#the graveyard of shows with potential and terrible execution

[words-writ-in-starlight]

If you ever go on a rant about BBC Merlin and Arthur's development, I will LISTEN and I will CHEER. Seriously. Last Minute Reveal SUCKED. He should have found out at the end of season 3, or early season 4. Season 4 should have been Arthur dealing with the revelation of Merlin's magic, the implications, Merlin's loyalty to him versus his loyalty to his father, and his evolving moral struggle. Season 5 should have been the Golden Kingdom and hijinks, not the fucking clusterfuck we got. UGH

Actually, I’ve already bitched kind of at length about Merlin, but tbh if you’re still interested I could definitely bitch more?  I might need a specific topic though because “just complain generally about this show” one time got me into 7K words of trouble with the SPN fandom.

[shsl-heck]

A (Currently) Untitled Custom MTG Set

Okay so, this is my second attempt at typing this all up since tumblr randomly ate the first one, but for the past while I’ve been attempting to create a custom mtg set in a new plane I am tentatively naming Ecumia. This has been an on and off project but I decided to start posting updates here because I think it will be interesting to see my thought process throughout the whole thing, and also because I’m hoping it’ll motivate me to keep going. My basic idea is that it takes place on a plane starved for mana where cities have been modified to become constructs that travel the plane scrounging for what little mana they can find. The rest is going to be below a read me because it’s a long post. It has a summary of the setting, draft archetypes, mechanics and just some random thoughts on where I may go.

First I want to go ahead and go into more detail about the cities. There are five main giant cities, each of them is based on a four color mana combination. They’re all based both literally and ideologically on what color mana they lack just as much as they’re based on the colors they do have. So I guess I’ll go ahead and list them out with some explanations since they’re one of the biggest features of the world. (Sidenote: they’re all meant to be in some way terrible and corrupt.)

Zezuklet is the WUBR aligned city. It positions itself as a meritocracy, to be a prodigy in Zezuklet is the expectation. Everyone works to improve themselves and their skills to serve the city in its never ending quest for expansion and fuel. They cooperate and work together like the cogs in a machine not like people who care coming together. Black and red provide the passion for self improvement no matter the cost, blue provides the forethought and efficiency with which everything is run, and white gives the system it’s strict laws and orderly conduct. Meanwhile despite the white aspect’s focus on cooperation the lack of green mana manifests in a lack of sense of community which gives the city it’s main theme of isolation and alienation, the embodiment of society as a cold machine.

Philael is the WUBG aligned city. It’s a cult run by a council of revered priests, prophets, and theologists. It’s not the rakdos style cult though, it’s much more of the sinister sort of banality like scientology, mormonism or selesnya. The modern new life fusion way style of cult if that makes sense. Everyone is part of the family, and you don’t betray your family. If you do, then anything is fair game. Don’t worry though, family forgives. White and green create a tightknit but highly stratified and strict sense of community. Blue manifests itself in the extreme degree of mental manipulation and veiled knowledge that goes on in the running of the cult, and we see black in the cult’s policy of brutal retaliation against those that break its rules. The lack of red mana is meant to provide a sense of lacking individual identity or the ability to express oneself.

Novaesium is the WURG aligned city. In concept it’s meant to be ruled by a lineage of wise and powerful philosopher kings, however in execution the monarchs are rarely as wise and fair as one would hope. They are a regressive society who desperately tries to cling to a mythical past version of Novaesium where it was the center of culture of commerce across the plane. Anything that threatens to interfere with the return of the kingdom’s golden age is essentially considered treason. As with many of the cities white manifests in Novaesium through it’s monarchy and sense of authoritarianism and strict but arbitrary rules. Blue shows itself through the focus on subjects like classicism and focus on analyzing the past, while red lends itself to the passion and zeal to return to that past. Green ties it all together with the sense that their community is all linked together and working towards a common supposedly noble goal. Black mana when appearing in characters that aren’t villains is typically reflective of self improvement and ambition, so Novaesium’s lack of black mana is meant to reflect an inability to move beyond the dreams of the past and create something new.

Raxfada is the WBRG aligned city. In Raxfada might makes right, which means that few warlords last long thanks to the frequent invocation of trials by combat to determine who should be in charge. Despite the bloody duels and lack of formal legal system Raxfada works on a strict honor system. Families are to take eye for eye and tooth for tooth. In order to keep the city running Raxfada is in a forever war, hunting down smaller weaker cities and draining the mana from them or integrating them into the city’s mass. White and black combine to create the honor system that substitutes for rule of law with it’s focus symmetrical but swift and brutal violence. Red represents the zeal and love for battle that citizens are raised to value in order to continue the forever war, and green the philosophy of might making right, and value of raw physical strength.

Quisith is the UBRG aligned city. It runs on a parliamentary system in which many small guilds and miscellaneous groups vye for control over the parliament. People are in general highly devoted to their individual parties but deeply suspicious of all others, believing them to be plotting to take over. These fears are of course justified since nearly every single guild, secret society, etc are all planning to take over in some manner. Quisith is unique in that because it’s made up of small factions sweeping statements about philosophy are a bit harder, but in general blue and black combine to produce a very dimir-esque aspect of subterfuge and subtle conflicts and plotting between organizations. Red is meant to reflect the intensity of conflicts and constantly flaring tempers between warring factions. The lack of white means that there’s a lack of centralized authority and unity between the whole of the factions.

Now I want to move on to the draft archetypes, each of which cover a two color pairing to make them flexible enough to build in limited formats.

Azorius Artifacts takes advantage of the color pairing’s ability to control the tempo of the game while giving it tools to buff, untap, and take advantage of artifacts they play in other ways. This is probably the most control oriented draft archetype for players who are a fan of that.

Orzhov Cycling is, as the name suggests focused on cycling. Specifically it uses cycling as a means to drain life from your opponents while maintaining card selection. I have the urge to say this is probably more of a midrange deck, but honestly I could see it being built in a couple different ways.

Boros Voltron/Go Tall focuses on applying powerful buffs to a single creature with cheap spells, making it one of the more aggro focused draft archetypes. There’s really not much more to say than that.

Selesnya Toughness Matters is my attempt to make a draft archetype that takes advantage of creature’s toughness with spells that set power equal to toughness and others that reward playing high toughness creatures. Because of the focus on more defensive creatures I think this archetype could potentially turn into a stall focused one, but it is also green so who knows what people could come up with.

Dimir Self Mill seems like pretty well trodden territory (it just appeared in Theros,) but it specifically seeks to take advantage of the two new custom mechanics, Trawl, and Repurpose which both have graveyard synergy and actually give Dimir the ability to ramp. I’ll explain both those mechanics in the next section though.

Izzet Auras is not something that is traditionally thought to fit the color pairing. However on this plane I wanted auras to be a sort of magical expression of an inner truth. Similarly to how the Prismari in strixhaven view their craft as artistry, auras are considered a deeply personal and artistic form of magic which I thought fit Izzet. (I actually came up with this before strixhaven was spoiled so it was a fun surprise.) Izzet auras do things like grant card draw, firebreathing and more, making them a sort of toolbox deck.

Simic Go Wide wants to overwhelm their opponents quickly with their efficiently costed creatures and overwhelming generation of tokens. Yes, this is an aggro Simic archetype, lord forgive me.

Rakdos Self Burn obviously deals direct damage to yourself as well as opponents and permanents they control while rewarding you for lowering your own life with benefits like card draw and buffed creatures.

Golgari Repurpose is fully based around the Repurpose mechanic which grants them exceptional temporary ramp, letting them cheat out giant creatures at the cost of exiling cards from their graveyard to help pay. This is yet another archetype aiming to use new mechanics, this time with sacrifice outlets and giant beaters.

Gruul Aggro is the mother of all aggro draft decks in this list. It has a focus on cheap but strong creatures with haste, and powerful enter the battlefield effects that defeat your opponent before they can begin to pull out their own strategy.

Finally, I want to finish off with a summary of the new mechanics, and a report of my progress as of writing this.

The two main mechanics unique to this set are Trawl and repurpose. Trawl lets you mill an amount of cards and then return any lands put into your graveyard that turn to your hand. I’m still ironing out the kinks in repurpose, but essentially repurpose is a keyword on permanents that lets you exile them from your graveyard (and maybe your hand, I haven’t decided) in order to add generic mana to your mana pool.

As of right now I have around 65 of the 101 magic cards found at common in each set completed. Rough drafts of white’s common cards in the set are finished and I plan to go back over an re-edit them to add some polish after I’m done with all the commons.

Thanks for reading and hopefully this was interesting!

[banddndau]

