#until spn premieres

[lemotmo]

You have already answered similar questions so feel free not to post. I just thought I would share 😊

Q. Where is the Promotional stuff?! What is going on? I need answers. Every show now has a trailer but 911. Is he coming back or not? I need to know something other than Tim is still obsessed with Ryan, haha.

A. Lol, the man is very transparent about his Ryan/Eddie love. He always has been. They're clearly hiding something. I think it was pretty much confirmed that The Rookie was the show something got spoiled for, I don't watch it so I have no clue how big of a spoiler it was. But obviously 911 took the opportunity to button everything up on their end. They clearly don't want something spoiled about the 3 episode event. I think we can pretty safely say there is no kind of AU happening. What we saw was most likely the television show Bobby is consulting on. For all the SPN ptsd's out there freaking out in my ask box, this is an entirely different show. It's not the same thing. However , it would make sense, and in fact be hilarious, if the characters on the show mirrored the real 118. There will be nothing wrong with doing that. We are talking about a Ryan Murphy show. I would be more surprised if they didn't do that.

I think if they drop a trailer it will be during the Family Fued episode. Double the PR in one sitting. They are doing things completely differently this time around. So it's hard to predict. I would imagine we'll get interviews the week leading up to the premier at least. We know Ryan has some sitting out there, and so far they're following the same pattern with Ryan/Eddie that they followed with Oliver/Buck last off-season. Everything else is different. But I would imagine the week leading up to the premier will be pretty PR heavy. Unless they want to hold everything until after the premier. If they're hiding something big we may have to wait. I'm going to address Tommy one more time and one more time only. He is not important enough to feature in anything that is currently taking place. He was made much more important by both fandoms than he ever was going to be to the show. Period. He was never going to be a main. He was never going to be main adjacent. He was a guest star with less than 30 total minutes of screen time. If we get a trailer and he isn't in the trailer I don't think he's returning. The previous seasons love interests have almost always featured in the trailer in some capacity so if they exclude him from that I think it's safe to assume he was let go. The only reason I'm hesitant to say he was fired is because they pinned his Instagram comment. I don't see them pinning a comment from a fired employee. However given everything we have learned about how control heavy Disney is I don't see how he kept his job following the cameo garbage. He clearly broke Disney protocol. So I genuinely don't know. He is very low hanging fruit by Disney standards though so it is what it is. If he shows up for a scene or two or an episode or two it doesn't really matter. He's not going to play any significant role one way or the other. And there is no need to keep talking in circles about it. We have 20 days to go. I'm looking forward to the FF episode and the stuff we will be getting once the season starts (hello Eddie in a church talking to the priest). We'll see what if anything juicy the FF episode provides and we will go from there. 💗

Thank you Nonny! I'm definitely posting this one, because people have been asking for Ali's opinion on the lack of promotion for Tommy, which is about the same opinion as mine, only more eloquently explained. 😉

So I'm not adding any of my opinions on this one, since all of you already know exactly what I think about most of this. :)

IMPORTANT! Please don't repost this ask and/or a link that leads straight to my Tumblr account on Twitter or any other social media. Thank you!

Heads up! For anyone who is giving me the shifty eyes for reposting Ali's updates instead of reblogging. Read this.

Remember, no hate in comments, reblogs or inboxes. Let's keep it civil and respectful. Thank you.

If you are interested in more of Ali’s posts, you can find all of her posts so far under the tag: anonymous blog I love.

[lol-jackles]

Hi. Your blog is still on alarm on my dash. Really enjoying your opinions.

If your time allows you, I’d like to know your opinion & reviews on SPN 9X13.

"The Purge" has Sam and Dean go undercover in a health spa after finding a link to deaths where the victims have lost their entire fat reserve. They discover the owners are a pair of Peruvian monsters, a sister and brother who parallel Sam and Dean; the sister wants to co-exist with humans and help them by siphoning off surplus unwanted fat for food, the other only want to feed and more he tries his sister's way, the hungrier he got until he succumbs to his nature and kills for food. This foreshadow Dean's struggle to live with the Mark of Cain until he couldn't, increasingly becoming "hungry" as the season went on. Sam have lived and adapted with his freakish, "unclean" nature for so long that he is fully functional even if he never makes peace with it.

One of the strengths of Supernatural is their stand-alone/MotW/filler episodes usually advance the season-long arcs and even get referenced or talked about in later episodes. Despite Sam and Dean’s church codependent commitment ceremony in season 8's finale, they still got baggage and hence Dean lying about the extreme, desperate measures he took to save Sam’s life in season 9's premiere and keeping him in the dark.  Once Sam found out, he is angry and bewildered by Dean’s actions that he sees as betrayal, and draws up boundaries as a way of saving his relationship with Dean. But from Dean’s pov the new boundaries were walls set to destroy what is between him and Sam. So Dean conflated saving Sam from the Peruvian monster in this episode to saving Sam in those 2 previous episodes in attempt to remove the wall between them that Sam set up.

Remember, Dean isn't going to learn the same lesson each season, which is why he made Sam's anger over the Gadreel possession about his (Dean) own issue and left Sam alone (with Cas in the bunker) to hunt down Gadreel... only to run into Cain got the Mark to, huh, kill Abaddon instead for some reason.

