple places, including YouTube.

[oopsalldadsderby]

The contestants have been finalized! Here's the bracket lineup!

So how this is going to work is, there's going to be 8 polls a day, starting tomorrow, until we hit semifinals. That means we'll do group A, B, C, D, then side AB, then side CD, then all the quarterfinals together. I'll update the images whenever we hit a new round.

Plain text Round 1 matchups under the cut:

(As a reminder, groups are formatted as [Dad name] & [Kid name]. So if there's multiple of either dads or kids, they'll use the word 'and.' Think of the ampersand like a separator.)

Group A

Bruno & Team Bucciarati (JJBA:GW) vs. Kanan & Ezra (SW Rebels)

Tony Stark & Peter Parker (MCU) vs. Lin & Asami, Mako, Bolin, Korra (LoK)

Balsa Yonsa & Chagun (MGotS) vs. Thancred & Ryne (FFXIV)

Aizawa & class 1A (MHA) vs. C!Philza & crew (DSMP)

Sojiro Sakura & the Phantom Thieves (Persona 5) vs. Tommy "Big Man" & Gus (Sweet Tooth)

Finn & Leif (FE) vs. Sandor & Arya (GoT)

Axel/Lea & Roxas and Xion + King Mickey and Riku (KH) vs. Artemy & Sticky and Murky (Pathologic)

Joel & Ellie (TLoU) vs. Darkwing Duck & Gosalyn Mallard (Darkwing Duck)

Group B

Pyrrha & Nona (TLT) vs. Kelsier and Vin (Mistborn)

Fukuzawa & Ranpo (BSD) vs. Miss Honey & Matilda (Matilda)

Jack Wynand & the Little Sisters (Bioshock) vs. Scar & Mei Chang (FMA)

Eda Clawthorne & King and Luz (TOH) vs. John Silver & Jim Hawkins (Treasure Planet)

Logan & Kitty and Jubilee (Wolverine) vs. Geralt & Ciri (Witcher)

Donquixote "Rosinante" Corazon & Law (OP) vs. Rouxls Kaard & Lancer (Deltarune)

Sully & Boo (Monsters Inc) vs. Simon & Marceline (AT)

Din & Grogu (The Mandalorian) vs. Bobby Singer & Sam and Dean (SPN)

Group C

Welt Yang & March 7th and the Trailblazer (Honkai Star Rail) vs. Jim Hopper & Eleven (Stranger Things)

Ingo & Irida and protagonist (PLA) vs. Gregor Samsa & Emil Sinclair (Limbus Company)

Nanami Kento & Itadori Yuuji (JJK) vs. Meta Knight & Kirby (Kirby)

Phoenix Wright & Trucy (AA) vs. Shirou & Michuri (BNA)

Yuugo and Lucas & 50 kids (The Promised Neverland) vs. Stan Pines & Dipper and Mabel (GF)

Date & Mizuki (AI:TSF) vs. Peabody & Sherman

Cabalena and Jowd & Lynne (Ghost Trick) vs. Pigsy and Tang & MK (LMK)

Kiryu & Haruka (+others) (Yakuza) vs. Tenmyouji & Quark (Zero Escape)

Group D

Silco & Jinx (Arcane) vs. Guts & Schierke (Berserk)

RGB & Hero (TPoH) vs. Father Garcia & John (FAITH)

Sam and Max & The Geek (Sam and Max) vs. Tom Wachowski & Sonic (Sonic movie)

Rei and Kazuki & Mira (BD) vs. Daud & Billie Lurk (Dishonored)

Chongi-re, Numeri and Butler (TRPC) vs. Jacob Holland & Maisie (The Sea Beast)

Reigen & Mob (MP100) vs. Maedros and Maglor & Elrond and Elros (Silmarillion)

Jean Valjean & Cosette (Les Miserables) vs. Loid & Anya (Spy x Family)

Batman & Robins (Batman) vs. Kurogane & Syaoran (Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle)

[carry-on-my-wayward-hobbit]

