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holyhellpod · 4 years ago

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Holy Hell: 3. Metanarrativity: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship? aka the analysis no one asked for.

In this ep, we delve into authorship, narrative, fandom and narrative meaning. And somehow, as always, bring it back to Cas and Misha Collins.

(Note: the reason I didn’t talk about Billie’s authorship and library is because I completely forgot it existed until I watched season 13 “Advanced Thanatology” again, while waiting for this episode to upload. I’ll find a way to work her into later episodes tho!)

I had to upload it as a new podcast to Spotify so if you could just re-subscribe that would be great! Or listen to it at these other links.

Please listen to the bit at the beginning about monetisation and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to message me here.

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Transcript under the cut!

Warnings: discussions of incest, date rape, rpf, war, 9/11, the bush administration, abuse, mental health, addiction, homelessness. Most of these are just one off comments, they’re not full discussions.

Meta-Textuality: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship?

In the third episode of Season 6, “The Third Man,” Balthazar says to Cas, “you tore up the whole script and burned the pages.” That is the fundamental idea the writers of the first five seasons were trying to sell us: whatever grand plan the biblical God had cooking up is worth nothing in face of the love these men have—for each other and the world. Sam, Bobby, Cas and Dean will go to any lengths to protect one another and keep people safe. What’s real? What’s worth saving? People are real. Families are worth saving.

This show plugs free will as the most important thing a person, angel, demon or otherwise can have. The fact of the matter is that Dean was always going to fight against the status quo, Sam was always going to go his own way, and Bobby was always going to do his best for his boys. The only uncertainty in the entire narrative is Cas. He was never meant to rebel. He was never meant to fall from Heaven. He was supposed to fall in line, be a good soldier, and help bring on the apocalypse, but Cas was the first agent of free will in the show’s timeline. Sam followed Lucifer, Dean followed Michael, and John gave himself up for the sins of his children, at once both a God and Jesus figure. But Cas wasn’t modelled off anyone else. He is original. There are definitely some parallels to Ruby, but I would argue those are largely unintentional. Cas broke the mold.

That’s to say nothing of the impact he’s had on the fanbase, and the show itself, which would not have reached 15 seasons and be able to end the way they wanted it to without Cas and Misha Collins. His back must be breaking from carrying the entire show.

But what the holy hell are we doing here today? Not just talking about Cas. We’re talking about metanarrativity: as I define it, and for purposes of this episode, the story within a story, and the act of storytelling. We’re going to go through a select few episodes which I think exemplify the best of what this show has to offer in terms of framing the narrative. We’ll talk about characters like Chuck and Becky and the baby dykes in season 10. And most importantly we’ll talk about the audience’s role, our role, in the reciprocal relationship of storytelling. After all, a tv show is nothing without the viewer.

I was in fact introduced to the concept of metanarrativity by Supernatural, so the fact that I’m revisiting it six years after I finished my degree to talk about the show is one of life’s little jokes.

I’m brushing off my degree and bringing out the big guns (aka literary theorists) to examine this concept. This will be yet another piece of analysis that would’ve gone well in my English Lit degree, but I’ll try not to make it dry as dog shit.

First off, I’m going to argue that the relationship between the creators of Supernatural and the fans has always been a dialogue, albeit with a power imbalance. Throughout the series, even before explicitly metanarrative episodes like season 10 “Fan Fiction” and season 4 “the monster at the end of this book,” the creators have always engaged in conversations with the fans through the show. This includes but is not limited to fan conventions, where the creators have actual, live conversations with the fans. Misha Collins admitted at a con that he’d read fanfiction of Cas while he was filming season 4, but it’s pretty clear even from the first season that the creators, at the very least Eric Kripke, were engaging with fans. The show aired around the same time as Twitter and Tumblr were created, both of which opened up new passageways for fans to interact with each other, and for Twitter and Facebook especially, new passageways for fans to interact with creators and celebrities.

But being the creators, they have ultimate control over what is written, filmed and aired, while we can only speculate and make our own transformative interpretations. But at least since s4, they have engaged in meta narrative construction that at once speaks to fans as well as expands the universe in fun and creative ways. My favourite episodes are the ones where we see the Winchesters through the lens of other characters, such as the season 3 episode “Jus In Bello,” in which Sam and Dean are arrested by Victor Henriksen, and the season 7 episode “Slash Fiction” in which Dean and Sam’s dopplegangers rob banks and kill a bunch of people, loathe as I am to admit that season 7 had an effect on any part of me except my upchuck reflex. My second favourite episodes are the meta episodes, and for this episode of Holy Hell, we’ll be discussing a few: The French Mistake, he Monster at the end of this book, the real ghostbusters, Fan Fiction, Metafiction, and Don’t Call Me Shurley. I’ll also discuss Becky more broadly, because, like, of course I’ll be discussing Becky, she died for our sins.

Let’s take it back. The Monster At The End Of This Book — written by Julie Siege and Nancy Weiner and directed by Mike Rohl. Inarguably one of the better episodes in the first five seasons. Not only is Cas in it, looking so beautiful, but Sam gets something to do, thank god, and it introduces the character of Chuck, who becomes a source of comic relief over the next two seasons. The episode starts with Chuck Shurley, pen named Carver Edlund after my besties, having a vision while passed out drunk. He dreams of Sam and Dean larping as Feds and finding a series of books based on their lives that Chuck has written. They eventually track Chuck down, interrogate him, and realise that he’s a prophet of the lord, tasked with writing the Winchester Gospels. The B plot is Sam plotting to kill Lilith while Dean fails to get them out of the town to escape her. The C plot is Dean and Cas having a moment that strengthens their friendship and leads further into Cas’s eventual disobedience for Dean. Like the movie Disobedience. Exactly like the movie Disobedience. Cas definitely spits in Dean’s mouth, it’s kinda gross to be honest. Maybe I’m just not allo enough to appreciate art.

When Eric Kripke was showrunner of the first five seasons of Supernatural, he conceptualised the character of Chuck. Kripke as the author-god introduced the character of the author-prophet who would later become in Jeremy Carver’s showrun seasons the biblical God. Judith May Fathallah writes in “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural” that Kripke writes himself both into and out of the text, ending his era with Chuck winking at the camera, saying, “nothing really ends,” and disappearing. Kripke stayed on as producer, continuing to write episodes through Sera Gamble’s era, and was even inserted in text in the season 6 episode “The French Mistake”. So nothing really does end, not Kripke’s grip on the show he created, not even the show itself, which fans have jokingly referred to as continuing into its 16th season. Except we’re not joking. It will die when all of us are dead, when there is no one left to remember it. According to W R Fisher, humans are homo narrans, natural storytellers. The Supernatural fandom is telling a fidelitous narrative, one which matches our own beliefs, values and experiences instead of that of canon. Instead of, at Fathallah says, “the Greek tradition, that we should struggle to do the right thing simply because it is right, though we will suffer and be punished anyway,” the fans have created an ending for the characters that satisfies each and every one of our desires, because we each create our own endings. It’s better because we get to share them with each other, in the tradition of campfire stories, each telling our own version and building upon the others. If that’s not the epitome of mythmaking then I don’t know. It’s just great. Dean and Cas are married, Eileen and Sam are married, Jack is sometimes a baby who Claire and Kaia are forced to babysit, Jody and Donna are gonna get hitched soon. It’s season 17, time for many weddings, and Kevin Tran is alive. Kripke, you have no control over this anymore, you crusty hag.

Chuck is introduced as someone with power, but not influence over the story, only how the story is told through the medium of the novels. It’s basically a very badly written, non authorised biography, and Charlie reading literally every book and referencing things she should have no knowledge of is so damn creepy and funny. At first Chuck is surprised by his characters coming to life, despite having written it already, and when shown the intimidating array of weapons in Baby’s trunk he gets real scared. Which is the appropriate response for a skinny 5-foot-8 white guy in a bathrobe who writes terrible fantasy novels for a living.

As far as I can remember, this is the first explicitly metanarrative episode in the series, or at least the first one with in world consequences. It builds upon the lore of Christianity, angels, and God, while teasing what’s to come. Chuck and Sam have a conversation about how the rest of the season is going to play out, and Sam comes away with the impression that he’ll go down with the ship. They touch on Sam’s addiction to demon blood, which Chuck admits he didn’t write into the books, because in the world of supernatural, addiction should be demonised ha ha at every opportunity, except for Dean’s alcoholism which is cool and manly and should never be analysed as an unhealthy trauma coping mechanism.

Chuck is mostly impotent in the story of Sam and Dean, but his very presence presents an element of good luck that turns quickly into a force of antagonism in the series four finale, “Lucifer Rising”, when the archangel Raphael who defeats Lilith in this episode also kills Cas in the finale. It’s Cas’s quick thinking and Dean’s quick doing that resolve the episode and save them from Lilith, once again proving that free will is the greatest force in the universe. Cas is already tearing up pages and burning scripts. The fandom does the same, acting as gods of their own making in taking canon and transforming it into fan art. The fans aren’t impotent like Chuck, but neither do we have sway over the story in the way that Cas and Dean do. Sam isn’t interested in changing the story in the same way—he wants to kill Lilith and save the world, but in doing so continues the story in the way it was always supposed to go, the way the angels and the demons and even God wanted him to.

Neither of them are author-gods in the way that God is. We find out later that Chuck is in fact the real biblical god, and he engineers everything. The one thing he doesn’t engineer, however, is Castiel, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Real Ghostbusters

Season 5’s “The real ghostbusters,” written by Nancy Weiner and Erik Kripke, and directed by James L Conway, situates the Winchesters at a fan convention for the Supernatural books. While there, they are confronted by a slew of fans cosplaying as Sam, Dean, Bobby, the scarecrow, Azazel, and more. They happen to stumble upon a case, in the midst of the game where the fans pretend to be on a case, and with the help of two fans cosplaying as Sam and Dean, they put to rest a group of homicidal ghost children and save the day. Chuck as the special guest of the con has a hero moment that spurs Becky on to return his affections. And at the end, we learn that the Colt, which they’ve been hunting down to kill the devil, was given to a demon named Crowley. It’s a fun episode, but ultimately skippable. This episode isn’t so much metanarrative as it is metatextual—metatextual meaning more than one layer of text but not necessarily about the storytelling in those texts—but let’s take a look at it anyway.

The metanarrative element of a show about a series of books about the brothers the show is based on is dope and expands upon what we saw in “the monster at the end of this book”. But the episode tells a tale about about the show itself, and the fandom that surrounds it.

Where “The Monster At The End Of This Book” and the season 5 premiere “Sympathy For The Devil” poked at the coiled snake of fans and the concept of fandom, “the real ghostbusters” drags them into the harsh light of an enclosure and antagonises them in front of an audience. The metanarrative element revolves around not only the books themselves, but the stories concocted within the episode: namely Barnes and Demian the cosplayers and the story of the ghosts. The Winchester brothers’s history that we’ve seen throughout the first five seasons of the show is bared in a tongue in cheek way: while we cried with them when Sam and Dean fought with John, now the story is thrown out in such a way as to mock both the story and the fans’ relationship to it. Let me tell you, there is a lot to be made fun of on this show, but the fans’ relationship to the story of Sam, Dean and everyone they encounter along the way isn’t part of it. I don’t mean to be like, wow you can’t make fun of us ever because we’re special little snowflakes and we take everything so seriously, because you are welcome to make fun of us, but when the creators do it, I can’t help but notice a hint of malice. And I think that’s understandable in a way. Like The relationship between creator and fan is both layered and symbiotic. While Kripke and co no doubt owe the show’s popularity to the fans, especially as the fandom has grown and evolved over time, we’re not exactly free of sin. And don’t get me wrong, no fandom is. But the bad apples always seem to outweigh the good ones, and bad experiences can stick with us long past their due.

However, portraying us as losers with no lives who get too obsessed with this show — well, you know, actually, maybe they’re right. I am a loser with no life and I am too obsessed with this show. So maybe they have a point. But they’re so harsh about it. From wincestie Becky who they paint as a desperate shrew to these cosplayers who threaten Dean’s very perception of himself, we’re not painted in a very good light.