Understandably Sam is frustrated as the 3 incidents were not the same: in the church, Dean told Sam the truth that the ritual will cause his death and promised Sam not only will they find another way, that he would never put some one else before Sam. Dean wasn't hiding information from Sam. Dean saving Sam from the Peruvian monster was a straightforward action, no underhanded agenda. So Sam told Dean the unvarnished truth: Dean didn't want to be alone. This gets brought up again by Billie in season 11's "Red Meat", and in season 13','s "Advanced Thanatology" Dean tells Billie that he's dragging down Sam.

Sam's admission that he wouldn't save Dean under "same circumstances" means he wouldn't selfishly save Dean for personal gains, or without vital information. Back in season 3 he first sought Dean’s agreement to use the immortality serum instead of giving it to him without informing him ahead of time. Sam was ready to die in the hospital (season 9 premiere) and Dean essentially violated a do-not-resuscitate order (DNR). Nobody can really blame Dean for wanting to save Sam's life at any cost, but he fails to see things from Sam's pov that led to him needing boundaries in the first place.

I found the scene of Dean immediately recognizing roofies pretty on-the-nose. He said he didn't want to end up missing kidneys while traveling in little known places, which, yeah good idea, so why didn't Sam know what roofies look like? I took it as callback to when Sam didn't know he was being possessed by Gadreel under Dean's watch.

"The Purge" was one of the weaker MotW episodes but it still gets the job done of advancing the main storyline arcs. It started out as a lighter filler episode and ended with a "truth hurts" bite that leaves a deeply wounding mark that set off a fierce fandom debate.

[drunkkenobi]

Before Mystery Files braves the algorithm this Friday, thought I’d do a quick check-in with the Watcher viewcounts.

First and foremost, WWW has cooled down a bit. It’s in line with the first six weeks of original WWW eps, Mystic Museum and Soda Pals, and better than the rest. Older eps have cooled off too, although they really did get significant boosts there for awhile. My personal opinion about WWW’s future is that if they get sponsors for it, it may become a travel show (like the Montana episode) but is dependent on their schedule and being sponsored. Still, I will be holding out hope for an Iowa State Fair WWW because it would be a delight to me personally.

As you can see, the second season of Worth a Shot has not blown the doors off. Sad because I liked the changes to the format a lot, bringing in Mari as a co-host, having a couple episodes with a Steven battle. 

New season of TMS is right in line with last year’s, so it’s nice to see it be consistent. Also last year’s got a nice little boost.

Ghost Files continues to do banger numbers every week, particularly the Hobo Hill House finale. Last week it got 81k views, which is almost as much as the new WAS did. 

Mystery Files starts this week! My official prediction is that it will do quite well, but not Ghost Files level. This is based on my BFU viewcounting, where True Crime and SPN were quite equal in viewers until the last couple years when SPN became a more statistical favorite. TC often really popped off based on subject, so I’ll be interested to see if that follows here. 

I’m excited for MF to do well for a few reasons. First, obviously, I want all their series to do well. Second, having seen the premiere on Patreon last week, I can confirm that it’s a very good show with amazing production and it truly feels like a Team Watcher show and not necessarily Team Ryan/Shane/Steven/whoever. It’s very collaborative! And third, because MF is made in-house without travel expenses, the better it does means the more the company can do travel videos or take chances on other creators or new concepts. 

For posterity, as of May 15, 2023, Watcher has 2.53 million subscribers, 274 videos, and 283,468,098 views. That averages to 1.034 million views per video. This is up from 1.018m views per video from December. 

[detailtilted]

hi! I'm sorry if you've talked about this before, but I've been wondering how you enhance the spn con videos. like, how does it work? cause your videos look amazing, especially in comparison to the previous footage!

Thank you so much for being interested enough to ask!

At a very high level, the visual enhancements to the original videos themselves are made by running an upscaling program and then manually adjusting color-related settings in my video editing software. Sometimes I also fix aspect ratios if the original videos are squished.

Below are way more details than you probably ever wanted. 😅 I’ll put my very long answer after a break...

Upscaling

The very first thing I do when I start a new video is to take all the video sources I can find, pick out the ones I think I'm most likely to want to use, and see if I can get them to upscale. This is actually one of the easiest parts of the whole process, at least in terms of the actual time that I myself have to put into it. The computer does most of the work.

The upscaling is done through a software program. I don't actually have any idea, but I imagine it might be a dumbed down version of the type of software that movie studios use when they create upscaled Blu-ray releases of older films. I know the obvious question is, “What’s the software program?” I’m a little scared to say it without some explanation first, because it has “AI” in the title. I know and understand (and agree with) why AI is such a hot button today. However, this is not generative AI where it generates a new work out of nothing, and it’s performing a function that a human could not reasonably do.

The way I understand it, it runs an algorithm to analyze all the frames in the video and figure out how it can remove some of the visual “noise” and also add missing details to some frames based on what it finds in other frames. It then updates every single frame in the video. The videos I’m currently working with have 30 frames per second. A 30-minute video would therefore have 54,000 frames. For a human to compare 54,000 frames and make all the tiny changes required to each one would be… impossible I think. So anyway, after that long preamble, the name of the software I’m using is “Topaz Video AI”.