~ People I wanna know better Tag Game ~

Thank you @deadhoneybee !! 💕

Last Song: Genesis, Grimes. Not the usual stuff I listen but it’s such a vibe

Favourite colour: Like earthy or pastel blues and greens

Last show/film: last show was always sunny which I’ve rewatched so many times it’s basically white noise to me now lol. And I dont think I’ve seen a movie this year so it would probably would have been Knight Before Christmas or the Reputation stadium tour (rip 😔)

Sweet/savoury/spicy: savoury! All I want to eat rn is tacos or bao buns 😩

Relationship Status: single

Last Google search: autopsy vs coroner report (writing research lmao, for the below fic)

Current obsession: supernatural aus - specifically hunter x supernatural creature ship dynamic.

And more specifically a wolfstar au I started as a joke based off of a spn werewolf episode but have suddenly turned very serious and I can’t stop writing it.

And also a Les amis fic I read years back but can’t stop thinking about. I can’t remember what it was called and it was incomplete but all the Les amis were hunters except for grantaire (vampire) jehan (fae) and eponine (ghost) and those three were flatmates and unknowingly flirting with the guys trying to wipe them out.

Last book: I finished Mort, Terry Pratchett last week and I’m currently reading Life Class, Pat Barker and Why I’m No Longer Talking To WhitePeople About Race, Renni Eddo-Lodge

Looking forward to: I’m going to back Cardiff on Thursday to see friends and then London on Saturday to see my sister/have a LOTR marathon

I tag any of my mutuals who see this (yes even you 👁️ 👁️)

[chiisana-sukima]

The thing about spn is over and over for 15 years it asked the ethical question "is it a character flaw to want to escape your abusive family?", and over and over for 15 years it looked us all dead in the eye and answered "yes".

Along with all the anger, there actually is a lot of moving personal history and good analysis in the tags, and I especially wanted to peer review two sets of tags:

From @deanwinchestergenderenvy:

And from @wendibird:

I think @deanwinchestergenderenvy is right that it is textually there that Sam tries to distance himself from his family background and the way he was raised. It's especially obvious at the beginning, but you can see it to some extent throughout the show (e.g. Lebanon, where without John's death, Sam becomes Lawyer Bill Gates, but also in things as minor but imo clearly class-coded as the brothers' needling each other about salad vs hamburgers or dad rock vs podcasts about the protestant reformation). And I do also think spn often presents Sam's distancing himself from his roots as a moral failing, and that for a shorthand to describe that (alleged) failing, classism is as good a word as any.

@wendibird is not the only one who mentioned the crab bucket metaphor, and I think it's on point. Is Sam classist to attempt to escape the bucket if the other crabs don't (or at least vigorously, if not always 100% convincingly, claim not to) want to leave?

Spn's class analysis sucks. The vibes, for many of us who grew up poor/lower working class in the US, are impeccable. They remind us so, so much of home. Ngl the nostalgia for early-years!Dean's life specifically is so powerful for me it sometimes makes me cry. But its actually not awesome-like-Superman to work for shit (or no) wages in unsafe conditions to benefit people living in homes you'll never be able to afford with lives so divorced from yours you'll only ever be able to imagine them as fiction. You're just being exploited. And its actually not classist to be heartbroken your loved ones are dying like flies of preventable causes around you or to wish your life expectancy was at least the shitty national norm or that you had a job whose benefits included insurance. We all deserve to escape poverty and systemic (and family) abuse together.

Any analysis of whether Sam is classist or not in the end comes back to Stanford and his attempt to escape hunting and his family inheritance of violence and abject poverty. Fans who feel angry about him dissing Dean's EMF meter or sitting on the hood of Dean's car complaining about Dean hustling to support them both; yeah I hear ya'. Sam's being kind of a douche there. But his desperate prison break just failed and cost him the life of yet another loved one, and he's grappling with the fact that he's not gonna make it--he's not gonna get out, and Dean's right there, telling him this objectively awful marginalized life is wonderful. He just lost the biggest, most devastating argument of his life. Of course he's pissy about it.