The whistle-in forest was vast. The purple haze coming down gently as a warning of the impending sunset. It was a good payoff taking a mission to help some villagers be rid of some terrorising bandits. While they had no rare items to offer the bit of gold as well as a couple potions to boost stats the Beatles took gratefully. Walking back to the nearest town should have a reward in itself however. Walking miles on foot and had till sundown to make it before the nightime dangers would show their faces in their domain. "Ya know I was really hopin that at some point a coupla' thieves or pissy merchants would scamper our way and we could show 'em what we're made of and take their horses so we wouldnt hav'ta use all our bloody energy just walkin!" John complained Paul's way. "Oh you know very well that village didn't have much to offer and if we tried to take even one horse we would be steppin the line and I don't want to get into trouble for taking more than what we were given, not after_!" Paul remarked not even looking behind at John, who was dragging his feet obnoxiously crunching the dead leaves that blanketed the forest floor. "Well mr. goody good!" John stopped. "From the looks of it we're not gonna make it out of 'ere by sundown!" Hearing that news George and Ringo groaned in frustration. Ringo pinched the bridge of his nose not in the mood for an argument to begin. "Look before we start blamin each other for the naturewalk we can't stop now unless we wanta' be stuck here even longer." said Ringo. "Rings' right." Paul agreed. "No point in waitin for anything so even if we dont want to we gotta walk." "Geo you've been awful quiet halfway through us comin here. What's eatin' ya?" Paul asked the Cleric walking beside him. His serious resting face looking more intense. "I ju-" A strong autumn wind suddenly blew their way, blowing back their capes and coats, whilst being pelted by a barrage of orange and red leaves. "You were sayin?" The fighter chuckled smoothing his hair down looking at his friends long hair blown into every direction. George huffed moving the hair out of his eyes and throwing the hood of his coat over. "I was gonna say I just don't like the feel of this place. I'm feelin bad energies 'round..." "I suppose I understand where you're comin at." replied Paul looking around. "Don't have those magic senses a yours but it does feel the trees are gettin bigger the further we go...cheer up Georgie!" Paul gave a brotherly pat on the back and wrapped his arm around the youngers shoulder. "Nothing in here we can't handle!" As the next hour drew to a close so did the evening sun. Slipping away beneath the horizon leaving a dark night, a violet hue washing over the leafy canopies. The worst the party had come into contact with was a harmless bat flying by the only real threat being some spiders the size of a palm coming their way. Not willing to take chances they smited them all with ease. "Not sure I'm likin where we're headed fellas..." Ringo said with nervousness. "I wasn't going to say more on it but George was right I'm not feelin right here..." The sorcerer floating a globe of light a few feet past his palm to get a better idea of where they were and the potential routes. They were far from where they should have been walking down. A simple mistake they could have made not being able to see clearly without the sun to peak through the leaves and give them guidance. Where they were the trees seemed to be taller and older, moss hanging from the branches like the hair of old hags, their trunks twisted and hanging as though they were looking down and mocking the party of four below. It was only when a wave of fog streamed through the the two magic users shuddered with wide eyes. "Strange brew..." Ringo muttered. "Lads I don't wanna alarm you to much but we-" "Witch territory...Rings..." George interupted pointing up above asking Ringo to move the light where he gestured at. A large cocoon the size of a human hung from the tall braches above, then four more, then eight more, then a whole plethora could be seen. John fidgeted with his glasses. "These aren't..." John didn't have to say what they actually were because the mere thought of it alone was nervewraking enough. These were no cocoons...they were giant spider victims wrapped in their silk. Unable to move or scream if they were yet to die. The team moved closer together all back to back facing each direction fearing the worst of a surprise attack each readying their attack. "We need to try and get out of here, if we do it slowly then we shouldn't be seen." Paul instructed trying to fix the situation. Small spiders were fine but whatever could make that display was not an opponent Paul was mentally prepared to face. Paul looked over to the two magic users in the group. "Where's the witch...?" "Witches don't show their faces unless ya make it to their den." George answered still locked in readying attack. "My best guess is what's makin these is what this witch is kin with." "A spider witch?" John interjected. "Well then we can just find and squash the bitch!" "I wouldn't." said Ringo. "Even the lesser of a witches 'ave magic stronger than Geo and I combined. Fellas like you an' Paul frankly would stand an even lesser chance." John gulped. "Do they now..." A shuffle could be heard in the branches. All eyes shot towards the sound. A sword, daggers, a mage hand, and a fireball pointing it's way. Paul raked his mind for a way to get the group out safely, this was all his idea anyway but he wasn't planning on this! Hinting at the rest to follow his lead with gentle steps in hopes of not drawing attention by what would be regularly an aggresive stomp of the dry leaves on the forest floor. Another gust of wind soared their way even stronger than the last this time the four having the keep grounded preventing the possibility of being knocked back. It's was then the beast showed it's face. It was too late now, as a giant spider dropped itself down to the ground leaving a string of thick silk behind. This was no spider any of the Beatles has seen before. It was twice the size of a horse. It had horns on its head and its jowels, as well as one large eye in the center of its face being surrounded by the other seven slightly smaller eyes and they were all pointed at the four. "FUCKING SHIT!" John screamed. Without hesitation Ringo hurled a fireball at the Spider queen. The abominable arachnid shrieking as the spell scorched it. Enraged it then barreled head on to the group forcing them to split. John and Ringo on one side Paul and George on the other. "Ya see what I said! I knew something was off! I bloody knew it!" George exclaimed whilst using mage hand to fight. "wELL I-" Paul began to defend his descision making before one of the insects massive legs darted towards him the fighter then using his sword to deflect trying to shake it off. "This is it Paul! Next time I feel some fucking junk is about wherever we are! I'm leaving!" George continued to chastise Paul while casting mage hand to also fend off the Spider queen. "I dont care if you disagree either! You should have just heard me! I'm tired of not being heard! I'm not a child you know!" Those words struck Paul. He didn't mean to have the Cleric feel that way. Was he really brushing him off that much? Many thoughts threatening to throw the fighter off focus but there was no time to talk things out like well respected traveling heroes. They had a bigass bug that was controlled by a hidden witch who is going to kill them if they don't find a way to beat it sooner than it beats them. The battle continued on with the two magic users casting some of their best spells in hopes of weakening the monster. Paul taking wide swings with his sword. John who had disappeared into the trees was attempting to try and locate a weak spot on the beast so he could then try to execute a sneak attack and end the battle quicker. Watching the fight below whilst scouting out a good spot here above to jump from was interupted from John's mind when he bumped into something soft. "What the hell?" Adjusting his glasses he gasped seeing he had bumped into one of the "things" wrapped by the Spider queen. It was definitely human sized. Feeling panic begin to fester he moved past quickly only the continue to see this hanging graveyard of dozens of bodies around the tree tops. The gravity of this situation hit the rogue like a stone in a puddle. Not only if they lose could they die. But a gate even more terrible is the idea of him or worse his friends being taken hostage alive or barely hanging on. Held immobile upside down to slowly perish and become this monsters meal. Tired of trying to mentally calculate the weaknesses of a creature he had never even faced before John readied his daggers and jumped onto the Spider queens thorax and sinking in the blades through her exoskeleton. Seeing the move finally add more heavy damage to it what John didn't anticipate was It's powerful shriek following it bucking him off of her much like a raging bull, the rogue flying off hitting a tree. The two daggers still stabbed deep with dark olive green blood oozing from the wounds. "John!" the other three yelled in unison. "You better not be yellin at me cause youre worried! It better be a thank you for guttin that thing!" John yelled back sitting up recovering and pulling another dagger from his coat. The three smiled in relief at Johns constant humor even in his attempts to hide his fear. This didn't help much however with the continued arguments between Paul and George. Ringo stuck in the middle of the bullshit (again). Reminding them to fully focus on the goal of not dying. The spider queen was looking more worse for wear but the same could be said for the four lads. Both foes growing weary but in no means ready to back down. The spider queen fully opened the large middle eye it bearing resemblance to a human eye. The iris pink and the pupil widening as it reeled in the four to its ultimate ability. The purple haze that had long entwined with the woods in the afternoon seemed to grow and envelope them in Paul, John, and Ringos eyes. It was relaxing much like a high actually. The intoxicated three then felt their minds go fuzzy and their bodies wobble beneath them. Paul swore he heard someone shouting at them but he then drifted away into a dark dreamless sleep the last his image in his mind was that pale pink eye.

[first-and-ten]

Week 17 Recap

The NFL season ends with a bang. 

I did terrible in fantasy, but ended on a high note in both leagues. I did better in picks than I did last year but didn’t break my 2014 record. I missed on 3 survivor picks all year and made $71 in fake bets. Half the upsets I picked happened and I locked up games with almost 80% accuracy. We had one perfect week (DEN, SEA, NO, GB and both my fantasy teams win, NE loses) and ended on a disaster week (All my teams lose, NE wins). The Pats will carry the NFL Title Belt into the postseason.

Oh, and there’s the small matter of historic failure by one team. That’s right, the Cleveland Browns are now the third team to go winless in an NFL season in the Super Bowl era, and the second to do it in a 16-game season. Congratulations, Browns, you deserve it, and the Matt Millen Award for Losing will henceforth be called the Matt Millen and Sashi Brown Award for Losing.

In happier news, the longest playoff drought in North American pro sports is over. The Bills needed a handful of very specific miracles, and they got them. So strange to think that if just the Bills and Chargers were tied LA would go to the postseason, but with the Titans and Ravens in the mix they’re out. Not sure I like how that works. But it’s a little heartwarming for Bills fans to get to see their team in the playoffs for the first time this side of Y2K.

Teams That Need/ed Kaepernick: CLE, BAL, IND, TEN, HOU, JAX, NYJ, MIA, DEN, GB, PHI, NYG, ARI, SF

Coaching Graveyard: Ben McAdoo (NYG), Chuck Pagano (IND), Jack DelRio (OAK), John Fox (CHI), Jim Caldwell (DET), Bruce Arians (ARI)

The Room Where It Happens: PHI, PIT, NE, JAX, MIN, LAR, NO, CAR, KC, TEN, BUF, ATL

Fallen Tributes: CLE, NYG, SF, IND, DEN, CHI, TB, WSH, ARI, GB, CIN, NYJ, HOU, MIA, OAK, DET, DAL, BAL, LAC, SEA

GB 11 - 35 DET Game Ball: Ameer Abdullah Bet: +$2 [W] The season mercifully ends for both teams. Nice running by Abdullah, but the Lions still haven’t had a 100-yard rusher in the Stafford era, and maybe that’s why Jim Caldwell is out. Honestly, I think he should have stayed. His team had a respectable enough year. The Packers did not, and to their credit they are not putting it all on Rodgers’ injury, firing DC Dom Capers finally and reassigning GM Ted Thompson. 

HOU 13 - 22 IND Game Ball: Frank Gore? Bet: +$1 [W] I didn’t watch this game, or any highlights from this game. Could have been Frank Gore’s last. Was definitely Chuck Pagano’s last.

CHI 10 - 23 MIN Game Ball: Latavius Murray Bet: +$2 [W] The Bears’ only real move was an incredible Red Herring punt return for a TD that got buried in a game where every wrinkle they tried on offense was either poorly executed or well-defended, or just cockamamy in the first place. The story of their season, really. Maybe that’s why John Fox is out.

NYJ 6 - 26 NE Game Ball: Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill Belichick the Football Guy! Bet: +$9 [W] The Jets couldn’t move an inch, and James Harrison had 2 sacks (in garbage time.) The Pats offense still looks stale, but it won’t in two weeks, I would bet the farm. 

WSH 10 - 18 NYG Game Ball: Elisha Manning Bet: -$5 [L] This result made no sense, except that it did. No idea what the Giants are gonna do with Manning or about their head coach vacancy. Washington likewise has decisions about their QB and HC. Jay Gruden should be safe but it feels like Kirk Cousins is going despite being just as worth his mega-contract to the Potatoes as he is to any other team. Next year whoever is under center will be working with a team better than its record after half the roster trickles back in from IR.