There are a variety of settings you can tweak, so I focus on upscaling one video source at a time because the same settings that work with one source may not work for a different source recorded with different equipment. I try different combinations of settings to small sections of the video until I find settings that seems to return noticeably improved results without adding any weird distortions. Sometimes I have to give up and proclaim the task impossible. If the video has too much noise and/or not enough good detail already there for it to work with, then it won’t upscale well. I get much, much better results with original video files than I do with files from YouTube. I think the videos were compressed when they were uploaded to YouTube and lost some of their quality.

If I find a setting that works, I tell the software to apply those settings to all of the videos from the source I'm currently working on and then leave my computer to crunch through them. That can take hours, and it makes my computer sound like it's preparing for liftoff, but it doesn’t require my involvement. I’ll often let it run overnight, then check it the next day to see if it came out ok. Sometimes I have to go back to the drawing board because I find parts of it didn’t come out well at all, but usually if the sample looked good then the full result also looks good.

Then I take my next video source (another set of videos recorded by a different person on different equipment) and repeat the process.

Color Corrections

This is all done in my video editing software. I’ve been using Adobe Premiere Pro. There’s free software out there that might be a better choice. I tried one early on and didn’t do very well with it, but I had no idea what I was doing. Video editing is new to me. So for me, the advantage of using a very popular software program was that there are tons of answers out there for just about every question I’ve ever thought to ask. Now that I have more experience, maybe I’ll give some of the free options another try. I have to decide whether or not to renew my current license at the end of the year and the price is pretty crazy, especially considering it's only for a limited period of time.

So… back to color corrections. My original attempts at this did not start out well. My first set of videos were the CHICON 2007 videos and those colors looked fine to me, so it never even occurred to me to adjust colors. When I moved on to Comic-Con 2008, I was confronted by a bunch of badly red-tinted and green-tinted videos and I thought, “Hmm, I wonder if this video editing software can do anything about that.”

And I tried. I drove myself absolutely mad. I’m not good with colors in general, I’d never worked with color adjustment settings before, and my eyes were going crazy trying to figure out if I was making things better or if I was just creating a new variety of bad. I put out a plea for opinions/advice here on Tumblr with some screen shots showing what I’d done so far, and sensitivehandsomeactionman came to my rescue. They took one of my screen shots and adjusted the colors in their own software to show me what could be achieved. And it looked amazing. Having that example to reference was a huge help. It was still a challenge for me, but I eventually got pretty close to what they did.

I’m not as good at it on my own, but I learned a lot through that process that I’ve been able to apply to my subsequent videos. I think every video I’ve worked with since then has had at least slightly wonky colors, so I've had a lot more practice. There are a bunch of complicated color-related settings in Adobe, but eventually I found the “Lumetri Color” panel which has a simpler set of set of controls consisting of a few sliders that let you adjust between two opposites until you find the right balance.

One slider is for Exposure and it basically changes the lighting from darker to lighter. Then there are two color-related sliders. One shifts between blue and orange and the other shifts between green and purple. I play around with those sliders until I think the colors look more natural, focusing mostly on their skin tone. Then if needed, I’ll adjust the Saturation slider a little to tone things down. For the most part, playing with those 4 sliders usually gets me something that I think looks decent.

Some videos are more difficult than others though, and I still consider this to be very much outside my wheelhouse. When I announce a new video on Tumblr, I usually display a comparison image of the original video versus the enhanced. Those help me see that the end result does in fact look at least a little better than the original. Sometimes after staring at the video for hours on end, I start to doubt.

If there are any wonky aspect ratios making the video look squished, that’s a really easy fix by just changing the scale percentages for that video in my video editing software.

All The Rest of the Work

All those things I just babbled about probably take up only 25% of the time I spend on each video. Less if the videos don't give me much trouble with upscaling or color adjusting. I could write another book about the rest of the process, but what I've already typed is probably overkill as it is so I'll try to be brief since this stuff isn't as much about the visuals anyway.

This is when I move on to the process of choosing which videos to display at which times and editing everything together into one (hopefully) cohesive video. I also try to choose the clearest audio that covers most of the panel. Audio changes are very noticeable, so I try to minimize them and use a single audio throughout the whole video as much as possible. Often the audio you’re hearing was from a different video than the one you’re seeing.

Once I have all the footage edited together, that’s when I start adding the subtitles and the extra content. These things are by far the most time-consuming part of the process, especially the subtitles.

I hope this answered your question. Thanks again for asking! If I didn't answer your question and if you want to risk having another book typed to you, let me know. 😅

[loverboy-havocboy]

Are we doing closet cloneshipper confessions here? If so, hi

I've been in the tumblr fandom communities for over a decade and joined the sw community right before the last season of tcw premiered. It legit never occurred to me that anyone would have an issue with clonecest - spn was still running and wincest was like the second most popular ship there so it seemed like standard fanfic fodder until the antis had a huge meltdown a few months later and drove half the people I followed out of fandom completely.

