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holyhellpod · 4 years ago

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5. God’s Specialest Little Princess

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Buckle in for 58 minutes of gushing about Claire Novak-Mills-Winchester, it’s going to be a thrilling ride.

Transcript under the cut.

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CW: rape, child sexual assault, child abuse and neglect

After Cas, Claire is my favourite character on Supernatural. Every time I think about what I want my gender to be, the words “biker Barbie” pop into my head. I bleached my hair and I’m growing it out and I started wearing my secondhand leather jacket. When I think about my ideal life, I romanticise living out of my car and roadtripping across the country, no rent to pay, no dripping shower head, no shitty broken fan in my room, no carpets to clean, no dishes piling up in my sink for days and when I finally go to clean them a spider crawls out of the sink and onto my arm effectively ending any motivation for ever doing my dishes again. The chain Pie Face has vegan pies and sausage rolls now, and they’re so good I could live off them. Claire was a strong factor in finally getting my licence in April this year, and if I ever rob a servo I’ll do it in her honour.

There’s something I want to say, that I’ll leave until the end of the episode, after all my witty and insightful and amazing metacommentary. It’s either problematic, or controversial, or stupid but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. So wait until the end before you judge me, after we’ve had our time together and become best friends.

Going off the previous episode of Holy Hell, Claire has a rough family history. I didn’t talk about it in that episode because I wanted to talk about Claire in her own episode. Her story evolves from a bit part in Cas’s complicated life journey as he falls from heaven and gives his life to the Winchesters, to a character with her own motivations, goals and desires. She becomes a mirror of Dean, but Dean as he always should have been: someone with a wealth of fambily connections, and okay with being openly gay. She gets a love interest, a fambily, the opportunity to save people and kill monsters, a trip to another world, and turned into a werewolf. All this in 7 episodes.

The fandom talks a lot about Claire being Dean-coded, but I see in her what potentially Dean could have been, if he let himself actually give into his desires instead of repressing them and drinking them away. Don’t worry, this episode is about Claire, it’s not about Dean, but it’s impossible to do an episode about Claire without talking about him. Despite how he kills her surrogate father, and the only adult who showed her kindness since her Gran died, manipulative and conditional though it was, she immediately imprints on Dean. She goes after the creature who took her mother Amelia and kills it with its own sword. She becomes a hunter, takes to the road, dons disguises, and saves people with little regard for her own safety. And she’s good at it. She’s very good at it. Cas and Dean would absolutely beam with pride if they saw her wield a flamethrower.

In season 4 “the Rapture,” written by the legend himself Jeremy Carver, we’re introduced to Claire as Castiel’s vessel Jimmy Novak’s dutiful daughter, her and her mother Amelia being the reason Jimmy wants nothing more to do with Cas or the angels. What we know of their family isn’t much: Jimmy and Amelia are religious, but when Jimmy starts hearing Cas talk to him, Amelia is convinced he’s mentally unwell and tries to get him to take medication. I mean, speaking as a Casgirl, I know for a fact Cas makes everyone mentally unwell, literally everyone on this show and everyone who has ever had an interaction with the show Supernatural or its fanbase. But speaking as someone with mental health struggles, I do think it’s great that Amelia wanted to get Jimmy help instead of just like praying the thoughts away. Also, having a serious mental illness, I am an advocate for medication as one way to treat mental health issues. So it was good for me to see Amelia literally hand Jimmy medication.

Okay, so I don’t like Jimmy, I personally revel in headcanons where he’s a closeted homo in a lavender marriage who would NEVER allow his daughter to be with another woman, and therefore it’s fun for me that he died when Cas was exploded by Rafael. But Misha in this episode? Go off queen. This episode fucks so hard, but not because of Claire. It deepens the angel lore, it gives Misha his first of many roles that he plays outside of Cas, it gives us a taste of what the angels are doing behind their facade of “God’s great plan,” and the first we see of Cas’s many gay conversion therapy shock treatments. Also something something airwaves, technology, angel voices, receiving revelation, angel radio, Jimmy selling ad time for AM radio, something something. Jeremy Carver knows his shit, and he always delivers. He wrote four episodes in season 4, three of which feature Cas, including “In The Beginning,” the first time travel episode, “Death Takes A Holiday,” where Sam and Dean become ghosts, and this episode, “The Rapture”. It’s almost like he’s good at his job, which on this show is absolutely shocking.

It’s never shown how 12 year old Claire deals with her father’s apparent mental health issues. We see her praying with him at dinner, and again when Jimmy gets possessed by Cas and she sees him outside. Cas says to her, “I am not your father,” a line that’s repeated in season 10. But it’s interesting that Claire is the one who comes outside, and not Amelia. Even though the lore is never really explained with regards to vessels and seeing angels’ true forms, my takeaway is that Claire saw the light from when Cas possessed Jimmy, because, being Jimmy’s daughter, she can see Cas’s true form and hear his voice.

When Cas is zapped back to angel headquarters, Jimmy wants to get out of the game, but when he returns to his family, he’s inundated with demons and forced to become Cas’s vessel again in exchange for his family’s lives. During this episode, Cas takes possession of Claire, and honestly I thought Sydney Imbeau knocked it out of the park as Cas, working with the otherwordliness of angels that Misha does, especially considering she’s not given much to do as Claire. In this episode, Claire is primarily used as a bargaining chip between forces much stronger than herself —when Jimmy’s neighbour blah blah comes into their home, he holds Claire hostage with a knife to her throat; later in the episode, a demon possesses Amelia and uses her and Claire as bait for Jimmy; and then Cas possesses her with the intent of letting Jimmy die and using Claire as his vessel from then on. Jimmy refuses to let Cas do this, and Cas possesses Jimmy again. Claire is reunited with her mother, and that’s the last we see of the Novaks for six years.

In season 10 episode “The Things We Left Behind,” written by Andrew Dabb, we see Claire as a recalcitrant almost-18 year old, played by the wonderful Kathryn Newton, who Cas breaks out of a youth home. There’s a buddy-comedy esque scene where Cas tries to talk the manager of the group home into letting him take Claire out. Cas and Claire get a meal together, and Cas says that they should stick together, but Claire, who is haunted by the memory of Cas taking her father away from her, steals his wallet and escapes.

Cas enlists the help of the Winchesters to track her down—which includes yet another scene of Cas imploring Dean to help him, and Dean relenting after initially saying no, because he’s a stubborn bastard but has never really been able to deny Cas anything in his power. Claire goes to her friend Randy’s house, and he convinces her to try and rob a convenience store to get money for a loan shark. Up to this point, we haven’t seen anyone that Claire considers important to her. She has no friends in the group home, she doesn’t do well with authority so she doesn’t like the group home manager, and so far all we’ve heard is that her mother took off trying to find Jimmy, and her gran died a few years back. Claire has no one, except Randy and Randy’s son, and she considers him a father figure, someone who is there for her when no one else is.

Considering she has literally no one else, this little bit of home, in which she can eat a home cooked meal and sleep in a real bed, would be a nice reprieve from a system that can’t protect her and marginalises her further. But Randy is not a nice man. He manipulates Claire, using his authority as a pseudo-parent to guilt trip her into stealing for him, because he’s so bad with money he has to borrow from a loan shark and then can’t pay it back.

Cas intervenes, and he, Claire and the Winchesters have a confrontation. Claire is upset and rebuffs Cas’s attempts to set her straight, because in her eyes Cas is her dad’s killer and he’s the reason she doesn’t have a family anymore. Cas sees her as his responsibility, but it’s more than that: he saw the effect that possession had on Hannah’s vessel the previous episode, and he wanted to atone for possessing Jimmy. But he also wants I guess what we all want: something to live for. Past the apocalypses and the wars in heaven and the constant angel fighting, Cas is still looking for something to believe in. He thinks if he makes up for what he took from Claire, then he can live with the choices he’s made so far, that they will have been worth it. He says in season 15 episode “Gimme Shelter” that he lost his faith after so many years on earth and realising that God truly doesn’t care about humanity or the angels anymore, and that in becoming a father to Jack, he regained his faith. So Claire is the prototype to that: he wants to find his faith again, and he thinks he can if he becomes Claire’s protector.

But when Claire looks at him, she sees her father’s face. She feels the pain of losing not just her father but her mother too, her home, any semblance of normalcy. She probably didn’t finish high school, she doesn’t want to go to college, she has no car or home outside of Randy, and she only has the money she can steal. She doesn’t see a future for herself, and she’ll be ageing out of the system soon, which means she really will be on her own. Like Cas, she is adrift, with no one to look out for her, scraping by as best she can. And when Cas comes into her life, after everything she’s been through, she can’t accept what he wants to give her—not only is he not in a position to give her the stability or normalcy she needs, like a parent should, she wouldn’t accept it anyway, not only because he hurt her so badly, but because it’s not what she wants anymore. She doesn’t want to go to college, get a 9 to 5 and live in Suburbia with a husband and 2.5 kids like Jimmy and Amelia, but she also can’t see a way out of the life she currently lives—trapped in the foster system and forced to steal by the only man who is kind to her. But that doesn’t stop Cas from trying, and he and the Winchesters get enmeshed in her life from here on out.

Claire says, “I used to pray to you to bring my dad home safe,” and Cas’s answer crushes me every time. He says, “I know,” with a truly harrowed expression. He says he’s sorry for what he did to her, and she says, “No, you feel guilty. There’s a difference.” I really like this scene, and I think it’s one of the better scenes with character dynamics and dialogue that the show has ever done. And there are a lot of good scenes in this show, but this one always strikes me. Probably because I love Claire so much and I’m obsessed with her and Cas’s dynamic.

Okay diverting from Claire, because this episode is just so good in every way, the next Winchester scene is severely fucked up and I just have to talk about it. Sam, Dean and Cas are in a bar, and Dean recounts a story of when they went to New York and he got roofied at CBGB before his father found him and tore him a new one. It’s supposed to be a good memory for him? Like, he had a good time and then his dad ruined it, but in the end it was okay because it was actually a bad time and John saved him. Dean, baby, you are so fucked up.

Contrasting with that story, after Claire goes back to Randy’s, she finds the loan shark and his goons waiting for her. The loan shark offers Randy a way out: he’ll forgive the debt, if Randy gives him Claire. While the loan shark is attempting to rape Claire, Cas, Sam and Dean bust into the house, and Cas saves her, just like John saved Dean. Once they get Claire out of there, the loan shark breaks a bottle over Dean’s head, and he slaughters all of them. Good for him. Dean’s done a lot of good murders over the years, but that one is particularly sweet. Mark of Cain era Dean, my beloved. Sam, Cas and Claire find him surrounded by dead bodies, and that’s where the episode ends. Fuckin’ brilliant. Masterpiece theatre. Downright Shakespearean.

In the next episode, “The Hunter Games,” written by BuckLeming, Claire is holed up at a motel while Cas figures out what to do with her. She wants to leave: she still can’t handle seeing Cas, even less so now that Dean has killed the only friend she had. She says, “You look like my dad. You killed my dad,” while Cas struggles for something he can say to make this right. His guilt at ruining her life affects him deeply; he doesn’t have family outside of the Winchesters, and now that Hannah is back in heaven he doesn’t have a purpose either. No one needs him. No one has a plan for him. He is as adrift as Claire is, but he thinks that if he can be her lifeboat, if he can save her, then it can make up for hurting her.

She says, “Dean Winchester is a monster,” and Cas says, not looking at her, “It’s possible there’s a little monster in all of us.” It’s proof enough that Cas will always choose the Winchesters over everyone else, and that’s the problem. In seasons 13-15, when Jack becomes a permanent fixture in their lives, he reorients Cas’s priorities. Cas becomes his protector, his father, and he chooses Jack over Sam and Dean, especially Dean, again and again. Because that’s what it means to be a father. But in season 10, Cas isn’t ready to be a father just yet. He isn’t ready to stand on his own two feet, and he can’t support anyone else. He especially can’t support Claire because of the intricacies of their relationship. She says, “You want me to trust you, but the fact that you would defend Dean proves I can’t.”

Cas defends Dean, because he is—let me get the pronunciation right—irrevocably in love with him. Did I do it? Did I say it right? I practiced it only a hundred times, barefoot in the kitchen, in front of my one apartment window, cooking a chickpea fritter, waiting for someone to love me.

The next we see of Claire, she’s in a bar playing pool with some random couple. She lays out her fambily baggage: mom gone, dad dead, second dad dead, and some guy who wants to be her third dad. Cas convinces Dean, the guy who will become her fourth dad, to call Claire and talk to her, as Cas says, “one extremely messed up human to another.” We also get the line from Cas, “I like texting. Emoticons.” WAH. Cas’s faith in Dean is unwavering, in part because Cas has nothing else to believe in. But it doesn’t go well. The couple Claire is with convince her to set up a meeting with Dean where they try to jump him, and he almost kills them before Claire runs again. Cas finds her walking by the side of the road and they have a lovely conversation where Claire says she wants to turn her life around, but she has to go it alone. She gives him some hopeful parting words: she could call him sometime, and he looks better in a tie. My god, Cas’s smile, he’s just so happy. It’s not the ending he wanted, and it’s not the stability Claire deserves, but it’s a compromise.

We get yet another Claire episode in season 10, which is why season 10 is the superior season post apocalypse, “Angel Heart,” written by Robbie Thompson. It starts with a dream in which Amelia Novak is reunited with Jimmy in heaven, only for her to wake up being fed on by a grigori. Someone pointed out that if the show was casting for purely Jimmy Novak there’s no way Misha would have gotten the role because he is just so… well, queer. Strange. Off kilter. Odd. And in this episode, instead of the original actor for Amelia, Wynn Everett, she is played by Leisha Hailey, who is most notable for playing Alice on The L Word. If they’re trying to make me think of this as a lavender marriage, well they are succeeding. Jimmy is a closet case and he and Amelia got married because they were horny, and that’s what good little Christians do when they’re horny.

The next scene is Claire at a bar, the day of her 18th birthday, interrogating a guy Ronnie something who is the only lead she has on the whereabouts of her mother. He says he doesn’t know anything, she follows him outside, he gets rough with her and pushes her against a dumpster, she gets knocked out, and he calls the ambulance before he runs off. Cas, who is Claire’s emergency contact, comes to the hospital to see her, with the help of Sam and Dean, and Claire tells them she’s looking for Amelia and who the guy Ronnie was. Claire says, “Amelia went looking for miracles. She was looking for Jimmy.” Sam, Dean and Cas have a heart to heart in the hallway, and when they go back to Claire’s room she’s gone. Sam heads to the motel where Claire’s staying and Dean and Cas interrogate Ronnie something. He says he worked for a faith healer, Peter Holloway, who took women and hurt them. Back at the hotel, Sam gives Claire tips on how to stay under the radar, and he’s impressed that she’s put together a murderboard with the information she needs to track down Amelia.

Sam tries to connect with Claire, but Claire doesn’t see the similarities in their situations. For Sam, Mary died when he was a baby and he never got a relationship with her. For Claire, she sees Amelia leaving as abandonment even worse than what Jimmy did. After knowing Cas, after forgiving him for what he did to Jimmy, even a little bit, she has to direct her anger somewhere. She has no one except for Cas, who she doesn’t want to see because he looks like Jimmy, and underneath it all, she does really miss her mum. She knows that normalcy isn’t in the cards for her, even if she does get Amelia back. I don’t think Claire’s thought through what’s going to happen if she finds her, only that she needs to. Sam offers some words of wisdom about hunting, how to set up fake credit cards, how to hack into Amelia’s credit card history, that they hunt to help people. This doesn’t phase Claire at first, but it does become a large part of her motivation to be a hunter later on in the subsequent seasons, even if she starts out hunting just for something to quell the simmering madness inside her.