For any of y'all who want a somewhat better class analysis of a real life equivalent of Sam and Dean's childhood, I can't recommend Liz Murray's Breaking Night: A Memoir of Forgiveness, Survival, and My Journey from Homeless to Harvard enough (no link because I don't want to give tumblr grounds to deactivate me, but its available pirated if you can't afford it). I actually hated that book with all my heart lol. I hated how triggering it was and how she found some things shocking that seemed normal to me, and how deeply the author felt like a class traitor to me and how bullshit I knew that feeling was. But I still recommend it as an antidote to spn, because wanting out is okay. It's normal and fair and just.

Please don't fight with each other in the tags.

[synesindri]

cleaning out my likes and finding tag games i haven't done yet 😩 thank you for tagging me in this WIP game @leatafandom!! your responses about your WIP are so intriguing 👀

i'm going to go with something i haven't actually written anything about yet but that i'm thinking about using as my next longform project. undecided if i want to do it as a fandom thing or not, since it's the full backstory of sverrir, the spn oc i developed as gabriel's vessel but who at this point might as well just be his own thing lolol

The name of the game is: pick a particular WIP. Bold the themes that are explicitly explored, and italicize the themes that are secondarily explored.

addiction | beauty | betrayal | change vs. tradition | chaos vs. order | circle of life | coming of age | communication | convention vs. rebellion | corruption | courage | crime and law | dangers of ignorance | darkness and light | death | desire to escape | dreams | displacement | empowerment | facing darkness | facing reality | faith vs. doubt | fall from grace | fame and fortune | found family | fate | fear | fear of failure | free will | friendship | fulfillment | good vs. bad | government | greed | guilt and forgiveness | hard work | heroism | hierarchy | honesty | hope | identity crisis | immortality | independence | individual vs. society | inner vs. outer strength | innocence | injustice | isolation | knowledge vs. ignorance | life | loneliness | lost love | love | man vs. nature | manipulation | materialism | motherhood | nature | nature vs. nurture | oppression | optimism | peer pressure | poverty | power | power of words | prejudice | pride | progress | quest | racism | rebirth | relationships | religion | responsibility | revenge | sacrifice | secrets | self-awareness | self-preservation | self-reliance | sexuality | social class structure | survival | technology | temptation and destruction | time | totalitarianism | weakness | vanity | war | wealth | wisdom of experience | youth

0-pressure tagging @notquiteinsane, @fandom-space-princess, and @artoodeeblue!

[feelitstillmp3]

god this show is so stupid. *continues to keep watching*

[scoobydoofenshmirtz]

#i think history is the only thing that makes sense bcuz if he had majored in ANY of those other options. we'd fuckin know about it#he'd be insufferable imagine pol sci or psych or GOD FORBID philosophy.... oh he'd be so fucking annoying about it#anyway history also makes sense as to how he knows so much random shit that you would not learn in any of those other subjects#(history) lore boy before law boy ya know#spn#i also feel the need to add i have no fucking idea what pre-law is supposed to mean#like. idk. you can just... take... law......#do y'all not have law majors/degrees in america? anyway

Okay you make very good points I have met philosophy majors lol.

But as to your question about what pre-law actually is, well, it's kind of nothing. There's (as far as im aware) literally no such thing in the US as a "pre-law" major. It's more what people say when they intend to go to law school after undergrad or sometimes schools will have pre-law advising or course suggestions but it's not a defined course of study or major. I don't know how it got into Hollywood as a major, maybe it was at some point? But yeah law schools here don't really require any specific major or classes, it's more about your grades and your skills. The majors I listed above (plus criminal justice which isn't available at Stanford) are the most common for law students but really you can major in pretty much anything. My friend who recently graduated from one of the top law schools in the nation with a tax law specialty studied psychology and Italian (how we met) in undergrad and she got a huge scholarship because she had excellent grades, recommendations, LSATs, etc. If you've ever seen Legally Blonde, they kind of make a joke about Elle studying fashion merchandising, but with her GPA and LSATs it would be totally be realistic for her to apply to top law schools. Really from what I understand, law school is just so completely different in what you learn and how you learn it to undergrad that your major doesn't really matter. Any lawyers can back up or refute that but that's at least what I've heard.