And then tbb started and some of the same people who had such an issue with clonecest decided they hated all of tbb too. I was beyond pissed at that point so I started a little tbb side blog to spite them. I didn't really have any tbb cloneships at the time so I sorta ended up with a non-ship tbb blog by accident and it got a lot bigger for me than the original page and now I have friends through that who are def not fans of the cloneshipper life and have no idea that I ship.

At first it was fine because my ships were totally separate from tbb anyway but lately I've really been feeling the crosshunt feels and I don't feel like I can say anything about it at this point, you know? It feels like I've been lying even though that wasn't my intent at all - it really just didn't come up as an issue until now. If someone had asked me if I ship clones, I would have said so straight up but no one ever did and now I'm afraid to be the one to bring it up.

I don't care what rando antis say to me. They have no power over me. But I don't want to lose my friends over it. I don't know how they'd react. I know they don't like clonecest and I'd never ask them to participate in something they don't ship but I genuinely don't know if they'd be more ship and let ship about it or if they'd insta block me for it. I want to think they'd be cool about it but some people who seemed so reasonable before got so out of control when the anti clonecest purge went down before so I don't know what to think.

oh anon, i'm sorry. i will give you my 2 cents but i am just a little guy, ykwim?

i think it would be so hard to lose friendships you've cultivated over such a period of time, people you care about. but at the same time.. are they the kind of people you're sure you want to be friends with if you're so afraid to voice an opinion about fictional characters? i mean, cloneshipping isn't even a real life moral issue, as much as antis want to treat it like one. if they turn on you for that.. they'd probably turn on you for something equally superficial eventually, right?

so i think engaging in things that make you happy will make your life better than trying to please judgemental people in the long run.

[cleolinda]

Weekend links

My posts

Bad pain week. We do what we can. That's mostly posts about the strikes right now.

The strikes

Oh boy.

To keep this section manageable, I highly recommend looking (in terms of my own tags) at #wga strike (writers) and/or #sag aftra strike (actors), or #strikes if you would like to see everything in one place. (A variety of tags are being used sitewide.) There's also a UPS strike coming up.

The week started off with "The endgame is to allow things to drag on until [WGA] union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses." The week ended with Ron Perlman hearing about it.

Scabby the Rat reporting live from SPN News Network

Major points from the SAG-AFTRA press conference re: how shitty the studio/streaming side is

The effects we may see (awards shows, indie movies, reality TV, media unions outside the US continuing to work because they may be legally unable to join the strike)

The Oppenheimer cast timed it so they would be seen walking off the London premiere after the strike was called. Bear in mind that "the big actors who don't need more money" are needed to draw attention to the plight of the other 98% of the guild who need health insurance, the rights to their own likenesses, and fair wages

What I said: Always remember that the people hoarding the money can make the strike stop at any time. Get mad at the right people. And I'll reemphasize that here: You don't have to just sadly and patiently wait for your shows to come back. You can get mad. You can start asking why the FUCK Disney or Netflix or whoever is so CHEAP that they'd rather postpone or cancel their billion-dollar shit than PAY WORKERS.

Reblogs of interest

It's Disability Pride Month, and I need to reblog more about that. But I haven't been posting as much of anything this month as I did last month because: disability flare-up. Whee.

Evernote, don't you even think about shutting down

Never over what Sleepy Hollow did to Nicole Beharie

Video

I'm not really versed on what happened with the AO3 DDOS attack, but this poster and their grandmother were: "She took matters into her own hands. SHE FOUND AO3"

The BBC Bad News Banger

Thrashy-thrashy-thrash

The sacred texts

A tumblr glossary: blorbo, glup shitto, eeby deeby, plinko horse, scrimblo bimblo

The classic that started a SFF subgenre: Humans are space orcs

The Mushroom Post by way of Avatar: The Last Airbender

SATAN IS NOT A FUCKING POGO STICK

Personal tags of the week

Wet Beast Wednesday was particularly good this week

Kenergy

[420technoblazeit]

"would you still love me if I was a worm" i raise you one "Would you still love yourself if Y0U were the worm." Self-Reflect.

i saw htis ask last night and it baffled me so i left it until now. i got into an. argument? a heated conversation??? ? with a friend a while ago bc i asked not if she woudl love me if i was a worm but if she would take care of me adn make a habitat complete with a tv so i could watch supernatural. and she said that i could use a phone but i thikn as a worm u wouldn't have enough body heat to interact with the screen and. actually wait everyone settle this for me

[hologramcowboy]

Interesting tidbits from my deep dive:

• rumors about Danneel being banned from SPN set dating as far back as 2008

• Neil Patrick Harris hated Danneel, apparently she was a huge bitch behind the scenes on both How I Met Your Mother (she was in one episode, s4e5, which aired in 2008) and the Harold and Kumar movies (she played Kumar’s girlfriend and had a small role in all three movies)

• Danneel bullying extras and other cast members (only girls of course) on the set of OTH. These rumors date all the way back to her very first appearance (season 3) in 2005, so pre Jensen meaning her stans can’t really attribute the rumors to jealousy

• Rumors about Danneel hating Gen // being jealous of her dating all the way back to 2009. Not shocking given that neither of them attended each others wedding and didn’t really start interacting until J+D moved to Austin, but I was a little surprised because for a few years (2015/16 until the end of SPN) it seemed like people were dead set on the narrative that they were friends