Dean says to Demian and Barnes, “It must be nice to get out of your mom’s basement.” He’s judging them for deriving pleasure from dressing up and pretending to be someone else for a night. He doesn’t seem to get the irony that he does that for a living. As the seasons wore on, the creators made sure to include episodes where Dean’s inner geek could run rampant, often in the form of dressing up like a cowboy, such as season six “Frontierland” and season 13 “Tombstone”. I had to take a break from writing this to laugh for five minutes because Dean is so funny. He’s a car gay but he only likes one car. He doesn’t follow sports. His echolalia causes him to blurt out lines from his favourite movies. He’s a posse magnet. And he loves cosplay. But he will continually degrade and insult anyone who expresses interest in role play, fandom, or interests in general. Maybe that’s why Sam is such a boring person, because Dean as his mother didn’t allow him to have any interests outside of hunting. And when Sam does express interests, Dean insults him too. What a dick. He’s my soulmate, but I am not going to stop listening to hair metal for him. That’s where I draw the line.

Where “the monster at the end of this book” is concerned with narrative and authorship, “the real ghostbusters” is concerned with fandom and fan reactions to the show. It’s not really the best example to talk about in an episode about metanarrativity, but I wanted to include it anyway. It veers from talk of narrative by focusing on the people in the periphery of the narrative—the fans and the author. In season 9 “Metafiction,” Metatron asks the question, who gives the story meaning? The text would have you believe it’s the characters. The angels think it’s God. The fandom think it’s us. The creators think it’s them. Perhaps we will never come to a consensus or even a satisfactory answer to this question. Perhaps that’s the point.

The ultimate takeaway from this episode is that ordinary people, the people Sam and Dean save, the people they save the world for, the people they die for again and again, are what give their story meaning. Chuck defeats a ghost and saves the people in the conference room from being murdered. Demian and Barnes, don’t ask me which is which, burn the bodies of the ghost children and lay their spirits to rest. The text says that ordinary, every day people can rise to the challenge of becoming extraordinary. It’s not a bad note to end on, by any means. And then we find out that Demian and Barnes are a couple, which of course Dean is surprised at, because he lacks object permanence.

This is no doubt influenced by how a good portion of the transformative fandom are queer, and also a nod to the wincesties and RPF writers like Becky who continue to bottom feed off the wrong message of this show. But then, the creators encourage that sort of thing, so who are the real clowns here? Everyone. Everyone involved with this show in any way is a clown, except for the crew, who were able to feed their families for more than a decade.

Okay side note… over the past year or so I’ve been in process of realising that even in fandom queers are in the minority. I know the statistic is that 10% of the world population is queer, but that doesn’t seem right to me? Maybe because 4/5 closest friends are queer and I hang around queers online, but I also think I lack object permanence when it comes to straight people. Like I just do not interact with straight people on a regular basis outside of my best friend and parents and school. So when I hear that someone in fandom is straight I’m like, what the fuck… can you keep that to yourself please? Like if I saw Misha Collins coming out as straight I would be like, I didn’t ask and you didn’t have to tell. Okay I’m mostly joking, but I do forget straight people exist. Mostly I don’t think about whether people are gay or trans or cis or straight unless they’ve explicitly said it and then yes it does colour my perception of them, because of course it would. If they’re part of the queer community, they’re my people. And if they’re straight and cis, then they could very well pose a threat to me and my wellbeing. But I never ask people because it’s not my business to ask. If they feel comfortable enough to tell me, that’s awesome. I think Dean feels the same way. Towards the later seasons at least, he has a good reaction when it’s revealed that someone is queer, even if it is mostly played off as a joke. It’s just that he doesn’t have a frame of reference in his own life to having a gay relationship, either his or someone he’s close to. He says to Cesar and Jesse in season 11 “The Critters” that they fight like brothers, because that’s the only way he knows how to conceptualise it. He doesn’t have a way to categorise his and Cas’s relationship, which is in many ways, long before season 15 “Despair,” harking back even to the parallels between Ruby and Cas in season 3 and 4, a romantic one, aside from that Cas is like a brother to him. Because he’s never had anyone in his life care for him the way Cas does that wasn’t Sam and Bobby, and he doesn’t recognise the romantic element of their relationship until literally Cas says it to him in the third last episode, he just—doesn’t know what his and Cas’s relationship is. He just really doesn’t know. And he grew up with a father who despised him for taking the mom and wife role in their family, the role that John placed him in, for being subservient to John’s wishes where Sam was more rebellious, so of course he wouldn’t understand either his own desires or those of anyone around him who isn’t explicitly shoving their tits in his face. He moulded his entire personality around what he thought John wanted of him, and John says to him explicitly in season 14 “Lebanon”, “I thought you’d have a family,” meaning, like him, wife and two rugrats. And then, dear god, Dean says, thinking of Sam, Cas, Jack, Claire, and Mary, “I have a family.” God that hurts so much. But since for most of his life he hasn’t been himself, he’s been the man he thought his father wanted him to be, he’s never been able to examine his own desires, wants and goals. So even though he’s really good at reading people, he is not good at reading other people’s desires unless they have nefarious intentions. Because he doesn’t recognise what he feels is attraction to men, he doesn’t recognise that in anyone else.

Okay that’s completely off topic, wow. Getting back to metanarrativity in “The Real Ghostbusters,” I’ll just cap it off by saying that the books in this episode are more a frame for the events than the events themselves. However, there are some good outtakes where Chuck answers some questions, and I’m not sure how much of that is scripted and how much is Rob Benedict just going for it, but it lends another element to the idea of Kripke as author-god. The idea of a fan convention is really cool, because at this point Supernatural conventions had been running for about 4 years, since 2006. It’s definitely a tribute to the fans, but also to their own self importance. So it’s a mixed bag, considering there were plenty of elements in there that show the good side of fandom and fans, but ultimately the Winchesters want nothing to do with it, consider it weird, and threaten Chuck when he says he’ll start releasing books again, which as far as they know is his only source of income. But it’s a fun episode and Dean is a grouchy bitch, so who the holy hell cares?

Season 10 episode “fanfiction” written by my close personal friend Robbie Thompson and directed by Phil Sgriccia is one of the funniest episodes this show has ever done. Not only is it full of metatextual and metanarrative jokes, the entire premise revolves around fanservice, but in like a fun and interesting way, not fanservice like killing the band Kansas so that Dean can listen to “Carry On My Wayward Son” in heaven twice. Twice. One version after another. Like I would watch this musical seven times in theatre, I would buy the soundtrack, I would listen to it on repeat and make all my friends listen to it when they attend my online Jitsi birthday party. This musical is my Hamilton. Top ten episodes of this show for sure. The only way it could be better is if Cas was there. And he deserved to be there. He deserved to watch little dyke Castiel make out with her girlfriend with her cute little wings, after which he and Dean share uncomfortable eye contact. Dean himself is forever coming to terms with the fact that gay people exist, but Cas should get every opportunity he can to hear that it’s super cool and great and awesome to be queer. But really he should be in every episode, all of them, all 300 plus episodes including the ones before angels were introduced. I’m going to commission the guy who edits Paddington into every movie to superimpose Cas standing on the highway into every episode at least once.

“Fan Fiction” starts with a tv script and the words “Supernatural pilot created by Eric Kripke”. This Immediately sets up the idea that it’s toying with narrative. Blah blah blah, some people go missing, they stumble into a scene from their worst nightmares: the school is putting on a musical production of a show inspired by the Supernatural books. It’s a comedy of errors. When people continue to go missing, Sam and Dean have to convince the girls that something supernatural is happening, while retaining their dignity and respect. They reveal that they are the real Sam and Dean, and Dean gives the director Marie a summary of their lives over the last five seasons, but they aren’t taken seriously. Because, like, of course they aren’t. Even when the girls realise that something supernatural is happening, they don’t actually believe that the musical they’ve made and the series of books they’re basing it on are real. Despite how Sam and Dean Winchester were literal fugitives for many years at many different times, and this was on the news, and they were wanted by the FBI, despite how they pretend to be FBI, and no one mentions it??? Did any of the staffwriters do the required reading or just do what I used to do for my 40 plus page readings of Baudrillard and just skim the first sentence of every paragraph? Neat hack for you: paragraphs are set up in a logical order of Topic, Example, Elaboration, Linking sentence. Do you have to read 60 pages of some crusty French dude waxing poetic about how his best friend Pierre wants to shag his wife and making that your problem? Read the first and last sentence of every paragraph. Boom, done. Just cut your work in half.

The musical highlights a lot of the important moments of the show so far. The brothers have, as Charlie Bradbury says, their “broment,” and as Marie says, their “boy melodrama scene,” while she insinuates that there is a sexual element to their relationship. This show never passed up an opportunity to mention incest. It’s like: mentioning incest 5000 km, not being disgusting 1 km, what a hard decision. Actually, they do have to walk on their knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. But there are other moments—such as Mary burning on the ceiling, a classic, Castiel waiting for Dean at the side of the highway, and Azazel poisoning Sam. With the help of the high schoolers, Sam and Dean overcome Calliope, the muse and bad guy of the episode, and save the day. What began as their lives reinterpreted and told back to them turns into a story they have some agency over.

In this episode, as opposed to “The Monster At The End Of This Book,” The storytelling has transferred from an alcoholic in a bathrobe into the hands of an overbearing and overachieving teenage girl, and honestly why not. Transformative fiction is by and large run by women, and queer women, so Marie and her stage manager slash Jody Mills’s understudy Maeve are just following in the footsteps of legends. This kind of really succinctly summarises the difference between curative fandom and transformative fandom, the former of which is populated mostly by men, and the latter mostly by women. As defined by LordByronic in 2015, Curative fandom is more like enjoying the text, collecting the merchandise, organising the knowledge — basically Reddit in terms of fandom curation. Transformative fandom is transforming the source text in some way — making fanart, fanfic, mvs, or a musical — basically Tumblr in general, and Archive of our own specifically. Like what do non fandom people even do on Tumblr? It is a complete mystery to me. Whereas Chuck literally writes himself into the narrative he receives through visions, Marie and co have agency and control over the narrative by writing it themselves.

Chuck does appear in the episode towards the end, his first appearance after five seasons. The theory that he killed those lesbian theatre girls makes me wanna curl up and die, so I don’t subscribe to it. Chuck watched the musical and he liked it and he gave unwarranted notes and then he left, the end.

The Supernatural creative team is explicitly acknowledging the fandom’s efforts by making this episode. They’re writing us in again, with more obsessive fans, but with lethbians this time, which makes it infinitely better. And instead of showing us as potential date rapists, we’re just cool chicks who like to make art. And that’s fucken awesome.

I just have to note that the characters literally say the word Destiel after Dean sees the actors playing Dean and Cas making out. He storms off and tells Sam to shut the fuck up when Sam makes fun of him, because Dean’s sexuality is NOT threatened he just needs to assert his dominance as a straight hetero man who has NEVER looked at another man’s lips and licked his own. He just… forgets that gay people exist until someone reminds him. BUT THEN, after a rousing speech that is stolen from Rent or Wicked or something, he echoes Marie’s words back, saying “put as much sub into that text as you possibly can.” What does Dean know about subbing, I wonder. Okay I’m suddenly reminded that he did literally go to a kink bar and get hit on by a leather daddy. Oh Dean, the experiences you have as a broad-shouldered, pixie-faced man with cowboy legs. You were born for this role.

Metatron is my favourite villain. As one tumblr user pointed out, he is an evil English literature major, which is just a normal English literature major. The season nine episode “Meta Fiction” written by my main man robbie thompson and directed by thomas j wright, happens within a curious season. Castiel, once again, becomes the leader of a portion of the heavenly host to take down Metatron, and Dean is affected by the Mark Of Cain. Sam was recently possessed by Gadreel, who killed Kevin in Sam’s body and then decided to run off with Metatron. Metatron himself is recruiting angels to join him, in the hopes that he can become the new God. It’s the first introduction of Hannah, who encourages Cas to recruit angels himself to take on Metatron. Also, we get to see Gabriel again, who is always a delight.