DAL 6 - 0 PHI Game Ball: Dan Bailey  Bet: +$3 [W] The Cowboys refused to let this game end as it was destined: with a 0-0 tie. Dan Bailey did his part though, missing a FG and a PAT. Nick Foles certainly had the shutout in mind, throwing for fewer yards than the length of my longest pass in a quidditch game. What a masterclass in wasting a #1 seed. 

CLE 24 - 28 PIT Game Ball: Factory of Sadness Bet: -$9 [W] What can you even say? What do you say about a team winning only one out of 32 games over two years? About that team keeping the coach that did it for a third try? About going into a matchup in the last week against your hated rivals to find that they are resting every meaningfully impactful player? About moving the ball in that game better than you have all year, keeping the game within one possession, only to have a disappointing first-rounder straight up drop a pass from another disappointing first-rounder on 4th down? What on earth is there to say about a team that ultimately answers to the whim of a criminal billionaire who doesn’t give a damn about his team, when its fans care so much they are throwing their own parade just because they know this is a chance to celebrate, if ironically, a team that they’ve stuck with through every other possible terrible thing that can happen to a football franchise. What do you say when a team is so miserable that going 0-16 in a way feels like a fulfillment of its destiny? Congratulations, Cleveland. May your fans’ many years of exploitation for monetary gain finally be repaid. May this season exorcise whatever demon has cursed your city. You are the true Sovereigns of NFL Pain. You are the Factory of Sadness.

DEN 24 - 27 KC Game Ball: Pat Rollin With Mahomies Bet: -$10 [W] So many mixed emotions. The Broncos lost -- but that means they get a better draft pick -- but we lost to the Chiefs backups -- but it was close and we saw some potential -- but I lost $10 despite betting on the winning team -- but Vance Joseph is staying -- but Vance Joseph is staying. Patrick Mahomes did well enough for Chiefs fans to be hopeful about the future but not well enough for Alex Smith to be sweating, so that’s terrible.

CAR 10 - 22 ATL Game Ball: Matt Bosher Bet: -$12 [L] The Falcons kicked a lot instead of dancing in the end zone, but they sealed the deal when in mattered. The defense is looking good and Atlanta will enter the postseason as the only member of the NFC side that was there a year ago.

CIN 31 - 27 BAL Game Ball: Tyler Boyd Bet: +$8 [L] After trailing all game, the Ravens fight back for what seemed like the inevitable narrow victory, gaining a 3-point lead with about a minute to play. And Dalton moves the Bengals to midfield where they stall, finally facing a 4th and 17. This is the end for the Dalton/Lewis era, and the end of Baltimore’s 3-year playoff absence. They will happen upon the postseason as severe underdogs hoping their history can carry them past the likes of KC, NE, and PIT.  And then it happened. A hole appeared in the middle of the field. Dalton delivered a solid strike right to Boyd. Boyd juked defenders, sprinted down the sideline, and powered into the end zone, and just like that the tables turned entirely. The Bills popped champagne and Joe Flacco wrinkled his brow. Aaaaaand the Bengals retained Marvin.

BUF 22 - 16 MIA Game Ball: Tyrod Taylor Bet: -$5 [L] The Bills just straight up had fun trashing the Dolphins’ fourth-stringer and handing the ball of to DTs on the goalline. The real fun came later that night though. Wow, what a ride.

NO 24 - 31 TB Game Ball: Jameis Mr. Wimstons Bet: +$3 [L] The Saints didn’t show me anything in this game I wasn’t already worried about. The Buccaneers end the season hot, to little avail, and this result could be construed as a positive for the Saints, whose path to the AFC Championship now looks like a home tilt against the Panthers -- who they’ve already beaten twice -- and then a visit to Nick “I Can’t Throw In Anything Less Than Ideal Conditions” Foles. Look up some of Alvin Kamara and Mark Ingram’s records from this season, because they are staggering and I don’t get paid for this.

JAX 10 - 15 TEN Game Ball: Derrick Henry Bet: +$70 [L] Jacksonville covered by half a point on a bet that would have left me with $1 if I lost it.  This is the opposite of what the Teal And Gold needed before heading into the win-or-go-home stretch, and if they falter next week against Buffalo I would give partial credit for knocking them off to the Titans. Credit to Tennessee: I did not think they would take care of business but they did. You are what your record says you are, and their record says they’re a playoff team. One that’s gonna lose and maybe still fire their coach, but a playoff team nonetheless.

OAK 10 - 30 LAC Game Ball: Philip Rivers Bet: -$1 [W] *Adelle’s “Rolling in the Deep” plays in the background as the Chargers are eliminated from the playoffs*

SF 34 - 13 LAR Game Ball: Janeane Garofalo  Bet: +$5 [W] Yeah, the Rams rested their starters (and the Saints let them get away with it) but this win was still significant for the Niners. I’m not sure I’ve EVER seen a bigger in-season turnaround. They’ll go into the offseason on a 5-game winning streak with a QB of the future who is 7-0 as a starter. That’s not normal. It’ll be interesting to see what the week off and loss of momentum does to LA. 

ARI 26 - 24 SEA Game Ball: Bruce Arians’ Retiring Ass Bet: +$10 [L] Arians is like 4-2 in Seattle, and he will retire that way. Blair Walsh remains the most baffling hire by the Seahawks. The Falcons’ win a minute earlier made his game-ending kick essentially irrelevant but it just encapsulated the frustration of this season when he missed it anyway. Hopefully he’s gone next season, and hopefully Pete Carroll, Cliff Avril, and Kam Chancellor are NOT gone next season. If this was Larry Fitzgerald’s last game ever, he went out on his usual note: humbly holding his team together and lifting them to victory.

Record this week: 9-7 Record this season: 168-88 Locks record: 76-20 (Survivors used [XXX]: ATL, SEA, NE, GB, PIT, DEN, DAL, MIN, NO, DET, KC, LAC, MIA, SF, JAX, BAL, IND) Upsets record: 34-34 2014 pace: 188-67-1 Pickwatch leader: 180-76 (Jeff Ratcliffe, PFF) Betting: +$71 ($71)

NFL Title Belt: NE (Defended from NYJ)

Matt Millen Award for Losing Jackpot Winners: 2017 Cleveland Browns (0-16)

FANTASY CORNER

Danger Squirrels 332 - 270.8 :) The Champs [W, 6-8]

And thanks to my opponent leaving Ben Roethlisberger in the lineup I avoid being the last place team in the league a year after winning the damn thing. 

[words-writ-in-starlight]

Anyway I feel vindicated.

So your rant on Supernatural? Also I fell in love with the story you're talking about and basically want to know more. Sorry.

My buddy, you have made An Error, but let’s do this shit.  To any SPN fans who have wound up herethrough Ye Olde Search Function, I encourage you to stop reading now.

I watched up to about halfway through Season Five before Idecided that I could Do It Better (I think this is the novel you’re talkingabout, anon, unless it’s Earth is where the trouble comes from), and draggedmyself up to about halfway through Season Seven before I packed it in and gaveup, resigned that the parts of the show I loved were about four to five seasonsdead.  So like that’s the information I’mworking on here.

So, obviously, lots of people have lots of legitimatecomplaints about Supernatural,including treatment of queer characters, characters of color, and women, aswell as their fairly rampant history of queerbaiting.  And lots of people have covered this in morecompetent detail than I could ever manage, so like google “sexism in Supernatural” or something and you cando your own reading there.  Hell, if youwant to do it the lazy way, you can knock out two of the above with this onearticle in friendly, easy-to-read Buzzfeed format.  To the nominal credit of the people involved,I will add that the cast seems acutely aware of these problems and finds itdistasteful, HOWEVER the problems persist and therefore that credit is minimal.  Anyway. These things are covered much more thoroughly by many other people whoare far more cogent than I could hope to be, so I’m going to leave those alone.

Instead, my rant is mostly summed up as “YOU CALL THIS SHITSTORYTELLING.”

So there are four basic parts to this rant, or rather fourbasic flaws that form the fundamentally weak foundation of Supernatural as a narrative.

Failure to commit to a single cohesive narrativearc, also known as “SOME OF THAT AND SOME OF THAT AND SOME OF THAT AND SOME OFTHOSE” syndrome

The persistent and erroneous belief thatcharacter death = character development and narrative progression

Inability to commit to a major change ofparadigm, also known as out and out narrative cowardice, which I personallycall “flinching during Plot Roulette”

Total incapacity to put their characterizationwhere their script is regarding the Winchester brothers and the other major players

*cracks knuckles*

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[words-writ-in-starlight]

Please tell me all about your complaints with BBC Merlin, bc I too have Many Complaints (ft. Miscommunication and Secrets Are Good For Drama to a Maximum of One Season and Certainly Not Five; Morgana is a Terrified and Oppressed Woman Who Is Made Evil for Being Terrified and Oppressed and Does Not Deserve It, Much Like All Mages; and Everyone Has A Serious Case of Forgetting Their Character Growth when The Plot Requires.

*deep breath*

Honestly I think my ultimate complaint about Merlin is that it suffers from an absolutely crippling case of narrative cowardice, which is a concept you might recall from my Inevitable Tirade About SPN.  Basically: if you open your show with a large portion of it predicated on a conceit that has to be drastically altered in order to accomplish the ultimate goal of the plot (in the case of Merlin, switching from uther’s Camelot to Arthur’s Camelot), you can’t be a shit about it and you have to actually goddamn do it.  CHANGE YOUR PARADIGM, YOU LIMP NOODLES.

No, I’m dead serious, all their problems basically boil down to a critical inability to change the paradigm.  Let’s do an experiment to prove it.

Merlin’s magic, obviously.

Two things here.