• Finally found those lesbian rumors! Dating back to 2008, people were convinced that she was dating Elizabeth Harnois because she brought EH with her everywhere (notably to the My Bloody Valentine Premiere and on a trip to Australia with Jensen) and EH has been a rumored lesbian for a very long time. Found a taptalk board about closeted lesbian actresses from 2013 and EH was a very big topic (and beloved by lesbians apparently). I wasn’t even aware that EH was famous enough to garner that kind of attention

And weirdly enough, the most interesting tidbits didn’t involve Danneel at all. The first is pretty relevant given how often Jensen has been speaking about all the opportunities he missed due to SPN, and the answer is apparently not that many. He wanted to break into the movie scene and film during SPN’s break from filming, but was unsuccessful and not happy about it. Would try out for things/have his name thrown out there, and wasn’t getting anything back which caused a rift between him and his agent. Jared on the other hand apparently had a decent amount of offers, specifically for action movies. Notable roles were lead role in Conan the Barbarian (2011) and Poseidon in The Immortals (2011). Inclined to believe this rumor based on a few factors. The rumor about off season work for J2 was posted back in 2009, and the poster claimed to work for the CW. All of their other posts (mostly about Gossip Girl and Dawn Ostroff who was the president of the CW at the time) have proven to be true, so I don’t think they would randomly lie about this one thing. Then you have Jared himself, who really bulked up in seasons 4-6 of SPN and had the perfect action hero physique. Why put in all that work unless you’re prepping for potential roles?

The second rumor is something that I had never heard before, and it’s about Jensen. It’s something that I think a lot of people don’t want to hear/are going to push back against, so I want to do a bit more research before bringing it back out of obscurity. The Ackles really do love to bury things…

A little disclaimer, all of this is obviously gossip and with all gossip we have to take things with a grain of salt. And for those that are curious, I found all of this information on old livejournal boards, datalounge threads, now defunct fan forums and blogs. Obviously these places aren’t great sources and won’t be passing any academic scrutiny, but gossip isn’t the most regulated field. I had to sift through a lot of J2 timhatting and obvious fanfiction, but there were some gems. My process for whether or not something was legitimate enough to include was how often it’s been mentioned throughout the years, what point in the timeline it was introduced, if someone was claiming to have insider have their claims been proven true in the years leading up to now, if any proof was attached, how biased the post was (if it was clearly a Jensen/Jared stan trying to discredit or take down the other I wrote it off), and my own discerning eye for potential truths (I’ve worked in archives, have a degree in history, am currently working on my masters and have been honing my gossip researching/lie detecting skills since I read my first tabloid as a preteen).

Her set track record matches her lack of credits currently. People don't want to work with arrogant actors. My guess is she burned a lot of bridges by acting like a b and also by acting badly, let's face it she has no talent and no technique so her career only went as far as her fake boobs took her.

Really curious about the Jensen part now, if you feel like sharing please know I can keep the secret.

Thank you for sharing all of that, I loved reading it and I love how you wisely added a disclaimer to it as well.

[gentlemancowboy]

The way I completely forgot Bridgerton s3 was premiering today until a gifset popped up between all the spn category 5 event posts like Ariana what are you doing here?

[musicandwordsandheart]

Carry On

This is in no way going to be a unique post. There have been hundreds, probably thousands, of others just like it. All the same, I'm going to add mine. Because like all those thousands of others, this show means something to me.

It took me just over a decade to finish the entire series. That doesn't seem like long when talking about a TV show that ran for 15 seasons, but I finished the first 8 seasons in a single summer.

That summer. I can't hear Kansas or any of the show's other cues without immediately being transported back there, to that little post-college apartment in Vegas. Being the only one in a 4 person place because all the others had finished their student teaching and left. I stayed behind, deciding to finish out the semester at the school I would be taking over that fall, getting my last bit of training in, stepping into my big-girl shoes.

So I was alone. Just recently had my first root canal, which meant I was still addicted to the "chocolate-covered strawberry" shake I found at the nearest Sonic. I had no plans that night. I made a pot of instant flavored rice and took it, my shake, and my laptop to my room; being in the living room of an empty and un-lived in apartment wasn't appealing anymore. I remember starting with most of the lights off, all except my beat-up little Target bedside lamp. I'd heard about this show for ages, wasn't ever sure it was for me, but decided I'd try it that night. Why not?

Within minutes, I had every light in the entire apartment blazing. Door locks were triple-checked, rice abandoned, and I was hooked.

What happened next was the final and real transition from college to adult-life. I went home for the summer and, in between prepping for my new challenge ahead, I squirreled away in my parents' cool basement, bingeing this show as a way to calm my (then undiagnosed) anxiety. I stayed up too light, sobbing into the night by myself over Sam's (first) death. Then Dean's. Then the perfection that is Season 5. Then everything that followed. At some point that summer I began investing in the DVD sets, some scrounged from eBay, some purchased straight off Walmart shelves or Amazon. I finished season 8 with 2 weeks to go before I made the big move--2 months before the 9th season would premiere.

In my new life, I DVR'd every episode, had Pinterest boards and Tumblr posts full of SPN fandom. I went to a convention. I loved it so, so much.