Cas and Dean get to the hotel, Cas wishes Claire a happy birthday and gives her a present, which is a grumpy cat plushie he got from “The Hot Topical.” Sweet little man!!! That’s Claire’s gay dad!!! Turns out Ronnie was murdered by Peter Holloway, the grigori, and Dean, Cas and Claire check out the crime scene. Despite how eager Claire is to get there, she is disgusted by what she sees. Dean says it’s “bring your daughter to work day.” You heard it here, folks: Claire is Dean and Cas’s daughter. Sam and Cas decide to investigate the farmhouse Holloway owns, but make Dean and Claire stay behind, because Dean is still under the influence of the Mark of Cain. In the car, Sam and Cas have a heart to heart that builds upon the conversation Cas and Dean had at the beginning of the episode: where Dean said Claire was better off on her own, Sam says that family matters, and that Cas needs to look after Claire instead of abandoning her. Meanwhile, Dean and Claire play minigolf and bond over movies and hunting. Dean explains to Claire that because Jimmy gave up his life, Cas was able to save the world, that Jimmy’s sacrifice wasn’t for nothing, and that he’s a hero. With Claire’s help, he figures out that the wound that killed Ronnie was from an angel sword, and that what they’re looking for is a grigori. Cas finds Amelia. Dean gives Claire a pistol and says, “Happy birthday, don’t shoot me,” and they head out after Sam and Cas.

Amelia’s dynamic with Claire follows the pattern established by John Winchester that we come to understand as bad and wrong. In this show, the dynamic is thus: Dean protects Sam, because Sam is his child, and Cas protects Jack, because Jack is Cas’s child. Jimmy gives up his life to protect Claire from the horror of being a vessel, and he dies. Amelia forsakes Claire by trying to find Jimmy, choosing her husband over her daughter just as John chose Mary over their boys, and in both cases it leads to irreversible damage done to the children. Amelia dies protecting Claire, just as Jimmy did and Amelia and Jimmy are reunited in heaven, just as Mary and John are reunited in heaven. Amelia should definitely be in the Bad Place, and I’m not so hot on Jimmy either, but he’s gay so he’s definitely burning in hell. Like I can see the CasJimmy T4T connection, but Jimmy is only important in so far as Claire is traumatised over his disappearance and death, and how she weaponises that against Cas. I think Cas speaks about Jimmy maybe once in 12 seasons outside of his episodes with Claire, but feel free to correct me if it’s more. Like, Jimmy is not interesting to me. He’s a closeted midwestern white Christian living in suburbia, and the most interesting thing to happen to him is Cas. I couldn’t care less about Jimmy.

Sidenote: every time something happens with Claire and Amelia in the last few scenes, Cas and Dean look at each other. Like, the camera is on them for a significant amount of time as they look at each other. What does this mean. Director Steve Boyum, what are you trying to tell me. Please reach through the screen psychically and convey your thoughts.

In the last scene, Claire agrees to go to Jody Mills’s place, what she calls a “halfway house for wayward girls.” She and Dean share a nice moment where he gives her a Caddyshack DVD and a lore book for her birthday. He finds the angel sword and the Grumpy Cat plushie in her bag, but he doesn’t take them. Cas comes up to her and says, “If there’s anything you need,” and she hugs him, the way a daughter hugs her father she hasn’t seen in a while, and may not see again any time soon. She gets into a taxi as Willie Nelson’s “Blue eyes crying in the rain” plays, and the taxi takes off, Claire crying as Cas gets smaller and smaller in the background.

And we still have three more Claire episodes. So let’s trudge on.

In season 11’s “Don’t You Forget About Me,” written by Nancy Won, Claire has been living with Jody Mills and Alex. She’s also been hunting—badly. She calls Dean and Sam to help on what she believes is a case. When Dean picks up the phone, he answers with a joke, but then gets serious and says, “You got it. We’ll be there.” Because he’s Claire’s dad. Inarguably. Sam and Dean are already at Jody’s with Claire when Jody and Alex get home from school, and the following scene where they’re all eating dinner together is actually the funniest scene in this entire show. Claire details what she’s been working on—three people missing, reports of strange animals, stalking out Brayden Point—and Jody points out that Claire’s has been hit with a bunch of assault charges, and would be in jail if Jody wasn’t the sheriff. This leads into a conversation about Alex having sex with her boyfriend and the use of condoms and birth control. Oh it’s just perfect, it’s delicious, Sam and Dean are so uncomfortable and Claire is revelling in it. The line reads and reactions Jensen gives are just scrumptious. Sam has a talk with Claire about the hunting life consuming her, and hits on some pretty important points: hunting can be an escape from real life, from the pain of trauma and experience, such as what Claire’s gone through with her mum, dad, gran and Cas, and in true Dean Winchester fashion has decided to repress all that shit and keep moving. She thinks it would be better if she branched out on her own, because she doesn’t see a place for herself in the Mills family. Honestly this whole show should be about Claire juggling two found families and full time hunting while running from the horrors of her past.

The next day, Alex’s favourite teacher is found strung up the flag pole, and Sam and Dean help Jody out with the case. Claire turns up and tries to butt in, but Dean pulls her aside to give her some tough advice, like that she needs to appreciate what Jody is doing for her and that she needs to acclimatise better to the life she’s living. He doesn’t tell her that she shouldn’t hunt, but that she needs to be grateful about the good things in her life. I wish the scene was longer, but it cuts off pretty quickly after Dean stares down Alex’s boyfriend and Claire gives him shit for it. Dean is Claire’s dad too! He sees any troubled kid and is like, is anyone gonna adopt them or am I going to have to do it? And doesn’t wait for an answer.

Later that day, they’re having a pow wow at Jody’s house. Claire wants to help Sam and Dean investigate, however, Jody reminds her that she has another appointment with her college registrar to re-enroll after not going to any of her classes. She doesn’t want to go, because her priority is hunting. When Jody says that she needs to re-enroll, Claire replies, “When there’s a killer out there?” because that’s the most important thing to her. Not necessarily saving people, as it will become, but stopping the bad guys. She wants to be a gunslinger, a lone ranger, a hero. She wants to be like Dean and Sam. She wants to stop killers, because her dad was killed, her mum was killed, both by angels, and that rightly fucked her up. Because Claire was put into the foster care system, because she didn’t finish high school—another thing her and Dean have in common—she has limited options for how she both can and wants to live her life. Like, she’s not victim to the gig economy. She chooses to be a hunter, because she’s good at it, and it’s what she loves doing. Sidenote: give me the Claire vlog where she talks about living in her car, stretching her money by only eating one meal a day, selling feet pics on OnlyFans, and remodelling her wagon so she can set up a bed in there. I would subscribe to her channel.

She doesn’t want to go to school, but everyone is pressuring her into living a normal life, because they think that it’s what’s best for her. But Dean never says she shouldn’t be hunting—he doesn’t approve of the way she’s going about it, and he’s not exactly taking her under his wing, but he never outright says she shouldn’t hunt. And Sam doesn’t either. But Jody does not want that life for her, because she understands the value of a stable job, and the way hunters tend to live—they die young, and they get hurt a lot. So there’s this conflict between Jody wanting the best life Claire can live, but not understanding that Claire doesn’t want a typical life or a 9-5, and Claire wanting to hit the road and kill monsters, not understanding why Jody doesn’t want that for her, so she comes off as ungrateful and rude. Dean has to point out that Jody’s doing the best she can for Claire and Alex, but Claire isn’t used to seeing the reasons behind why adults and carers do the things they do. Jimmy left, Amelia just fucked off, her gran died, and whenever she got in trouble, the group home would put her in isolation to punish her. I don’t think at any point has an adult sat her down and explained things to her—and sometimes parents just don’t. Sometimes parents will just do things and expect you to follow their rules because they’re your parents, and never actually explain why they do the things they do. Which is bad.

And Jody is having such a hard time dealing with Claire’s behaviour, coupled with the fact that she didn’t raise Claire and Alex from birth like in a traditional parent-child relationship, that she doesn’t know how to talk to her. She gets Sam to talk to her. And that doesn’t go well. We never get to see a conversation with Jody and Claire where they both explain where they’re coming from, and that’s a crime. We were robbed. I’ve had those conversations with my mum over the years, after doing years and years of healing and working on my issues, and they are so cathartic. It’s amazing to have a conversation with someone you care so deeply for, have the chance to explain your side of things, and maybe even apologise, and not be judged for it. But Claire and Jody aren’t there yet. And while they never have that conversation on screen, they do get to a place of understanding in the next two episodes.

In the next scene, when Jody and Claire are about to head out to the meeting with the registrar, they are attacked by the school janitor, who turns out to be a vampire, and taken to the school. In short, the janitor is out for revenge on Alex, who lured him into being food for her nest. He’s been turned into a vampire, and he turned the most popular guy in school, convinced him to date Alex, and now they want to kill Claire and Jody to get back at her. They break Jody’s leg, feed on Claire, and beat the shit out of Sam, before Dean takes care of the janitor and Claire beheads the jock boyfriend. This is another example of how capable Claire is as a hunter. Despite her earlier misfires, including the assaults on innocent people, she is already saving people and hunting things.

In the penultimate scene, Claire and Alex have prepared breakfast for Jody, as a thank you. She comments that they are a family, and that means they all have something to lose now. The contrast between Alex and Claire is subtextual, but it’s there: Alex wants to have a family. She didn’t leave her nest for 8 years despite how they used, abused and groomed her, because they were her family, and she wanted to protect them. Claire doesn’t have any blood family left, and she still hasn’t healed from how both Jimmy and Amelia abandoned her. She’s angry, defensive, jumpy, and yes, rude and ungrateful. She has a bad attitude, and she’s amazing. She’s the mean sister. She’s a Deancoded Casgirl AND a lesbian. You literally cannot get a better character than Claire Novak, and she’s only in 7 episodes of the show.

In this scene, Jody explicitly calls them family, but you can see on Claire’s face that it doesn’t make her happy. She hasn’t had family for most of her teenage years, and the family she did have sold her to a loan shark who assaulted her. Now she’s been given the chance at having a normal life with her new family, but she doesn’t want it; as always it comes back to how she wants to be hunting. Fambily hasn’t turned out well for her, either. She will never be satisfied with a house in the suburbs and a university degree like Sam would have been, or at least told himself he would have been at the beginning of the series. Like Dean, Claire needs to have her feet on the ground so she can run: run into burning buildings, run from the law, run from her past, run from her mistakes, run into being the person she wants to be. But the only way she sees it is by doing it alone.

The final scene shows Claire explaining to Dean that Jody is going to teach her how to hunt smartly, and an exchange between Sam, Alex and Claire where Alex explains that she can’t be in the hunting world, that it’s not for her. We see in later episodes that she’s still living with Jody, and that she’s helping Jody out with cases, but she hasn’t fully embraced the hunter lifestyle. And that’s great, because it shows that characters can have a relationship with hunting and hunters without letting it take over their entire lives. She reminds me of Ellen and Jo, who run a hunter bar, but stay out of the hunting action for various reasons until the Winchesters come along. Okay, I wrote this little paragraph about Alex running a clinic for hunters in the future, Patch Adams style, where they could get fixed up without any questions being asked. Ideally this would also be part of Sam and Eileen’s Supernatural Rehabilitation Centre and Home for Wayward Children. But that’s for a fanfic I’ll never write, I guess~ Except I did write that fanfic. Like, the day after writing that part of the script, I saw a post about Dean running a hunter b&b out of Bobby’s rebuilt and refurbished house, and then I wrote an Alex-centric fic about her time there.

The episode ends with Sam and Dean driving off in Baby while Jody Alex and Claire watch them go. The thing I’ve noticed about Jody is that whenever she’s on a hunt with Sam and Dean, she always ends up with something broken. Like, it’s not worth it. Get out of there.

The next Claire episode is season 12 “Ladies Drink Free,” written by my hero Meredith Glynn. A teenager and her brother get attacked by a werewolf, and Sam, Dean and Cas’s British boyfriend Mick investigate. They get wind of Claire impersonating a Fishing and Wildlife officer in order to investigate the same case. When Dean calls her, he opens by talking like Yogi Bear and saying that a bear wants his pic-a-nic basket, which makes Claire smile. They meet up at the lodge where the three guys are staying. Dean refuses to let Claire have a beer, and Claire gives them the intel she’s gathered on the case. When she mentions a grabby bartender, Dean arcs up, chomping at the bit to defend her honour, but she says she handled it. Sam and Dean ask why Claire’s alone, and she lies about Jody letting her hunt by herself, when in the previous scene it’s revealed that Jody thinks she’s checking out colleges. That night, Mick the English guy kills the bitten girl with a silver nitrate injection.

The next day, Claire, Sam, Dean and Mick go to the morgue and find the girl dead, then split up—Sam and Claire hit the park to talk to some kids, and Dean and Mick go to the bar. Mick lies about what he did the night before, and when the bartender says that Claire, who talked to him the night before, is a crazy bitch, Dean threatens to “break his face.” Because he’s her dad. The guy actually asks if Dean’s her dad. It’s in the text. After they leave the bar, Dean gets the truth from Mick—they argue because Mick says he had to do his job, and gets offended that Dean is no longer doing what he feels should be done. Dean says that he doesn’t believe the world is black and white anymore, and honestly that’s some of the best growth he goes through in the whole series. It’s important because in the next scene, after Sam confronts Claire about lying to Jody, Claire gets bitten by a werewolf.

So that fucking sucks. Back at the lodge, the four of them argue about what they should do. Dean advocates for helping Claire live as normal a life as she can as a werewolf, but Claire doesn’t want to—she says “I can barely keep it together on a good day.” She would rather die than hurt Jody or Alex. Sam, ever the brainiac, finds another solution: a way to turn Claire back to human using the blood of the sire werewolf. Dean doesn’t want to let her do it, because there’s a chance she could die.

While Sam and Dean are out trying to find the werewolf, he turns up at their hotel room, attacks Mick, and takes Claire. The guys track Claire to the werewolf’s cabin, and a fight ensues, where they get the werewolf’s blood, kill him, and inject Claire. The next scene is her turning back to human—it’s horrible to watch as she writhes in pain, and Dean does his Dean thing of needing to take a break from watching the people he loves most in the world get hurt when he can’t help it. He does this in season 4 when Sam detoxes in Bobby’s panic room slash demon cell, in season 9 when Crowley is torturing Gadreel in Sam’s body, and later in season 14 when Jack dies from his mysterious illness which I still don’t fully understand but please don’t explain it to me, I will not understand.

In the final scene, Claire thanks Sam and Dean and apologises, saying “You’re here when I need you and that’s all that matters.” When she says she doesn’t know if she’ll tell Jody what happened the night before, Dean says they’ll back her up. Claire calls Jody and lets her know she’s been hunting by herself, and a montage of her hugging Sam and Dean plays over the message she leaves for Jody, showing that she’s grown enough to let people into her life, and that she’s letting go of a little bit of the trauma that kept her from letting them in.

My review is: good episode but no Cas, and also the sire werewolf blood thing is just ripped from season 6 when they cured Dean of being a vampire. I know there are literally 15 seasons of this show but can we get some new material. Use those brains, babies, I know you can do it. Come on Supernatural writers! Supernatural writers let’s go!

The next Claire ep is her final one: season 13 “Wayward Sisters,” written by Andrew Dabb and Bobo Berens. Most people know that this was supposed to be a backdoor pilot to a spinoff show, with Claire, Jody, Donna, Patience, Kaia and Alex, and while it never happened, like, in reality, it’s actually still happening in my heart and mind and brain and dick and balls. But it’s not all bad news! Walker is still going strong, and has indeed been picked up for a second season. Diversity win! Your favourite sub-par actor continues to cock it up wherever he goes.