Now I'm curious how it works in other countries. My only point of reference is that Dan Howell was going to study law at university 😂 so I assume the UK has undergrad law courses but I don't know about any other countries.

Sorry to go off on such a long explanation but I am endlessly fascinated by the things movies and tv get wrong about college especially considering plenty of screenwriters went to college and also just how different my college experience at an urban public university was vs the idealized serene colleges in most movies.

Sam college major-popular pre-law edition*

*note that pre-law is not actually a major pretty much anywhere (maybe at some school somewhere but ive never actually seen it as a major). These choices are all based on some of the most popular majors for law schools students and i only included options available at Stanford (so no criminal justice).

Also leave in the notes/comments your alternate ideas. I'd like to make another poll with some wildcard suggestions.

[shallowseeker]

Since the dash is having fun with intelligence, let's also take a moment to appreciate Sam conceptualizing the Campbells as "brawn" and the Winchesters as "brains," even after he directly witnessed how much competence and intelligence Samuel Campbell was wielding in-real-time.

SAM: What Cupid said about heaven busting ass to get Mom and Dad together. The Winchesters and the Campbells – the brains and the brawn.

No only does Sam buy the unreliable-Heaven's cupid story (I'm not so sure Dean did), but he's overlaying his prejudices on top of it, pigeon-holing each into a 2D stereotype.

[naruhearts]

Listen, EW and TPTB—

We’re actually getting ANGEL alum Christian Kane onboard for S15 as Dean’s old former hunting friend, whom he possibly met pre-series canon.

*nudges @bluestar86*

This is a pretty big deal, guys. Quite interesting. BIG stuff on the horizon here.

Narratively, this just brings so many avenues of bi!Dean potential to the table. OUT OF GOOD FUN, I’m obviously and sensibly ready to expect nothing, but also ready to expect everything *flails*

Basically:

[remythologise]

Leviathan anon here: the version you and @griderednerve sounds way better than what actually happened in season 7. And yeah I think the Leviathans were suppose to be a message against capitalism and on a better show, it would have been interesting but unfortunately this is Supernatural. Also Supernatural doesn't need to plug anti capitalism into the show when Castiel, thee angel of thee lord exists. Cas was created because of the writers strike and days before his character was introduced, we reached the peak of the financial crisis (and like the whole lesson to be learned from that crisis was capitalism is terrible)

I mean I am ALL for anti-capitalism messages I think it could have worked for Supernatural too... if the Leviathans weren’t so freaking stupid. They just don’t really work as season-arc villains. I think the real problem with Season 7 is incredible anti-climatic villain writing after the Apocalypse and Crowley/Cas, like we cared so much about Michael, Lucifer, Cas and Crowley... and Dick/the Leviathans sucked in terms of character writing and bad CGI. If you think about it, the Leviathans are a REALLY GOOD one-or-two-episode premise that were stretched out over an entire season. But I don’t think they even leaned into the horrors of the Leviathans very well - if I remember correctly could have been basically Yeerks 2.0 or Skrulls or Cylons, but that aspect of psychological horror (who do you trust? and are they people too?) was never explored in an impactful way. Like ultimately Leviathans leaned into Supernatural’s weaknesses (bad black goo CGI) and not its strengths (character building and psychological horror) and I think that’s why it failed!

[castielcommunism]

I finally rewatched season 12 because of all your love for it, and it's a WILD RIDE. On a meta sense, I cannot understand the politics of it at all. like, we've got the whole, "The President is Satan" angle, which, given the 2016 American primaries and election fiasco... yeah okay (though I'm not sure of the timing of writing episodes, so I'm also kinda like...is this also because people thought Obama was the antichrist because he wanted to help poor people? ANYWAYS). And THEN there is the weird pro-life brainwashing baby son of Satan stuff, which is its own can of worms that I'm still wrapping my head around. And the whole BMOL stuff that is basically like, "bureaucracy is bad" when it should have been saying, "genocide is bad." Would have loved for Sam and Dean to have another moral reckoning with their work that actually had some CHANGES for their behavior... i digress.

but at the same time, I get to see Dean being uncertain and messy with his mom, and Sam getting to take on a leadership role as Dean steps back, and I'm HERE for that stuff. I remember being pretty peeved that they brough Mary back when I watched it live because I was kind of tired of resurrection (shocker) and didn't trust them to do anything meaningful with her story (because spn + women is almost always bad), but on rewatch I like her in season 12 with her questionable decisions and her misplacement in life and her awkward socialization with her sons.

this has been a long message, and I hope you don't mind! Thanks for reading (and for recommending another look at s12).