But life is tricky. I watched religiously until halfway through season 13, when things became unmanageable and I was pulled too far under in my battle with anxiety. I pressed pause for a bit. I got my mental health and my life together, I found other things that I loved so much. And then I moved across the world.

Couldn't access the final 2 seasons while they were airing live, and sometimes the VPN wouldn't even let me tune in to catch up on Netflix, so I was sort of forced to let it go.

Last year, I started again, back home for another summer in that same house. I started from the beginning. This time, I made it through the first 12 seasons before moving back, before relying on a VPN once again.

By now, I knew the ending. I had seen the spoilers, the controversy. I had seen the real-life stuff between actors, been disappointed by certain choices, baffled by others. I had been out of the diehard fandom for years now. I had also, like all of us, lived through a global pandemic. I knew so many were disappointed with how this show had gone out. Still, in the back of my mind, I knew I needed to finish.

And today, finally, thanks to a typhoon-forced day off, I have.

For me, I get the complaints. Well, not so much the complaints, but the sense of... 아깝다. 아쉽다. What a shame. It's a shame that a show like this, that means so much to so many people, had to go out with a Covid-induced whimper, not the bang it deserved.

But I still cried. I still felt that sense of loss. This show....it means so much to me. It got me through some tough times. It walked with me through the transition to adulthood. It was my everything for so long.

Although...it's been freeing in a way. Knowing I have finished, seen it through to the end. Now, whenever I'm feeling that urge (it should be no surprise that it usually hits me every summer, when days start getting hot and I crave chocolate-strawberry shakes) I can start wherever I want. Stop in on all my favorites, or binge it all. It's always gonna be there, just like it always was.

It may have taken me a decade, but I'm so glad this show exists.

[laf-outloud]

//That sounds pretty reasonable. I expected GK to be high due to it's DC connection (including those who watched to see if it's really as bad as people say it is.)//

Yep, I expected them to have a decent premiere because, like you mentioned, it’s a DC property and people, for better or worse, tend to tune in to at least see what they’re like. Also the spn fandom who are still his fans who tuned in to support mc. I’m sure his minions and some hellers will watch regardless but the less invested spn fans might be one and dones like for TW (spn fans who tuned in to give it a shot but didn’t want to suffer through that lack of quality). What I’m most interested in is the ep 2 ratings. That’s when we’ll really see what it’s going to be like going forward. Will it hold steady like WIndy did? Or crash on ep 2 like TW did?

I don't know if it will crash. GK doesn't have nearly as far to fall as TW did, but I believe the numbers will decrease every episode until it hits about 350K (which is what TW did after their initial drop.)

I saw a lot of online support (over 20,000 tweets using #CWGothamKnights - not sure how many more used #GothamKnights), but that didn't correlate directly with the ratings so I'm guessing that a lot of those tweets were from international Misha and SPN fans checking the show out. They may help the SM engagement scores, but they're not going to help the viewer numbers.

[raina16]

This and yet when SPN was airing and I'd and other. OG Dean fans would complain, when I said, these writers are forgetting a lot about who Dean is, it would be written off as just dean girl favoritism. Dean sure had some anger, his mother died when he was 4, his father emotionally used and abused him, his brother didn't even seem to notice everything he did for him(he was a kid he gets a pass WHILE he was a kid but not afterwards), but anger was NEVER who he was supposed to be, it wasn't supposed to be his pretty much only character trait.

It wasn't even a major character trait until literally years into the show when the writers just I don't know forgot. Dean was the one who wanted to hunt, not for revenge but so other families wouldn't suffer like his had. Dean was the one who got between angry John and angry Sam(I mean hell a big part of the season 2 premier, with Dean between life and death, was a metaphor for how in life John and Sam spent so much time angry with each other that Dean became invisible emotionally to both of them, they didn't even realize the toll it took on Dean or the weight he was carrying). Of course he'd have some anger but it was never his default, not like the writers made it in the final seasons but acted like he'd always been that way.

I'm so emotional about the fact that the softest and least angry we've seen Dean in YEARS is in the project where Jensen had ALL the control over his character.

[mlobsters]

supernatural s15e1 back and to the future (w. andrew dabb)

find it a little weird that they're using the bob seger famous final scene song for the season premiere big recap thing, they used this song in an episode - for kevin's funeral pyre in 9x10. maybe they've reused a song like that (poignant moment within an ep and then a recap, they reuse recap songs certainly) before and i just didn't notice, did this time because that song is in my main playlist from when i watched that s9 episode. typing all that up, what a pointless thing to care about. not sure i vibe with the clips and music selection but they're really hit or miss for me in general. music thematically, yes. anything else, ehh

also been thinking like. i don't see why s13-14 (and 15 remains to be seen, obviously) are said to be so much worse than say, s7-12 (though 11 had bright spots for me not seen since way, way back - or hey, better than *gasp* s1-5 at times because it occasionally focused on good feelings in a way that was just not happening before.) and i'm sure i'm in the minority yet again but i just haven't particularly liked the main plots for most of the seasons. and while i had some big issues with s6, it didn't go campy-ridiculous for me until the leviathans. and again, for me, pretty much everything since has gone that direction. some not campy, but all pretty ridiculous. i tolerate, not delight :S but i'm here for the characters and relationships, so i keep on keeping on.

anyway. dark and jittery longer than i deem necessary battle in the graveyard which somehow became not a death sentence in between the season break

DEAN Great. So we go outside, we get ripped apart. We stay in here, w-what, starve to death?! CAS Well, I wouldn't starve. DEAN Well, good for you.