My reasoning behind why Wayward Sisters didn’t get made and Walker Jared Ranger got renewed for a second season, is that they promo’d the shit out of it. “Wayward Sisters” happened in the 13th season of a show that had been waning in popularity for several years. There was always a dedicated fanbase, but by the time this episode happened, it was mostly reddit bros, military weirdos, and a tiny selection of dedicated queers on tumblr. None of that was enough to give Wayward Sisters a final push. Also, all the people who are currently streaming that show on Amazon Murderer or whatever, yeah you’re the problem.

“Wayward Sisters” starts with Claire rescuing a little girl who has been held captive by werewolves. Possibly to turn her, possibly to kill her, possibly for some more nefarious and frightening reason, but Claire busts in, kills the three wolves, and saves the girl. We see how much Claire has improved: she was always a good hunter with good instincts, but now she can take out three wolves by herself, wield a knife, a shotgun, and a revolver with ease. It’s also important for us to see her save someone, because ultimately that’s the reason Sam and Dean tell themselves they stay in the hunting game, and that’s Claire’s new reason. It’s here that we see her motivations change: where once she ran from the idea of fambily and took out her frustration, anger and pain on evil creatures, she now dedicates her life to saving people.

Jody calls her with bad news: Sam and Dean are missing. Claire hightails it back to Sioux Falls, where she’s briefed by Jody and introduced to Patience Turner, Missouri Moseley’s granddaughter. Patience tells her that she had a vision of Claire dying, and Claire responds by basically telling Jody to back off and let her live. Claire’s been hunting by herself because she wants the freedom, the wants the thrill of killing monsters, and because she doesn’t want to be tied down. She tells Alex that if she stayed in Sioux Falls, Jody would just worry all the time, and Alex says, “Claire, she never stopped.” Being taken under Jody’s wing means being protected by her, but Jody is so afraid of losing another child after losing her son and husband that she is overprotective, and it smothers Claire, especially after Claire spent years on her own in the foster care system and group homes. She doesn’t know how to have a family anymore, she doesn’t know how to fit into a family unit. In the last episode, she thought that lying to Jody about what she was doing was better than admitting what she wanted to do, and in this episode she’s being truthful but still struggling with being honest. Jody rarely hears from her—in fact this is the first time in a while Claire has been home. I can’t remember if Jody mentions her in between this and “Ladies Drink Free” but I do remember conversations Jody has with other characters about Claire after this, meaning that if my calculations are correct, this episode is turning point in their relationship.

After an argument with Jody, Claire runs off to the hospital where Alex works, and they have the famous exchange where they insult each other’s outfits. Alex says that Claire “looks like Biker Barbie,” and Claire glows with the praise. Honestly it’s all I want to be. They check the system for aliases of Sam and Dean’s and find that a Jane Doe was brought in recently—Kaia Nieves. Claire goes to find her, and Kaia splits, getting defensive when Claire mentions Sam and Dean. As she runs outside, a monster jumps out from the shadows, but Claire subdues it by stabbing it in the throat after Jody shoots it in the leg. And then we cut to Claire saying, “So let’s talk,” and Kaia’s horrified face. It’s beautiful.

From there, they take the creature, a thing we don’t get a name for, to Jody’s garage and Alex dissects it. Kaia leaves and Claire finds her sitting on the front stoop, agitated and scared. They have a conversation about what the thing is, and Kaia says she doesn’t know, just that she sees them when she dreamwalks, she runs, and sometimes they catch her. Their conversation drifts to the scars they have, which is a common theme among queer relationships, and they laugh together. It’s sweet and wholesome and the beginning of a relationship that defines Claire’s character arc throughout the rest of the show—unfortunately, this is Kathryn Newton’s last episode, and we only hear about her from Jody. Claire and Kaia’s relationship parallels moments of Dean and Cas’s relationship, except they sped it up and crammed it into one episode, like the horrible ghouls they are. Dean and Cas got twelve years. Claire and Kaia got twelve hours. Where’s the fucking justice.

Meanwhile, Sam and Dean are stuck in The Bad Place, the place that Kaia dreamwalks to. Dean is eating, because of course he is, and Sam does his constipated concerned face. They talk about how they’ve been there for two days and that the portal has probably closed by now. Dean says, “No one back home knows where to start looking for us,” and when they run off to escape ominous growls, a shadowy figure with a lance appears.

The women plan to stick around at Jody’s until they can figure out their next move, but Patience has a vision of more of those creatures ransacking Jody’s house, so they all split. A “the plot comes to you” moment. Claire and Patience go head to head before they leave, with Patience standing up for herself, and Claire only backing down when Kaia says her name. They meet up with Donna in the morning, who is Jody’s second half and second momma to Jody’s girls, which soon includes Patience and Kaia. The Wayward Sisters fragment of Supernatural is so rich with untapped potential, and even though they couldn’t get the pilot off the ground, there’s no reason they couldn’t get the girls together again to solve another case. This episode is one of my favourite episodes of any series ever. And you know what? It has lessened my dislike of Bobo Berens from boiling to simmering. Also I rewatched “Despair” and I found some things to like about it, even if he did fridge another woman of colour. Like he does in this episode, and the episode that introduces Patience. Seems to be a running theme, hmmmm.

Jody and Donna decide to head to the last place Sam and Dean were seen, and Claire, Kaia, Patience and Alex stay behind. Jody says to Claire that she needs to stay behind to make sure the other girls are okay, and Claire nods and accepts this. We can tell it’s partly due to Kaia, and Claire finding someone she wants to protect, but also she’s putting a lot of faith in Jody to know what’s best. It’s in direct counterpoint to earlier in the episode when Claire yelled at Jody for treating her like a kid, and previous episodes where she felt smothered by Jody. Now she sees the trust Jody is giving to her, and she gives that trust right back. It’s such a lovely moment and Kathryn Newton plays it with such vulnerability and softness.

There’s another scene with Sam and Dean in the Bad Place, where they get the shit beaten out of them by the shadowy figure with a lance. Donna and Jody find the shipyard where Kaia opened the portal, and get attacked by more of the creatures. With Jody and Donna gone, Claire and Kaia have another heart to heart. Claire spills her fears about dying, but also her desire to save Sam and Dean after they did the same for her. Kaia says, “If you go, I’ll go with you.” The DeanCas parallels are insane. Meanwhile, Jody and Donna find the portal, and Jody says that she’s going in, because she can’t lose Claire, but then they get distracted running from more of the creatures. Claire saves them by wielding a flamethrower, like the boss she is, and then runs upstairs to the portal.

Kaia and Jody follow. Jody tries to stop Claire, but she realises how much Claire needs to do this, to save Sam and Dean. She realises how capable Claire is of saving Sam and Dean, because she just saved Jody and Donna, and she isn’t backing down from this fight. She needs to be the hero right now. She needs to look her own death in the face and overcome it. Jody gives her permission to go, and Claire turns to Kaia, holds out her hand and says, “I’ll protect you.” Together, even though Kaia is terrified, they step through the portal.

The Bad Place is blue and green and dark and lush. It’s uncorrupted by humans. Out there is a lawless land, where creatures roam free, living naturally, the way humans used to before we moved out of the rainforests, when our diet was 100 per cent fruit, nuts and seeds. Maybe some of them Palaeolithic magic mushrooms. Take me out of capitalism and put me in a rainforest, blease. They find Sam and Dean tied to trees and cut them loose before hightailing it back to the portal. When they get there, the shadowy figure throws its lance at them, aiming for Claire. When Kaia pushes her out of the way, the lance hits her instead, and she goes down. Claire reaches for her hand, which Kaia squeezes before it slackens, and she, presumably, dies.

As a huge monster approaches, hungry for human flesh, Sam and Dean pull Claire back through the portal. Dean pulls her, which is fitting: Dean pulled Sam out of his burning apartment when Jess died in the pilot, Sam pulled Dean back when Cas went after Lucifer in the season 12 finale, and Dean’s pulling his daughter back when she wants to stay with Kaia or go after the shadowy figure who killed her.

They bust back into their normal universe and Claire slumps on the ground, distraught, until Jody scoops her up and pulls her Pieta-style into her arms. Patience comes in to see them in the same position as in her vision. Claire cries, and Jody hugs her, and soft music plays as we see Kaia’s lifeless body, her hand, the spear in her stomach and her blood.

Cut to the next day, when Sam and Dean say goodbye to Jody before they leave. Dean says, “I tried talking to Claire,” and Sam says, “She seems pretty shut down.” Jody says, “Claire’s going to need a lot of time.” She goes to see Claire, who is in her room, crying. She says to Jody that she was right about Claire rushing in with no plan, and why Jody wants to protect her so badly: so she doesn’t feel what Claire feels now that Kaia is gone. Kathryn Newton does such a fantastic job in this scene, and I love how it’s one long, sustained shot as she talks about her trauma. This episode is directed really well, and I do have to admit that it’s written well too.

Meanwhile, the other Waywards, Donna Patience and Alex, are cleaning the house, and when Patience says, shocked, “I killed a monster,” Alex replies, “Welcome to the family.” It’s such a nice moment. This found family dynamic, especially with so many sapphic women, is literally my dream life, monster killing included. I wanna be a hunter so bad. When Claire pulls out her trusty hunter diary, her voiceover explains that she wants to stay with her family because she needs them. She needs them because she loves them, but also because she wants to track down the thing that killed Kaia and kill it.

As this voice over is happening, it cuts between Claire, Jody, Patience, Alex and Donna eating dinner, and another rift where the shadowy figure jumps out of. She lowers her hood to reveal that she is Kaia. DUN DUN DUN. And that’s where the episode ends. So even while this is Kathryn Newton’s last episode as Claire, Yadira Guevara-Prip is in a bunch more episodes as both Bad Place Kaia and regular Kaia. And yes, she does continue to beat the shit out Sam and Dean, which is amazing. But as Jody reveals in Kaia’s last episode, she hasn’t told Claire about Bad Place Kaia. I’m a little fuzzy on the details, so I’m not sure when it’s revealed that normal Kaia is still alive, but I think that’s in her last episode, and Jody doesn’t tell Claire then either. Claire’s been hunting Bad Place Kaia for two years without knowing who she is, and Jody could have told her and given her at least a little bit of closure. That’s so messed up! If they had another Claire episode, we could’ve had Claire and Kaia reuniting and this convo between them all where Claire demands to know why Jody didn’t say anything, instead of it just being brushed over. Like, Supernatural does a lot of shady things, but this isn’t even questioned.

One last thing before I move on. This creature who kills Claire’s mother is a grigori, a class of angel who feeds on humans. It’s some kind of poetic that angels took both her parents from her, and she could only avenge one. In the last season, Jack kills the last of the grigori, so hot girl shit runs in the family. Once exposed to the supernatural world in this way, Claire becomes paranoid and erratic, thinking she’s seeing supernatural creatures everywhere, and attacking civilians. She’s just human after all, and she couldn’t save her father or her mother, so she sets her sights on killing evil things. We’ve seen this happen with John, Sam, Dean, Bobby, Gordon, Jo, Tamara and Isaac from season 3 episode “That Magnificent Seven,” Jesse and Cesar from season 11 episode “The Chitters,” and probably a bunch more. It’s a running theme in the show. In this way, Claire is doing what seems most natural. Either people move on from their experiences of losing loved ones to the supernatural, or they embrace the life and fight the supernatural themselves. It was honestly such a joy to see Claire again in season 10, because me and the Casgirlies I hung around in 2010 loved her and her potential, especially her potential as Cas’s vessel. Even though I do have some suggestions as to what they could have done differently, what they did do was really wonderful, and it was nice to see that the show and its producers changed how they approached queer sexuality. And of course, Cas. Cas. Cas the original gay angel who fathered two gay kids and married a gay husband. I love rainbow families.

Okay this transcript is almost 10,000 words, and I haven’t even gotten into the meat of what I wanted to talk about, which is Claire and Cas.

Claire’s relationship with Cas is one of the most interesting dynamics on the whole show. They never once talk about how he possessed her for a hot minute back in 2009, but it was the subject of many of my casgirlie friends’ fanfiction a decade ago. The relationships of vessels and angels is such an unexplored well of ideas and possibilities. For instance, Lucifer is psychosexually obsessed with Sam, Adam and Michael are in love, and all instances of Michael in regards to Dean before season 15 are just like… wildly horny. What even the fuck was that scene in season 5 episode “The Song Remains The Same” when Michael possessed 1979 John? Matt Cohen, what were you doing… Angels are batshit.

But Claire and Cas’s relationship isn’t like that. Cas is Claire’s dad, her protector, the one who feels responsible for her and how her life has turned out. If we got to see them interacting past season 10, we could have had so many interesting philosophical conversations and seen more of their father-daughter dynamic. He IS responsible for the way her life turned out before she turned 18, and I hate that Sam and Dean have such a big impact on her life going forward without Cas. They send her to Jody’s, they turn up at her first case, they save her from turning into a werewolf, and they’re the ones she saves, while Kaia (seemingly) dies in the process. Claire and Kaia’s relationship explicitly parallels that of Dean and Cas, which makes sense because Bobo and Dabb wrote that episode, and Bobo wrote Cas’s gay love confession in a Dabb showrun season, and yet Cas is not there???? Explain. Actually I don’t even remember where Cas is, because all seasons past 8 sort of blend together, at least in terms of Cas’s arcs. Like Carver era is known for its rampant sexual drive and not its narrative cohesion, and Dabb didn’t know what to do with Cas in 12-15 which is why he’s like, chasing after Kelly, and then he’s looking for God again, and then he’s kind of taking care of Jack but he’s also leaving Jack alone for long periods of time with the two most damaged humans on earth outside of me and my family. WHERE IS CLAIRE.

I would have loved an episode where Cas and Claire are on a hunt together, especially as a precursor to the hunts he goes on with Jack in the later seasons. He wouldn’t need to be as careful as he is with Jack, and it would mostly be Claire taking the lead and Cas tagging along, trying to instigate conversations about how proud he is of her, how much Jimmy would love to see her happy and fulfilled, and that he hopes she can find another love one day, while Claire rolls her eyes and uses any excuse to bail out of the conversations. The little easter egg we got in season 15 episode “Galaxy Brain,” where the Winchesters, Cas and Jody rescue Kaia from the Bad Place after she has been trapped there for two years, is Cas mentioning Claire. He says to Jody that she can’t come to the Bad Place to rescue Kaia because if she died, Claire wouldn’t be able to handle it. Cas is a full-time parent now, and he understands the intricacies of parent-child relationships. Also, Jody gets absolutely craphammered every time she fights a monster—literal broken bones and cuts and scrapes and bruises, every time. We don’t need to see that in every one of her episodes, blease. But it’s true: Claire wouldn’t be able to handle losing another parent, just like Jody wouldn’t be able to handle losing another child. It’s a lovely moment between parents, and between two people who care so much about Claire and Kaia that they’re willing to risk their lives for them.