First, Merlin hiding his magic.  At the beginning, Merlin can’t tell anyone about his magic on pain of death, because Uther.  This implicitly sets up the eventual transition into Arthur’s Camelot as a shift into a ‘safe’ Camelot for magic users in general and Merlin in particular, because we all know a little bit about Arthuriana and we know that Merlin becomes Arthur’s trusted adviser, magic and all.  So in order to accomplish that transition, what ‘should’ happen (by ‘should’ I mean, ‘the thing that makes intuitive sense to someone waiting for the plot to advance’) is that Merlin’s presence and involvement in Arthur’s life gradually makes Arthur more comfortable with magic, until finally a crisis forces a reveal in which Merlin comes clean and puts Arthur in the position of deciding once and for all where he stands.  Plot and precedent in every other Arthurian legend requires that Arthur decides, at the very least, that Merlin is not evil and that consequently magic can be used for good.  This would by virtue of necessity put Arthur and Merlin against Uther, and moreover mean that it would be the two of them scheming together in order to save the kingdom every couple weeks, which would be an excellent way to develop their relationship and progress toward Arthur’s Camelot.  Instead, by trying to uphold the ‘secrecy’ conceit, the plot is forced to relapse to Square One every couple of episodes, and therefore when Arthur’s Camelot does come ‘round, it’s not safe for Merlin to come clean, Merlin still doesn’t really trust Arthur, Arthur’s playing checkers on a board where the other side is playing chess, and We The People feel pretty fucking cheated.

Second, Merlin’s magic in general.  FRIENDS.  COMRADES.  IF YOU ARE GOING TO GO TO GREAT LENGTHS TO SET SOMEONE UP AS THE MOST POWERFUL MAGE IN HISTORY, I WANT TO SEE THEM BE THE MOST POWERFUL MAGE IN HISTORY.  Honestly by about season 3 there’s no point to Merlin being worried about coming clean, because we’re told repeatedly that he’s powerful enough to not worry about being burned at the stake or whatever.  According to what we’re told, Merlin should have the raw power to walk into Uther’s courtroom and announce “Hello, all, I am a warlock and I dare you to mess with me” and then go back to his business.  But since we never see him actually carry that out–y’all he fucking killed Nimueh with lightning, why didn’t we see that again?–Merlin’s power level is mostly an Informed Attribute, which leaves the viewer frustrated and confused by a lot of the tension the show sets up regarding threats to Merlin’s life.  We see Merlin demonstrate multiple times that it would be almost impossible to execute him by traditional methods, and yet we’re still supposed to agree that it’s too dangerous.  Like.  Listen, my friends.  Here is a pro tip.  It’s actually not a narrative-ending problem to have a ludicrously OP character (which is what Merlin would be if the writers were consistent with his abilities), but you have to acknowledge that they develop a whole different set of obstacles than someone who isn’t ludicrously OP.  It just takes some creative thinking.

Morgana!

Morgana is horribly mistreated by the narrative and I’m not gonna question you there, but moreover, a lot of the problems with her magic plotline are, again, about a fear of changing the paradigm.  So, like, okay, let’s all agree that it would make infinitely more narrative sense for Morgana to go to Arthur, her foster brother and trusted friend, in distress and tell him that she thinks she can do magic, which Arthur would tell his servant Merlin.  The two of them recommend that Morgana keep it under wraps, and maybe that’s how Arthur starts to come around on the magic thing, rather than Merlin’s influence.  Sure, super chill.  Instead of just doing an about-face on the whole loyalty thing because…what…she’s not the heir?  (It’s been A Minute since I put myself through this show.)  Instead of that whole mess, maybe Morgana comes to Merlin when Uther is wounded and begs him to help her find a way to heal him, because surely, surely, if his beloved ward (and daughter) uses magic for something so pure and innocently good as healing the king, it can’t be evil.  When that inevitably backfires, Uther banishes Morgana from Camelot, and Arthur tells her to go because it’s safer.  Morgana, betrayed by Uther and perceiving herself to be abandoned by Arthur and Merlin, turns on Camelot in a rage and allies with her sister Morgause.  This plotline gives Morgana more agency, avoids the rather unsavory “madness leads to murder” overtones, minimizes the predatory vibe of Morgause’s plotline, and actually contributes to developing Merlin and Arthur as leaders and characters alike.

The problem, of course, is that this plotline hinges on Arthur’s character not being a static piece of shit that would honestly fracture under even the most minimal paradigm shift.  So instead, Morgana draws the short straw for a sudden face-heel turn so that there can be a motivation to enforce Arthur’s hatred of magic and Merlin’s fear of telling the truth, and then she disappears for half a season only to show up again crazy and homicidal, which…honestly there’s not a lot of emotional punch there.  At no point in time did I sympathize with Morgana because, update, I do not believe that fratricide and patricide are legitimate responses to her situation in the show.  But since they presented it as a problem that should have been sympathetic, I was mostly just angry rather than disinterested.

Merlin and Arthur’s friendship!

Honestly this should be pretty blindingly obvious, but Merlin and Arthur…I actually don’t super care for their relationship, because there are so few occasions when Arthur counterbalances his constant insults and judgement with the kind of do-or-die loyalty Merlin shows him.  And like on the one hand it’s clearly meant to be largely in good humor, but there are plenty of times when it’s Clearly Not.  But the worst part is that I can’t even hold it against Arthur because Merlin is not telling him the truth, which in turn I can’t hold against Merlin because Arthur is pretty much a narrow-minded magic-hating prick, which never changes because Merlin isn’t telling him the truth, because Arthur has never given him reason to think he’d stand by Merlin against Uther, and so on down the line.

And you expect me to believe that relationship develops into something strong enough to build a kingdom on?  To build a legend on?  I think the hell not.  In order to develop that relationship into something that feels as last-gasp-devoted as the show tells you it should, someone’s paradigm has to shift and it basically has to be Arthur because See Above and, again, the showmakers are fucking cowards.

Arthur’s personality AS A WHOLE

Once again: I am existentially exhausted by the whole Arthur Is A Dick thing.  And I don’t blame Merlin for starting it, but it’s definitely a peak concentration of the whole phenomenon, and I fucking hate it.  I eventually stuck it out and watched three seasons and change and I did genuinely enjoy a lot of things, but I attempted the first episode three times and had to stop because I was so fucking aggravated with Arthur’s character.  And basically, in order for him to move firmly out of Spoiled Rich Prick With Issues into Competent Merciful Leader With Tragic Backstory That Panned Out Well In The End, he needs to acknowledge in-narrative that he’s been, A, contributing to the persecution of magic users and that’s something he’ll never truly be clean of, and, B, he’s been not only mocking but actively penalizing Merlin for what Arthur does not realize is saving the country.  Basically, it would require Arthur to grow up, not just in his status as king but in and of himself as an individual, in his relationships as well as in his throne, become more than a war hero with more courage than is healthy.  It would require Arthur to spit out an apology that sounded like an apology, and start trusting Merlin’s word as an adviser rather than a conveniently intelligent servant.

And like.  That paradigm shift would probably have made the showrunners shit their pants on the spot.

If you, like me, couldn’t move past these issues but still want(ed) to enjoy the characters and universe, I have a solution for you!  Here is the most magnificent series rewrite I have ever seen in my life, and as far as I am concerned the One True Merlin Canon.  The link is to the Season 3 rewrite, which is where it goes hard AU and solves a lot of problems. 

In conclusion: fuck this noise, everyone go watch Legend of the Sword instead, @Guy Ritchie please make at least one sequel.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

you know what also pissed me off about supernatural, though? the inability to commit to their own worldbuilding. even while clinging to a static paradigm, where The Masquerade is in full effect, they couldn't be consistent about what sort of underground magic communities do and don't exist. I know this can be blamed on multiple writers and all, but it drives me up the wall. f.ex. witches are All Evil and tend to work alone, until that episode with the familiars when you find a bunch of nice(r)

witches who go to witchbars and hardly ever poison each other’s drinks, oh and also familiars are athing. a while later spike and cordelia are witches who’ve had a tempestuousrelationship for… centuries I think, aka witches can live for a really longtime, so there’s no way the bigger/older ones don't all know each other. thereought to be SOME sort of witch ‘society’, even if it’s just loosecommunication. but no, after this you never hear of witches ever again, muchless familiars or witch

bars. then you’ve gotBela, who caters to rich people who know magical artifacts exist, but there’sno exploration of what that could MEAN – if Bela can hold down a job, thenenough of the country’s elite own and exploit magic stuff that it could –SHOULD – have at least some effect on US politics, as in who gets power.there’s never a whisper of that, but okay, this isn’t exactly the winchesterboys’ social scene. but failing that, some of these magic-obsessed rich peopleshould turn up for a

few episodes, eitherhaunted or else guilty of inflicting a monster-of-the-week on someone. heck,one of them could be a recurring vaguely-helpful character that the boys stopby and menace a bit whenever they need access to some excessively obscureartifact. you already mentioned the mess of all those Alpha Monsters who werepowerful and unkillable and stuff, and had their own dread agendas withpotentially far-reaching consequences for their respective species, and thenjust… vanished. I don’t

even remember how. andthen there’s the hunter community, which is the most inconsistent of all. firstit’s just these two and their dad, and then they start finding out their dad’sold friends were all actually hunters or oracles or whatever. so far so good;these are just Mysteries Of Our Father’s Past, and valid character/plotdevelopment stuff. but there’s Bobby, who Knows Everyone, and Ellen, whose barevery hunter in the country frequents sooner or later, and this means huntersknow each

other, know about eachother, they have a network of communication and they share intel, gossip, tradesecrets. but the moment the bar blows up there’s just no network, noconnection, nothing at all binding hunters together, even though Bobby stillknows everyone and Ellen and Jo are still around and plenty able to found a newbar if they wanted to, or at least keep in touch with at least half of thepeople who used to swing by their bar. oh and also the demons! they talk aboutcomplex politics

happening in Hell, theyhave some sort of prophesied demon queen who takes the body of a young girl andhas glowing white eyes (I don’t even remember what happened to her), they havedemon religion and spirituality to the point where Lucifer is basically DemonJesus – I’m pretty sure this is explicitly stated, Lucifer is to the demonswhat Jesus is to really devout Christians, semi-mythical status and prophesiedsecond coming and everything – and the show makes an effort to flesh out itsdemonic

characters, give thempersonality and desires and drives, and it shows distinct differences in howdifferent demons feel about humanity, and about what they do, and all that. yetdespite all this, the only demon we meet who doesn’t immediately try to murderthe boys is Ruby. no one tries to bargain honestly with the boys, no one butCrowley tries to aim the boys at their own enemies, no one begs for mercy orlies about repentance. nothing. can you imagine if those demons who told Sam totake up

his antichrist mantleand lead a demon army decided that, since their Chosen One was unwilling, theyought to convince him? what if a bunch of demons had started discreetly tailingthe boys, showing up sometimes to rescue them from really bad fights or offerup dead monsters like housecats offering dead birds? ‘hey chosen one, we caughtyou this demon who’s high up in Crowley’s hierarchy, do you want to torture himfor information yourself or do you want us to do it?’ they solemnly swear that

that they’ve stoppedkilling humans, they keep quietly growing in number, and they always scrambefore the boys are conscious enough to kill them properly. sam and dean havemany arguments about whether they were REALLY too concussed to stab theirlatest demonic rescuer and get absurdly angsty and argumentative about it. Iknow my rant has gotten pretty thoroughly disorganized and this is moving backinto must-have-a-static-paradigm territory, but I am a little bitter.