This episode is a lot of fun. Metatron poses questions like, who tells a story and who is the most important person in the telling? Is it the writer? The audience? He starts off staring over his typewriter to address the camera, like a pompous dickhead. No longer content with consuming stories, he’s started to write his own. And they are hubristic ones about becoming God, a better god than Chuck ever was, but to do it he needs to kill a bunch of people and blame it on Cas. So really, he’s actually exactly like Chuck who blamed everything on Lucifer.

But I think the most apt analogy we can use for this in terms of who is the creator is to think of Metatron as a fanfiction writer. He consumes the media—the Winchester Gospels—and starts to write his own version of events—leading an army to become God and kill Cas. Nevermind that no one has been able to kill Cas in a way that matters or a way that sticks. Which is canon, and what Metatron is trying to do is—well not fanon because it actually does impact the Winchesters’ storyline. It would be like if one of the writers of Supernatural began writing Supernatural fanfiction before they got a job on the show. Which as my generation and the generations coming after me get more comfortable with fanfiction and fandom, is going to be the case for a lot of shows. I think it’s already the case for Riverdale. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the woman who wrote the bi Dean essay go to work on Riverdale? Or something? I dunno, I have the post saved in my tumblr likes but that is quagmire of epic proportions that I will easily get lost in if I try to find it.

Okay let me flex my literary degree. As Englund and Leach say in “Ethnography and the metanarratives of modernity,” “The influential “literary turn,” in which the problems of ethnography were seen as largely textual and their solutions as lying in experimental writing seems to have lost its impetus.” This can be taken to mean, in the context of Supernatural, that while Metatron’s writings seek to forge a new path in history, forgoing fate for a new kind of divine intervention, the problem with Metatron is that he’s too caught up in the textual, too caught up in the writing, to be effectual. And this as we see throughout seasons 9, 10 and 11, has no lasting effect. Cas gets his grace back, Dean survives, and Metatron becomes a powerless human. In this case, the impetus is his grace, which he loses when Cas cuts it out of him, a mirror to Metatron cutting out Cas’s grace.

However, I realise that the concept of ethnography in Supernatural is a flawed one, ethnography being the observation of another culture: a lot of the angels observe humanity and seem to fit in. However, Cas has to slowly acclimatise to the Winchesters as they tame him, but he never quite fit in—missing cues, not understanding jokes or Dean’s personal space, the scene where he says, “We have a guinea pig? Where?” Show him the guinea pig Sam!!! He wants to see it!!! At most he passes as a human with autism. Cas doesn’t really observe humanity—he observes nature, as seen in season 7 “reading is fundamental” and “survival of the fittest”. Even the human acts he talks about in season 6 “the man who would be king” are from hundreds or thousands of years ago. He certainly doesn’t observe popular culture, which puts him at odds with Dean, who is made up of 90 per cent pop culture references and 10 per cent flannel. Metatron doesn’t seek to blend in with humanity so much as control it, which actually is the most apt example of ethnography for white people in the last—you know, forever. But of course the writers didn’t seek to make this analogy. It is purely by chance, and maybe I’m the only person insane enough to realise it. But probably not. There are a lot of cookies much smarter than me in the Supernatural fandom and they’ve like me have grown up and gone to university and gotten real jobs in the real world and real haircuts. I’m probably the only person to apply Englund and Leach to it though.

And yes, as I read this paper I did need to have one tab open on Google, with the word “define” in the search bar.

Metatron has a few lines in this that I really like. He says:

“The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.”

“You’re going to have to follow my script.”

“I’m an entity of my word.”

It’s really obvious, but they’re pushing the idea that Metatron has become an agent of authorship instead of just a consumer of media. He even throws a Supernatural book into his fire — a symbolic act of burning the script and flipping the writer off, much like Cas did to God and the angels in season 5. He’s not a Kripke figure so much as maybe a Gamble, Carver or Dabb figure, in that he usurps Chuck and becomes the author-god. This would be extremely postmodern of him if he didn’t just do exactly what Chuck was doing, except worse somehow. In fact, it’s postmodern of Cas to reject heaven’s narrative and fall for Dean. As one tumblr user points out, Cas really said “What’s fate compared to Dean Winchester?”

Okay this transcript is almost 8000 words already, and I still have two more episodes to review, and more things to say, so I’ll leave you with this. Metatron says to Cas, “Out of all of God’s wind up toys, you’re the only one with any spunk.” Why Cas has captured his attention comes down more than anything to a process of elimination. Most angels fucking suck. They follow the rules of whoever puts themselves in charge, and they either love Cas or hate him, or just plainly wanna fuck him, and there have been few angels who stood out. Balthazar was awesome, even though I hated him the first time I watched season 6. He UNSUNK the Titanic. Legend status. And Gabriel was of course the OG who loves to fuck shit up. But they’re gone at this stage in the narrative, and Cas survives. Cas always survives. He does have spunk. And everyone wants to fuck him.

Season 11 episode 20 “Don’t Call Me Shurley,” the last episode written by the Christ like figure of Robbie Thompson — are we sensing a theme here? — and directed by my divine enemy Robert Singer, starts with Metatron dumpster diving for food. I’m not even going to bother commenting on this because like… it’s supernatural and it treats complex issues like homelessness and poverty with zero nuance. Like the Winchesters live in poverty but it’s fun and cool because they always scrape by but Metatron lives in poverty and it’s funny. Cas was homeless and it was hard but he needed to do it to atone for his sins, and Metatron is homeless and it’s funny because he brought it on himself by being a murderous dick. Fucking hell. Robbie, come on. The plot focuses on God, also known as Chuck Shurley, making himself known to Metatron and asking for Metatron’s opinion on his memoir. Meanwhile, the Winchesters battle another bout of infectious serial killer fog sent by Amara. At the end of the episode, Chuck heals everyone affected by the fog and reveals himself to Sam and Dean.

Chuck says that he didn’t foresee Metatron trying to become god, but the idea of Season 15 is that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all their lives. When Metatron tries, he fails miserably, is locked up in prison, tortured by Dean, then rendered useless as a human and thrown into the world without a safety net. His authorship is reduced to nothing, and he is reduced to dumpster diving for food. He does actually attempt to live his life as someone who records tragedies as they happen and sells the footage to news stations, which is honestly hilarious and amazing and completely unsurprising because Metatron is, at the heart of it, an English Literature major. In true bastard style, he insults Chuck’s work and complains about the bar, but slips into his old role of editor when Chuck asks him to.

The theory I’m consulting for this uses the term metanarrative in a different way than I am. They consider it an overarching narrative, a grand narrative like religion. Chuck’s biography is in a sense most loyal to Middleton and Walsh’s view of metanarrative: “the universal story of the world from arche to telos, a grand narrative encompassing world history from beginning to end.” Except instead of world history, it’s God’s history, and since God is construed in Supernatural as just some guy with some powers who is as fallible as the next some guy with some powers, his story has biases and agendas. Okay so in the analysis I’m getting Middleton and Walsh’s quotes from, James K A Smith’s “A little story about metanarratives,” Smith dunks on them pretty bad, but for Supernatural purposes their words ring true. Think of them as the BuckLeming of Lyotard’s postmodern metanarrative analysis: a stopped clock right twice a day. Is anyone except me understanding the sequence of words I’m saying right now. Do I just have the most specific case of brain worms ever found in human history. I’m currently wearing my oversized Keith Haring shirt and dipping pretzels into peanut butter because it’s 3.18 in the morning and the homosexuals got to me. The total claims a comprehensive metanarrative of world history make do indeed, as Middleton and Walsh claim, lead to violence, stay with me here, because Chuck’s legacy is violence, and so is Metatron’s, and in trying to reject the metanarrative, Sam and Dean enact violence. Mostly Dean, because in season 15 he sacrifices his own son twice to defeat Chuck. But that means literally fighting violence with violence. Violence is, after all, all they know. Violence is the lens through which they interact with the world. If the writers wanted to do literally anything else, they could have continued Dean’s natural character progression into someone who eschews the violence that stems from intergeneration trauma — yes I will continue to use the phrase intergenerational trauma whenever I refer to Dean — and becomes a loving father and husband. Sam could eschew violence and start a monster rehabilitation centre with Eileen.

This episode of Holy Hell is me frantically grabbing at straws to make sense of a narrative that actively hates me and wants to kick me to death. But the violence Sam and Dean enact is not at a metanarrative level, because they are not author-gods of their own narrative. In season 15 “Atomic Monsters,” Becky points out that the ending of the Supernatural book series is bad because the brothers die, and then, in a shocking twist of fate, Dean does die, and the narrative is bad. The writers set themselves a goal post to kick through and instead just slammed their heat into the bars. They set up the dartboard and were like, let’s aim the darts at ourselves. Wouldn’t that be fun. Season 15’s writing is so grossly incompetent that I believe every single conspiracy theory that’s come out of the finale since November, because it’s so much more compelling than whatever the fuck happened on the road so far. Carry on? Why yes, I think I will carry on, carry on like a pork chop, screaming at the bars of my enclosure until I crack my voice open like an egg and spill out all my rage and frustration. The world will never know peace again. It’s now 3.29 and I’ve written over 9000 words of this transcript. And I’m not done.

Middleton and Walsh claim that metanarratives are merely social constructions masquerading as universal truths. Which is, exactly, Supernatural. The creators have constructed this elaborate web of narrative that they want to sell us as the be all and end all. They won’t let the actors discuss how they really feel about the finale. They won’t let Misha Collins talk about Destiel. They want us to believe it was good, actually, that Dean, a recovering alcoholic with a 30 year old infant son and a husband who loves him, deserved to die by getting NAILED, while Sam, who spent the last four seasons, the entirety of Andrew Dabb’s run as showrunner, excelling at creating a hunter network and romancing both the queen of hell and his deaf hunter girlfriend, should have lived a normie life with a normie faceless wife. Am I done? Not even close. I started this episode and I’m going to finish it.

When we find out that Chuck is God in the episode of season 11, it turns everything we knew about Chuck on its head. We find out in Season 15 that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all along, that everything that happened to them is his doing. The one thing he couldn’t control was Cas’s choice to rebel. If we take him at his word, Cas is the only true force of free will in the entire universe, and more specifically, the love that Cas had for Dean which caused him to rebel and fall from heaven. — This theory has holes of course. Why would Lucifer torture Lilith into becoming the first demon if he didn’t have free will? Did Chuck make him do that? And why? So that Chuck could be the hero and Lucifer the bad guy, like Lucifer claimed all along? That’s to say nothing of Adam and Eve, both characters the show introduced in different ways, one as an antagonist and the other as the narrative foil to Dean and Cas’s romance. Thinking about it makes my head hurt, so I’m just not gunna.

So Chuck was doing the writing all along. And as Becky claims in “Atomic Monsters,” it’s bad writing. The writers explicitly said, the ending Chuck wrote is bad because there’s no Cas and everyone dies, and then they wrote an ending where there is no Cas and everyone dies. So talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. Talk about giant craters in the earth you could see from 800 kilometres away but you still fell into. Meanwhile fan writers have the opportunity to write a million different endings, all of which satisfy at least one person. The fandom is a hydra, prolific and unstoppable, and we’ll keep rewriting the ending a million more times.

And all this is not even talking about the fact that Chuck is a man, Metatron is a man, Sam and Dean and Cas are men, and the writers and directors of the show are, by an overwhelming majority, men. Most of them are white, straight, cis men. Feminist scholarship has done a lot to unpack the damage done by paternalistic approaches to theory, sociology, ethnography, all the -ys, but I propose we go a step further with these men. Kill them. Metanarratively, of course. Amara, the Darkness, God’s sister, had a chance to write her own story without Chuck, after killing everything in the universe, and I think she had the right idea. Knock it all down to build it from the ground up. Billie also had the opportunity to write a narrative, but her folly was, of course, putting any kind of faith in the Winchesters who are also grossly incompetent and often fail up. She is, as all author-gods on this show are, undone by Castiel. The only one with any spunk, the only one who exists outside of his own narrative confines, the only one the author-gods don’t have any control over. The one who died for love, and in dying, gave life.

The French Mistake

Let’s change the channel. Let’s calm ourselves and cleanse our libras. Let’s commune with nature and chug some sage bongs.