Today the tumblr discourse focused around Claire, Cas and Dean, and at least on my dash people’s reactions to the idea that Claire would be the one to help Dean come out. All the posts I saw were unanimous in saying that Claire hates touchy feely moments as much as Dean does, and she would probably never even have the conversation where she comes out to him, let alone facilitate Dean’s coming out. Like there would be one night where Dean passes Claire a beer and is like, “So you and Kaia, huh,” and Claire says, “Yeah. Me and Kaia. So what?” Dean says, “I’m just happy for you, you know? You got a chance at something special. Not every hunter gets that.” And Claire would make a sarcastic remark and pretend she doesn’t hear the praise, but that’s about as touchy feely as it would get. Dean is still pretty incapable of saying what he means in this regard, even when he has time to put his thoughts together. Like until Cas literally says the words, Dean has no idea Cas is even capable of loving him. He doesn’t even entertain the thought. The life that he wants Sam, Jack and Claire to lead doesn’t exist for him, and until Kaia it doesn’t exist for Claire either, but then she finds out how to fit into a makeshift found family with her sisters and gay mums, and sometimes hangs out with her gay trans dads and uncle Moose and baby brother who is just a little boy. The absolute travesty that we never got to see Claire and Jack interacting. They would absolutely set something on fire, Jack by accident and Claire not so much. Claire would teach Jack to shoplift and tell him it’s okay because corporations are stealing from their workers, and then they would have a backyard sword throwing competition. Where the hell is this episode, Andrew Dabb?

My absolute favourite Claire headcanon is something that’s been around probably since before I joined the fandom in 2010, that Claire is supposed to be Cas’s true vessel the way Dean is Michael’s and Sam is Lucifer’s. I love it for so many reasons: because Claire is so powerful and being paired up with an angel she would be completely unstoppable; because she and Cas would be best friends and they’d drink boba tea for the first time and Cas would let her have control of the vessel to see Amelia and they’d go to stationery stores and buy stickers that smell like watermelon; because he could see the world through a child’s eyes and be able to appreciate it that much more as he’s falling; because it would pose questions like, would Claire grow mentally and emotionally, or would she stay stuck as a 12yo forever? Does Cas feel her emotions, his own, or both?; because it would bring to the forefront the idea of vessels and angels coexisting peacefully years before they actually addressed it. Of course, they couldn’t possibly have Sydney Imbeau play Cas, because children age quite visibly, and one of the things Cas says in season 4 episode “The Rapture” when he possesses Claire is that vessels don’t age when possessed. It just wouldn’t work. Like obviously Misha aged too. Because he’s. You know. Human.

The main problem with the headcanon of Cas possessing Claire is that. Well. He’s in love with Dean and has been since they met in Hell. And Dean would actually not fall in love with a 12 year old. That’s just wrong like legally and ethically and morally. And Cas rebuilt Dean: he knows that Dean is into DILFs, and Jimmy is right there. It’s perfect.

Did you forget about the thing I was going to say? Well, here it is: human AU Claire is Cassie from Promising Young Woman. Except Claire would absolutely murder those rapists. And that’s why she’s the only character that matters.

#supernatural #supernatural podcast #claire novak #spn #podcast #holyhellpod

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holyhellpod · 4 years ago

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New setup! (I just added the lap desk.)

#holyhellpod #update #behind the screen

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holyhellpod · 4 years ago

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Hi everyone, me again. Popping in to say that my Claire episode is taking longer than expected because I have so many things to do, with real life and fandom. If you’d like to keep up with me please follow me @deannifersbody and hassle me to keep writing my script. I want to do my best with this podcast which means taking it slower than I would like, but it also means you get a more quality product to listen to. Hopefully that’s a good trade off!

I also wanted to say I have a Ko-fi now, and while you’re under no obligation to donate, anything you tip me will help in the production of this podcast, and also real life things like helping me to save up for a car. I appreciate every one of you for following and listening and I hope to get some good content out to you soon!

#update #holyhellpod #supernatural #supernatural podcast #spn

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holyhellpod · 4 years ago

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4. Fambily

In this episode, we skim the surface of the fambily dynamics in Supernatural, which are–ah. Dicey at best.

Apple | Spotify | Google

Transcript under the cut!

Keep reading

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holyhellpod · 4 years ago

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Hello fans, furries and freaks. I haven’t abandoned this project! I’m still working albeit slowly as I have a million and one things to do and then I just end up watching Always Sunny instead. BUT I have decided that I work best on a schedule. I can usually keep my self-enforced deadlines and when I do have a deadline it works better for me. So I’m thinking of try to do an episode once a month. My current episode is on Claire, the next one will be on the Ghostfacers, and the one after that will be on a specific lead from the show (three guesses which one). I originally thought I should do two a month but I think that would be a mad scramble to get things done as opposed to getting them done properly. At the moment I don’t have a specific date I want to get this next episode out, but I will try to get them out a month after the previous, so if I get my Claire ep out on the 10th (but hopefully before then) then I will aim for the 10th of every month.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, complaints, send them to me or reply to this post. Thank you very much for following and listening to the podcast, it means so much to me.

#update

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holyhellpod · 4 years ago

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4. Fambily

In this episode, we skim the surface of the fambily dynamics in Supernatural, which are--ah. Dicey at best.

Apple | Spotify | Google

Transcript under the cut!

Content warnings: domestic violence and family abuse

[Growl]

Ah, the Winchesters. Where do we even start. Unhinged, deranged, and continually traumatised in every way, Sam and Dean complete each other. At least, that’s what the show wants us to think. Despite the ways they betray each other, lie to each other, and piss each other off, they are fambily. And fambily is the most important thing. The concept of Fambily in the show Supernatural (2005-2020) takes many twists and turns throughout its run. In the first five minutes of episode one, the heteronormative, nuclear family of John, Mary, Sam and Dean is ripped apart by an unknown, antagonistic force that represents all the evil in the world. It creeps into a nursery and eviscerates a white, blonde mother while preying upon a 👶, I mean, how much more evil can you get? It’s fantastic that, in the later seasons especially, Supernatural embraces this idea that fambily doesn’t end in blood, but blood doesn’t always mean fambily. By the end of the series, the fambily concept has expanded to include two dads, an aunt and uncle, and a thirty-year old infant. I’m going to talk about the finale in its own episode, so that my ire will have its proper outlet.

When the show starts, Sam, Dean and John have each other, and only each other. By the time season 2 really kicks off, Sam and Dean don’t have John anymore, but they do have Bobby Singer. The concept of the triumvirate follows them throughout the series as though they’re in a less sexy Italo Calvino novel—first Sam, Dean and John, then Sam, Dean and Bobby, then Sam, Dean and Ruby, then Sam, Dean and Cas, then Sam, Dean and Mary, then Sam, Dean and Jack. It’s broken in seasons 13-15 when Cas comes back and they have a family of four, and then five when Mary can stand to see her boys.

But the Winchesters are not the only fambily in Supernatural who matter. In season two, we’re introduced to the Harvelles, mother Ellen and daughter Jo, who are a hunting fambily who run a hunter pub in the middle of whoop whoop. A pub that Eric Kripke famously hated, and rejoiced when he burnt it down at the end of season 2, because the Winchesters and by extension everyone they know aren’t allowed to have anything good ever. It’s revealed in season two episode “No Exit” that John got Jo’s father killed on a hunt, which obviously affects Jo more than it does Sam and Dean.

[Editing note:] Okay I’m editing this episode, and I’m not happy with it. I’m not going to scrap it completely because I think I do have good points to say, but the general analysis of this episode is so surface level. It is basically contributing nothing to the conversation. And I started this podcast in order to actually contribute something to the culture. I could make a bunch of text posts on tumblr or I could spend hours and hours and hours and hours of my life to something that — I don’t know. Is it bringing me joy? Not at the moment. But, yeah. So I’m not going to scrap this episode completely but this is my way of saying from now on the episodes are going to take as much as they will take and I will commit myself to having deeper and more thoughtful analysis. And if I have to spend an entire episode on one aspect of one thing, I will. I could be at university right now studying a masters or a PhD in fucking literary analysis but instead I’m sitting on my bed making a Supernatural podcast because it brings me joy. It does. It really makes me happy and I don’t want to abandon this project, because people are listening to it. I don’t know why, I don’t know what you like it about it, but you’re listening. And I just think I owe it to myself to make things that I support 100%. So I’ll continue this episode and hopefully this rambling hasn’t put you off it completely. But from now on, I’m going to really, really talk about things that matter in regards to Supernatural… Kind of an oxymoron. Kind of a contradiction. But things that contribute to the cultural consciousness instead of just rehashing the road so far. That’s all I want to do. I want to contribute. I want to say good…ful things. Okay this is making me happy. It’s already working, it’s already making me happy. I’m just going to keep rambling and laughing. Okay so, more thoughtful analysis, deeper analysis. Things that make you think. Things that make me think. Instead of just a bunch of words that mean nothing. Okay, continuing on.

Okay to figure out which episode this was I had to watch a little bit of season two, and I’m still on my season 13 rewatch. The difference between the two seasons. I don’t know if I can even put into words the growth this show has gone through, and the characters have gone through, over the last 15 years. It would be like summarising my own growth by combing through my extensive diary collection and the years of societally- and governmentally-enforced heterosexuality that has plagued my entire life. Those boys are babies in season two. The bootcut jeans alone. Sam is literally 23 years old. I don’t even talk to 23 year olds. I block them on social media.

The Harvelles are a blip in the Winchester map. While the actors Samantha Ferris and Chad Lindberg did attempt to resuscitate their cultural currency months after the show ended by participating in an event — okay I can’t. I can’t even go into it. Like, clearly Samantha Ferris heard back from her representation as soon as she started posting those tweets and realised she wouldn’t continue to get money if she endorsed, well, the gays. And Chad Lindberg was just using the clout to push his Etsy wares like a 14th century merchant, so I gotta respect the hustle. But Jo and Ellen die in season 5 episode “Abandon All Hope” and are barely mentioned again except the episode Ash appears in, season 5 “Dark side of the moon,” Jo in season 7, “Defending Your Life,” and Ellen in the season 6 episode “My heart will go on.” They didn’t exactly leave what you would call a lasting impact for the next, you know, ten seasons.

To be honest, I’m not sure when it’s revealed that Bobby’s wife died after being possessed by a demon. It’s made clear in season 5 “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” and I did not have to look that up, because season four and five are burned into my retinas like a particularly nasty sun flare. Bobby outlines the horrific way he killed his wife, because why not throw some spousal violence into the mix, and later in season 7 “Death’s Door,” it elaborates on their life together. I saw this sentiment expressed on TikTok, which we all know as the foundation of cultural knowledge, which was that fambilies don’t need to be two parents and children. Fambilies can be spouses or partners. You don’t need to have children in order to be a fambily. I think that’s a very nice sentiment and I’ve chosen to adopt it for these purposes. Bobby and his wife Karen are a fambily. While Karen wants kids, Bobby chooses not to have them for fear of becoming like his father and repeating the trauma he inflicted on Bobby. Bobby and Karen’s fambily dynamic is ruptured in the same way that John and Mary’s is—by an intrusive, demonic force that brings Bobby into the hunting world and ends Karen’s life. But by the time we see him at the end of season 1, Bobby is already ingratiated into Sam and Dean’s lives as their surrogate father, and this bond only deepens as the show progresses. Bobby expresses the sentiment to Dean to not be like John, that Dean is already a better man that his father ever was. Isn’t that what we all want to hear? That we have superseded our parents and outgrown them in ways they could never comprehend? Don’t we just want to be better than the generations that came before us, in order to mould a better world for the generations that come after us? Don’t we want to make things easier for our children, and our friends’ children, and our siblings’ children? Dean is a better man than John, and Bobby is better man than his father ever was. It’s about breaking the cycles of intergenerational trauma. I have to believe that Sam, Dean and Bobby did this, because then it’s possible for me to do the same thing. Include here that speech about representation in media that I didn’t bother writing for the last episode. Bobby is the surrogate father to Sam and Dean, a better father than John was, a better hunter even. He crafts an entire network of hunters who report to him, as seen in the season 6 episode “Weekend at Bobby’s,” and he continues to act as Sam and Dean’s mentor until his death in season 7 “How to win friends and influence monsters”. An alternate universe version of Bobby is introduced in season 13, which I have my reservations about, and he and Mary get together, which again, why. Season 13 is so hard to sit through.

A fambily that is introduced late into the series and is simply NOT given enough screen time is the Banes fambily. In season 12, “Celebrating the life of Asa Fox,” we are introduced to the Banes twins, Max and Alicia, who are by far the most gorgeous hunters we’ve seen in the series. They are hunters raised by a witch, Tasha Banes, who doesn’t appear yet, and they manage to survive the trial by fire that is overcoming the demon Jael. Later in this season, in the episode “Twigs and Twane and Tasha Banes,” both of which are written by the late great Steve Yockey, we are introduced to Tasha in a way that seems awfully familiar: Alicia calls Sam to say their mother has gone missing on a hunt, and hasn’t checked in in a few days. By the end of the episode, Alicia and Tasha are dead, and Max has ostensibly sold his soul for the power to bring Alicia back. The Banes twins’ storyline directly parallels Sam and Dean’s from the pilot, but it’s a tragedy from the outset. We already know Tasha is dead and they can’t save her, however, like Dean does for Sam at the end of season 2, Max chooses to save Alicia at the expense of his own soul. Spin off when. Banes twins series when. I’m waiting. They were in two episodes and I’m still thinking about them. The Harvelles are dust.

In season 7, “Reading is Fundamental,” a waifish 17 year old honour’s student Kevin Tran breaks into a rehabilitation facility to steal a tablet. This starts a chain of events that ingratiates Kevin Tran in the apocalyptic, death-succumbing world of the Winchesters, starting with Dick Roman, head leviathan, and continuing, but not culminating, with his death at the hands of Gadreel, who was possessing Sam, it’s a whole thing. Any time you attempt to summarise anything on Supernatural, you sound like a lunatic. And I say that as someone who has a supernatural podcast, with an audience of only supernatural fans. We are lunatics, but we’re lunatics together. Kevin’s arc was cut way too short, but we at least got to see him with his momma Linda in the beginnings of season 8 with the unfortunately named episode “What’s up, Tiger Mommy?” It introduces Linda Tran as a capable and worldly woman, hell bent on protecting her son. She offers up her soul among other things in exchange for Kevin and the tablet with him. During the episode, she is possessed by Crowley, and Dean attempts to kill him, which would mean killing Linda as well. Kevin considers this the ultimate betrayal and leaves with his mum. Later in season 9 episode “Captives,” Linda is reintroduced as a captive of Crowley, who escapes with Sam’s help. Back at the bunker, she reunites with Kevin, who is now, thanks to the Winchesters’ incompetence, a ghost 👻. My macbook keeps suggesting little emojis in the smart bar so I just gotta put ‘em in. That’s the last we see of Linda, so I’m drawing my own conclusions about whether she gets to live a long and happy life. Kevin is a fan favourite and despite my reservations about Osric Chau which I will not get into like ever I really like Kevin too. He outsmarts Crowley many times and shows remarkable tenacity to get an impossible job done. His desire to see his mum again, the driving force behind his actions, mirrors Dean’s desperation to have his fambily together again like they used to be. I would call this a parallel but I don’t believe they purposefully did this, I just think they accidentally rehashed the same tired storyline they’ve been peddling since 2005. But yeah, if I was Kevin and all I had was my mum, seeing her again would be the driving force for my actions as well. Kevin’s father is never mentioned, and it honestly isn’t a big deal, which is great. Sometimes fathers are just absent, and you don’t need throw a hissy fit about it or make it your entire personality, Dean.