LOL good one, cas

CAS He's an abomination! BELPHEGOR You're an abomination with that stupid, dumb trench coat.

ooh burn. and so true

BELPHEGOR I mean, the last time I was on Earth, I mean, I was human. Ah, it was a while ago. I mean, but, you know, we were all worshipping this giant rock that looked like a huge penis, and... Anyway, folks back then, you know? Had a lot of humps. I mean, a lot. Look at 'em now. I mean, look at you. I mean, you're, uh, you know, gorgeous. DEAN What? Okay. When are you gonna get out of that body? BELPHEGOR Eh, when I find another one. I mean, I would've jumped at the cemetery, but all those meat suits were a little too, uh, you know, wormy. Difficult to blend, if you will

giving me leonardo dicaprio accent/cadence there with the wormy bit. weird. also mentioned dicaprio way back when he was in that nougat scene in 13x01. anyway, i mean this is something. can't resist the whole new character for the same actor thing. but seems like a more fun role for calvert

music they've got playing while sam and cas search the houses is pretty unique. i like it. this really muffled deep fast percussion. miracle. and jay gruska?? okay, i see you!! look at you, sir!!! finally coming up with a win

the killer clown makeup, good!

the blood mary wig and makeup, HORRENDOUS. reminds me of the knockoff ringu girl in 7x18. called it party city costume and makeup 🤪

spn s7e18 party on, garth

handy that the spell that needs a human heart, there's an abundance of freshly dead people around. i don't have the energy to even ponder what this demon's agenda is

BELPHEGOR What? Oh. No. I-I mean, uh... – I'm a fan. DEAN Excuse me? BELPHEGOR Yeah, I-I didn't want to say it in front of the other guys, but when you were in Hell, with Alastair, I, uh... I got a chance to watch you work. And, I mean, the things you did to those people, I mean, it wasn't torture. It was, um... It was art. DEAN Yeah, but that was a long time ago. BELPHEGOR Depends how you look at it.

dean surprisingly chill about this conversation. far more chill than i am. maybe he's been doing some work

so every door in hell opened, including the cage. ok. so is that how they finally address adam?

stupid god weapon which i assumed was lethal no matter what, well. festering at least.

and some sort of hallucination flashback vision who knows what i don't know what with evil!sam and dean begging sammy. great, visions 3.0?

lol, seen the gag reel gif from this scene where misha calls him dean instead of sam

it's fun that they're doing new spellwork magic stuff with a character, but. clearly it's gonna be some big Thing, what with how useful and powerful it is

not remembering why dean's being snippy with cas. i guess because he doesn't want to talk about jack dying? they've pretty well glossed over it

little more fester-y. needed some gooey bits to dab off with the gauze

DEAN Okay. Hey, do you remember when we were little? What I would do to distract you whenever I'd rip off a Band-Aid or something like that? SAM Yeah. You'd tell some stupid joke. DEAN Yeah. Knock, knock. Come on. Knock, knock. SAM Who's... DEAN Still got it.

cute cute. i don't care if it's pandering i will take any and all pre-series anecdotes

SAM Yeah. So, when Chuck… God… said "This is the End," I guess this is what he meant. DEAN Yeah, well. Screw him. He's been playing us this entire time. Just when we thought we had a choice. You know, whenever we thought we had free will. We were just rats in a maze. Sure, we could go left. Sure, we could go right. But we were still in the damn maze. Just makes you think, if all of it… you know, everything that we've done… What did it even mean? SAM It meant a lot. We still saved people. DEAN Yeah, but what for? You know? Just so he could throw another End of the World at us and then sit back and chug popcorn? SAM Maybe. Yeah, maybe. But… now he's gone. DEAN You think? SAM That's what he does. He gets bored and… and… and… and pulls the ripcord. I mean, that's what he did with Apocalypse World and… and probably with all of them. He moves on, starts another story. But you know what? Good. 'Cause if he bailed, it's just us. For the first time. It's just us. DEAN And about three billion ghosts. SAM Yeah, well, what's one more Apocalypse, right? But, seriously, if we win… When we win this, God's gone. Hm. There's no one to screw with us. There's no more maze. It's just us. And we're free. DEAN So you and me versus every soul in Hell? I like those odds. SAM Yeah, me too. DEAN Well, you know what that means. We got work to do.

also will always accept sam and dean vs the world

i'm not totally understanding this jumping to the conclusion that chuck is gone-gone. what with his repeated stated desire last episode that they're his favorite show. would presume he's just orchestrating his big farewell season arc

jay, it was too much to ask for good music throughout, i know. the music backing sam and dean's conversation at the end made me roll my eyes lol

[j2memories]

Entertainment Weekly (May 12th 2023)

The Winchesters has more story to tell, and they're ready to fight for it

Following its cancellation, The Winchesters' cast is speaking out about finding it a new home.