“The French Mistake” is a song from the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles. In the iconic second last scene of the film, as the cowboys fight amongst themselves, the camera pans back to reveal a studio lot and a door through which a chorus of gay dancersingers perform “the French Mistake”. The lyrics go, “Throw out your hands, stick out your tush, hands on your hips, give ‘em a push. You’ll be surprised you’re doing the French Mistake.”

I’m not sure what went through the heads of the Supernatural creators when they came up with the season 6 episode, “The French Mistake,” written by the love of my life Ben Edlund and directed by some guy Charles Beeson. Just reading the Wikipedia summary is so batshit incomprehensible. In short: Balthazar sends Sam and Dean to an alternate universe where they are the actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, who play Sam and Dean on the tv show Supernatural. I don’t think this had ever been done in television history before. The first seven seasons of this show are certifiable. Like this was ten years ago. Think about the things that have happened in the last 10 slutty, slutty years. We have lived through atrocities and upheaval and the entire world stopping to mourn, but also we had twitter throughout that entire time, which makes it infinitely worse.

In this universe, Sam and Dean wear makeup, Cas is played by attractive crying man Misha Collins, and Genevieve Padalecki nee Cortese makes an appearance. Magic doesn’t exist, Serge has good ideas, and the two leads have to act in order to get through the day. Sorry man I do not know how to pronounce your name.

Sidenote: I don’t know if me being attracted aesthetically to Misha Collins is because he’s attractive, because this show has gaslighted me into thinking he’s attractive, or because Castiel’s iconic entrance in 2008 hit my developing mind like a torpedo full of spaghetti and blew my fucking brains all over the place. It’s one of life’s little mysteries and God’s little gifts.

Let’s talk about therapy. More specifically, “Agency and purpose in narrative therapy: questioning the postmodern rejection of metanarrative” by Cameron Lee. In this paper, Lee outlines four key ideas as proposed by Freedman and Combs:

Realities are socially constructed

Realities are constituted through language

Realities are organised and maintained through narrative

And there are no essential truths.

Let’s break this down in the case of this episode. Realities are socially constructed: the reality of Sam and Dean arose from the Bush era. Do I even need to elaborate? From what I understand with my limited Australian perception, and being a child at the time, 9/11 really was a prominent shifting point in the last twenty years. As Americans describe it, sometimes jokingly, it was the last time they were really truly innocent. That means to me that until they saw the repercussions of their government’s actions in funding turf wars throughout the middle east for a good chunk of the 20th Century, they allowed themselves to be hindered by their own ignorance. The threat of terrorism ran rampant throughout the States, spurred on by right wing nationalists and gun-toting NRA supporters, so it’s really no surprise that the show Supernatural started with the premise of killing everything in sight and driving around with only your closest kin and a trunk full of guns. Kripke constructed that reality from the social-political climate of the time, and it has wrought untold horrors on the minds of lesbians who lived through the noughties, in that we are now attracted to Misha Collins.

Number two: Realities are constituted through language. Before a show can become a show, it needs to be a script. It’s written down, typed up, and given to actors who say the lines out loud. In this respect, they are using the language of speech and words to convey meaning. But tv shows are not all about words, and they’re barely about scripts. From what I understand of being raised by television, they are about action, visuals, imagery, and behaviours. All of the work that goes into them—the scripts, the lighting, the audio, the sound mixing, the cameras, the extras, the ADs, the gaffing, the props, the stunts, everything—is about conveying a story through the medium of images. In that way, images are the language. The reality of the show Supernatural, inside the show Supernatural, is constituted through words: the script, the journalists talking to Sam, the makeup artist taking off Dean’s makeup, the conversations between the creators, the tweets Misha sends. But also through imagery: the fish tank in Jensen’s trailer, the model poses on the front cover of the magazine, the opulence of Jared’s house, Misha’s iconic sweater. Words and images are the language that constitutes both of these realities. Okay for real, I feel like I’ve only seen this episode max three times, including when I watched it for research for this episode, but I remember so much about it.

Number three: realities are organised and maintained through narrative. In this universe of the French Mistake, their lives are structured around two narratives: the internal narrative of the show within the show, in which they are two actors on a tv set; and the episode narrative in which they need to keep the key safe and return to their own universe. This is made difficult by the revelation that magic doesn’t work in this universe, however, they find a way. Before they can get back, though, an avenging angel by the name of Virgil guns down author-god Eric Kripke and tries to kill the Winchesters. However, they are saved by Balthazar and the freeze frame and brought back into their own world, the world of Supernatural the show, not Supernatural the show within the show within the nesting doll. And then that reality is done with, never to be revisited or even mentioned, but with an impact that has lasted longer than the second Bush administration.

And number four: there are no essential truths. This one is a bit tricky because I can’t find what Lee means by essential truths, so I’m just going to interpret that. To me, essential truths means what lies beneath the narratives we tell ourselves. Supernatural was a show that ran for 15 years. Supernatural had actors. Supernatural was showrun by four different writers. In the show within a show, there is nothing, because that ceases to exist for longer than the forty two minute episode “The French Mistake”. And since Supernatural no longer exists except in our computers, it is nothing too. It is only the narratives we tell ourselves to sleep better at night, to wake up in the morning with a smile, to get through the day, to connect with other people, to understand ourselves better. It’s not even the narrative that the showrunners told, because they have no agency over it as soon as it shows up on our screens. The essential truth of the show is lost in the translation from creating to consuming. Who gives the story meaning? The people watching it and the people creating it. We all do.

Lee says that humans are predisposed to construct narratives in order to make sense of the world. We see this in cultures from all over the world: from cave paintings to vases, from The Dreaming to Beowulf, humans have always constructed stories. The way you think about yourself is a story that you’ve constructed. The way you interact with your loved ones and the furries you rightfully cyberbully on Twitter is influenced by the narratives you tell yourself about them. And these narratives are intricate, expansive, personalised, and can colour our perceptions completely, so that we turn into a different person when we interact with one person as opposed to another.

Whatever happened in season 6, most of which I want to forget, doesn’t interest me in the way I’m telling myself the writers intended. For me, the entirety of season 6 was based around the premise of Cas being in love with Dean, and the complete impotence of this love. He turns up when Dean calls, he agonises as he watches Dean rake leaves and live his apple pie life with Lisa, and Dean is the person he feels most horribly about betraying. He says, verbatim, to Sam, “Dean and I do share a more profound bond.” And Balthazar says, “You’re confusing me with the other angel, the one in the dirty trenchcoat who’s in love with you.” He says this in season 6, and we couldn’t do a fucken thing about it.

The song “The French Mistake” shines a light on the hidden scene of gay men performing a gay narrative, in the midst of a scene about the manliest profession you can have: professional horse wrangler, poncho wearer, and rodeo meister, the cowboy. If this isn’t a perfect encapsulation of the lovestory between Dean and Cas, which Ben Edlund has been championing from day fucking one of Misha Collins walking onto that set with his sex hair and chapped lips, then I don’t know what the fuck we’re even doing here. What in the hell else could it possibly mean. The layers to this. The intricacy. The agendas. The subtextual AND blatant queerness. The micro aggressions Crowley aimed at Car in “The Man Who Would Be King,” another Bedlund special. Bed Edlund is a fucking genius. Bed Edlund is cool girl. Ben Edlund is the missing link. Bed Edlund IS wikileaks. Ben Edlund is a cool breeze on a humid summer day. Ben Edlund is the stop loading button on a browser tab. Ben Edlund is the perfect cross between Spotify and Apple Music, in which you can search for good playlists, but without having to be on Spotify. He can take my keys and fuck my wife. You best believe I’m doing an entire episode of Holy Hell on Bedlund’s top five. He is the reason I want to get into staffwriting on a tv show. I saw season 4 episode “On the head of a pin” when my brain was still torpedoed spaghetti mush from the premiere, and it nestled its way deep into my exposed bones, so that when I finally recovered from that, I was a changed person. My god, this transcript is 11,000 words, and I haven’t even finished the Becky section. Which is a good transition.

Oh, Becky. She is an incarnation of how the writers, or at least Kripke, view the fans. Watching season 5 “Sympathy for the Devil” live in 2009 was a whole fucking trip that I as a baby gay was not prepared for. Figuring out my sexuality was a journey that started with the Supernatural fandom and is in some aspects still raging against the dying of the light today. Add to that, this conception of the audience was this, like, personification of the librarian cellist from Juno, but also completely without boundaries, common sense, or shame. It made me wonder about my position in the narrative as a consumer consuming. Is that how Kripke saw me, specifically? Was I like Becky? Did my forays into DeanCasNatural on El Jay dot com make me a fucking loser whose only claim to fame is writing some nasty fanfiction that I’ve since deleted all traces of? Don’t get me wrong, me and my unhinged Casgirl friends loved Becky. I can’t remember if I ever wrote any fanfiction with her in it because I was mostly writing smut, which is extremely Becky coded of me, but I read some and my friends and I would always chat about her when she came up. She was great entertainment value before season 7. But in the eyes of the powers that be, Becky, like the fans themselves, are expendable. First they turned her into a desperate bride wannabe who drugs Sam so that he’ll be with her, then Chuck waves his hand and she disappears. We’re seeing now with regards to Destiel, Cas, and Misha Collins this erasure of them from the narrative. Becky says in season 15 “Atomic Monsters” that the ending Chuck writes is bad because, for one, there’s no Cas, and that’s exactly what’s happening to the text post-finale. It literally makes me insane akin to the throes of mania to think about the layers of this. They literally said, “No Cas = bad” and now Misha isn’t even allowed to talk in his Cassona voice—at least at the time I wrote that—to the detriment of the fans who care about him. It’s the same shit over and over. They introduce something we like, they realise they have no control over how much we like it, and then they pretend they never introduced it in the first place. Season 7, my god. The only reason Gamble brought back Cas was because the ratings were tanking the show. I didn’t even bother watching most of it live, and would just hear from my friends whether Cas was in the episodes or not. And then Sera, dear Sera, had the gall to say it was a Homer’s Odyssey narrative. I’m rusty on Homer aka I’ve never read it but apparently Odysseus goes away, ends up with a wife on an island somewhere, and then comes back to Terabithia like it never happened. How convenient. But since Sera Gamble loves to bury her gays, we can all guess why Cas was written out of the show: Cas being gay is a threat to the toxic heteronormativity spouted by both the show and the characters themselves. In season 15, after Becky gets her life together, has kids, gets married, and starts a business, she is outgrowing the narrative and Chuck kills her. The fans got Destiel Wedding trending on Twitter, and now the creators are acting like he doesn’t exist. New liver, same eagles.

I have to add an adendum: as of this morning, Sunday 11th, don’t ask me what time that is in Americaland, Misha Collins did an online con/Q&A thing and answered a bunch of questions about Cas and Dean, which goes to show that he cannot be silenced. So the narrative wants to be told. It’s continuing well into it’s 16th or 17th season. It’s going to keep happening and they have no recourse to stop it. So fuck you, Supernatural.

I did write the start of a speech about representation but, who the holy hell cares. I also read some disappointing Masters theses that I hope didn’t take them longer to research and write than this episode of a podcast I’m making for funsies took me, considering it’s the same number of pages. Then again I have the last four months and another 8 years of fandom fuelling my obsession, and when I don’t sleep I write, hence the 4,000 words I knocked out in the last 12 hours.

Some final words. Lyotard defines postmodernism, the age we live in, as an incredulity towards metanarratives. Modernism was obsessed with order and meaning, but postmodernism seeks to disrupt that. Modernists lived within the frame of the narrative of their society, but postmodernists seek to destroy the frame and live within our own self-written contexts. Okay I love postmodernist theory so this has been a real treat for me. Yoghurt, Sam? Postmodernist theory? Could I BE more gay?