THIS IS ALSO SUCH A GOOD POINT there is just so much to be bitter about with this show, like, good god, you’d think that sooner or later they’d run out of basic narrative rules to fuck up.

Speaking of rules, I think this is a manifestation of one of Supernatural’s wider problems, which is that they just DO NOT SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THE RULES OF THEIR OWN UNIVERSE.  Like, all they’ve REALLY nailed down is that demons can be exorcised, but anything that isn’t a demon is pretty much at the mercy of the plot for A) how powerful it is, B) how hard to kill it is, and C) how ‘human’ it’s considered.  Like, everything from werewolves to wendigos are stated to be at least PART human, but basically their ‘humanness’ and subsequently the amount of sympathy accorded to them is predicated on how benign (or how attractive) they look in their human form.  The magic of this universe is wildly unpredictable--the Winchesters sometimes do/dabble in magic themselves, but we never really learn how magic works.  Does it require a focus?  Does it require badly-pronounced Latin?  Is it an expression of the user’s willpower?  Is it similar to what demons do (implied when All Witches Are Wicked for the first few seasons) or not?  Does it require natural talent or can anyone learn it?  THERE ARE SO MANY QUESTIONS THAT ARE TOTALLY IGNORED.  THEN there’s the question of societies in this supernatural underworld.  Like, I think I’ve expressed in my John Wick comments how much I like functional underworld societies with rules and systems, but honestly it’s CRITICALLY necessary if you’re doing what SPN does and having the society Matter.  I cringe every time I think about how clumsy and slapdash the hunting community was in Supernatural, because it had SO MUCH POTENTIAL, don’t talk to me about it, I made it work better when I wrote my spite novel.  I’m sure I can think of fifty million more incomplete universe rules, but I can honestly feel my blood pressure rising right now so I’m going to stop.

OH MY GOD GUYS, please, if you’re a writer, let me beg you right now in person to figure out the rules of your universe and then commit.  Here are some pointers.

Magic should work in a conceptually similar way to gravity: its rules should be consistent and should be able to be broadly extrapolated from the general effect, and if you’re going to BREAK those rules you’ve got to have a damn fine reason.  

The sliding scale of ‘humannness’ should...slide less, to be completely honest, work your shit the fuck out EARLY or make working your shit the fuck out a plot point (please see Stormdancer for a good example).  

If you’re dealing with questions of what makes someone human (@SPN FOR LIKE FOUR FUCKING SEASONS) then you should actively question like “Hey, my dude, can we morally kill this person for something they have no control over” unless your character took the trait ‘Callous’ somewhere in their history (which is also fine).

If you have an underworld society--or any society tbh???--WORK YOUR SHIT OUT.  How do they work together (ex: hunters pretending to be ‘the boss’ when someone calls the number on that fake business card)?  How do they support each other (ex: safehouses? maybe? this is never discussed in SPN? and I hate it?)?  What are the things people differ on (ex: whether or not to murder the Winchesters, which, like, I know you’re supposed to be against that because they’re the protagonists, but by the time I bailed I def wanted someone to shoot them)?  Is there an assumption of free exchange of favors or is there a strict financial/bargaining system?   How much does one person vouching for another matter in the community?  ANSWER SOME BASIC QUESTIONS FFS

Finally, most crucially, for the love of all that is good, Pick A Plot.  One plot.  It can have subplots (example: an overarching plot broken up by smaller missions, a la your average TV show) or multiple acts (as in a play, where you’ve got a couple major pieces that assemble into the main plot, like Much Ado where you’ve got (roughly) the matchmaking, the wedding, the vengeance, and the resolution), but it should be One Plot and you need to tie up those motherfucking loose ends.

This has been “Hey look turns out that 6K later I have Even More Complaints about Supernatural” with Moran.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

Idea for a Buzzfeed quiz: We Can Tell How Old You Are Based On What Season You Stopped Watching Supernatural. Stopped watching in season 5? You got: 20 years old *that gif of Adam still in Hell*

I’m fucking wheezing this is so funny, someone with a friend in Buzzfeed do it and link me.

Also I have no idea if this is the gif you meant but it was the first one that came up under ‘adam supernatural’ and I’m cackling.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

The thing about SPN is that all of its characters have such good potential, y'know? Like the Sam's Boy King of Hell thing you mentioned. And the Antichrist. And all the other characters whose potential was wasted so the show could revert back to it's lazy formula. I'm just really bothered about this. Idk man it pisses me off.

ANOTHER THING ABOUT THE WASTED POTENTIAL. AMARA. THE DARKNESS. PRE-BIBLICAL. GOD"S SISTER. THE BE ALL END ALL OF VILLIANS. Her plotline was so crap????? Season 13 confirmed and that was the best they could give us? I truly believe if they had played their cards right they could have created an amazing story arc that would've kept people engaged and saved the show from itself.

I’m just so much enjoying that people actually agree with me.  Because you’re right!  The characters by and large have a lot of potential!  The dynamics have the potential to be really interesting!  AND YET.

Fuckin’ Supernatural, seriously.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

All right, @notsumma it won’t let me reply directly to your reply on the SPN Tirade because this website is CONSTANTLY in need of a white knight (I love X-Kit guys) and is currently acting up with that function, so here we go:

so assuming that by s7 the show you liked was 4 years dead, that lines up with Eric Kripke's opinion. you know, the creator of the show. he wanted to stop at the end of s3, but the network was like 'nah, we're making  money.' then at the end of s5 he didn't reup his contract, so everything from s6 on is just high-production-value fanfiction.

THIS EXPLAINS SO MUCH, the first three seasons are good fun--it ain’t Shakespeare, but I knew what I was getting into--and even up to five...sort of hung together, at the very least, and then it goes OFF THE GODDAMN RAILS, wow, this answers so many questions.  And also, like, basically I was right?  It’s basically two totally different Frankenshows with the same characters and premise loosely divided by the whole Lucifer situation.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

notsumma replied to your post: I hope you don't mind if I rant a bit, but I'm...

okay so I’m totally with y'all that spn sucks, but that’s not gonna stop me from watching season 13. I’ve sunk 12 years of my life into this show, i will see it through

And I want you to know that I admire the fuck out of that bloody-minded stubbornness.  *fist bump*

[words-writ-in-starlight]

I hope you don't mind if I rant a bit, but I'm just re reading the SPN rant and I'm remebering how mad I am about this show??? Because I used to really like it, and up to Season 5 I had issues but I dealt with it because y'know it was good overall. But then like as the seasons kept on going I was left in a permanent state of "wtf" I actually made it 5 episodes 1/?

of Season 8 before I was like... what am I doing so I bingewatched a bunch of crime shows. But then Season 11 started airing and I still had "kept up" with SPN because of "nostalgia" or wtfever and I heard they were introducing "The Darkness" the "biggest bad ever, pre-creation, sister of GOD" and I'm like eh, but then the fandom was coming up with all these theories and 2/?

I'll give it a try and then I heard they had Season 13 confirmed so I was like hey, it's going to be 3 season arc! Hey, maybe it'll turn out alright! I started mid way through the season so when I started watching it was pretty obvous they'd already set Amara/the Darkness as Dean's love interest but I was like... well if it was Sam she's be dead but since it's with Dean 3/?

hey might create a heartrenching arc about sibling? (How naive I was..) And as the season went on I kept cringing but Season 13 confirmed! EVEN BIGGER BAD THAN ALL THE OTHER BAD! GOD REAPPEARENCE! It's going to turn out all right! And then they literally had the most STUPIDEST ENDING EVER 4/?

SPOILER: IT WAS LITERALLY I'M SORRY I WAS OS MEAN TO YOU BRO

THEN MOTHER OF ALL PLOT TWISTS (SPOILER) THEY BRING BACK MARY! SO GET READY FOR SEASON 12 WINCHESTER ANGST + MUM AND MOST PROBABLY AN EVEN BIGGERER BADDAERER BAD!!!! *inhales* It was at this point I switched off the t.v and screamed into my pillow 6/?

I'm just very frustrated about SPN and all the wasted potential with Amara/ the Darkness. THEY HAD SEASON 13 CONFIRMED. Idk why I sent you all of this, your rant just awoke the beast in me I guess. I'm just going to leave with all of this *gestures toward previous asks* and run away. Sorry 7/7

HONEY never ever apologize for bitching about Supernatural with me, I am here for you to get it the FUCK off your chest.  I am the most sympathetic ear.  Amazingly, my epic rant was a mere fragment of my complaints.  SO ANY TIME YOU NEED TO BITCH, I AM HERE FOR IT.

That being said, damn, anon, you stuck it out way longer than I did.  And wow, I have done some googling and I just.  I just give up.  I don’t understand the plot.  I am confused.  I tried to fucking figure out the Amara thing, I Wiki’d, I IMDB’d, but it’s incomprehensible.  And then fucking Mary gets resurrected?  Goddamn, I’m just glad I got out when I did tbh.