Missouri Moseley, played by the inimitable Loretta Devine, is introduced in the first season, episode “Home,” in which she helps out on a case involving Sam and Dean’s childhood house. We find out that Missouri is a long-time friend of John’s and helped him to understand that supernatural forces were behind Mary’s death. She is Sam and Dean’s first point of entry into the world of the Supernatural, and they didn’t know it until they meet her in “Home”. In season 13 episode “Patience,” another layer to Missouri’s character is added with the advent of her family: estranged son James and granddaughter Patience Turner, who is also a psychic. We get a lot of backstory for Missouri in this episode, even if it is sloppily written and contradictory to the way they initially set her up. If Missouri and James had been travelling when he was a child, why was she stationed in Lawrence in both 1983 and 2005? What did he mean that Missouri was hunting? I can’t be bothered unpacking the confusing bits of information presented in this episode. It’s not a good episode and I really don’t see why everyone goes apeshit for Bobo Berens. He kills Missouri in this episode, in a really horrible way. Like the history of Supernatural’s racism and misogyny should not be dumped on one man, but nor should it be perpetuated and it is continually throughout the entire show. Confusing, contradictory and badly written backstory aside, she is an interesting character, and her willingness to sacrifice herself to save her family echoes that of Mary in “Home”. I’m actually really mad that Patience never gets to have a relationship with Missouri, and later in season 13 episode “The Bad Place,” Patience’s father tells her that if she leaves to help The Winchesters and uses her psychic abilities, she’s not welcome back in his house. To me that’s just unnecessary. We have a family that has already been ruptured by the death of Patience’s mother, further ruptured by Patience’s father cutting off contact with Missouri, and then to go a step further he disintegrates their family unit by kicking Patience out. Like how much loss do the Moseley-Turners have to endure? It’s really just cruel at this point. But Patience does find family with Jodie, Donna, Claire, Alex and eventually Kaia, and while I love the concept of found family and this found family in particular, it comes at the expense of biological family, which is something that the show has pushed from the very first episode. So that’s evolution in itself. Going from “fambily is the most important thing to these characters” to “found fambily is where we find love” is great, but ripping apart a biological fambily like the Moseley-Turners, and indeed starting the episode by saying Missouri has been shunted out of her son and granddaughter’s lives for trying to bring her son comfort, is just fucked. Like, I couldn’t name a single Bobo episode that I actually like without having to comb through them. I’m trying really hard not to shit all over him because as a writer I know how much that sucks and I know how hard is it for any marginalised writers to get a start, but I’m allowed to have my vendettas.

If you’ve watched the “Runs In The Family” angels MV from 2010, and only if you’ve watched the “Runs In The Family” angels MV from 2010, you will understand just how jacked up the angel family really is. The angelic counterpoint to Sam and Dean are the archangels Lucifer and Michael. We are introduced to two different versions of Michael—one in season 5, who possesses their dad in 1979 and their brother Adam in 2010—my god that was literally over a decade ago—and Apocalypse World Michael, played by four different actors: Felisha Terrell, Christian Keyes, Jensen Ackles, and Ruth Connell, who plays Rowena. I don’t know what in the hell Jensen Ackles was doing performance-wise when playing Michael, but I consider it a federal crime akin to drug trafficking or money laundering. As for Christian Keyes playing Michael, Andrew Dabb, you know what you did and you’re going to have to live with that.

In season 5, during the apocalypse, Michael and Lucifer only interact in the last episode, “Swan Song,” but the entire season is built around their conflict. Lucifer disobeyed their father, and Michael as God’s most powerful weapon must defeat him. It’s meant to mirror Sam’s descent into, uhhhh, badness or something, disobeying John to run away to Stanford, or, like, drinking demon blood? It’s unclear. Lucifer and Apocalypse World Michael interact in season 13, and Michael kills Lucifer only to take over Dean’s body and start a season-long arc of, like, bad acting and barely thought-out plots. I would say to Jensen Ackles “don’t quit your day job,” but this is literally his day job.

The angels as they’re introduced in season 4 are warriors of god, and all they know is obedience and killing. Even Cas can’t break out of the cycle of killing his angel siblings, and often justifies it by saying that it’s for the greater good, that he needs to do it to take down a stronger force like Raphael or Metatron. Anna manages to break free of her family by falling and becoming human, but when Cas betrays her and the angels capture her, she is lobotomised, tortured and sent back out to kill Sam. Then she’s burned to a crisp by Michael possessing John, not the last time a woman would burn to death on this show. The angels are dysfunctional at best, and actively hostile to each other, especially Castiel, the infamous spanner in the works. I could write an entire academic paper about how the angels think of Castiel as this rebel slut who murdered his way to the top and is going to be the downfall of angel kind, but Dean thinks of him as this little nerdy guy with a harp he carries around in his back pocket. Which honestly Cas would love because he’s obsessed with Dean and wants to touch his butt. I don’t know what else I can say about the angels without turning this into a dissertation, so I’ll continue on.

While all seasons of the show are about family, season six is especially about matrilineal family. It introduces the concept of the mother of monsters—Eve—and focuses on Mary as a solution to the loneliness the characters feel after her death. Samuel Campbell, Mary’s father, is brought back to life and manipulated by the promise of seeing his daughter again. He asks Sam and Dean what they wouldn’t do to see Mary again, which is kind of the general thesis of the show. What wouldn’t John, Dean and Sam do for each other? Dean sells his soul. John makes a deal with the demon who killed Mary. Sam teams up with Ruby to kill Lilith in revenge, which begins as a suicide mission because he doesn’t know how to handle his grief for Dean. The difference is that Samuel betrays Sam and Dean, his own grandchildren, for the promise of seeing Mary again. This cardinal sin alienates him from being a good guy, because good guys never betray Sam and Dean. Sam and Dean are our protagonists! Our heroes! The bringers of the light! The knights in shining armour! The white on rice. The cherry in cherry pie. They are the ones we’re meant to align ourselves with, because it’s their story the narrative is telling. And anyone who doesn’t align themselves with the Winchesters is an enemy who needs to be defeated.

We’re introduced to the character of Gwen in the first episode of season 6, “Exile on Main Street”, and she says in the episode “Family Matters” that Samuel, the patriarch, doesn’t like her very much because she reminds him of Mary. While Samuel, Christian, Gwen and co are technically family, Dean has no connection to them past bloodlines. And as I said before, while family doesn’t end in blood, we learn throughout this season that blood doesn’t always mean family. Gwen dies in the episode “And Then There Were None,” because of course she does, and Mary doesn’t come back, at least not in this season.

In “Family Matters,” the alpha vampire, played by the irreplaceable Rick Worthy, mentions that “we all have our mothers,” referring to Eve, the mother of monsters, the one who spawned every other monster and who has been trapped in purgatory ever since. Eve is pulled from Purgatory to wage war against the hunters and Crowley because they have been preying on her first borns, the alphas. I love Eve. I love her. She’s my favourite villain after Metatron. Mainly because I think she is like… sexy as hell. Like wow I am just so attracted to Julia Maxwell and this, like, bored smokey affect thing she does where she barely moves her mouth when she speaks and her strong brow makes her seem so intimidating. I don’t know anything about her personally, but I feel like she would’ve bullied me in high school, and I’m into it. It’s really hard to judge just from this one role whether she’s a good actor because Eve has such limited range and few things to do, but I really wish she’d gotten more screen time. Yeah, she’s doing the bare minimum and I’m completely obsessed. But Eve isn’t just a monster, she’s literally THEE milf. The original milf. And I really think she should’ve stayed around, but since they kept Lisa alive they had to kill at least one high profile woman.

Continuing with the family storylines in season 6, Dean tries to establish a family with Lisa and Ben, and for the most part succeeds. He gets a job, plays the role of the doting boyfriend and stepfather, and protects them as best he can. I’m going to spare you the rant perched at the tip of my tongue about how this is at best a lavender marriage or staying together for the kid, and that Lisa only exists to be an ideal for Dean, not an actual partner he can grow with throughout the rest of the show. It’s his first attempt at a fambily outside of Sam, Bobby and John, and it fails miserably because Lisa isn’t a good match. The fact is, she will never be able to fit into the hunting world because of the way the writers wrote her—as mother and girlfriend archetype, and we’ve seen how well they do with those—in fact they actively paralleled it in “Exile on Main Street” where they had Dean hallucinate Azazel coming back and pinning Lisa to the ceiling. It couldn’t be more obvious that they don’t respect her. At least they didn’t fridge her for Dean’s man pain. It’s honestly horrible because Dean put so much effort into believing this was his one chance at happiness, and when it crumbles like a tim tam in hot tea he beats himself up for it and uses it as an excuse to never be happy.

He does seem to be happy for the most part with Lisa, but because Sera Gamble doesn’t know how to write interesting or complex female characters, when Sam reenters the picture it once again becomes about the original premise: two brothers on the road, fighting the forces of evil. There’s no room for any women in that sphere. Up until this point I think—correct me if I’m wrong—there has been one female hunter who survived, and she was in one episode. The hunter Tamara in season 3 “The Magnificent Seven,” whose husband died in maybe the most sadistic way anyone has died on this show. Don’t rewatch it, just google it. All women die, including Mary, their mother, who is brought back in season 12 and killed in season 14. AND FOR WHAT? For WHAT Andrew Dabb.

Often, the loss of a parent, child or significant other is used to excuse bad behaviour and terrible choices. The hunting life causes Mary’s whole family to die before she can escape it, and because she makes a deal with Azazel for John’s life, the same demon John makes a deal with, Azazel kills her anyway. John abused his kids and brought them into the hunting life, because he was obsessed with getting revenge for Mary’s death. Sam does the same thing when Jess dies in the first season, and it starts a 15-season long arc of pain and misery. He sets Lucifer free in the season four because he is obsessed with getting revenge for Dean’s death and obsessed with the power drinking demon blood gives him. Then again, Sam is actually right for saving people by exorcising demons, which is literally the first part of the family business motto, instead of just gutting them with the demon knife, but because Dean doesn’t agree with it, it’s bad. Sam always wants to do the right thing, he just gets a little caught up in the details. But you know what? Bloodfreak rights.

When Cas dies in season 13, Dean is so overcome with grief, a grief that echoes John and Sam’s, that he mistreats Jack and threatens to kill him. In season 14, Nick, Lucifer’s vessel, boo snore hiss, kills everyone involved with the murder of his wife and child before he finds out that it’s actually Lucifer’s doing, and then he tries to raise Lucifer from the empty because he’s addicted to killing? Whatever, stop employing Mark Pellegrino. Stop writing men as obsessed with getting revenge

The biological fambilies in Supernatural suck shit. Honestly every time I watch an episode about fambily I’m even more glad I don’t talk to mine. Dean and Sam need to spend some time away from each other, while they’re both still alive. Their fambily dynamic gets better as the show progresses, and I was pleased to see in season 12 that they do away with the codependency, constantly sacrificing themselves for each other, isolating themselves, betraying everyone they know for each other—they started to act like, you know, normal people. And that’s good. Sure, the show would not be anywhere without John sacrificing himself for Dean, and Dean sacrificing himself for Sam, and honestly that’s what made those first few seasons amazing. But after a while it becomes lazy writing, not parallels. A parallel that Supernatural pulled off is Sam comforting Magda in season 12 episode “The Survivor” in the way he needed to be comforted in season 1 and 2 as a psychic child. A parallel is Dean preparing Cas’s body for cremation in season 13 in counterpoint to the way Cas remade Dean’s body in season 4. This show can absolutely do parallels, some of the most beautiful parallels ever put on screen, but the last season was such lazy writing that I cannot forgive it.

This has been an overall negative episode of Holy Hell, and that sucks. I don’t want to be so negative. I want to talk about the good things that Supernatural did, and share in joy with you all, so now I’m going to talk about the only positive I see with fambily in the entire show.

For Dean, everyone older than him is a parent to disappoint, and everyone younger than him is a little sibling to protect. Cas is the exception, as there’s no way to define Dean and Cas’s relationship without acknowledging the reciprocal romantic ways they care about each other. Dean says on multiple occasions that Cas is like a brother to him, and that he’s Sam and Dean’s best friend. He actually drops the line, “After Sam and Bobby, you are the closest thing I have to family,” on Cas in season 6, and he acts like it’s nothing, but you can see in the expression on Cas’s face that Dean just recontextualised the entirety of Cas’s being in one sentence. Cas falls for Dean, gives up his family for Dean, and decides to follow him in the first act of free will we see on screen. And Dean, who has never known love without pain, says to Cas, you are fambily to me, I actively choose you, you belong in my life. But to belong in Dean’s life is to follow his plan, and when Cas doesn’t, he is punished for his hubris. Dean loves him, and he never even admits it.

Charlie becomes like a little sister to Dean, as does Jo. Jack is unequivocally Cas’s son, but becomes something of Dean’s son as well and some would argue Sam’s son. Claire becomes Cas’s daughter, but imprints so much on Dean that many, myself included, have come to consider Dean her father as well. If you subscribe to the idea that Dean and Cas are old marrieds, Dean would be Claire and Jack’s stepfather, and they would be a nuclear fambily all on their own. In season 14 “Lebanon,” when John says to Dean that he thought Dean would have settled down with a fambily, Dean says, “I have a fambily.” Just thinking about it gives me goosebumps.

Cas chooses to be a part of Claire’s life in season 10 “The Things We Left Behind” because he feels guilty about what happened to her after he possessed Jimmy, but after getting to know Claire he cares for her. The crime that is Claire and Cas not interacting after season 10, my god. That’s his daughter, you ghouls. But Claire and Dean do get more moments together. Dean, Sam and some British guy save Claire from turning into a werewolf, and Claire and the rest of the Wayward Sisters save Sam and Dean from the Bad Place. The Wayward Sisters are a found fambily all on their own, and since I could devote an entire episode to Jody’s little brood, I have chosen not to talk about them much, because this episode is at least half an hour, 34 minutes, and it would take up too much of my time. Claire is one of my favourite characters and I’ll be talking about her in the next ep, so stay tuned for that.

Even before Jack is born, Cas becomes his protector. He goes from trying to convince Kelly to end her and Jack’s life, to being her pseudo-husband and the surrogate father to her child. To me personally, it’s the best thing this show has ever done. Cas, Kelly and Jack love each other in a way that is so wholly uncomplicated, that is so pure and so good. Once Cas becomes Jack’s protector, there’s never any question of whether they would hurt or betray each other. He is Cas’s son, his baby boy, and he loves Cas so much that he resurrects Cas from the empty. When they meet for the first time in season 13 “Tombstone” after Cas comes back, they fit into each other’s lives so easily. This is the part in writing this where I was absolutely sobbing my dick off. There are so many moments between them that show the kind of love that each of these characters deserved. Sam and Dean deserve to have that love from their father, and so does Cas. And together they build a family unit around caring for Jack that does indeed end the intergenerational trauma that plagues the Winchester fambily.

And that’s why season 16 is so important to me. I can make things better. Dean sorts his shit out, all of his shit: his alcoholism, depression, ADHD, borderline personality disorder, suicidal ideation, sexuality, gender, the fact that Cas is literally the love of his life and he gets to save him from the Empty the way Cas saved him from Hell. They plant flowers in the field where Dean spread Cas’s ashes in season 13, and they get married at Jody’s cabin with all their loved ones left alive. Claire walks Cas down the aisle and Jack is the flower girl, because he’s literally a three year old baby. Sam and Eileen raise a bunch of rugrats and the Wayward fambily continue the hunting legacy and have a Sunday afternoon roast every week. Dean and Cas raise Jack right, they cut up oranges for soccer practice and watch all his school plays. He and his cousins grow up knowing what it’s like not only to be loved, but to be looked after, to have all their needs met. They grow up normal, and the trauma that plagued their family is a thing of the past. It’s good, you know? It’s just fucking good.

#transcripts #episodes #supernatural #spn

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holyhellpod · 4 years ago

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This is an outtake from an upcoming episode. I didn’t want to include it in the episode but I also didn’t want to cut it completely, so here you go! Transcript under the cut.