Middleton and Walsh in their analysis of postmodernism claim that biblical faith is grounded in metanarrative, and explore how this intersects with an era that rejects metanarrative. This is one of the fundamental ideas Supernatural is getting at throughout definitely the last season, but other seasons as well. The narratives of Good vs Evil, Michael vs Lucifer, Dean vs Sam, were encoded into the overarching story of the show from season 1, and since then Sam and Dean have sought to break free of them. Sam broke free of John’s narrative, which was the hunting life, and revenge, and this moralistic machismo that they wrapped themselves up in. If they’re killing the evil, then they’re not the evil. That’s the story they told, and the impetus of the show that Sam was sucked back into. But this thread unravelled in later seasons when Dean became friends with Benny and the idea that all supernatural creatures are inherently evil unravelled as well. While they never completely broke free of John’s hold over them, welcoming Jack into their lives meant confronting a bias that had been ingrained in them since Dean was 4 years old and Sam 6 months. In the face of the question, “are all monsters monstrous?” the narrative loosens its control. Even by questioning it, it throws into doubt the overarching narrative of John’s plan, which is usurped at the end of season 2 when they kill Azazel by Dean’s demon deal and a new narrative unfolds. John as author-god is usurped by the actual God in season 4, who has his own narrative that controls the lives of Sam, Dean and Cas.

Okay like for real, I do actually think the metanarrativity in Supernatural is something that should be studied by someone other than me, unless you wanna pay me for it and then shit yeah. It is extremely cool to introduce a biographical narrative about the fictional narrative it’s in. It’s cool that the characters are constantly calling this narrative into focus by fighting against it, struggling to break free from their textual confines to live a life outside of the external forces that control them. And the thing is? The really real, honest thing? They have. Sam, Dean and Cas have broken free of the narrative that Kripke, Carver, Gamble and Dabb wrote for them. The very fact that the textual confession of love that Cas has for Dean ushered in a resurgence of fans, fandom and activity that has kept the show trending for five months after it ended, is just phenomenal. People have pointed out that fans stopped caring about Game of Thrones as soon as it ended. Despite the hold they had over tv watchers everywhere, their cultural currency has been spent. The opposite is true for Supernatural. Despite how the finale of the show angered and confused people, it gains more momentum every day. More fanworks, more videos, more fics, more art, more ire, more merch is being generated by the fans still. The Supernatural subreddit, which was averaging a few posts a week by season 15, has been incensed by the finale. And yours truly happily traipsed back into the fandom snake pit after 8 years with a smile on my face and a skip in my step ready to pump that dopamine straight into my veins babeeeeeeyyyyy. It’s been WILD. I recently reconnected with one of my mutuals from 2010 and it’s like nothing’s changed. We’re both still unhinged and we both still simp for Supernatural. Even before season 15, I was obsessed with the podcast Ride Or Die, which I started listening to in late 2019, and Supernatural was always in the back of my mind. You just don’t get over your first fandom. Actually, Danny Phantom was my first fandom, and I remember being 12 talking on Danny Phantom forums to people much too old to be the target audience of the show. So I guess that hasn’t left me either. And the fondest memories I have of Supernatural is how the characters have usurped their creators to become mythic, long past the point they were supposed to die a quiet death. The myth weaving that the Supernatural fandom is doing right now is the legacy that will endure.

References

I got all of these for free from Google Scholar!

Judith May Fathallah, “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural.”

James K A Smith, “A Little Story About Metanarratives: Lyotard, Religion and Postmodernism Revisited.” 2001.

Cameron Lee, “Agency and Purpose in Narrative Therapy: Questioning the Postmodern Rejection of Metanarrative.” 2004.

Harri Englund and James Leach, “Ethnography and the Meta Narratives of Modernity.” 2000.

https://uproxx.com/filmdrunk/mel-brooks-explains-french-mistake-blazing-saddles-blu-ray/

#transcripts #supernatural #supernatural podcast #<60mins #this is first and foremost a podcast about cas and misha collins

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thornfield13713 · 5 years ago

Note

do you have any headcanons about your new Supernatural AU dying to get out? Inquiring minds want to know!

Ok. Um, I’m going to presume it’s the one I posted about and not the Man of Letters!Dean AU I’m hashing out with a friend right now, although that one is also quite fun. If it is that AU you’re talking about, I am now seriously worried about my account security.

Anyway, five headcanons off the top of my head for this AU. Most of these are Cas-related, because he’s my favourite character and because his is the most changed storyline here.

Jimmy Novak has been a missing person ever since the car accident that happened when Cas took possession of him. After a short, failed manhunt, he’s eventually given up as dead as the amount of blood found in his wrecked car was such that no human ought to have survived it. It’s thus a bit of a shock when, six years later, Victor Henriksen shows up at the Novaks’ place in Pontiac to inform them that Jimmy has turned up alive, well, and a suspected serial killer.

Dean got kicked out by John more-or-less immediately for letting Cas escape, but didn’t meet Castiel again until three months later, on a solo hunt in Nebraska. Neither of them were really doing brilliantly at this point in their lives, with Cas having developed an addiction to an assortment of painkillers because the sheer amount of pain involved in being human was more than he knew how to cope with, and Dean spiralling because he is now, officially, alone in the world. They were tackling the same case, separately at first, but ended up working together when it turned out to be a rather bigger hunt than either of them was up for alone.

While Sam has figured out that they’re together within a week of being back on the road with them, he doesn’t realise that Dean and Cas aren’t actually in the closet about it until a few months later. They’re neither of them especially given to PDA, even if they aren’t hiding it, and most people still make the ‘couple’ assumption about Sam and Dean, as Cas is really, objectively terrible at the ‘talking to people’ bits of hunting and thus doesn’t tend to get involved in them as much.

Cas has rather a lot of knives, and is quite sentimentally attached to some of them. His angel blade will always be the favourite, of course, but there are a few others he is very fond of, either because they’re well-made or have some other sentimental value. He also has a tendency to try to carry every single one of them on his person, to the point where undressing him can feel very much like going to bed with a porcupine. Every single time the Winchesters are taken into custody during the FBI’s manhunt for them in seasons two and three, Cas always takes a detour while they’re escaping in order to retrieve his knives.

Cas and Dean re-established contact with Bobby a lot sooner in this AU than the Winchesters did in canon. Part of this was Dean’s general disconnection from the rest of his family, with Sam at Stanford and John having all but disowned him. Part of it was that, as he wasn’t hunting with John anymore, the falling-out that led to them staying out of touch wasn’t as big a concern.

#destiel #supernatural

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misccee · 6 years ago

Text

Daily Destiel FicRec 2/15/19

The Guardian

by Weasleychick32

Words: 49,664

Fandoms: Supernatural

Mature

Graphic Depictions Of Violence

F/F, M/M

Complete Work

18 May 2018

Tags

Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Castiel/Dean Winchester

Dorothy Baum/Charlie Bradbury

Dean Winchester

Castiel (Supernatural)

Claire Novak

Charlie Bradbury

Sam Winchester

Gabriel (Supernatural)

Victor Henriksen

Original Female Character(s)

Jo Harvelle

Benny Lafitte

Lucifer (Supernatural)

Past Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester

Slow Burn

John Winchester's A+ Parenting

Orphan Sam Winchester

Orphan Dean Winchester

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence

Major Character Undeath

BAMF Castiel (Supernatural)

U.S. Marshall Dean

Protective Dean Winchester

Writer Castiel

Fallen Angel Castiel (Supernatural)

Castiel (Supernatural)'s True Form

Hurt Castiel

Hurt Dean Winchester

Gore

Happy Ending

Summary

A dead judge. A witness. An infallible assassin.

Well, technically he did sign up for that last one. They all did. Orphaned at Singer’s Home for Children Displaced by the Supernatural they adopted each other. Sam may be his only sibling, but as far as he's concerned, he has five. For them-Sam, Charlie, Benny, Claire, and Jo-he needs to make it out of this alive.

Castiel Milton is a fallen angel in a world where the supernatural live in the open. As exciting as it sounds on paper, his life is a series of one monotonous moment after another; he writes speeches for big names with even bigger egos, has a cat that only sleeps in the sink no matter what he does to try to make her stop, and in his free time he looks for his sister who disappeared when he was a kid. When he witnesses the murder of a federal judge, his simple little life implodes. Nothing is as it once was and if he stops to catch his breath, he’s dead.

#destiel #destiel ficrec #my ficrec

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queen-of-deans-booty · 6 years ago

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Jus In Bello- Part 3

Pairing: Dean x Reader

Word Count: 2,168

Warnings: Typical Supernatural violence, language, angst, blood, you know the usual

Author’s Note: I do not own anything from Supernatural. All credit goes to their respective owners. Any and all comments on these are appreciated. I really want to hear what you guys think about this one!

Feedback is the glue that holds my writing together.

Tags at the bottom

“Sam and Dean Winchester. Y/L Y/L/N. I’m Deputy Director Steven Groves. This is a pleasure.”

“Well, I’m glad one of us feels that way,” Dean said and Steven looked at Dean before looking back at you. He smirked maliciously and you frowned, putting yourself down for not feeling this earlier.

“I’ve been waiting a long time for you three to come out of the woodwork,” Steven said before taking out his gun and pointing it at you.

“Guys, he’s a demon!” You yelled right before he shot you in the shoulder. You yelled out in pain as you fell onto the bed, your blood spraying on the wall behind you. Steven tried to take a few more shots at you but you narrowly missed them. To distract the demon, Sam began to chant the exorcism in Latin, taking the demon’s attention away from you. He walked over to their cell and shot Dean in the arm, the same thing happening to him. With his hands outstretched in front of him, Sam reached through the bars and grabbed at the hand holding the gun.

Steven’s eyes turned black as he growled but before he could do any more damage, Steven’s head moved back and forth as Sam chanted in Latin.

“Sorry, I've gotta cut this short. It’s gonna be a long night, fellas.” The demon said before exiting the deputy’s body. As soon as the demon left, Steven dropped to the ground, Sam still holding the gun. Suddenly the door opened and two officers came rushing in with Henriksen behind them, his gun trained on Sam.

“Alright, put the gun down!” One of the officers yelled.

“Wait, okay, wait,” Sam pleaded as he moved to put the gun down.

“He shot him!” The same officer yelled.

“I didn’t shoot him, okay. I didn’t shoot anyone.” Sam defended himself.

“He shot me!!” You grunted in pain, making the men look at you. You were still lying on the bed with your hand pressed to your wound.

“He shot me too!” Dean spoke up.

“Get on your knees, NOW!” Victor yelled and Sam nodded, doing what he was told.

“Okay, okay, okay. Don’t shoot. Please. Look. Here. Here,” Sam passed the gun through the bars as he got on his knees. “Look. We didn’t shoot him. Check the body. There’s no blood. We did not kill him. Go ahead, check him.” Reidy looked at Sam before leaning over Steven. He checked the body and looked up at Victor.

“Vic, there’s no bullet wound.”

“He’s probably been dead for months.” You said through the pain.

“What did you do to him?” Victor demanded answers.

“We didn’t do anything. You wouldn’t believe us even if we told you the truth.” You snapped at him. He raised his gun at you and you looked at Dean worriedly.

“Talk or I shoot.” He threatened.

“He was possessed by a demon.” You told them the truth.

“Possessed? Right. Fire up the chopper! We’re taking them out of here now.” Henriksen scoffed.

“Yeah! Do that!” You yelled at him, getting angry. You whimpered when you moved your shoulder and looked at Dean who was pissed.

“Bill?” Reidy said over the walkie-talkie. “Bill are you there?” You assumed Bill was in charge of the helicopter. However, there wasn’t any response. Henriksen nodded to Reidy to see what was going on and the other Agent left the room. The other officers still had their guns trained on you and the brothers.

“They’re dead. I think they’re all dead.” Reidy said over the talkie. Your eyes widened because you knew what that meant. If one demon found you, then a whole fleet of them out be here. Suddenly, there was a loud crash coming from outside and that shook the officers and Victor up.

“What the hell was that? Reidy? Reidy?!” Victor said over the talkie but no answer. “What the hell was that? Come in? Reidy? Reidy? Alright, let’s go.” The officers and Victor left you and Dean to bleed out while Sam was sighing in frustration.

“How are you holding up, sweetheart?”

“It fucking hurts but it looks like he didn’t hit a major artery so I won’t bleed out in the next ten minutes,” You sighed, sitting up while keeping pressure on your wound. “What about you?”

“Just great.” You sighed and leaned against the wall, wondering what was going on out there. You needed to get out because you three were the only ones who can fight this. All of a sudden, the lights in the entire building went out and that put you immediately on alert. You stood up and looked around the room, the emergency light still on.