@SPN producers, let it end.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

I know The Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand Eighteen is a little late in the game for hot takes on BBC’s Merlin, but like

Among the many other reasons I have previously discussed, a kind of critical reason that I was really pissed with them keeping Arthur in the dark for the whole show was that Arthur did terrible things to people with magic and honestly expecting me to think of him as the unsullied noble king of legend when he had that amount of blood on his hands was both stupid and shallow.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

is there a link to your rewrite of supernatural anywhere? i might have just missed it, but i didn't see it on ur ao3 and i am Heaps Curious

Yeeeeah my buddy I’m not gonna lie to you, I actually have your first ask waiting to be done when I’m less behind on my shit, because I haven’t ever sat down and violently rewritten SPN in text form, just out loud to my friends.  And don’t get me wrong, I am PUMPED to tell you about how committing to their first major story arc would have made it A Better Show, but on the other hand it is NaNoWriMo right now and I am doing a novel that requires about 1 hour of research per 1000 words written, because I’m an idiot.  So if you need my input on your history test about the American Revolution, I will get right on that, but the SPN overhaul will have to wait for the sweet sweet freedom of December, because....well.  One time I just wrote up what was wrong with the show and it took me like 7K and quite a bit of time.

[words-writ-in-starlight]

So your rant on Supernatural? Also I fell in love with the story you're talking about and basically want to know more. Sorry.

My buddy, you have made An Error, but let’s do this shit.  To any SPN fans who have wound up herethrough Ye Olde Search Function, I encourage you to stop reading now.

I watched up to about halfway through Season Five before Idecided that I could Do It Better (I think this is the novel you’re talkingabout, anon, unless it’s Earth is where the trouble comes from), and draggedmyself up to about halfway through Season Seven before I packed it in and gaveup, resigned that the parts of the show I loved were about four to five seasonsdead.  So like that’s the information I’mworking on here.

So, obviously, lots of people have lots of legitimatecomplaints about Supernatural,including treatment of queer characters, characters of color, and women, aswell as their fairly rampant history of queerbaiting.  And lots of people have covered this in morecompetent detail than I could ever manage, so like google “sexism in Supernatural” or something and you cando your own reading there.  Hell, if youwant to do it the lazy way, you can knock out two of the above with this onearticle in friendly, easy-to-read Buzzfeed format.  To the nominal credit of the people involved,I will add that the cast seems acutely aware of these problems and finds itdistasteful, HOWEVER the problems persist and therefore that credit is minimal.  Anyway. These things are covered much more thoroughly by many other people whoare far more cogent than I could hope to be, so I’m going to leave those alone.

Instead, my rant is mostly summed up as “YOU CALL THIS SHITSTORYTELLING.”

So there are four basic parts to this rant, or rather fourbasic flaws that form the fundamentally weak foundation of Supernatural as a narrative.

Failure to commit to a single cohesive narrativearc, also known as “SOME OF THAT AND SOME OF THAT AND SOME OF THAT AND SOME OFTHOSE” syndrome

The persistent and erroneous belief thatcharacter death = character development and narrative progression

Inability to commit to a major change ofparadigm, also known as out and out narrative cowardice, which I personallycall “flinching during Plot Roulette”

Total incapacity to put their characterizationwhere their script is regarding the Winchester brothers and the other major players

*cracks knuckles*

POINT THE FIRST

Right, so first it’s the story of Sam having strange powersand their dad being MIA, which segues pretty naturally into the story of Sampotentially being the Antichrist, and then there’s Dean’s sacrifice of his soul,which at very least holds up even ifit sort of acts like the previous plotline about their dad’s soul didn’t happen.  Upuntil this point, I was pretty comfy.  Ihad some complaints covered below, but I was copacetic.  Season Three is largely about getting rid ofthe contract on Dean’s soul.  Okay, seemslegit, you have a tangible problem with potentially serious consequences.  Now, having had not one but TWO seasons whichwere easily summed up with ‘so Sam is mebbe the Antichrist or at very leastAntichrist-adjacent,’ I made what I thought was a logical leap and went “well,gee, if I was mebbe at the very leastAntichrist-adjacent, I would leverage the fuck out of that to do somethingabout my apparently beloved brother’s soul.” Even when they didn’t go withthat (news flash: I wrote that novel mydamn self and amazingly it worked out 100x better, narratively speaking,because it’s fucking logical), I wasstill kind of like “gosh sure is a good thing they remembered that they spenttwo entire seasons building up to Sam mebbe being Antichrist-adjacent.”  And there’s the whole drama with Ruby which Ijust…am very uncomfortable with for a lot of reasons, not least of which isthat it’s a very thinly veiled endeavor to rehash the same ‘Sam being afraid oflosing touch with humanity’ plotline as Seasons One and Two but without havingto worry about really altering the paradigm, see Point The Third, and alsobecause it’s really intensely literal about the concept of having a femalecharacter exclusively as a prop for consumption.  And Castiel shows up and a thousand ships arelaunched, blah blah blah, and then after the end of Season Four…we never hearfrom Sam’s powers again for more than a couple lines.  

As of about Season Four, the focus of the show abandons Samand shifts tangibly onto Dean, who is now The Interesting Character because hehas Been Through Hell (literally). Furthermore, we are now given Dean’s POV on any quandry between him andSam, which is a personal complaint because I honestly just think it’ssloppy.  Season Four is mostly dealingwith angels being assholes, which is really not as original as SPN likes tothink (Good Omens did it first and Good Omens did it better, get out of myface), plus Dean being the Righteous Man and the question of the oncomingApocalypse (sure is interesting how we spent two seasons building up to Sambeing Antichrist-adjacent).  The Apocalypseis less oncoming and implied to be more ongoing by the end of Season Four.  So Lucifer escapes and Season Five is prettymuch About That, involving the fairly unhelpful description that Dean isMichael’s ‘sword’ and they’re the true vessels of Michael and Lucifer,culminating in Sam being locked in the Cage because presumably someone realizedthat, hey, we have two maincharacters and we must make them both Interesting Characters.  Season Six is 50% about finding Sam’s souland figuring out how he got out of the Cage (sure would be helpful if we’dspent two seasons building up to Sam having inhuman powers and beingAntichrist-adjacent) and 50% a wickedinexplicable plot about the Mother-of-All and some kind of fucking jigsawmonsters and…Alpha monsters?  But thatnever really gets explained in a pertinent way except that they needed to anteup because they beat the Devil at theend of Season Five.  Oh, and a bonus 50% of some bullshit withCastiel and Crowley and ~Scheming~.  Andthen Castiel gets possessed by Leviathans (?) from Purgatory, which he openedwith Crowley (??) who he then betrayed (???), and Castiel decides He’s God Nowand also dies (????), and somehow these metaphysical more-powerful-than-angelsbadder-than-Lucifer things are sensitive to fuckingBorax.  

And it was at this point that I stopped the show in themiddle of a fight scene like 1/3 through Season Seven and actually said outloud “Gosh it’s almost like you needsomeone who’s Antichrist-adjacent to help you out here” before turning off the TV. And then I stopped watching and got better taste in TV and blew throughwriting a 250K novel in 18 months of being a full-time student because I waspowered by pure bitter spite.

Now, here are the two major things that matter about thiswhole deal.  First of all, the firstplotline is the most reliably coherent, although some degree of cogence lastedup until about Season Five—we understand why Lucifer wants out of Hell, weunderstand to some extent why Dean and Sam matter on the cosmic scale, we getpretty bored of watching Castiel do heel-face and face-heel turns like he’s ona Lazy Susan but like logistically it all makes a reasonable degree of sense.  That being said, the whole plotline ofSeasons Four onward would make a lot moresense, would it not, if they remembered that they’d spent a good solid twoseasons and change (Season Three, intermittent, Season Four, major) designingan Antichrist-like character who is now the last survivor of that batch ofexperiments.  Then, instead of having Samand Dean just be Inexplicably Special, you have Dean (who can still be theRighteous Man!) acting as the foil for Sam being forced into increasingly darkchoices, and Sam who’s a viable candidate for Lucifer-puppet because he’s partdemon.  Or, alternatively, Sam whomaintains his stance as the gentler of the two despite his demon blood, which would add a lot more depth to Supernatural’s fanatical hardon for theAngelic Asshole trope.  Honestly Irewrote the entirety of this show one time, predicated on the assumption thatthey actually went with the idea of Sam as the Boy King, and I think it wouldbe much less haphazard.  (Basically: hey,what if Sam actually used his status to strong-arm Dean’s deal into beingdissolved, as it’s implied that he’s totally capable of doing that and totallywilling to sacrifice his own humanity for his brother, and then Heaven sentCastiel to kill Sam, which would add a fuckton of legitimacy to Castiel’s LazySusan and Dean’s antagonism.  But no. Instead there’s monsters whose only vulnerability is fucking Borax.)

Second, and far more critical, is the total failure tocommit to a single plotline.  Okay, Sam’sstatus as the possible Boy King is a major plot point for two seasons, not somuch for the third season (he literally…a demon straight up tells Sam that he could have an army if he took up hisposition and it never occurs to himthat he could use that to help Dean), more so in the fourth season, and then itnever comes up again.  Even when it is unarguably pertinent to thesituation—Lucifer!  Fucking Luciferpossesses Sam and drags him to Hell and he comes back soulless and yet none of the writers ever, not once, went “Gosh, maybe we should remember those seasonswe spent developing Sam into sort of the Antichrist?  Maybe including at least a minor nod to thator somehow wrapping up the plotline would help cohere our current trainwreck ofa plotline?”  Nope, it’s just left as aloose thread, flapping in the breeze with all the subtlety of a limp dick.  It’s like Supernaturalis actually a Frankenshow of two shows with the same characters but totallyunrelated plotlines—maybe when Lucifer escapes he shunts them all sideways intoan alternate universe and there’s another show somewhere with a Dean whosebrother has never been even a little bit demonic and died through normal huntershenanigans suddenly having to deal with Sam the possible Antichrist, andthat’s the show that an alternate me is still watching.

And this is an ongoing problem.  Sam’s powers are just the major point that Ialways latch onto, because, first, I always think the phenomenon of “well fuckme sideways I might be obligated to end the world and ain’t that a messy thing”is pretty great (I really, reallylike Hellboy), and second, IT’S FOURSEASONS OF WORK YOU CAN’T JUST ABANDON IT.  But seriously.  Just. Throw a dart, you’ll hit a loose end. Because Supernatural is theequivalent of that one fucker we all hate in sitcoms—you know, the guy who’sdating a great girl he totally doesn’t deserve, but he can’t ~commit~ sothere’s all this ongoing Drama™.  Exceptthat in Supernatural, not only canthey not commit, they accidentally defeated their biggest gun—the literal Devil—less than halfwaythrough their series!  Whoops!  Quick, someone call up Satan’s cousin twiceremoved who’s even worse and more evil than he is!  And sensitive to Borax!  