CW: wincesties, suicide

oh god, I just got lost in the sauce. The amount of times I zone out while writing these scripts and just go off in my own little fairy tale world of like, “What if this show ended at season 5?” Sam in the pit, Cas and Bobby dead, and Dean living his closeted hetero life with Lisa. I know I said that it should’ve and we should retroactively cancel it, but I’m so glad it didn’t. We got an extra ten whole years of Cas content. No other show or movie franchise could possibly compare, because they don’t have Cas. Don’t get me started on the Castiel-to-Bucky Barnes pipeline, because I surfed that shit and came back worse for it. If the show ended in season 5, we never would’ve had the twelve year long love story that endured a widower arc, and a divorce arc, and a make up arc, and coming out at the end of all that. My god, remembering that Cas literally said — he literally said — he said it. He said that he loves Dean. He said that. On national television. He said it. I’m crying writing this. He admitted it. With his own words and his own tears. It’s been almost six months and I still cannot believe it. We fought for so long to have this. I remember being in the trenches with my fellow deancasnaturalgirls in 2011 when Balthazar literally said “the one in the dirty trenchcoat who’s in love with you”, and all those years of stanning them and writing bad fanfiction and making edits and just vibing in a hostile environment, in which the wincesties told us to kill ourselves and the writers gaslit us into thinking we were crazy. BUT WE KNEW THE TRUTH. WE KNEW THEY WERE IN LOVE. And every time a script leaks, like “Tombstone” and others did today, yes I’m still riding that high right now, it just shows how badly the writers did and the directors didn’t want this story to be told. If you thought I could go even one episode without losing my goddamn gourd over Dean and Cas, you have been listening to the wrong podcast. But you know what? I’m fucking valid. This show finally validated me. Ten years of knowing the truth, of reading between the lines, of having hope that it would somehow be textual until I just gave that shit up and jumped ship at the end of season 8. Watching seasons 5 6 7 and 8 going, just kiss, just kiss him, kiss him right now, you love each other, just say you love each other, friends don’t let friends die virgins, oh he’s not a virgin anymore, oh he died anyway, and now he’s back, and now you’re looking at him like Lot’s Wife even though neither of you are pure, you both lost your way in hell, but what’s forged in fire comes back as strong as steel, and you love him, and he loves you, and that’s the simple, ugly truth you can’t get hide from no matter how much stuff you pile on top of it. If it ended in season 5, we would never have gotten the confession. And we fucking earned that confession. We deserved that confession for 15 years of hate crimes and microaggressions and bigotry in every form. That was ours. I’m not kidding when I say this was as big a victory to me as marriage equality being legalised in Australia in 2017, and honestly? It’s had more of an impact on my day to day life. I don’t stan the Liberal Party and I don’t read every op-ed Malcolm Turnbull writes, but I do spend hours every day, most of the day in fact, thinking about Dean driving down the road with Jack and Sam in the backseat and Cas in the front seat with his hand on Dean’s thigh. Honestly, if Marriage Equality hadn’t gone canon but Destiel still did, I’d be okay with that. Am I joking? Figure it out yourselves. Actually, I’m glad the creators haven’t mentioned a single fucking thing about Destiel in the wake of the finale, because at least they’re not holding it over our heads like Malcolm Turnbull is still. Oh, really? You gave us this thing we really wanted and have been campaigning for and writing petitions about and raising money for and talking about for years and years and years, out of the goodness of your hearts? Thank you, really, thank you for doing this out of the blue with no prompting from us, and without calling us sick and twisted and crazy and desperate and criminals and siccing all your homophobic religious zealot followers on us, because you would never do that. No, you just want the fans and the homosexuals to be happy. Fuck Malcolm Turnbull and fuck Dabb and Singer. The least they can do for us is shut the fuck up about it.

But really, that victory was because of the people who kept watching. Like I said, I jumped ship before season 9, but there were an extra 7 seasons that I wasn’t around for. The people who kept the faith going until season 15 are the true heroes, and it’s because of you that we have this win. So hats off, really, you fucking legends, you made this happen, and I salute you.

#outtake #spn

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holyhellpod · 4 years ago

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[Announcement] An apology

Something has been bothering me. In the last episode of Holy Hell, when talking about Cas, I said the words, “at most he passes as a human with Autism.” I want to apologise for that. There is nothing wrong with having Autism, and I’m sorry to imply with this statement that there is—that Cas as a human with Autism is somehow less than a human without. For the past few years I’ve been researching Autism and trying to expand my awareness of this condition, and I truly believe that the way Cas is written is coded Autistic. I consider myself someone who is in tune to disability activism, and I’m always trying to improve my understanding of disabilities, ones that I have and ones that I don’t, and I understand that even calling Autism a disability is a contentious issue. So to perpetuate harmful, ableist rhetoric in this way does not sit right with me. I don’t want to alienate Autistic people, the same way I don’t want to alienate any other people who have been marginalised by society. So I’m sorry for that, and I’ll be more careful in the future. I’ve already taken it out of the recording and reuploaded the episode, but I still wanted to apologise. Please wait some time before the episode refreshes on podcast apps.

One of the resources I’ve used to learn about Autism is Yo Samdy Sam, a YouTuber who makes videos about her condition in order to raise awareness and understanding. Her videos are thoughtful and well presented, so check them out.

#announcement #ableism

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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.

Apple | Spotify | Google

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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holyhellpod · 4 years ago

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Holy hell, I did not actually expect to get any followers on this account. Thank you! I’ve just uploaded a new episode, so expect that to be available on your podcast apps soon! I will also post the transcript with links to the episode when it becomes available.

I’ve talked about this in the beginning of the episode but I’m in the process of adding monetisation and ads to the podcast. Please listen to the beginning of the ep to find out more and don’t hesitate to message me if you have a problem.

#update

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holyhellpod · 4 years ago

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Heyoooo, it’s another episode of Holy Hell! This one is dedicated to the manchild himself, Dean Winchester.

Apple | Google | Spotify | Instagram | Patreon

Transcript below!

CW: discussions of child abuse, child death, suicide, alcoholism, family trauma, mental health

[Music]

Dean Winchester is, in a word, my soulmate. I started kinning him when the show aired in Australia on Fox8 and I have not been the same since. From his devil-may-care attitude to his undying love for his family that pierces the veil of death to save the day, he really is the most. I have to say at the beginning that this episode of Holy Hell will not include discussions of Dean’s sexuality and gender. I’m saving that for its own episode, so stay tuned my pals.

What we know of Dean as he develops over the course of the first episode is: he’s been hunting, and hunting alone, he’s 26 years old, he drives a sweet ‘67 Impala, he wears an old leather jacket, he listens to 1980s metal, and he has an arsenal of weapons and supernatural fighting talismans in his trunk. He’s also a smartarse, one of his most endearing qualities. He gets defensive about their mother and her death, and he defends their father over and over. He’s a loyal son and brother. The impetus to bring Sam back into the hunting life, after Sam decided for good that he was going to leave, is to bring his fambily back together.

The quality that defines Dean Winchester is how much he loves he loves his fambily. In the first episode, he is so worried about his father that he recruits Sam to help look for him, even though Sam and Dean haven’t spoken in two years, and Sam ran away to college rather than continue to live with their father. He spends most of the first season defending their father, but when John comes back and starts arguing with Sam, Dean protects his brother from John. It’s one of the most significant examples of character growth Dean undergoes throughout the entire series, and it’s where his loyalty shifts from John to Sam.

In the episode of season 2, “Croatoan,” Dean decides not to shoot Sam when Sam contracts the Croatoan virus which turns people rabid and makes them kill. In the next episode, “Hunted”, Dean reveals that John told him to kill Sam if Dean couldn’t save him. But Dean doesn’t. He says that John begged Dean not to tell Sam, but it’s not John’s words that keep Dean silent. It’s his love for Sam and Sam’s wellbeing. And this brotherly love slash codependency is used by characters throughout the entire series, from the demons in season 1 to the literal character of God in season 15, to manipulate Dean and Sam. As many characters have pointed out, including Dean and Sam themselves, they are each other’s weak points.

At the end of season two, when Sam dies from a stab wound in his spine, Dean trades his own life for Sam’s. He makes a deal with a crossroads demon—his soul for Sam’s life—and subsequently dies and goes to hell at the end of season 3. Dean literally dies a gruesome death and spends forty years being tortured in hell because he couldn’t live without Sam. At the end of Season 8, Sam is dying from the effects of the trials, which he undergoes in order to close the gates of hell, and Dean convinces him to stop because, again, he can’t live without Sam. Sidenote: this is where I stopped being interested in their brotherly dynamic to the point of losing interest in the show. It became clear to me that the showrunners were more concerned with rehashing the same tired storylines between Sam and Dean than focus on characters who could expand the world and make the show better. In fact, they killed a lot of the interesting side characters in order to keep the show solely focused on the brothers. The exception to this is Castiel, and the reason they kept Cas around is because when he died in season 7 the ratings tanked. If that wasn’t a clear enough sign that the showrunners needed to open up the show to more than just Sam and Dean’s caustic dynamic in which they die and kill for and then betray and lie to each other over and over, then I just don’t know what the fans could have done to convince them. Nothing, apparently, because they ended the show with just Sam and Dean.

Dean’s relationship with John is fraught with insecurity and codependency. Dean has so little sense of self that what he does consider to be his carefully curated list of likes and dislikes were inherited directly from John: his car, his leather jacket, his hunting abilities, and his music taste. He also throws himself into hunts without any regard for his own safety, because he doesn’t believe that he is worth saving, or that his life is worth living. His personality is crafted from both John’s reliance on him as a son, hunter and partner in crime, and the woman he assumes Mary to be. Dean’s sense of self-worth relies on how many people he can save. This is why, in season 2 episode “What is and what should never be,” Dean’s dream reality is one in which he’s a low life loser who disappoints his family—because without John pushing him to be a hunter, Dean doesn’t save people, and because he doesn’t save people, he isn’t worth anything. Bear in mind that this is the best reality Dean’s mind could conjure for him: one in which his father is dead, and he himself is not worth saving.

In one of the most famous exchanges, he asks Cas why an angel would rescue him from hell, and Cas replies, “What’s the matter? You don’t think you deserve to be saved.” Twenty-nine years of bluster, insouciance, and a give-em-hell attitude crumbles in two sentences, wrought by a being Dean refuses to believe exists because, again, he doesn’t think that he deserves to be saved by them. He says, “[Why me? I don’t like getting singled out at birthday parties, let alone by God].” He thinks of himself so lowly that he accepted a one-year deal in exchange for Sam being alive. Dean cares so much about his family he lets it kill him.

But it’s not just Sam, Mary and John. Dean’s family grows to encompass a number of side characters: most notably Bobby their surrogate father, Charlie Bradbury the hacker, Claire Novak, Jack Kline, and Lisa and Ben Braeden. Even Mary makes another appearance in seasons 12 to 14. Unfortunately, because the show is the way it is, Dean puts Sam above all of these side characters, and then these characters are written out of the show. I should specify that Cas is not a side character; in most seasons, Misha Collins is billed as a main cast member, with his name appearing after Jensen Ackles in the credits. But he still dies in the third-last episode in order to have the show stay about the brothers. Even Jack, inarguably Cas and Dean’s son, is written out of the show in the second-last episode after dying multiple times. I say inarguably because I am not gonna argue with anyone about this. Claire and Jack are Dean and Cas’s kids. Dean and Cas are great parents who chaperone Jack’s prom and buy Claire her first hunting bow. They’re all one big happy, queer, neurodivergent family.

Dean loves the people in his life with reckless abandon. The times he’s excused Cas’s behaviour after Cas has done something ridiculous or foolish are too many to count. He grieves Cas’s multiple deaths, often succumbing to his alcoholism and entropy whenever Cas leaves him for more than a day. In a truly beautiful scene, Dean wraps Cas’s corpse in a curtain and watches, utterly and completely devastated, as his body burns. By this point, they have done so much for each other that it’s impossible to even envision the show without Cas, and indeed imagine Dean without his love for Cas. And we don’t have to for very long, as he always comes back a few episodes later. Even knowing this, the episodes where Dean mourns Cas are so heartbreaking and haunting that I cried for days after watching them.

Dean is great with kids, and every time he’s not is completely the fault of whoever is writing him in any given episode. We see him bonding with Lisa’s son Ben in season 3 and 6, Jesse in the season 5 episode “I Believe The Children Are Our Future,” and Lucas in the season one episode “Dead in the water”. With every child he meets, Dean gets on their level, empathising with them in a way most adults can’t. Like Claire and Jack, Dean has a complicated relationship with his father, who dies in the beginning of season 2 after bargaining his soul for Dean’s life to the demon that took their mother. Just like anyone else’s life, right? Must be Tuesday. This means Dean can relate to most children with traumatic backgrounds involving their parents, as a victim of parental abuse and having his mother die at age 4. I can’t find any sources to back this up, but a theory that rolled around in fandom was that Dean became mute after Mary died, which is what happens to Lucas after his father drowns. He says in “Dead In the Water” that he loves kids, and it’s true. As one tumblr user put it, Dean wanted to be baby trapped.

Dean carries the deaths and pain of his loved ones with him like Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders. When Claire is bitten by a werewolf, the characters administer blood of the sire wolf that bit her in order to cure her of her lycanthropy. Dean has to leave the room while she’s in pain, because he can’t bear to watch her die. The same goes for when Jack dies. Thankfully, Claire lives and Jack comes back a few episodes later.

When thinking about Dean being a father, I’m reminded of that scene from Scrubs when Dr Cox says he’s worried about being a father because his own dad was an abusive alcoholic. The difference between Dr Cox and Dean is that Dean doesn’t have his reservations about raising kids. He fits into Lisa and Ben’s life easily, at least for the first year, and we see a montage which includes him teaching Ben how to fix cars. When Claire lets her guard down enough to hug Dean, he hugs back just as hard. When he finally deals with the trauma of Cas dying in season 13, he accepts Jack into his life, and even grieves Jack when he dies. Dean escapes the intergenerational trauma that plagues his family by being a fantastic dad to the random kids who happen into his life by chance. He was born to be a father, and the fact that this show took that away from him and us as the audience makes me want to kick the showrunners into the sun.

Until season 6, Dean’s family only included men. The concept of the nuclear family—two sons, a husband and a wife—was ripped apart in the prologue of the first episode when Mary dies. Dean doesn’t know family for the first 5 seasons of the show outside Sam, John, Cas and Bobby. I do consider Ellen and Jo to be important to the story, but they’re only in a handful of episodes and die in season 5 for a reason that is plainly ridiculous. Did the Winchesters have to lose every single person in their lives to the fight? Clearly Kripke thought they were going to be cancelled after the fifth season, because it shows. And honestly? Maybe they should have. Let’s retroactively cancel the whole show. It can’t hold power over us anymore, because it’s dead and we cremated it.

But when Dean moves in with Lisa and Ben, he discovers a new type of family he didn’t have before, and new family dynamics. Instead of the 28-year-old son that Sam is to him, he takes the opportunity to teach Ben about cars and spend time with him and Lisa without the need to hunt. He gets a job, he makes some friends, and he lives the safe, apple pie life he begrudged Sam for in the pilot episode. It’s only when Sam reappears in his life that Dean’s codependency strikes again and he realises that he can’t live half in the normal world with Lisa and Ben and half in the hunting world with Sam. Sam says this himself in the first episode of Season 6, “Exile On Main Street”. Despite the ways Dean tried to settle down throughout the rest of the 9 seasons, the showrunners ultimately decided a man who was healing from trauma and alcoholism, who had adopted two kids as his own, and was learning how to bake cakes for his son’s birthday, deserved to die at the ripe age of 40, a week or so after he’d learned that his best friend was in love with him. You gotta laugh. Instead of getting the ending both Dean and we deserved—which was Dean settling down, opening a bar, and living the next forty years in relative gay peace while he got fat and watched Cheers reruns—well, we got something else. And I will always be bitter about that.