I’m glad you enjoyed it!! Season 12 is an absolutely insane season lol.

The satan for president shit was almost definitely a Trump thing (I doubt they were responding to right wing racism aimed at Obama, especially given that the president character in spn was a white Republican). spn’s politics become much more genetically liberal by the later seasons so it’s not super surprising. That stuff was mostly goofy shit that I didn’t really mind. Like it was inoffensively silly for the most part. And also Dean and Sam being arrested for trying for exorcise the president of the United States is an objectively hilarious plotline. The anti-christ plot line is something I can’t really place? Like I also don’t know what to think of it outside of it being just generally weird and setting up plot shit for the next season. But it’s also funny and mostly inoffensive.

However, I feel like the British Men of Letters, ridiculous and weird as they are, are thematically appropriate villains for season 12 because they’re grappling with the legitimacy of the show’s premise in much the same way Mary’s resurrection is. The BMOL are the obvious, logical conclusion to hunting - monsters are essentially bad and the only way to deal with monsters as a class of people is to destroy them. The BMOL is what hunting would look like if it were “institutional.”

But, and this is where spn runs into the wall because it can’t fully confront itself, framing the conflict as individualistic American hunting vs organisational British hunting is a false dichotomy, because American hunting is already institutional, it’s just decentralised and unstructured. The “institution” that undergirds hunting is white supremacy, specifically the American flavour of it. Hunting in supernatural forwards a bio-essentialist view of “monsters”, who are broadly speaking a class of people. Monsters don’t arise because of social forces, they are not historically or politically contingent, and the word “monster” is not an ideological one, it is a purely descriptive one. Monsters are just monsters because they’re monstrous. They are inherently bad and must be killed.

And I don’t think spn is consciously arguing this so much as it is glorifying a rugged individualistic white American masculinity, but in so doing it imports that reactionary baggage into the show. But because it’s not a text that is consciously political as such, it’s inconsistent. This is why ghosts and other spirits, for example, mostly fall outside of this model - ghosts arise from historical events, from fear and suffering, from trauma, from injustice. They’re “contingent” in this sense and not inherently evil. They are the consequence of human action, and the only way to defeat them is to reckon with the actions that led to their creation. But generally when you have flesh-and-blood monsters in the show, it’s almost always purely biological. Sometimes it’s genetic (rougarou) and sometimes it’s infectious (vampires, werewolves, Sam’s demon blood, etc). You also have cases of exception, like Garth, where people can consciously fight against their own biological destiny and be “one of the good ones,” so that further complicates it.

What the BMOL do is take all of that complexity and stand as hardliners. There are no exceptions, and it doesn’t matter what type of monster you are. They’re all bad and must be destroyed. And once you destroy the enemy in your own backyard, you move elsewhere and begin the process again.

And obviously Sam and Dean are uncomfortable with that! You’re supposed to be uncomfortable with it. The Winchester (and .: American) model of hunting is more flexible and informal, and they want to keep it that way. And like strictly speaking that’s a better model, but it’s comprised of the same ideological “stuff” as the BMOL model of hunting. The political battleground is basically how far you want to take hunting as a societal project. Do you leave it to individuals who hunt at the margins of society, or do you formalise it and make it a conscious part of society?

So like season 12 is grappling with the show Supernatural as a concept, with its politics on the one hand and its emotional core on the other. Hunting isn’t actually an unalloyed good and has unequivocally fascist conclusions if you were to industrialise it. Mary is not the perfect saintly mother figure whose corpse provides emotional justification for hunting. The biggest problem season 12 suffers from is, ironically, that it is a season of Supernatural, a show dedicated to not fundamentally changing anything, so these questions (is hunting actually bad? Is Mary a human being?) are never properly answered. Mary eventually dies again, the BMOL fade away and their remnants (Ketch) become an ally.

