#watchingspnagain intro

[watchingspnagain]

Meet Lor

Heigh ho, Lor here.

I’m no stranger to falling devastatingly in love with a TV show, and I’ve experienced the strange rush of obsession and loyalty that can come with being a fan any number of times before, but there’s just something about Supernatural. The way this show and these characters have wriggled their way into my life, the way they’ve settled themselves on my mental furniture—it may not be a fully unique experience for me, but I for sure can’t imagine SPN ever again not being one of my touchstone stories. And while there’s something about the show, certainly part of what makes it so special is the way I watched it.

I first encountered SPN in 2006 when a friend brought the DVD of season one along when they came to visit, and we watched the whole thing in… three days? I was in love with Dean from “Easy, tiger” and I loved the show. However. It scared the pants off of me. I was twenty-five. I didn’t touch it again until I was nearly forty and Mace, an online acquaintance at the time, mentioned that she was watching it and thought I’d like it. So I tried again.

I can’t begin to guess why I was able to carry on (heh) with it that time (though there are still some episodes in season one that prompt me to hide right behind the sofa), but carry on I did. Mace and I ended up exchanging reactions to seasons, then to episodes, then, once the pandemic hit, we started watching episodes together, messaging real-time reactions to one another while we watched in sync, from several states apart. The long hiatus before the end of season 15 was broadcast meant we were caught up and watched the final episodes of the show essentially as they aired—a first for us. And, aside from a brief pause over the holidays to allow us to recover from the finale (*heavy sigh*), we’ve never stopped watching the show together. We still watch two or three episodes together a week and talk about the show pretty much every day.

I’ve heard many times about wonderful friendships springing up through fandom, but I’d never experienced it before. I’ve always had fannish friends, but the friendships were always solidly in place first and were unlikely to have changed at all if fandom never came into them. This has been my only experience of becoming friends through the experience of fandom: Supernatural has been a conduit and a catalyst for Mace and I to become the best of friends, friends who squee and theorize about a favorite show, sure, but friends who also help each other through hard shit, go to each other for advice, and have metaphorically held one another’s hand through the fear and uncertainty and anxiety and boredom of a global pandemic. And I will forever hold the show in my heart for allowing that to happen. But take the show away (please, don’t), and our friendship would be just as strong. Whatever I may feel about SPN in years to come, I know it’s given me a friend for life.

The Lore on Lor:

I grew up in a house overflowing with books and I’ve been a voracious reader for as long as I can remember. I have a PhD in English and now work as a copyeditor and proofreader. This is one of the very few book-related careers where you *do* actually get to read all day. Booyah!

Other shows/franchises that make up a significant part of my personality include Star Trek (TOS, primarily; AOS, a bit; TNG, a smidge), Star Wars, Doctor Who, LotR, Harry Potter, and (recently—it’s Mace’s doing!) Buffy.

I go positively giddy for metafiction, retellings, and transformative fiction. Fairy tales set in space? Pride and Prejudice but with dragons? Jane Eyre in a southern suburban cul de sac? Characters stepping out of their books? Stories where Cas and Dean are rival bakers? Bring them to meee!

In real life, I find drama exhausting and uncomfortable, but if there is a conflicted character on offer? One who is adorable and vulnerable and charming and damaged and maybe just a bit of a jerk? Sign me up.

[watchingspnagain]

Meet Mace

Hi, I'm Mace, and this is my Intro Post. Ab Spectando Condito and all that. (I sometimes channel Livy when I'm nervous, don't be alarmed.) And I'm nervous because my memory is absolute crap so I can't actually remember all the details here, even though this all started only, like, two years ago. It's also hard to wrap my head around the idea of trying to describe this thing that Lor and I have started (created?) and how and why it has become so important. So, well, bear with me.