While it’s clear from the first season that he has reckless and suicidal tendencies, he doesn’t stop fighting to the bitter end. Even when faced with his own impending death in the season 2 premiere, “In my time of dying,” he fights to stay alive for Sam and John, while working the mystery that is overcoming his own death. Devastated as he is by Sam diving into hell at the end of season 5 and seemingly gone for good, Dean still gets up everyday and makes a life for himself in Lisa’s home. While season 6 was overall a bummer of a season, just god-awful in every aspect, saved from my complete vitriol only by “The French Mistake,” it did show us how great a dad Dean can be, and readied us for what was to come—being Claire and Jack’s dad. The lengths he goes to for his family are immense and all-consuming. As Cas says in “Despair”, Dean is a being of love. He loves everyone else, even when he can’t find it in him to love himself. He really thinks that he’s just a killer, not a father or a husband.

I’ve never subscribed to the idea that we have to love ourselves before we can love anyone else, or before anyone else can love us. Sorry Rupaul, you old bitch. We are all deserving of love, because love sustains us and helps us grow. And when we don’t know how to, it’s through loving others that we can learn to love ourselves. If Dean knew what a great father and friend and husband and brother he is, if he could see himself the way others, in the show and out of it, see him, I think he’d burst. You don’t like getting singled out at birthday parties? Well tough shit, Dean Winchester, because I’m gonna devote an entire podcast to you.

I talked about Dean’s carefully curated list of likes and dislikes before but I’ll go into more detail now. Things he likes: guns; rock and roll; nice cars; women; fighting; scamming people at pool; back alley blowjobs, probably; pie; driving across the country; Ozzy concerts; cowboy movies; being in control of every little thing in his life. His dislikes are: flying on planes; hair metal; angels and demons; anyone who harms his brother, his best friend or his kids; boredom; and being jerked around.

Okay I literally cannot talk about the cowboy movies without mentioning that he makes Cas watch them with him, in his Deancave, and the implications of that make my head roll off my body and into the dirt. Like they literally have gay little movie nights and watch their gay little cowboy movies together and Dean says all the gay little lines. I said I wasn’t going to talk about his sexuality, but mentioning cowboy movies leads to Cas wearing a cowboy hat and saying “I’m your Huckleberry.” This makes me insane. Excuse me, I must have my daily scream.

Okay, I’ve collected myself. Have I? Let’s just move on. In the Winchester tradition of inherited family trauma, Dean gets all of John’s interests, and Sam gets all of John’s mistakes. Dean’s personality throughout the show is basically quippy remarks, pop culture references, laughing with food in his mouth, and grouchiness. In case you haven’t realised, he is amazing to me. Every time he fires a rifle or pistol? Couldn’t be better. Eating a burger made of out donuts? Fucking incredible. Even when faced with beings with untold power, he doesn’t lose his cool. One of my favourite exchanges is when Zachariah comes to Chuck’s house in the first episode of season 5, “Sympathy For The Devil,” and starts soliloquising at him, Dean tells him to “cram it with walnuts, ugly.” Cram it with walnuts, ugly. It’s been ten years and that still makes me laugh. Top ten Dean lines for sure. Like all of my main characters throughout the years of writing original fiction are just “Dean Winchester but girl,” and I’m a good writer, but I can never come close to the level of hilarity that he achieves. And every single writer on the show seems to get that. The only times I can think of where Dean’s characterisation has irked me on a writing level are in season 6—basically the entire thing—and the way he treats Jack in the later seasons, specifically late season 15. But it’s really rare for me to watch an episode and not enjoy Dean. Even throughout the Mark Of Cain era, which I loved, when things were very serious, he had such style and panache and held himself so confidently that I was like, wait maybe he made some points? Maybe he should kill everyone?

Dean is a hunter and a killer, but that’s not all he is. He’s very skilled in hand to hand combat, weaponry, and tactical manoeuvres. Even when something doesn’t go exactly to plan, he’s usually able to improvise something to end up with a win. Because he is the main character, his choices and reactions, while sometimes extremely problematic, are never questioned, and that’s to his detriment. In the last episode of season 14, “Moriah,” Dean is unable to kill Jack, but in early season 15, he treats Jack’s betrayal as Cas’s fault, because he can’t take it out on Jack. Cas leaves, but it’s framed as a good thing because Cas is Jack’s father, and has to take responsibility for what Jack has done. In this instance, I don’t blame Cas at all. Okay I rarely blame Cas for anything, including the things he’s done wrong, because no he didn’t and you can’t prove it. But he especially didn’t do anything wrong when Jack killed Mary, and he didn’t do anything wrong by killing Belphagor. But by the middle of the season, in the episode “The Trap,” Dean admits his wrongdoing in taking his anger out on Cas, one of the only people who loves him without conditions. You’d think this would be a defining moment of character progression, but then Dean chooses to act exactly the same way by throwing Jack under the bus. Like, throwing him harder, under a bigger bus. So what was the point.

Anyway, those are choices the writers made, and not Dean.

Going back to what I was saying about being neurodivergent, Dean has adhd. I know this because I have adhd, and I’m Dean-coded. He’s wildly creative, impulsive, has a touch of OCD, and he has a hard time making long-lasting friends, although this is mostly due to how all his friends die. His best friend is an autistic angel and the only reason they’re still friends is because they’re obsessed with each other, in like a really unhealthy way. One of the funny things about his and Cas’s relationship is that every time you see them in the same shot, Cas is standing perfectly still and Dean is constantly moving. They are almost complete opposites, aside from their queerness and neurodivergence. But then, I haven’t met a single queer person in my entire life who isn’t neurodivergent or disabled in some way. That doesn’t mean we can’t live perfectly functional and normal lives, it just means we’re better than everyone else.

Dean also exhibits black and white thinking—to him all felons are redeemable and all monsters should be killed. Felons are redeemable because he himself is a felon, and monsters should be killed because they all do monstrous things. When faced with the possibility of angels being real, he refuses to believe it for the first two episodes, because, as he says, “he’s never seen one.” Eventually he learns how to see in shades of grey and not kill every monster he meets, but this is because of his time in purgatory with Benny, his Cajun vampire boyfriend.

Another sign of Dean’s ADHD is physical sensitivity. In the season one episode “Bugs,” he comments on the shower’s water pressure. Like it’s a big deal to him, when he’s only ever used 1-star motel room showers. In the later seasons, he’s also seen to wear a fluffy robe and soft pajamas with hotdogs on them and socks that say “Send Noods” but noods spelt like noodles. And so he should! Dean deserves comfort! He’s a special boy.

ADHDers often have problems with executive function—remembering appointments, cleaning up after ourselves, showering, eating, even going to the toilet when we need to pee. The hunting life excludes Dean from the normal functions of usual life, such as dentist appointments, dropping the kids off at school, meal prepping for the week, or turning up to a job on time. These were only factors in Dean’s life during the gap between seasons 5 and 6 when he lived with Lisa and Ben, and it’s not shown how his executive dysfunction impacted his suburban, settled life, but Lisa does mention that Dean drinks a lot. It’s another thing he inherited from John, much as I did my alcoholism from my father, and my adhd too. But Sam doesn’t drink to excess more than a handful of times over the entire 15 seasons, whereas Dean subsists on alcohol to get through the day. At one point in season 11, I’m pretty sure, don’t fact check me, he is shown to be drinking a beer at about 10 in the morning, because, as he says to Sam, “You drank all the coffee. What do you want me to do? Drink water?” Dean your liver must be quaking.

Excess is a common problem for people with ADHD. We have problems with limiting ourselves—because our dopamine machine broke, anything that gives us a little bit of high—such as sugar, sex, alcohol, stimulants, any kind of food that is bad for us but tastes real good—we usually have it in excess because we can’t help ourselves. In the season 4 episode “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester,” Dean eats the entirety of the candy in the Impala. The only reasons I don’t eat everything in my fridge every day is because, one, I don’t have the money, and two, it’s all ingredients I have to prepare and not ready-made food. Whereas Dean has only known fast food for the first 10 or so seasons until he starts cooking and baking and settling into domesticity. Like anyone who gets UberEats every day instead of cooking for themselves knows how expensive that is. He also engages in meaningless sex, although people have pointed that Sam actually gets more on screen action than Dean. But I know a lot of amab people who engage in casual sex with randos because it satisfies a base need. Dean could be classified as hypersexual in some regards, but I know what hypersexuality feels like and it’s like this overwhelming miasma where you can’t think about anything except how horny you are, and I don’t think Dean has that normally. Maybe when he was a demon in season 10, but generally I think he can control himself.

His settled life in the men of letters Bunker is a far cry from his flashbacks in season 8 to Purgatory. From what we know of purgatory, the land of gods and monsters, it was a year-long monster hunt, but without any of the boring paperwork. Dean got to fight and kill as many vampires, ghouls, leviathan, etc as came his way, which is why it’s absolutely ridiculous that he died by rebar in a vampire fight. He spent an entire year spilling blood and chopping off heads, day and night, and he dies by metal bar to the spine? And he’s not even coughing up blood? Andrew Dabb, I’m coming for you. Of course purgatory is the perfect place for Dean because it’s constant adrenaline, constant excitement, constant stimulation, which is what every day life lacks. Even Dean’s every day life is like, 20% monster killing and the rest is leg work. They go weeks or months between cases, and sometimes don’t find the monster at all. So I’m not surprised he gets bored easily and drinks. Would if I could too, my pal.

Which leads me onto Dwelling. Dean dwells on the horrors of his life in a way I do and my carefree older brothers don’t. In the season 4 episode “Heaven and Hell,” he reveals to Sam that he remembers his entire forty years in hell, and there are flashes of his memory littered throughout the season in creepy, split-second increments. He dwells on the people who die, doing his thousand-yard stare into the funeral pyre of everyone they cremate. In the most egregious display of dwelling, he rewrites history TWICE to deal with his grief — in season 8 he makes himself believe that it was his fault Cas didn’t come back from purgatory with him, and again in season 13 he invents the story of Jack controlling Cas to deal with his grief over Cas’s death. His PTSD twists the truth until it becomes another way to torture himself, because if someone gets hurt it’s on him; everyone who loves him is just one more person to disappoint.

On a lighter note, Hyperfixations, equivalent to Autism special interests, are a common trait of ADHD. Some of Dean’s hyperfixations include: hunting in general; cowboys and cowboy movies; the musical Rent; the movie Braveheart; larping. He loves dressing up and acting, and what is putting on a monkey suit and lying about being a Fed if not larping? Oh god the meta of that coupled with the season 4 episode “The Monster At The End Of This Book” is making my head hurt. And actually, the next episode of Holy Hell is on the subject of meta-textuality so stick around if that’s something you enjoy.

One of the amazing things about ADHD is creativity. Since we’re easily bored and easily amused, we’re constantly pushing the boundaries of our curiosity. In season three episode “Bloodlust,” Dean decapitates a vampire with a miter saw, something that even veteran vampire hunter Gordon Walker comments is a thing of beauty. Dean creates a Ma’lak box in season 14 episode “Damaged Goods” as a way to contain Michael if he ever inhabits Dean’s body again. Dean is always making up words like “were-pire” and “Jefferson Starships,” and he has an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of pop culture, which he references in almost every line of dialogue. Like tv and movies raised me, but even I don’t understand a lot of his references. It’s almost like he’s a character in a tv show being written by dozens of people. But that’s not right. He’s a real person and my friend. My friend Dean Winchester, who shouts me burgers and passes out on my couch.

Also, I’m bragging now but as of the day of writing this I got my ADHD diagnosis and it feels so good to have a doctor, a psychiatrist in fact, confirm my belief. After about three or four years of figuring out I have adhd and then trying to make everyone else believe me when I say I do, it feels like a huge weight off. Dean deserved to feel that. He deserves to put a name to his differences and be in charge of his life instead of letting his anger, confusion and impulses control him. If anyone is worried that you might have something and don’t know whether to pursue a diagnosis, my two cents are that it has only improved my life. I was diagnosed with Bipolar Affective Disorder in 2014 and it allowed me to go on medication, which snapped me out of the worst period of anxiety I have ever gone through and also a psychotic episode that featured talking walls and a swarm of Christmas beetles. Trust me, we all need help sometimes, and some people like me need more help than others, but you can take control of the forces in your life that hold you back. As my mother used to say to me when I was a child, the world is your oyster. It really fucking does get better, and since I started on the right anti-depressants for me my life has improved so goddamn much. The world is fucked right now, and it’s impossible to even function on most levels. We all need therapy. I myself have a gp, a psychiatrist, and a psychologist and they keep me relatively sane. I would not be alive if I didn’t have years and years of ongoing therapy and good drugs. Plus I journal everyday and practice gratitude. I’m still crazy but the craziness is contained and doesn’t hurt me anymore.

Despite never going to therapy, Dean grows from being a loner with one friend (his own brother) to someone with a wealth of connections and family. He picks up new people to love like he’s velcro, and when he goes in he goes all in. He would die for the people he loves. He’s constantly putting himself in danger to protect his loved ones. In the Season 6 episode “Let It Bleed,” Dean captures and tortures demons in an effort to find out where Crowley took Lisa and Ben. He then has Cas wipe their memories so that they don’t remember him and can live their lives without him, at his own great distress. In season 5, he goes to Stull Cemetery to impinge on the fight between Lucifer and Michael, just to be there for Sam. As Dean says, he’s “not going to let him die alone.”

That being said, I do have to talk about Dean’s very few, but ultimately life-ruining, flaws. His emotional dysregulation makes his moods unpredictable at best. By virtue of his black and white thinking, he forces the people he loves to choose sides between him and other characters, such as Sam and Ruby, Cas and Crowley, Mary and the british men of letters, and Cas and Jack, and when they don’t choose him, he passively aggressively, and sometimes just aggressively, tortures them until something else usurps their betrayal. His anger issues are par to none, and often get him in a lot of trouble. But since he is the main character, he never really faces consequences for this, and neither does he mature. Even in the final season episode “The Trap,” while Dean admits how angry he is and how wrong he was for taking it out on Cas when Jack died, mere episodes later in “Unity” he turns Jack into a nuclear reactor to take out God, and Jack dies again. His characterisation in the last few seasons, especially in regards to Jack, is all over the place. I would have to start a murderboard to explain how Dean feels about Jack and how he reacts to what Jack does in every episode. Like, pictures and red string and everything. And even then I would not be able to comprehend exactly what the writers did and what they thought they were doing.

But unlike me, Dean always believes the best in people until proven otherwise, and he does always come around to the people who atone for their sins. Even when Sam refuses to get his soul back in season 6, Dean keeps trying until Sam is put right. Between seasons 7 and 8, He spends a year in Purgatory looking for Cas despite how Cas sent Sam insane, ingested billions of monster souls, and became God. When the people he loves choose him, he chooses them back.

But even when they betray him, lie to him, deceive him, and hurt the other people in his life, he can’t stop loving them. He never stops loving Sam or Cas or Jack or Mary or John or Bobby. He loves with everything he has. He is, as Cas says, a being of love.

Oof. That was a lot of words and I feel like I only just scratched the surface. Like realistically I just talked about fambily and ADHD. There is just so much to Dean Winchester that maybe I’ll make another episode sometime. But I am definitely making an episode purely about Dean’s gender presentation and sexuality in the future. You can find the show at holyhellpod on Tumblr where I post transcripts for the episodes and Instagram where I post memes.