No, no, I’m kidding. We all know that Satan’s cousin twice removed, who’s even worse and moreevil than he is, is actually named Metatron.

Fuckin’ Supernatural.

POINT THE SECOND

I know this is going to come as a shock, but rampantcharacter death does not actuallyqualify as a legitimate way to progress your narrative or develop yourcharacters.  In order, the major players(nominally on the Winchesters’ side) who die or seem to die in the first fiveseasons are Sam’s girlfriend, John Winchester, Ash, Sam, Bela, Dean, (Deanseveral times in Mystery Spot), Ruby,Castiel, Jo, Ellen, Sam, Anna, Sam, Dean, Gabriel, Castiel, Bobby, and sort of Sam with the whole Cagething.  And those are just the peoplewith arcs that extend over more than a season (except for Sam’sgirlfriend).  It’s entirely possible,even probable, that I missed some.  Thatdoes not include the one- ortwo-episode characters whose deaths we’re supposed to observe as emotionallywringing, nor does it include the frankly vast numbers of civiliancasualties.  So, for the ease of reading,we’re going to divide ‘character death’ into ‘reversible character death,’which is largely the prerogative of the primary trio, and ‘permanent characterdeath,’ and we’re going to talk about why there are real problems with the way Supernatural treats both of them.

First of all, the problems with reversible character deathare obvious—there are no fucking stakes! Like, arguably the stakes are ‘the whole world,’ but obviously not (seePoint The Third), so practically speaking the stakes should be life or death, because the show tells you that the stakes are life or death.  Now, sometimes resurrection is an importantplot point, I get that, in my spite novel there is, in fact, aresurrection.  But here’s the thing.  Either you have to straight up establish arevolving door policy and change your stakes (example: the show Forever, where the point is that the MCis immortal and would very much like to not be immortal anymore), or you can only use that resurrection once.  You use it once, and you still get theemotional gut punch of “Oh God, they’re dead”and the flood of relief when it proves that they’re not dead after all.  You use it more than that, and the audiencebecomes complacent that, well, you won’t reallykill them.  By the time you’re on a levelwith Supernatural, it just…doesn’tmatter?  A major character dies, but youraudience has already hit compassion fatigue because of the death rate, whichI’m about to cover, so there’s not really any oomph to it.

The problems with permanent character death aresignificantly different.  Now, I myselfam a Happy Ending person (like…the world sucks …let me have my happy fiction),but even I recognize that a certain percentage of the characters in a story orshow like this one are basically just cannon fodder (it would be great if itwasn’t so consistently the women, POC, orLGBT folks, but whatever).  Theproblem is that it’s constant.  And not just “well that person’s a corpsebecause that’s what vampires do to people” or “some kid pissed off the localspirit and now they’re six feet under,” it would be totally fine and reasonableif that situation was an every episode thing (it…kind of is, that’s kind of thepoint).  But every few episodes, we’reexpected to get attached to a one-off character and then be deeply affectedwhen they die.  Take, say, Season Three:you have the hunters Isaac and Tamara in the first episode, Casey and FatherGil in the fourth episode (some flexibility as they’re demons, but we’resupposed to be shocked and horrified that Sam kills them both), Callie in thefifth episode, Gordon in the seventh episode (again, we’re supposed to behorrorstricken that Sam kills him, even though it’s clearly self-defense), all the civilians in the twelfthepisode, Corbett in the thirteenth episode, and finally Bela, who admittedlyhas had some nominal presence for a while. This does not include any Winchester trauma, which you’re always supposed to be deeply affectedby.  I’m sorry, but after a season or twoof being expected to work up that kind of emotional upset between five and tentimes over the course of thirteen to twenty episodes, your audience is going toburn out and start to lose emotional engagement.  

So, basic summary: the Anyone Can Die trope does not playwell with main characters who are on a Revolving Door of Death, because itmeans that minor characters don’t matter because Anyone Can Die, while majordamage or trauma to the main characters doesn’t matter either because they’reon a Revolving Door.  You can’t kill yourmain characters once (or more!) a season and expect people to still…worry aboutthem.

On a more strictly structural note, using character death asthe primary way to drive character development is just fucking lazy.  It’s just an indicator that the writers don’tactually know how to progress their character development in any other way,which is a major problem because, since they only develop the charactersthrough the deaths of others, they have to hit the Personality Reset buttonfairly regularly to make it look like things are actually happening to thepeople who are supposed to be developing. Which, in case you were curious, is why you feel that overwhelming senseof déjà vu when the Winchesters getinto a huge blowout fight about ‘don’t sacrifice yourself’ in about thethird-to-last episode, followed by one of them sneaking out to sacrificethemselves, followed by the other onebeing angry about it.  It’s the samegoddamn script, it’s just that Sam’s hair is probably longer and Dean isprobably scruffier.  Furthermore, thefixation on developing characters with the deaths of others means thatbasically every character is fair game but NO ONE’S DEATH HOLDS MEANING,because of the above, which means that SPN’s ‘character development’ turns intothis recursive self-congratulating circlejerk of killing someone, developingSam and Dean accordingly, and then somehow regressing them so that the writerscan do it over again and be proud of themselves for Such Dynamic Characters,Much Develop, So Change, Wow.

And I feel like the reasons that character death =/=narrative progression should be pretty clear from the rest of this rant, butbasically if you’re killing someone to progress your plot, it needs to be asolveable death (emotional payoff is what makes walking away from a booksatisfying, such as catching a murderer) or a terrible tragedy that drives thecharacters to great acts or both.  Supernatural is basically a horror/fantasymurder mystery, so it would be fine if they stuck with that model, but theykeep trying to sell the deaths of any number of major players and many many minor players as this greatand terrible tragedy that’s pushing the Winchesters forward.  And like, I’m sorry, but if you commit withinthe first episode to a dead mother anda dead girlfriend and a missingpotentially dead father, you’ve already pretty well maxed out your terribletragedies.  Find a different motivator,or else it looks like your characters just leave huge amounts of collateraldamage and refuse to take responsibility. Or, alternatively, it looks like the individual deaths don’t matter toyour main characters, which is NOT going to help with making your audience giveeven a single fractional fuck.

TL;DR: Character death is a powerful tool that rapidly losesits weight and import if you overuse it, and can make your audiencedisinterested and emotionally detached if they’re expected to care every time.  Slow your motherfucking roll, stick to aMAXIMUM of one resurrection per character unless their immortality is anexplicitly discussed plot point (at which point their deaths need to not mattermuch anymore), and remember that you can progress your plot in literally anyother way before you go for a shock-value death.

POINT THE THIRD

Don’t be a little bitch in your writing.  Honestly it’s that simple.  I’m gonna get into it some more, but that’sthe gist of it.  If you already know whatI mean, great, skip to the next point, because the TL;DR is “don’t be aninfant.”

This is something that plenty of shows are guilty of(Merlin, anyone?), but SPN is terrifiedof actually changing the paradigm.  Theshow must always include a certainlist of things:

The Winchesters in the Impala, which, sure, I’llgrant you that

A home base, also totally reasonable

Monsters to fight, fair enough

A masquerade (meaning ‘civilians do not knowabout magic’), which should honestly have broken down after, like, Season Twowhen they accidentally release massive numbers of demons into the world

A world to have the show happening in, which isa problem since they started theApocalypse in Season Four

Now…listen.

It’s fine, even necessary, to have some fixed points in anarrative.  It offers a way to anchoryour characters against the ongoing changes that the plot demands.  That, however, is very different from beingtoo much of a coward to alter the paradigm of your story when the major driving force is a change ofparadigm.

The first major change of paradigm they cop out on is Sam’spowers.  If Sam was the Boy King, thishypothetically Antichrist-esque position in the cosmic dichotomy, that would radically alter the dynamic.  Sam would automatically be the most powerfulbeing in any given room unless he was in a room with a respectably high-rankedangel or demon, and he would certainly be able to go toe-to-toe with most oftheir targets on their own terms. Telekinesis is an exceptionally goodpower, guys, like, as powers go—even disregarding his position in thehierarchy, Sam would be pretty strong in his own right.  Which, I’d like to point out, can be a reallythrilling change to a narrative, because it means that you have this additionallayer of ‘well, how do we deal with the fact that Sam doesn’t like being this strong, how do we dealwith the way demons and monsters have started to view him as more us than them’ and would give a much more legitimate basis for the questionof humanity that they shoehorn in later with the Ruby plotline.  Buffyhas its flaws, but at least it frequently brings up ‘hey, Buffy might be ostensiblyhuman, but she operates on the level of her enemies more than on the level ofher allies’ as an issue that she thinks about. But they don’t do that in Supernatural,they bail completely on the Sam plotline because they panic about theimplications of having such a powerful character.  And then they bring in fucking Castiel likethat’s not exactly the same problemcloaked in ‘well, noninterference.’  Like, please, that ship has fucking sailed,choke down your anxiety and figure out how the rules of your powerful characterwork, and then let them be powerful. It’s gonna be okay.  Deepbreaths.  If you make an OP character,that’s fine, you just have toactually deal with it rather than having their powers be an asspull every timethe main characters are in Real Trouble (*angry sigh* Merlin).

The second one they balk at is the unveiling of thesupernatural world and oh my God it is constant.  But let’s deal with the biggest and mostimprobable of these here: Season GoddamnTwo, where they bust open the doors of Hell and unleash some thousands ofdemons into the world.  Like, is that asmany demons as it could be, in comparison to your six to seven billionhumans?  No.  But it’s still a huge population and is implied to be accompanied by a huge uptickin various other supernatural happenings and is furthermore really visible.  The Devil’s Trap is suggested to pass throughat least a couple towns and it’s a big flashy event, so like…sure, maybe peoplewrite it off as swamp gas or what have you, but sooner or later people who havehad demons exorcised or seen some vampire/werewolf/etc shenanigans and lived totell about it are going to start running into each other.  They start hearing people say “it’s likeshe’s a totally different person” and they take that seriously rather thanwriting it off.  They were maybe saved bya hunter who confirmed that the supernatural exists and they maybe tell thatperson that, hey, something like that happened to them, maybe they could cometake a look around.  Maybe they couldcall the person who helped them out.  Andyou end up with this fucking Ponzi scheme of The Great Truth, where each personwho’s in the know finds one or two more people who’ve seen evidence and brings them into the loop, and then they find one or two more people who’veseen evidence.  And for every personwho’s determined to call it bullshit or think they’re insane, you’re going toget one who saw that person turn intoa hairy monster and murder someone, or who waspossessed by a demon, or who witnessedblack smoke merge with their spouse and turn them into a killer.  So you get this whole rickety network ofamateurs who’ve…kind of learned the thing. And like any Ponzi scheme, sooner or later it collapses.