Okay, here goes: For years friends had been telling me that I *needed* to watch Supernatural; it was right up my street, they'd say. But I kept putting their recommendations aside, thinking that, sure, Dean from Gilmore Girls is in it and he's adorable, but that other guy looks like a frat boy cliché, and overall the show seemed like it was probably Buffy but with Dudes (and I LOVE Buffy and will brook no substitutions or messings-with The Buffy). Eventually I decided to give it a try anyway, a decision wholly based on how hilarious the memes were. Maybe the non-Dean guy (His name is Dean? *His* name is Dean? Wait, no, that's not...but why tho?) isn't so bad? The first attempt didn't go well: my husband, who is so very not interested in SPN, was away on a business trip and I waited until my then-10yo son was in bed, crawled into bed myself, and started the first episode. At night. Alone. I made it 10 minutes before actually saying out loud, "NOPE" and turning it off. Cripes, that first episode (and most of the first season, really) is actual, full-on scary! I mean, what. Why have Handsome Boys making Hilarious Quips on a show that I can't watch because I'm too scared?! Sort of rude, to be honest.

And that was it for, I think?, a couple of months or so. Then - and this is one of the places where my memory gets foggy (I tried three times to type that correctly and the first two came out as "goofy" and honestly yes that too) - the watching of SPN was mentioned on another site I spend much amounts of time on. I suspect Lor remembers the details much better than I do, but somehow we starting talking about how we both had been thinking about watching SPN for a long time, but hadn't actually done so because past attempts on both sides had resulted in fright and flight.

Now, Lor and I have been friends on that other site for several years, but never before really corresponded much outside of that site's chat-like forum section. I pretty much admired her from afar, as it were, and held her as a Fantasy BFF in my daydreams - she was (and still is to this very day) cool and *so* clever and smart and had (and still does to this very day) such a brilliant knack for turning a phrase and I admired (and still do to this very day) her wit and snark and general amazingness, but, again, mostly from afar. So when we somehow decided to try again with Supernatural, but this time together, I was ridiculously excited. I had no idea, though, just how life-changing that decision would be. We bonded, it seemed, almost instantly over our love (second time is the charming one, I guess?) of the show and over discovering how much we have in common with each other. It's comical, almost, just how alike we are in all kinds of areas: similar childhood experiences, nearly identical (like, eerily so sometimes) tastes and opinions on all manner of things, and we're essentially twins in our list of Things That Make Our Anxieties Spike.

We started off watching the episodes separately (I think I was a little ahead of her for a bit? Gah - stupid faulty memory) and then typing up our comments and emailing them to each other, then responding with comments on our comments. And it quickly became one of the highlights of my days, getting those emails, reading through her clever and hilarious remarks, feeling pure glee when we had almost exactly the same thoughts - sometimes even typing the exact same phrases, word for word. This, then, at some point, evolved into watching the episodes at the same time and live-texting each other, which means that now we very often are typing exactly the same reactions, word for word, and then geeking out at how SAME we are in real time. Of course we have differences, too, but even those seem to complement each other: she's the Hufflepuff to my Slytherin; she's a Dean girl and I'm a Sam girl (well, and also a Crowley girl - Sam girl in the streets and Crowley girl in the sheets?); she likes Wuthering Heights, which slightly baffles me but, okay, because we both agree that MacFadyen is the best Darcy.

We had big plans to have a meet-up to watch the series finale together. See, we've never actually met in person. We became friends online, then became closer friends through this mutual SPN watch, but that's also online. And so I've never been face-to-face with my best friend. Because the meet-up for the finale didn't happen, of course. Because Covid, of course. For both of us, anxiety added a special sauce of NOPE to leaving the house this last year and we've both, I think, been pretty much isolated, staying home and not having much interaction with others outside the other members of our households. Which means that our SPN watching and our growing friendship took on an even greater meaning and importance for me. I'm honestly not sure that I could have handled the massive stress and anxiety of this last year without Lor's friendship. It just feels...natural, at this point, that I spend my days texting her back and forth about all sorts of things, the small and mundane to the big and important. Lor has become a huge part of my life and if a full day were to pass by without talking to her, I'd feel that loss fairly keenly. On some level it seems pretty bizarre that I owe such a debt of gratitude for this amazing friendship to a TV show, but here we are. This show, its characters, and the actors and writers who have made them so outstanding and special? Well, I owe them all incalculable amounts of thanks.