By Samantha Highfill

Published on May 12, 2023

For years, The CW tried to figure out how it could capitalize on the success of Supernatural, its 15-season phenomenon following Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles) as brothers destined to save the world… more than once. During Supernatural's run, the network attempted to launch not one but two spin-offs to no avail (though Wayward Sisters deserved better).

So when Supernatural ended in 2020, fans thought they were done with that world (at least until Padalecki and Ackles feel it's time for a revival). But during quarantine, Ackles teamed up with his wife, Danneel, to launch Chaos Machine Productions. One of their big priorities? The Winchesters, a Supernatural prequel that would follow Sam and Dean's parents, John and Mary, as they met in the 1970s and launched a family legacy.

"If you're going to spin off from this world, it's gotta be about a main character, it's gotta be about a Winchester," Jensen Ackles told EW at the time. "I think it was Danneel who was like, 'Well, it's your mom and dad.'"

On Oct. 11, 2022, The Winchesters premiered, offering fans a welcome return to the Supernatural world. With Dean narrating, the series introduced a young John (Drake Rodger), home from Vietnam, as he met Mary (Meg Donnelly) and discovered the truth that would come to define their lives together: Monsters exist.

For 13 episodes, fans were back in the world they loved — this time around, though, things were a little different. As any good prequel does, The Winchesters expanded on the world and the lore of the flagship series, striking that crucial balance between the new and familiar. They'd cracked the code on how to keep this story alive without Sam and Dean, by shifting the focus from brothers to friends and, for the first time, telling a central Supernatural love story.

In its final episode, The Winchesters opened up the world by revealing that we weren't watching Sam and Dean's John and Mary, but rather the John and Mary of another universe. In other words, the multiverse is the limit when it comes to future stories. "I feel like episode 13 was us literally dropping the engine block in and being like, 'Okay fire it up,'" Ackles tells EW. "We blew the proverbial doors off. I think the potential is massive."

Yes, the potential is massive, even after the show's cancellation by The CW, because he and the cast have already launched a #SaveTheWinchesters campaign to find the story a new home. "There's a lot of story to tell here and there's a huge fan base that is very actively engaged and willing to support it," he says.

The power of the SPN Family has been documented many times (and cannot fully be explained). It's how the show landed its first EW cover back in 2016 — because the fans voted for it. It's a passion that Ackles saw the instant he tweeted out the news that the show had been canceled. "They are fired up," he says of the fans. "I love that about this fandom. I love that they are so passionate about this world and this universe and these characters that they are willing to go to the mat for a show like this. I think that speaks volumes, especially to those who are willing to listen and have the power to do something about it."

As for Ackles, he's feeling optimistic about a future for the show. After all, Dean Winchester's been knocked down more than a few times, and that's never stopped him from getting back up.

"I do feel hopeful and I don't know whether that's just the optimistic side of me, which I didn't know existed in this capacity," he says with a laugh. "I've been moving more toward a curmudgeon, more toward what we all thought Dean Winchester would dive into when he got older. That's just the Dean in me. But I do have this crazy optimism for this show and I think it largely resides in the energy that we found on set with this cast and this crew. That crazy optimism is one of the reasons why this show made it on air in the first place, and I think it's one of the several reasons why the show should continue somewhere."

For those wondering, Ackles says they've already started discussing ideas for what a new season could hold. "We were talking not only about story and where we wanted to take our cast, we were talking about who we were going to bring back from the mothership," he says, adding that he received text messages from a few Supernatural alums who were bummed they didn't make it on season 1. "We were putting together a lot of tricks to keep up our sleeve and keep it exciting, not just for the new fans but for the returning fans as well."

Much like creator Eric Kripke had at the start of Supernatural, Winchesters showrunner Robbie Thompson has a five-season plan for the story. "Hopefully we get to execute that," Ackles says. "I just think that there's a way to keep this alive and it would be a shame to let that go."

Looking even further into the future, Ackles adds, "And then we don't know what it would look like beyond that but there was certainly a way of tying this into like a possible return of Supernatural down the line, which Robbie and I had talked about. It's something that Jared and I have talked about, what that might look like."

Link to the entire article

[domesticated-dragon]

The Winchesters, or Dean tries to write a book about his family in Heaven. But for some reason, his parents remember things very differently. His 2 editors (his BF and son) don't help much.

[seenashwrite]

Cards Against Supernatural: Nash’s Birthday Edition

Hey Dean, Sam... this sound like a good idea to y’all?

Awesome.

If you see this? You’re invited. ALL SPN Family members who are at least 18 years-of-age are welcome! 

We’ve got a large cap tonight, but if you can’t get in to play, just log in as “Spectator” til a slot opens up!

💡IF THIS WILL BE YOUR FIRST GAME WITH US, YOU NEED TO MAKE SURE IT’S GONNA BE YOUR JAM & READ THIS AHEAD OF TIME 💡

🔍 If you need to know more? Head over to CASPN's Headquarters! 🔎

GO TO THE GAME password: NASHPARTY

* FYI: We’re still on the alt server even though the main is back up, because on the main there’s no longer any chat or blank card functions, so we’re gonna have to get Skype or Discord sorted before we head back there *