But despite all of that I still really enjoy season 12. I think it’s one of the most unique seasons of supernatural for this reason, and if you focus on the Winchester family drama it’s really rewarding television. I’m glad all my posting about it inspired you to rewatch it, and I’m glad you enjoyed it!

[katsidhe]

SPN X-Coded Y Girl: Heroes and Villains

Methods:

All characters worth sorting in the CW’s acclaimed show Supernatural were placed into their correct X-coded Y girl nondrant. (Full classification may be found in the supplemental here). They were further characterized as protagonist, antagonist, or mixed, based on their narrative tendencies, and then color-coded appropriately. Totals for each separate girlhood and coding type were also calculated. 

Discussion: 

Girlhood is not a predictive factor of antagonistic vs. protagonistic tendencies, as evidenced by the aggressively similar percentages of narrative classes across girl types. In contrast, being Cas-coded in SPN is extremely correlated with villainy. 

Non-Dean-coded Cas girls are also highly polarized, being either antagonists or protagonists but never both. It should also be remarked that the two most protagonist-heavy nondrants, Dean-Dean and Sam-Cas, are Dean and Sam’s nondrants, respectively. 

Supplemental figure:

[lol-jackles]

I was reading through your codependency tag and I had a question that I didn’t see discussed - do you think this J2 dynamic has had an effect on the way the extras talk about each j? I noticed most of them seem to actively talk about and suck up to Jensen and don’t really talk about Jared unless he’s brought up first. Do you think a lot of the con extras were maybe around more during the time when Jared was starting to put up some boundaries from Jensen and the extras, not understanding the dynamic they walked in on, saw it as Jared being rude or standoffish or ‘cold’ to Jensen who they, and lots of fans, know as his best friend? Or since some of them were around from earlier on do you think the way the J2 relationship looked from the outside somehow painted Jared in a bad light vs Jensen? I don’t know if this question is even making sense, sorry, I just am always confused by the discrepancy in the way the extras are towards Jared and Jensen and the typical reasons that I see don’t really hold water for me. I see a lot saying that they’re sucking up to Jensen because of his production company, which does make sense to me but Jared is also an ep on a current show, has a prequel in the works, and apparently has a few other shows in development as well. So he might not have his own production company but he’s not out of work or just some random actor on a show. But also this started even before Jensen had CM or Jared was ep, this started while spn was still airing so there has to be something else to it. Any thoughts about what causes this discrepancy?

You got to go back 15 years and then go from there.  First, Jared is the youngest in the cast but he's also playing the lead protagonist and therefore by default he also has to play the unwritten role of leader of the cast and crew, whether he likes or not and regardless if he’s qualified.  Lead actors are expected to function something like a quarterback and captain of the football team. And he's paid the most.  So already the cast and crew is going to treat Jared differently from Jensen.

Imagine you’re back in high school and your classmate is a rich kid who skipped a grade (or 3) and is not only ruining the grading curve but is the class president and the football captain and has the power to cancel prom.  Can you honestly tell me you’re going treat this kid the same as your other classmates, much less like him?

Second, Jensen has a warmer relationship with the producers, including co-producer Jerry Wanek who followed Jensen to Supernatural without reading the script.  Jerry, like most producers, assumed Jensen was going to be the major star of Supernatural and beyond.  Producers hire directors, crew, and actors.  Kiss up to Jensen and you kiss up to the producers by proxy and maybe score yourself a future job.  

Third, Jared was viewed as bit of a wild card because enough people knew about his breakdown in season 3 because it happened on set.  They may even know about his attempt to break his contract and putting all of them out of the job.  So while fans tend to gravitate to Jared at conventions due to his gregarious personality, none of that matter to the “con extras” when Jared’s mental illness could put their jobs on the line.  

Fourth, now Jared is being indirectly blamed for ending their cash cow Supernatural when he accepted the holding deal from CBS.  Already Creation is starting to rebrand the SPN con to J2 con and gradually those “con extras” will get squeezed out.