Basically the point is: there is a limit to the parts permillion of The Great Truth that can be present before that shit becomes commonknowledge.  Look at any availablegovernment conspiracy for confirmation. The more people you tell, the looser the rules of ‘secret’ become, so ifyou have a big flashy visible disaster that involves drastically increasing the number of uninitiated civilians who areaware of The Great Truth…you’d better be ready to deal with that.  What I’m saying here is that by Season Seven,you’ve not only had this whole demon situation for a while, and increased those numbers several times with variousdisasters, but you’ve also had at least one big flashy disaster in a city.  So the Winchesters should pretty much be ableto walk into a given town and wander into the church or the bar or somethingand go “So, I heard there’ve been some weird murders” and have at least oneperson come up to them later and be like “Yeah it’s a ghost here’s all theinformation but I have no idea how to get rid of them.”  And when the Winchesters go *gasp* “How do you know The Thing” theperson should look at them like a fucking moron and go “It literally rainedblood last year, everyone in this time zone knows The Thing and also it’sevident that the end is pretty seriously nigh, so get on that.”  Commit to your big flashy disasters, youcowards, or at least have the decency to make it an ongoing Sunnydale joke.

Far more crucial is the fact that they bail on the end ofthe world…let’s see.  End of Season Fouris when the Apocalypse properly gets underway, so they balk at the end ofSeason Five (Lucifer and the Cage), end of Season Six (Mother of All andPurgatory), and like minimum once bythe middle of Season Seven (Godstiel) as well as at the end of Season Seven (Leviathans, I am now past where I kept watching),end of Season Eight (Metatron, angel tablets, falling angels), presumably endof Season Nine from what I understand of the summaries online (some…war onHeaven nonsense), and based on the trend I’m guessing that Seasons Ten throughThirteen keep to the model, do youunderstand my point here.  Thesearen’t even all the near-Apocalypses that they avert.  Off the cuff, I can think of the Croatoanvirus (…twice?  Three times?), as well asthree out of four Horsemen within episodes of each other.  They’re probably averting the Very Seriousand Catastrophic End of Days two or three times a season by Season Five, and that number only goes up.  This is very similar to the character deaththing: quite simply, if the audience is expected to get that worked up multipletimes a season, and brace for thatkind of disaster multiple times a season,you are inevitably going to bore them.  Yourplot has to be intensely recursive sothat you can ‘reset’ and avoid a new Apocalypse the next season, which getsboring, because it feels like you’ve been there before, similar to how usingcharacter death to advance character development demands that you hit thePersonality Reset button on the regular.

Furthermore, repeating the same level of disaster over and over and OVER again means that it starts to lack emotional weight, and yourcharacters start to seem really, really stupid if they don’t start to treatthings accordingly.  One of the things Ithought of constantly during thelast, say, season and a half that I watched of Supernatural was a quote from Buffy,specifically from Riley who I usually very much dislike but who NAILED thisparticular thing.  “When I saw you stopthe world from, you know, ending, I just assumed that was a big week for you.It turns out I suddenly find myself needing to know the plural ofapocalypse.”  And that’s the running jokein Buffy!  That they literallydeal with an Apocalypse every few episodes, and they lampshade it, and thecharacters respond accordingly—Buffy and the Scooby gang start to act cavalier,almost unimpressed, about each new disaster. Like “well, we saved the world, I say we party.”  That’s a direct quote from Buffy (IN SEASON ONE NO LESS), and Supernatural could stand to take a pageout of their book with that one.  BySeason Seven, the Winchesters seem like they have somehow missed out on thelast decade of their own lives because they always act so shocked and horrifiedthat somehow someone could try to endthe world.  Like!  Yes, yes they could and yes they would,welcome to the party boys!  Please try toget in touch with your own history on this subject!

So the highlights here are: don’t be a fucking baby aboutyour writing.  If you’re writing toward abig paradigm shift, you need to recognize that you’re playing Plot RussianRoulette, and you have to pull the trigger. Change the paradigm of your narrative and deal with the fallout like afucking adult, you tepid fools, you limp-necked cowards, you ink-stainedwalnuts.

POINT THE FOURTH

Listen very carefully. Do you hear that?  It’s the soundof the Winchesters promising eternal brotherly devotion and saying things like“you’re my brother, man” and vowing to always have each other’s backs.  

Now wait a moment longer, and listen very carefully.  Do you hear that?  It’s the inevitablesound of the Winchesters stabbing each other in the back and/or throwing eachother to the wolves because they’re feeling pissy, and then getting a whole(static! See Point The Second!) “character arc” about how distraught they are.

All right, y’all, I don’t have siblings so maybe I’m wrong, but I do write a lot and I think I’m right, and you should probably put yourcharacterization where your script is. If your primary relationship that you expect people to care about isfraternal devotion, you should maybe nothave those people cheerfully feed each other into metaphoricalwoodchippers.  Like.  Okay, maybe you get ONE chance to have adramatic falling out.  ONE.  And then when they repair the relationship,they need to actually sort their shit out and not keep having the exact same dramatic falling out because thatshit gets boring and is a sign of lazy writing and—shocker!—lack of character development.  Next time they fight, it has to be aboutsomething demonstrably different, notjust the same issue with a new set of tits (c’mon y’all, this is Supernatural, it’s always a set oftits).

Let’s do a real fast recap. There’s a one episode plot in Season One about the two of them fallingout over the question of whether they should follow their father’s orders.  Dean spends a good percentage of Season Twotaking his guilt over their dad’s death out on Sam, but we’ll give a passbecause they explicitly acknowledge it and take steps to resolve theproblem.  A major plotline develops inSeason Two that hunters have started trying to kill Sam, and Dean reliably,consistently has his back.  Props.  Season Three is kind of a mess (if you have a big visible semi-Apocalypseyou should probably deal with it, see Point The Third), but whatever.  Pertinently, Dean’s big ongoing concern isthat Sam isn’t acting like himself, because he’s being much more ruthless(something Dean has consistently told him to do), while Sam’s ongoing concernis that Dean is being reckless (justified, he has a death sentence onhim).  Season Four is when things startto break down.  Castiel shows up and Deanresponds with aggression, Sam gets his rehashed ‘humanity’ plotline with Ruby,there are a lot of really incredibly poor decisions made and a lot of lies toldwith minimal regard for the trouble that’s gotten them into before (@Sam).  There’s a fight that includes Dean callingSam a monster, which has been canonically identified as the thing Sam is mostafraid of, and acting like this whole demon blood thing is a terribletremendous shock, despite the fact that Dean…knew and totally failed to reactin any way except to penalize Sam (for trying to save him!  Much like Dean sold his soul for Sam!  And got pissy about Sam being pissed offabout!).  Cue Lucifer.  Apocalypse, possession, Horsemen, etc, etc,more Lazy Susan Castiel, infighting about who should say yes to what in orderto save whom, whatever.  

And then Sam apparently dies in the Cage and Dean…goes offto get a nice white picket fence? Um…this is not consistent with the characterization of a dude who soldhis soul to resurrect Sam literally just three years ago.  Their falling out has never been intenseenough nor consistent enough to justify this. Even if you say that Dean’s honoring his brother’s final wishes by nottrying to resurrect Sam or anything, Dean should be drinking himself to deathor something similarly dramatic, because allthe drama in this show comes from the relationship between the Winchesterbrothers.  

Basically, here’s the problem: the show spends a lot of time and effort on telling youthat the Winchesters would die for each other. And while they do use that trope a lot (John dies for Dean, who dies forSam, who sacrifices his humanity for Dean, who risks his life for Sam, whojumps into the Cage for Dean…), they seem to have forgotten that, generally,you’re only willing to die for people who you actually like.  Like, peopleto whom you are genuinely emotionally attached,not just people who are your family because Blood Is Thicker or whateverbullshit you’re trying to pull there. And by Season Five, I’m just…not convinced the Winchester brothersactually like each other anymore.  Andthat never gets dealt with, they just expect you to believe that the Winchsterslove each other because the show says so,and listen, I hate the saying of ‘show, don’t tell’ as much as the nextperson who’s suffered through a college writing class, but honestly.  Supernaturalneeds to stop telling its viewers that Sam and Dean care about each other andactually…demonstrate that shit on a regular basis.  

Example: there’s the incident at some point where someoneplants a phone call on (I think) Sam’s phone, apparently from Dean, telling himthat he’s a monster and he should go do an incredibly stupid and dangerousthing because the world and Dean would be better off if he was dead.  Which Sam then believes and listens to.  This seems totally justified based on therelationship they’ve had for the past season. Pro tip, kids.  If your majordynamic includes two people who readily and easily believe that the other isliterally calling them an inhuman abomination and telling them they should justdie, that…that is not a Loving Affectionate and Devoted Familial Relationship.  And if you’re pitching it as one, A, you needsome therapy, probably urgently, and, B, your audience is only going to stickit out for so long before they give it up as a lost cause.

The point of this whole thing is that you better be ready toput your money where your fucking mouth is, and keep your characterizationsconsistent with what you’re telling the audience.

ANYWAY.  

The ultimate TL;DR here is that Supernatural’s storytelling is approximately as competent as thenovel I wrote when I was eleven, which I have hidden in a deep dark hole neverto be seen or discussed ever again.  Less competent, even, because at least Icommitted to a single individual plotline and dealt with the fallout of majorchanges to the universe.  And it’sfucking tragic, because this was a show with some real potential buried underall the chaos.  If you ever want my fullrewrite, please do ask and I will tell you, but this is now over 6K words andon its tenth page, so I’m going to stop now.

Long story short?  Supernatural: What The Fuck.