“Oh, that can’t be good.” Dean sighed.

“We need to get out of here, patch our wounds up and fight these bastards back!” You yelled. You looked over at Sam and Dean to see Sam treating Dean’s wound. Sam used the toilet paper as gauze. You did the same thing. It wasn’t ideal but it was something. Dean yelled out when Sam hit something bad but Sam just rolled his eyes.

“Alright, don’t be such a wuss.” You chuckled because even after all this, they were still the same brothers.

“What’s the plan? Kill everyone in the station, bust you three out?” You looked up to see Henriksen at the entrance.

“What the hell are you talking about?” Dean grunted out.

“I’m talking about your psycho friends. I’m talking about a bloodbath.”

“Okay, I promise you—whoever’s out there, is not here to help us.” You glared at him.

“Look, you got to believe us. Everyone here is in terrible danger.” Sam tried to be the reasonable one.

“You think?”

“Why don’t you let us out of here so we can save your arrogant asses?” You snapped.

“From what? You gonna say demons?” After a few moments of silence, he rolled his eyes. “Don’t you dare say demons. Let me tell you something. You should be a lot more scared of me.” He turned around and left after that.

“How’s the shoulder?” Sam asked you and Dean.

“It’s awesome,” Dean said, tossing the stained paper away. “I’ll live. You know, if we get out of here alive. So, you got a plan?”

“Still thinking, Dean,” Sam said, checking the exit wound on his shoulder. You looked around and noticed Nancy, the secretary, peeking at you three from around the corner.

“Hey,” You whispered to the boys and they noticed Nancy standing there.

“Hey, Nancy, is it?” You asked gently and she backed away in fear of being caught. “Please, Nancy, Dean and I have been shot. We need your help. We’re bleeding badly. Just, could you go get a towel? Just one?” All she did was stare at you and you sighed, hoping to get through to her. “Look, Nancy, we’re not the bad guys. I promise you.” All Nancy did was leave you and you groaned, hitting your head on the wall.

“Nice try,” Dean said but you heard footsteps and turned to see Nancy walking over to you. It seemed as if she trusted you more than the brother. You got up and walked to her, reaching out for the towel. You grabbed it from her and smiled at her.

“Thank you.” You whispered. She just smiled back at you and you noticed the rosary around her neck. She was about to leave but you called out her name to stop her. You could use violence but you wanted to try something else.

“Nancy, that’s a nice necklace.” You said and she looked down at it before looking back at you. She still didn’t say a word.

“Look, can I tell you something?” You whispered but she didn’t make a move to go near you again. “I’m not going to hurt you, okay? You have my word.” That seemed to do the trick and she walked closer to you so you could whisper to her.

“I’m very religious, as I’m sure you are too. I would very much appreciate it if I could borrow your necklace? I would like to pray to God and ask for his forgiveness in this time of need.” She stared at you in the eyes and she nodded, taking off her necklace and handing it to you.

“Thank you, Nancy. You’re very kind.” She smiled at you before leaving your side. She left the room and you smirked, looking at the brothers.

“Why did you do that?” Dean asked.

“I think we might be needing some holy water. Sam, how does it go?” You smirked, going over to your toilet and copying whatever Sam said before dropping the necklace in the water. You stood up and turned around with a smile on your face.

A lot of time has passed by and you ripped the towel in two before sliding one half over to Sam who used it on Dean.

“We’re like sitting ducks in here.” Sam sighed, hating that he didn’t know what was going on out there.

“Yeah, I know. Would it kill these cops to BRING US A SNACK?!” Dean raised his voice at the end so that the officers could hear them in the other room.

“How many to do you think are out there?” You asked.

“I don’t know,” Dean answered.

“However many they are, they could be possessing anyone. Anyone could just walk right in.” Sam said and you agreed with him.

“It's kind of wild, right? I mean it’s like they’re coming for us. They’ve never done that before,” Dean smiled. “It’s like we got a contract on us. Think it’s because we’re so awesome? I think it’s because we’re so awesome.” Dean lost his smile when Sam offered the bitch face to him. You didn't have time to answer because the sheriff walked into the room, opening your cell first. You stood up and frowned, looking at the brothers who were on alert.

“It’s time to go.” You stepped back as the sheriff walked into your cell.

“Uh, you know what? I think I’m fine right here.” You didn’t know if he was possessed or not.

“What do you think you’re doing?” All heads turned to Henriksen who walked into the room.

“We’re not just gonna sit around here and wait to die. We’re gonna make a run for it.”

“It’s safer in here.”

“There’s a SWAT facility in Boulder.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” Henriksen said, walking inside your cell. You glanced at the brother nervously because you were chained up which left you at a disadvantage.

“The hell we’re not.” The sheriff growled. Henriksen took out his gun and shot the sheriff between the eyes. You jumped at the loud noise and looked at the FBI Agent. He smirked and pointed his gun at you but you were too fast for him. You slammed into him, ignoring the pain in your shoulder. He grunted and tried to get the upper hand but you grabbed his face and shoved it in the toilet. You looked at Sam and he started the exorcism. You held him under as best as you could with his body failing around. Another officer came into the room with his rifle but Dean took care of him.

“Stay back!!” Dean yelled at him. The demon in Victor lifted his head and screamed out in pain as his skin sizzled. His eyes were black as the night but you forced it under again.

“Hurry up!” Dean pressured Sam. The demon lifted his head, his eyes still black.

“It’s too late. I already called them. They’re already coming.” You shoved his head back in and Sam finished the exorcism. Black smoke came out of Victor’s mouth, shooting into the air vent.

“Is he… is he dead?” You looked behind you to see Nancy standing there, scared out of her mind. You were about to answer when Victor coughed. He pushed himself up on the bed and looked at you with a sad expression.

“Henriksen! Hey. Is that you in there?” You asked, looking into his eyes.

“I… I shot the sheriff.”

“But you didn't shoot the deputy.” Dean joked and you and Sam glared at him which shut him up.

“Five minutes ago, I was fine, and then…”

“Let me guess. Some nasty black smoke jammed itself down your throat?”

“You were possessed,” Sam said.

“Let me ask you something, Henriksen,” you sneered, staring into his eyes. “You believe us now?”

“I owe the biggest I told you so ever,” Dean said and you handed Victor his gun back.

“I told you, we’re not the bad guys.” You sighed.

“Officer Amici,” Henriksen said, standing up and addressed the officer in the room. “Keys…” Officer Amici handed Victor the keys and he unlocked your chains. You sighed in relief and Victor moved to Sam and Dean’s cell, doing the same thing.

“Alright, so how do we survive?” Victor asked.

“Do you have any spray paint?” You asked Officer Amici.

Series Rewrite Junkies:

@helllonearth @amyisabellal @deanwnchstr @caseykitten6 @quixoticcat @supernaturalblogging @notmoose45 @crowleysminion @mina22 @tahbehonest @oreosatmidnight @seninjakitey @flyonlittlewinchester @earthtokace @gingersnapped13 @superrandomnatural @my-wayward-heroes @stevetrevorstardis @supernaturallover2002 @teamfreewillsstuff @gucci-daddario @22sarah08 @gh0stgurl @put-my-favorite-record-on @rhiannonj79 @onlydeanandjensen

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awed-frog · 7 years ago

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I get what you are ssying re dontello and soullness but on that case Sam and Dean have no right to be hunters as well and shouldnt be murdering any creature at all either then those monsters even thosd that kill our victims of the week would have to be treated like human criminals as well (but in jail/right to legal hearing) what annoying me about the cas situation is that Cas gets held to these standards while Sam and Dean use their morality wheneever it fits them

I thought about this ask for a few days trying to come up with something interesting to say, but I’m not sure I have much to contribute. You make two very good and distinct points here, and this is my attempt at finding an answer for you.

1) Is it legit to kill monsters at all? In a way, I’d have to say no, it isn’t. In the very beginning, there was almost this vibe - hunting was presented like hunting animals, you know? So not murder, but putting down pests. Except that, of course, Dean is not very appreciative of ‘normal’ hunters, and we soon learn that monsters may not be human, but they’re still complex creatures with feelings, free will and an individual agenda. Also, not all of them are necessarily bad. Under those circumstances, what you say is true. If we’re talking ‘world is actually full of monsters’ approach, I much prefer what True Blood did with it - the premise, right, was the vampires wouldn’t hurt people because of the discovery of artificial blood, which allowed the whole thing to become about racism and prejudice rather than revolve around the ‘heroic quest’ trope. Supernatural, of course, is telling a different story. The starting point here is the very popular ‘lonesome hero is forced to act outside the law to bring justice to the land’ model which has been around since forever (you could even argue that the story of Promotheus fits this mould) and which is particularly appreciated and utilized in the United States for obvious (Wild West-related) reasons. Personally, I’m always a bit wary if this trope, but it’s hard to avoid it because it’s still everywhere, and I do appreciate some modern reworkings of it - for instance, I’m still seeing beautiful Civil War metas crossing my dash every other week, and I think it’s good we can discuss this kind of things. Now, you could argue Sam and Dean should do more to escape the trope - it’s not inconceivable, even in their world, to bring the supernatural out in the open, and it does bother me that the idea never came up again - especially after we learned that monsters themselves are way more organized and efficient and secretive than we assumed. Like, good job on bringing down that creepy-ass ebay site, but how many more like that are out there? Is it really possible that Victor Henriksen was the only FBI agent who noticed anything amiss, and the only one who cared enough to investigate? But, well, it’s very likely that Supernatural’s basic format is never going to change (although, I was intrigued by that conversation at the end of A Most Holy Man - I often speculated that the only way to end this show would be to get rid of all the monsters, so Sam and Dean could get out of the life without feeling guilty - the fact they’re going there, or at least wondering if it’s even possible, is really satisfying), which means that the only way to even begin to watch the show is to accept its premise: that this is a lawless world, and Sam and Dean have some sort of right to administer justice. This is why I’m not opposed to them taking hard decisions and killing monsters instead of, say, arresting them (how would they even had a trial?). The (un)spoken rule, however, is that you don’t kill for personal gain - you kill killers. You kill dangerous things who prey on humans. That’s the job. So when they use their skill and knowledge to do something else - that’s problematic, and it should, in my opinion, be framed as such. Donatello’s death is a prime example of this (Cas even said, a bit shiftily, that there wouldn’t be a new prophet until the current one died, and even if Sam and Dean got all frowny, in the end that’s exactly what happened - they got rid of a person who was useless to them and now, as a bonus, they’ll probably get another prophet who’ll be all new and shiny and soulful and uncorrupted), but there are others. For instance, half of Tombstone was exceedingly creepy and yet framed as okay. What we saw there was a world where policemen use a different standard depending on who was murdered, and openly act against the rule of law when it suits them - and, crucially, Dean went along with all of this. Compare and contrast with Folsom Prison Blues, which aggressively questioned whether men who’d been sentenced to prison time were less ‘worthy’ to be saved than other people (if memory serves, Sam initially thought they shouldn’t bother protecting inmates, while Dean, our moral compass and POV characters, vehemently disagreed). You see the shift in perspective there? That’s what I’m objecting to. In earlier seasons, we had way more problematic plot points, but they were acknowledged as such and widely debated. Now, not so much.