Anyway. So.

We're now on our second go-round with our SPN watching (because I think neither of us can now even begin to fathom a life in which we're *not* watching this show together), and Lor, (hello - did I mention she's brilliant and amazing?) low-key drops the idea that we should be blogging our live-text conversations. We've talked before about really wanting to have a record of *waves hands around* all this, and a blog seems like a great way to do that, regardless of whether anyone else ever reads it. I'm content for it to be an open and ongoing love letter to Supernatural and to our friendship, even if it remains a largely unread one.

And finally, here are a few Thing You Should Maybe Know About Me:

I'm a farmer's daughter with a PhD in Classics, a one-time professor, turned stay-at-home mom, turned part-time librarian, turned Classics prof. again, living in the Midwest with my husband, 12-going-on-80yo son, and a goofball of a golden retriever.

I love reading as much as I hate housecleaning, and I'll read pretty much anything unless the dog dies or the child gets hurt.

I also really like knitting and sewing and one of my very favorite things is to make ridiculously-tailored Halloween costumes for my son (thank the gods he's totally into it, too). I missed my calling to be a cosplay designer. Maybe in retirement...

I fall in love easily and fast and hard for fictional characters, especially the ones that are 1) evil and/or generally villainous, 2) tormented, 3) super smart and/or skilled, 4) filthy rich, 5) completely unattainable, and if they're all of the above, Holy. Damn.

[watchingspnagain]

Welcome to Lor and Mace’s Pretty Good Supernatural Rewatch Blog!

We’ll introduce ourselves in our next post, but here’s a quick rundown of what we’re doing here.

Lor and Mace have both seen all of SPN once all the way through, and we’ve both seen some of it more than once. Now we're rewatching from the beginning, mostly because neither of us like the thought of a world in which we're not regularly visiting the world of Sam and Dean, but also because we decided that we wanted to make some sort of record of the Thoughts and Feelings and Ideas we have about the show.

We watch in sync (from several hundred miles apart) and message each other our thoughts in real time. For each episode of the show, we’ll be sharing the log of that real-time chat (lightly edited for clarity), usually with some follow-up chat and occasionally with longer discussion of individual aspects of an episode written by one or both of us.

Please feel free to ignore, lurk, reblog, or engage with us as you like. Be kind, please. We are 100% here for thoughtful, critical discussion and encourage gentle, informed dissent but won’t engage if you’re being a jerk. Our asks are open. While we will sometimes be critical of the show, we also love it to itty-bitty bits. We hope to be mostly a positive space. We’re pro-Dean, pro-Sam, pro-Cas, pro-shipping, pro-show.

The blog will be teeming with spoilers, certainly for the episode in question and often for the whole show. The nature of our conversations will be adult and thus they may contain adult language and themes. We will tag each post with #watchingspnagain and #watchingspnagain with the episode number (i.e. #watchingspnagain 1x01). We’ll also try to tag for trigger warnings in our discussions and other things that seem relevant to each post.

Here’s some topics we’re likely to come back to again and again:

Hunters as outsiders

Liminal spaces and marginalization

Set-dec with regards to class

Trauma in the creation of hunters

Dean’s jokes that reveal what he means to conceal

Dean’s sexuality

The way Sam and Dean’s different childhoods inform their lives

Sam’s changing desires regarding “a normal life”

The morphing of the show from “Sam’s story” to “Dean’s story”

What it means to be Winchester "fine"

Destiel

Dean’s freckles

Sam’s hair

CAS