2) As for Cas’ role in all this - I agree with you, but I can’t understand why, exactly, this is happening. I think that on one hand, Cas is definitely regressing to his angelic self - in earlier seasons, there was a lot of effort devoted to showing him learning what being human was about, but it’s been a while since the show’s been interested in that. Instead, we’re now getting someone who’s more similar to the old Cas - someone who acts alone, doesn’t consult Sam and Dean, makes decisions ‘for the greater good’ (even if, at this point, that has shifted to ‘keeping the Winchesters alive’), doesn’t understand humans all that well and doesn’t even bother trying to because he sees himself as a distinct creature. All of this is - legit, narratively speaking, but also sounds a bit or a lot hollow because it sort of comes out of nowhere. Cas has been asked for years and years whether he’s a human or an angel or what, and apparently he’s now come to a conclusion and we missed the significant moment when that happened? My opinion, as you may know already because I’m old and salty and I repeat myself a lot, is that this reversion back to angelhood has little to do with Cas himself and more to do with getting out of the Destiel mess and giving more narrative focus to Sam and Dean. So the fact that any decision he makes is automatically dodgy or weird (or presented as such), well - that’s part of it. Another part, which, if it’s possible, annoy me even more, is that there’s been a ‘wholesomisation’ of Sam and Dean which I find uninteresting and badly executed. Because if you think about it - of course, these are our heroes, but we used to see the worst of them quite openly. And that worst wasn’t explained away or ignored - it was examined in painful detail. Now, however, it’s like they can do no wrong, not even when they’re objectively doing something wrong (I’m still not over Dean threatening Kaia, for instance, or Mary’s unexplicable choice to work with the BMoL after they’d literally kidnapped and tortured her son). Sure, we do get a line here and there about how ‘I’m not perfect but that’s okay’, but to me, that’s not nearly enough. Like, I don’t give a shit if you’re double-crossing a mafia boss to get Saint Ignatius’ blood, Dean - the real problem is you wanting to open a rift between worlds in the first place without even bothering to think of the consequences. See how dishonest the narrative is? They give us a hero who’s clearly doing a Pretty Good and Definitely Forgivable thing and they have him justifying it so we’ll coo and tell him that of course we don’t care he’s not perfect - he’s perfect to us. By highlighting something that’s not a problem at all, they make us forget all those other things that actually are problematic. So the fact Cas is the one messing up and making morally questionable choices is almost a necessity and definitely fits in with this new idea that Sam and Dean can do no wrong, because if all of our heroes were paragons of virtue all the time, there would be no story. Or, well - there would be a boring one.

#ask #spn meta #spn season 13 #sam and dean #bitter cas girl #criticism of the dabb era #moral relativism #that line in 13x15 #was particularly poisonous btw #very very sneaky #bad dabb #:P

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ao3feed-destiel · 7 years ago

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Life in the First-Degree

read it on the AO3 at http://ift.tt/2s58DMR

by chucks_prophet

"My name is Dean Winchester, I'm an Aquarius. I enjoy sunsets, long walks on the beach, and frisky women. And I didn’t kill anyone." Dean pauses. He's certain the camera catches the twitch in his lip. It could be the stuffiness in the room, between the pompous blue collars that've strutted in and out and the exhausted AC, but Dean gets a strange high off it. "But I'll tell you one thing—God's honest truth, that's what they'll have me swear in court soon anyway, right? So you may as well get an E! Exclusive before I get shipped to my next press junction: That bastard's lucky he's still alive. If you guys hadn't come when you did, he might be dead."

Words: 6270, Chapters: 1/2, Language: English

Fandoms: Supernatural

Rating: Explicit

Warnings: Rape/Non-Con

Categories: Gen, M/M

Characters: Dean Winchester, Castiel, Benny Lafitte, Chuck Shurley, Meg Masters, Kevin Tran, Victor Henriksen, Gordon Walker, Sam Winchester, Jo Harvelle

Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester

Additional Tags: Halfway House, Rehabilitation, Criminal Dean, Ex-prisoner Dean, Nurse Castiel, Benny Lafitte & Dean Winchester Friendship, Counselor Chuck, anger issues, Anger Management, Dean is a Softie, Castiel is a Sweetheart, Fighting, Boys fighting, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, References to Drugs, Heavy Angst, But also some humor, I try to get a little bit of everything, To Be Continued

read it on the AO3 at http://ift.tt/2s58DMR

#/users/chucks_prophet/pseuds/chucks_prophet #ao3feed #ao3feed destiel #destiel #<a href= rel="author

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ao3feed-charliebradbury · 6 years ago

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The Guardian

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/2GuGGEa

by Weasleychick32

A dead judge. A witness. An infallible assassin.

Dean Winchester is a hunter-turned-U.S. Marshal. Basically, he gets paid to protect people from monsters, human or otherwise. He didn’t sign up for dealing with a snarky, blue-eyed pain in the ass with an apparent death wish, an assassin, or hard-headed little sisters. Well, technically he did sign up for that last one. They all did. Orphaned at Singer’s Home for Children Displaced by the Supernatural they adopted each other. Sam may be his only sibling, but as far as he's concerned, he has five. For them-Sam, Charlie, Benny, Claire, and Jo-he needs to make it out of this alive.

Words: 49664, Chapters: 8/8, Language: English

Fandoms: Supernatural

Rating: Mature

Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Categories: F/F, M/M

Characters: Dean Winchester, Castiel (Supernatural), Claire Novak, Charlie Bradbury, Sam Winchester, Gabriel (Supernatural), Victor Henriksen, Original Female Character(s), Jo Harvelle, Benny Lafitte, Lucifer (Supernatural)

Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester, Dorothy Baum/Charlie Bradbury

Additional Tags: Past Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester, Slow Burn, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Orphan Sam Winchester, Orphan Dean Winchester, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Major Character Undeath, BAMF Castiel (Supernatural), U.S. Marshall Dean, Protective Dean Winchester, Writer Castiel, Fallen Angel Castiel (Supernatural), Castiel (Supernatural)'s True Form, Hurt Castiel, Hurt Dean Winchester, Gore, Happy Ending

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/2GuGGEa

#ao3feed #fanfic #fic #spn #charlie bradbury #cqc

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ao3feed-starker · 7 years ago

Link

by SilverDragonflyMoon

Rewritten

Chuck is not happy with the British Men Of Letters treatment of his favourite humans and he decides to show them as well as others the good that the Winchester siblings have done as well as who they have changed in a way for good. Chuck also decides to summon the friends who died protecting the siblings hours before their deaths and what the siblings did after their death and how it effected them.

He arrives in the bunker with Amara, just as Dean and Sam return to the bunker from killing the Alpha Vampire and they see the two ancient entities. Chuck then locked down the bunker while summoning those alive and those that died three hours before their deaths. Sam and Dean will find out that their baby sister Harley has lots of secrets and they were shocked.

Words: 5834, Chapters: 1/30, Language: English

Series: Part 1 of Seeing the Truth in the Past

Fandoms: Supernatural, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Captain America (Movies), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Doctor Strange (2016), Thor (Movies), Iron Man (Movies)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Categories: F/M

Characters: Harley Milligan-Winchester, Loki (Marvel), Jody Mills, Donna Hanscum, Claire Novak, Kelly Kline, Alex Jones (Supernatural), Castiel (Supernatural), Crowley (Supernatural), Rowena MacLeod, Lucifer (Supernatural), Antonia Bevell, Mick Davies, Arthur Ketch, Michael (Supernatural), Garth Fitzgerald IV, Mary Winchester, Eileen Leahy, Chuck Shurley, Amara (Supernatural), Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester, John Winchester, Henry Winchester, Bobby Singer, Caleb (Supernatural: Salvation), Jim Murphy, Gabriel (Supernatural), Raphael (Supernatural), Charlie Bradbury, Jo Harvelle, Ellen Harvelle, Ash (Supernatural), Benny Lafitte, Balthazar (Supernatural), Rufus Turner, Samandriel (Supernatural), Meg Masters, Jessica Moore, Victor Henriksen, Cain (Supernatural), Death (Supernatural), Kevin Tran, Zachariah (Supernatural), Metatron (Supernatural), Hannah (Supernatural), Anna Milton, Gadreel (Supernatural), Harley Winchester's pet

Relationships: Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester, Amara/Dean Winchester, John Winchester/Mary Winchester, Crowley/Jody Mills, Castiel/Meg Masters, Loki (Marvel)/Original Female Character(s)

Additional Tags: Chuck Shurley is God, Civil War Team Iron Man, Sibling Bonding, Zachariah (Supernatural) Being an Asshole, Arthur Ketch Being an Asshole, Amara and Chuck Shurley Make Up, Past Jessica Moore/Sam Winchester, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Steve Rogers Has Issues, Deaf Clint Barton, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Tags May Change, Tags Are Hard

#ao3feed-starker #ao3feed #fanfic #mcu #starker #peterxtony #tonyxpeter #ao3

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ao3feed-crowley · 7 years ago

Text

Season 1

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/2HtTJIp

by SilverDragonflyMoon

Rewritten

Words: 5834, Chapters: 1/30, Language: English

Series: Part 1 of Seeing the Truth in the Past

Fandoms: Supernatural, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Captain America (Movies), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Doctor Strange (2016), Thor (Movies), Iron Man (Movies)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Categories: F/M

Relationships: Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester, Amara/Dean Winchester, John Winchester/Mary Winchester, Crowley/Jody Mills, Castiel/Meg Masters, Loki (Marvel)/Original Female Character(s)

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/2HtTJIp

#IFTTT #ao3feed #fanfic #Crowley

0 notes

ao3feedsaileen · 7 years ago

Text

Season 1

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/2HtTJIp

by SilverDragonflyMoon

Rewritten

Words: 5834, Chapters: 1/30, Language: English

Series: Part 1 of Seeing the Truth in the Past

Fandoms: Supernatural, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Captain America (Movies), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Doctor Strange (2016), Thor (Movies), Iron Man (Movies)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Categories: F/M

Relationships: Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester, Amara/Dean Winchester, John Winchester/Mary Winchester, Crowley/Jody Mills, Castiel/Meg Masters, Loki (Marvel)/Original Female Character(s)

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/2HtTJIp

#IFTTT #ao3feed #fanfic #spn #Sam Winchester/Eileen Leahy #saileen

0 notes

queen-of-deans-booty · 7 years ago

Text

Nightshifter- Part 3

Pairing: Dean x Reader

Word Count: 2,786

Warnings: Typical Supernatural violence, angst, language, minor character death, blood, you know the usual

Author’s Note: I do not own anything from Supernatural. All credit goes to their respective owners. If you’re a junkie for this sort of thing, then a tag list is the right thing for you! If you want to be a Queen, I’ll add you to that list too! Any and all comments on these are appreciated.

Feedback is the glue that holds my writing together.

Tags at the bottom

You followed Dean down the hallway with a flashlight he gave to you in hand.

“So, what was that kiss all about? Not that I’m complaining.” Dean asked, shining his light in the dark places.

“This redhead bitch was trying to get with you. I just had to make sure she knew where she was standing.” You said, shrugging.

“What has gotten into you lately? You’ve never really been jealous before.” Dean said, stopping as he looked at you.

“I don’t know what it is. You’re right, I don’t usually get jealous but when it comes to you, I can’t help myself. I know you’re not a piece of property that I can own, but I get scared sometimes.” You admitted, sighing.

“Why?” He asked quietly.

“There’s always going to be someone better, Dean. I know you love me and I know you wouldn’t do anything to hurt me but I can’t help but think…” You trailed off, sighing deeply. Dean raised your head and pressed his lips to yours, kissing you passionately.

He pulled away too quickly and stared into your eyes.

“You’re right. I do… I do love you, okay? Isn’t that enough?” He asked.

“It is, you’re right. It’s just my mind messing with me. I love you.” You said, pecking his lips. Dean smiled and continued to walk, keeping an ear out, listening for noises that shouldn’t be there. You walked a bit further, coming in another hallway.

“Man, how many hallways does this bank have? It’s like a fucking maze.” You complained, walking behind Dean. Suddenly he stopped and shone his flashlight to the ceiling. You looked up to see one of the ceiling panels moved to the side, giving you only a peek of what was inside. But it was too dark to see.

You looked around the place and saw some maintenance shit left behind. You picked up a broom and handed it to Dean. He grabbed it and started poking at the panel until it gave way and whatever was in the ceiling fell to the ground.

You screamed softly and stared at the dead body of the man who touched your hand. The man who gave you that creepy, uncomfortable feeling. His throat was slit and you knew he was dead. That shapeshifter couldn’t have his double running around.

“See, I knew that man was the monster.” You said, looking at Dean.

“We have to get back to Sam, then.” Dean took your hand and you two rushed back to the vault.

“I don’t know why you left him in there with the monster in the first place.” You said, waiting for Dean to open it.

“Now’s not the time.” Dean said, opening the vault and looked at Sam who came right over. Dean pulled him in and whispered something to him, most likely telling him who the shapeshifter was. You looked past Sam and locked eyes with the monster, glaring slightly at him. He looked scared but so did everyone else.

Dean pulled away from Sam and put you behind him slightly as if he were protecting you. Sam walked back into the vault and to the commotion.

“You know what, Ronald, he’s right. We have to get this man outside. Come on, I’ve got you.” Sam said, taking the guard from the shapeshifter.

“Yeah, let me help you.” The monster said.

“I got him, it’s cool. Thanks, though.” Sam said. You knew you couldn’t just kill that thing right here and then but boy, did you want to. Sam got the guard out of the vault and he looked very relieved he was going to get some help finally.

“Hey, can we talk to you?” Dean said to the shapeshifter. The man nodded and walked out of the vault.

“Yeah, man, you got the gun.” The man surrendered, doing what he was told. You have to hand it to him, he was a good actor. When Dean got close enough, he attacked him, knocking Dean to the ground as he escaped. You rushed to Dean and helped him up, glaring at the direction the shapeshifter went in.

“Stop! Come back here!” Ronald said, chasing after the man. You groaned and rushed with the brothers, chasing after Ronald. You were glad he had ambition and all this energy but he wasn’t cut out to be a hunter. He was too eager to get things moving.

You rushed out into the main hall where you first saw Ronald but stopped when you saw a red laser dot on his back. Oh no.

“Ronald! Get down!!” You yelled but you were too late. Dean grabbed you by the waist and pulled you down, ducking to cover. You watched in horror as someone shot Ronald in the chest. You covered your mouth and got tears because this wasn’t how things were supposed to go. He wasn’t supposed to die.

Ronald slumped to his knees and then to the floor, dead.

Chaos began to happen as the hostages began running out of the vault but you didn’t care about that, all you cared about was Ronald. Sam sighed and got up, handing Dean a key, most likely to the door of the bank.

“Here, you take the guard and I’ll go after the shifter.” Sam didn’t wait for an answer as he ran off. You and Dean stared at Ronald and he crawled over to him, making sure he was caught in another crossfire.

“Sorry, Ron. You did a real good job tracking this thing, you really did.” Dean said, taking the rifle that Ronald had and crawled back to you, getting up and going over to the guard who leaned on Dean for support.

You watched from the side as Dean helped the guard with one arm and the rifle in the other. He unlocked the door and opened it slightly showing whoever was out there the gun he had.

“No, don't shoot! Don't shoot! Please!” The guard wept. You honestly felt bad for the man. The paramedics took him, making sure not to piss of Dean even more than they think he was. Dean went back inside but not before getting a good look around the place.

“Son of a bitch!” Dean said once the doors were closed and locked.

“What? What’s going on in there?” You asked.

“This place is surrounded by everyone. This has become a lot harder now.” Dean said with a sigh.

“We are so fucking screwed.” You said, defeated. You had no idea what to do now. Dean’s phone began ringing and he picked it up, talking to whoever was on the other line, most likely Sam.

“God, it's like playing the shell game. It could be anybody. Again.” Dean said, frustrated. Great, the shapeshifter changed again. What else is new?

“Alright, you search every inch of this place, I'm gonna go round everybody up.” Dean said before hanging up.

“Let me guess, he shed again?” You said, following Dean back to the vault.

“Yeah, so if you could use those powers you have, it would be great.” Dean said.

“Dean, it doesn’t work like that. I haven’t found the time to practice them. It comes to me, not the other way around.” You said with a sigh. Dean sighed but went back to the vault to round up the other prisoners. You stood back and watched, looking at the redhead from earlier.

“And I thought you were one of the good guys.” She said. You narrowed your eyes at her, not because you were jealous, because you noticed something was off. You didn’t need your supernatural abilities to help you out on this one. She seemed different and you knew that something was up.

“What’s your name?” Dean asked.

“Why would you care?” Yep, something was wrong because she was getting ready to hop on his dick when you first saw her.

“My name is Dean.”

“I’m Sherry.”

“Hi, Sherry, look, everything is going to be okay. This will be over soon, okay?” Dean shut the door of the vault but not before you caught her eye. She seemed as if she was smirking. Yep, she was the shapeshifter. As Dean was closing the vault, the landline of the bank started ringing. You looked at Dean and he nodded for you to answer it.

“Hello?” You picked it up, wondering who the hell was calling you. Probably cops.

“This is Special Agent Victor Henriksen.” A deep male voice said on the other line. Shit.

“Look, I’m not really in the negotiating mood right now.” You said, looking at Dean.

“Good, me either. It’s my job to bring you in. It’s a bonus if you’re alive but it’s not necessary.” The Agent said.

“Whoa, you’re kind of harsh for a Federal Agent, don’t you think?” You said, narrowing your eyes at nothing.

“Well, you’re not the typical suspect, are you Y/N?” He said and you could tell he was smirking. What the fuck? How does he know who you are? “I want you, Sam, and Dean out of that bank, unarmed or we come in. And yes, I know about the Winchester brothers.”

“How the hell do you know who we are?” Dean was staring at you with wide eyes because you were scared. “How did you find us here?”

“Go screw yourself, that’s how I knew. It’s become my job to know about you, Y/N. I’ve been looking for you for weeks now. I know about the murder in St. Louis and the Houdini act you puled in Baltimore. I know all about the desecrations and the thefts. I know about John.”

“Hey, you don’t know shit about John.” You said in a dark tone. That poked at Dean’s interest.

“He was an ex-marine, raised his kids on the road in cheap motels and back wood cabins. He was a real paramilitary survivalist type. I just couldn’t get a handle on what kind of psycho he was.” Agent Henriksen said.

“You have no right talking about John like that you fucking bitch.” You growled out, becoming very obsessive suddenly.

“Yeah, right, is that how your mother raised you? Yes, I know all about Y/M/N and how she died right in front of you when you were just 8-years-old. She had her throat slit and fell down the stairs. Then John came to get you and you’ve been raised by him ever since.”

“Stop it! Who the fuck are you?!” You yelled, getting very emotional over this.

“You have one hour to make your decision or we come through those doors, full automatic.” The Agent said, hanging up. You yelled as you slammed the receiver down, hitting the wall.

“Whoa, hey, who the hell was that?” Dean said, taking you into his arms.

“A real FBI agent and we’re on his wanted list. He knows everything, Dean. He knows how my mom died, how John raised us and the grave diggings and thefts. Dean, we are seriously fucked up right now. He said we have one hour to come out or they come in, guns blazing. What the hell are we going to do now?” You said, getting tears.

“Hey, we’re Winchesters. We will make it out alive. Come on, we need to go find Sam. He might have caught the shifter.” Dean said, trying not to overthink things.

“Yeah, I think Sherry is the shapeshifter.” You said, looking at him.

“What?”

“Yeah, I don’t know. You weren’t trapped in there with her. You should have seen her, fawning over you all the time. She’s different now.” You said.

“Then she’s trapped in there. Let’s go find Sam.” There was no need to go anywhere because Sam came back with a hard look.

“We have a problem out there.” You started to say.

“We have another problem. I know who the shifter is.” Sam said as he caught up.

“Yeah, I know, it’s Sherry. Look, there is a real FBI Agent who knows all about us, Sam. I mean, all of it. John raising us, my mom dying, the graves we dig up, everything. Please tell me something we can do.” You pleaded.

“We need to get her out of there.” Sam said, opening the vault. Is no one listening to you? You couldn’t go to jail.

“Sherry? We’re going to let you go, come on.” Dean said, looking inside to see everyone else frightened.

“What? Why me?” She asked.

“Uh, a show of good faith for the Feds.”

“I think I’ll stay in here, with the others.” She said, unsure of herself. You let out a huff and stalked inside, grabbing her arm. You frowned, not feeling the sense of dread when you touched her. But you were for sure she was the shifter. Maybe you were wrong.

“Listen up, sweetheart. Need I remind you we have the guns. So, I’m afraid you’re coming with me.” You said, pulling her along. She whimpered in fright and walked with you down the hall, following Sam to the open closet door where you saw another Sherry was.

Suddenly, Sherry began screaming bloody murder as she stared at herself on the floor.

“Is that community theater, or are you just naturally that good?” Dean said, confused a bit.

“This is the last time you get to turn into anybody, ever.” Sam said, holding the blade. Sherry screamed a bit and then fainted in your arms. You looked confused, laying her on the floor. Dean shrugged and grabbed the blade from Sam and was about to stab her in the heart when you stopped him.

“Dean, wait,” you said, touching the fainted Sherry. There was no dread coming off her at all and you moved to the other one, putting your hand on her leg, feeling that sense of dread. You looked at the boys and pointed to the body you were touching with a nod.

Dean nodded and you moved away and Dean was about to stab her but she opened her eyes and lashed out at Dean, grabbing him by the throat. Just then, the original Sherry decided to wake up to see Dean stabbing her double. She screamed again and you looked at Sam.

“Get her out of here!” You said to Sam. He nodded and took her away. You ran to aid Dean but the shifter kneed him in the shin and took off running.

“Come on, Dean!” You said, grabbing his hand and helping him up. You two took off running through the halls. You didn’t even know what was happening with Sam or where he was. But you trusted him that it was going to work out.

You ran and suddenly, a hand shot out, smacking him in the face. Dean dropped down and he dropped the blade. You growled and grabbed the pin, running around the corner and swinging at the shifter. She dodged it and punched at you but you easily avoided it.

You swiped at her again, hitting her hand and she hissed in pain from the silver. She grabbed your hand with the blade and twisted it. You gasped in pain and looked down to see some of her skin coming off. She was going to shed again and soon.

You dropped the blade in your right hand into your left hand and shoved the blade into her heart swiftly, catching her off guard. She gasped and stared at you with wide eyes as she fell to the ground, dead. You rushed over to Dean and helped him up, thankful that it was over.

“Okay, one problem down but what about the other? Where is Sam and how are we going to get out of here?” You said. You heard booted footsteps make their way down the hall but you were too late to move. You held your breath as you looked at a S.W.A.T officer standing in front of you.

He reached up and took off the mask, showing it was Sam.

“Sam! You scared the fuck out of me!” You breathed heavily, walking over to him.

“Here, put these on. I found a way out.” He said, handing you and Dean the uniforms. You put it on without question and followed Sam through the hallways, trusting him completely. You were family and you always stuck together, no matter what.

It was getting close to daylight and if the officers didn’t figure it out by now, then they would very soon. You and the brothers snuck out through the back and ran to the Impala, getting inside. Dean started her and took off the mask, peeling away from the terrible building.

“Shit, guys, we are so fucking screwed.” You said, leaning against the backseat.

The Queens:

@maddieburcham1 @ginamsmith @mogaruke @whit85-blog@inlovewithbja @spn67-sister @kdfrqqg@jarpadandjensenaremyheroes @roxyspearing@supercalifragilistic26 @mishamigose @cobrakai1967 @essie1876@wishedworld @crispychrissy @laqueus-ludovicus @nostalgic-uncertainty @jerk-bitch-and-an-angel @potterhead1265@starswirlblitz @untitled39887 @ta-n-ja @deans-fallen-angel-boy @scarletluvscas @notnaturalanahi @tahbehonest @stay-in–place@dreaminofdean @posiemax @donnaintx @mikey1822@alexandriajanae4 @li-ssu @just-another-winchester@obsessivecompulsivespn @emoryhemsworth @newtospnfandom@mizzezm @goldenolaf25

The Dean Beans:

@akshi8278 @mega-mrs-dean-winchester @winchesterandpie@spn-dean-and-sam-winchester @carribear31 @tacklesackles@oreosatmidnight @not-naturalfangirl @missselinakitty @iam-a-cutiepie @kristendansmith @milo-winchester-4ever @jensenackesl@codyshany316 @pheonyxstorm @helllonearth @juniorhuntersam@pouterpufftrain @ruprecht0420 @shut-ur-face-and-get-in-the-car

Series Rewrite Junkies:

@helllonearth @amyisabellal @deanwnchstr @caseykitten6 @roxalya19 @quixoticcat @supernaturalblogging @notmoose45 @crowleysminion @mina22 @tahbehonest @hadleymcallister2177 @destielsangels @spnhybrid @oreosatmidnight @valerieshubin @seninjakitey @flyonlittlewinchester

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