I don’t see myself doing an episode about Sam any time soon, Not because I don’t like Sam, but because I can’t stand Jared Padalecki. He’s done some things that I can’t support, and I’m really bad at separating the art from the artist. Especially when it’s something like Supernatural, which is not art. Supernatural is an experiment. It’s not Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry. Like Jared Padalecki didn’t invent rock and roll, you know what I’m saying? However, if you really want me to do an episode about Sam, you can pay me 101 Australian dollars and 50 Australian cents at patreon.com/holyhellpod. I’ll talk to you next time.

Links

http://www.scififantasynetwork.com/dean-winchester-has-adhd/

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holyhellpod · 4 years ago

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[TRANSCRIPT] 1. Pilot

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Trigger warnings: discussions of death, fridging, child abuse, child death, alcoholism

[Music]

“In one sentence, this is X-Files meets Route 66. Two brothers, cruising the dusty backroads in their trusty ‘64 mustang, battling the things that go bump in the night.”

These are the first two sentences of Eric Kripke’s pitch of Supernatural, dated August 30, 2004. Based on iconic media such as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, On The Road, The Odyssey, and The Matrix, Kripke considers Supernatural to be Star Wars in Truck Stop America. He went through over two dozen rewrites of the pilot to get to what we know today: grimy, gritty, horror-filled hero’s journey of the lives of two extremely damaged individuals who don’t really like each other personally or have anything in common, but love each other to death. They save people. They hunt monsters. That’s the family business.

The original pitch for the pilot had Dean informing Sam that supernatural creatures are real and they killed their mum. Sam spent his whole 21-year-long life believing that their father killed their mother, and now their father’s body has been found with Dean as the lead suspect in the murder. Sam has to make the choice to run back to their aunt and uncle’s house in LA where he can spend the summer interning at a law firm before he starts at Stanford, or help Dean fight monsters, and you KNOW which one he chooses.

In the pilot that aired, Sam knows about the supernatural. He and Dean grow up trained as warriors by their father John to hunt supernatural creatures, kill evil, and save people. The plot goes as thus: Sam, a 6 month old baby, is in his crib when an unknown man appears. Mary, Sam and Dean’s mother, walks in. John, their father, comes in as well to see what’s wrong, and finds Mary pinned to the ceiling with a slash across her womb. The house catches on fire, Dean as a four year old takes Sam out of the house, and John follows soon after.

Cut to 22 years later, Sam is a college student at Stanford with a beautiful girlfriend Jess whose resemblance to his mother is, ah, uncanny. He reveals that he’s got an interview on Monday with the law school at Stanford. His idyllic, apple-pie, safe life is interrupted by the appearance of Dean, who asks Sam to accompany him in finding their Dad. That’s the premise of the first season: finding Dad.

Sam makes a deal with Dean that he’ll help on this one last case before he embarks on his life as a lawyer-to-be. Dean takes the deal, but when they realise that John left the case unfinished and skipped town, it’s up to them to follow in John’s footsteps and pick up hunting again, as a fambily. However, Sam reiterates that he needs to be back at Stanford for his meeting that will determine his future, and Dean drops him back. But of course, this is not to be. When he finds Jess pinned to the roof of their bedroom, her womb slashed open, and the apartment starts to burn down, Sam is forced into repeating the history of intergenerational trauma that traps them in the hunting life. The trauma their father inflicted on them is a Promethean circle that leaves no one unscathed.

John is a hard man. While it’s evident in the first scene that he loves his boys, his grief coupled with his military history twists him into a drill sergeant who works his kids to the bone all in the name of the fambily business. He often puts his own needs above that of his kids, especially Dean, who often acts as the go-between Sam and John. From the very beginning, Sam is positioned as John’s mirror, pulled back into the hunting life when his girlfriend dies just like his mother. Both John and Sam have their lives upended by the death of their significant other, except for Sam, he has Dean, and John had his sons. Bringing them into the life meant leaning on them when he couldn’t handle his grief and the exhaustion of the job himself, but this is a caustic dynamic: your children are not your partners. Dean should not have gone on a hunt by himself at 17 to lay to rest the ghosts of two closeted nuns, when he was closeted himself. John should not have put the burden on Dean to look after his brother while John was away on hunts, because Dean was a child. It robbed Dean of his childhood, forced him to grow up too quickly, and left him with a saviour complex and control issues that he carries well into the last season of the show.

The abuse Sam and Dean suffer at the hands of their father is something that permeates the entire show, all the while the characters apologise for him and little commentary is made on how badly he messed them up. In the pilot, We don’t see him in the present, only in 1983, and then sporadically throughout the rest of the show, notably in seasons one, two, four and five, as well as in the show’s 300th episode “Lebanon”. He is a ghost that controls the fate of these two men, as he directs them where to hunt while at the same time refusing to even show his face in times of dire need. In the episode “Faith”, Dean is dying and John doesn’t make an appearance. In the episode “Home”, Dean calls John scared and crying and begs him to come back to their childhood home of Lawrence, Kansas. Again, John doesn’t show up for them.

There are many moments throughout the show that seem to hinge on one decision, and John’s decision to become a hunter and raise his kids as hunters too is one of them. Another decision is Dean’s choice to die in the last episode. Cas’s choice to partner with Crowley and suck all of purgatory’s souls into himself in season 6. Sam’s choice to settle down with Amelia in season 8.

But it all comes back to the very first decision: Sam deciding to go with Dean to find John. We know now that the demons Azazel and Brady were just waiting for the opportunity to kill Jess when Sam was at his most oblivious and unguarded, which they took after Dean re-entered his life. the repercussions of this reverberate throughout the entire show, most obviously in Sam choosing not to settle down with a woman for the first 7 seasons. But Jessica’s death is the impetus Sam needs to start hunting again, just like Mary’s death was the impetus John had for starting to hunt in the first place.

But actually, with the last episode of the series in mind, another choice is made clear. Dean’s choice to go to Sam.

If the first season would have you believe, Sam Winchester is the protagonist of the series, and Dean is his second in command. He’s one of five main characters throughout season 1, including Dean, John, Mary and Azazel the demon. Azazel begins the narrative by invading Sam’s childhood bedroom and killing Mary, but after the ordinary world of their lives before we hit the call to adventure, Sam is shown as an ordinary guy who just wants to make something of himself. He admits to Dean in some truly spectacular exposition that he swore he was done hunting for good, and that he’s put that life behind him to live safely with his girlfriend and college friends. Of course, being Supernatural, it doesn’t turn out like that.

If you take the last few seasons as gospel, it’s clear that Dean is the emotional heart of the series and Sam exists as his narrative foil. Somewhere along the way their roles got reversed. It’s Sam’s emotional journey we follow throughout the first season. It takes us until episode 4, “Phantom Traveler”, to find something that Dean is afraid of. As the season wears on, it becomes increasingly clear that all he wants is to have his family back together — Sam and Dad, all under one car or motel roof again. Sam, in the Winchester tradition, wants to find Jess’s killer, suspecting that the thing that killed Mary is the same thing that killed Jess. This obsession drives him throughout the first two seasons.

Sam’s motivation in the pilot is laid out clearly: he has to make it back to Stanford on time for his interview for law school. While it’s normal for regular people, it's about as far from the Winchester normal as can be, and that’s what Sam likes about it. It’s normal, it’s wonderbread, it’s safe. It’s freshly baked cookies and a tab at the only bar on campus. It’s your girlfriend in a maid outfit on Halloween, which you still don’t celebrate because it reminds you of what you gave up to be there. It’s getting a 174 on the LSATs but not telling your family because you don’t talk to them anymore, and you haven’t for years. It’s fine.

And then it all comes crashing down, and Sam’s motivation changes. He’s the hero accepting his journey while grieving the loss of the most significant person in his life since he ditched his family at 18 to live in the world instead of saving it from the sidelines. He’s the one our story hinges on, and it’s his reactions we live and die by. When Mary dies, we hardly know her. We don’t know John, either, so it’s hard to gauge how broken up we should be by her death. While I wouldn’t say we know Jess necessarily, we do know Sam, so when he grieves we grieve. The framework through which we view all of these events is Sam’s perspective, even if we do see Dean without Sam. I’m pointing this out because it’s important to know who we sympathise with most, and whose story a narrative is trying to tell. What exactly the narrative is saying is completely dependent on who is saying it.

One of Dean’s defining traits is that he’s great at getting laid. In the original pitch, Dean was supposed to be covered in tattoos and smoking like a James Dean-type. Nevermind that James Dean was queer, as is Dean from On The Road, the character the eldest winchester is named after. Dean chases tail like he’s a dog chasing bumpers, and he’s attractive and charismatic so it works out well for him. He doesn’t take it hard when a woman rejects him, which is something that a lot of men need to learn.

Sera Gamble, staff writer, executive producer, and showrunner of seasons 6 and 7, said about Dean:

“Dean always has a great comeback line, so it’s always fun to write him. Dean’s introduction to us in the pilot was him hitting on his brother’s girlfriend, specifically pointing out her boobs.”

But this is not all Dean is. He’s first and foremost Sam’s protector. In Dean’s second scene of the pilot, Dean is shown to rescue his brother from their house as it burns down, carrying him out of harm’s way. Dean, as the older brother, knows it’s his job to protect his younger sibling. It’s been drilled into him since he was four years old that he is supposed to protect Sam above everything, even when Sam ditched their family. Before the pilot, Dean and Sam hadn’t spoken in two years, and Sam hadn’t seen John in four. But by the end of the episode we realise that Dean hasn’t given up the mantle of protector. He rescues Sam from the building where Jess is being burned alive. First and foremost, Dean will always protect Sam.

At 26, Dean has seen things and done things that no one should see or do. Where Sam is sullen and quiet, Dean is loud and brash, getting into trouble, jumping headfirst into situations he shouldn’t be in. The situations he shouldn’t be in include: a crime scene, a river, a motel room, a haunted shack. Places he should be include the police station, because Dean winchester is many things and one of them is a felon.

We can’t find ourselves sympathising too much with Dean as a main character just yet because we don’t have any attachment to his weaknesses. Yes, Mary died, but she is such a non-character it doesn’t register (unless of course you’ve been through a similar tragedy, then sympathise away). Yes, he loves his car and his guns and his leather jacket, but we find out later that they are handmedowns from John. Dean’s personality is a carefully curated list of acceptable likes and dislikes, inherited from the abusive, alcoholic father John is to him and the woman, wife and mother he thinks of Mary as. In the pilot, Dean is the lovable scamp, but his desperation is lying in wait beneath the mask of finding his father. He wants his fambily back, but more than that, he wants his fambily safe.

We see Sam and Dean’s strengths play out through the episode. In their first encounter with the Woman in White, she possesses the Impala and drives it towards them. They both jump off the bridge, but while Sam clings on, Dean hurls himself into the river. Thus the death-defying stunt ends up a funny gag as Dean drags himself out of the muck, and Sam is positioned as the smarter brother. I mean, he got into Stanford, right? so he’s smarter, right???

Another moment establishes the bulk of their characters in two lines. Sam says, “What I said earlier, about Mum and Dad, I’m sorry,” and Dean replies, “No chick-flick moments.” Within this simple exchange lies the heart of their differences: Sam wants Dean to be okay. Dean would rather push Sam away than offer up his feelings like a charcuterie platter for anyone to pick apart.

From what we know of John, he is a man obsessed. Sam reveals that their whole lives have been based around trying to find the thing that killed Mary. John trained his sons to be hunters from an indeterminately young age, after finding out about the supernatural from various side characters and piecing the rest together himself. From how the other hunters talk about John, he is a master in skill and execution, and Dean and Sam take after him. Sam is smart and coordinated enough to be good at everything, and Dean is naturally gifted in intellect, tactical skill, and weapons. Together they make a formidable team. By the time the show really gets going, John, Sam and Dean are legends in the hunting community. Dean comments in a later episode that he’s famous, and other characters point out the same thing. Characters introduced later know who they are before the boys know who the other characters are and what their connection to John is.

The implications of John raising his sons are hunters are multitudinal. Because Sam and Dean have been raised this way, they have saved a lot of people that otherwise would have died. But it’s at their own expense. They can never live normal lives, and even when they settle down in season 8 at the Men of Letters bunker, the echoes of their loneliness and isolation are still present. That’s why it’s not enough to focus only on Sam and Dean, or introduce more characters just to kill them off, because the brothers are fundamentally lonely and isolated. And the point of any story is to have your characters progress (although in the case of a short story, it’s to reveal something about a character), so when they start out a certain way they need to have outgrown that stasis that they were trapped in by the end of the series. Sam deserved to build a life for himself in the hunting world, with another hunter and/or the queen of hell, making connections and a home for other hunters to stay in and, as one tumblr user says, a monster rehabilitation centre. Dean deserved to outgrow his trauma and simply grow as a character instead of being stuck as an depressed alcoholic with anger issues.

On the surface of the show, Dean is supposed to be Han Solo and Sam Luke Skywalker. But the first thing we learn about Sam to do with his family is that he left them as soon as he finished high school and had a chance to escape. Dean, however, stayed loyal to John and continued hunting. This dynamic of Sam rebelling against the the God figure of their father and Dean’s dependency on their father’s approval continues into the fifth season and parallels the storyline of the angel Lucifer rebelling and his brother Michael staying loyal to God. It certainly is an interesting dynamic, which I just realising as I type this paragraph was repeated in my own family. Me, the youngest rebelling against my abusive father around the time I started watching this show while my older brother continued to live with him, in squalor and destitution. There were no Gardens of Eden in our family, only a hell of our father’s making. My dad loves muscle cars and heavy metal, too, and I haven’t spoken to him in three years.

The motel room they find John occupying before he takes off is something you’d see in a serial killer’s lair. There are articles printed out and stuck to the wall, a line of salt encircling the room, various talismans and charms, and information on the woman in white. From what we see, John lives up to his legendary status, putting together a pattern of strange deaths and disappearances over the course of 20 years for his sons to eventually solve. But we already know by now that he puts hunting above his own children, and it becomes clear as the episode goes on that he is sending them out on hunts that he himself either can’t or won’t finish. He disappears and leads them on a proverbial and literal ghost hunt as they chase him across the country.

The universe of Supernatural started with monsters but encompasses a lot more than that. Kripke’s vision, which personally I think he executed really well, was small town Americana meets monster of the week. It’s ghosts on highways, cannibals in forests, and spirits in lakes. It’s a possessed car on a bridge aiming straight for our protagonists. It’s gas station junk food and driving 16 hours across multiple states on a hunch. It’s sleeping in your car and brushing your teeth at the side of the road because you couldn’t afford a hotel for the night. It’s grit meets slime. It’s real and fantastical at the same time. When I say this show activates the part of my mind that lives for road trips across a barren country through miles and miles of desert, I’m not lying. I used to love road trips as a kid, just staring out the window with my gameboy in my hand and Alanis Morisette’s Jagged Little Pill album in my discman. I long for those days.

The lore is one of the most interesting things about the show. in most episodes, the characters are seen to flick through physical books to gather information about what they’re fighting, which seems to take hours if not days. At one point I’m pretty sure that their father figure Bobby digitises his library, but then that’s never brought up again, so maybe I imagined it. There are hundreds of different creatures throughout the seasons, including some the show made up (Jefferson Starships in season 6), others they’ve taken from folklore and legends and put their own spin on. The interesting ways they present creatures, some pure evil, others sympathetic, is one of the reasons I loved this show from the beginning. All I ever wanted to write was urban fantasy, and this show presented it in an accessible way. I grew up in small towns with populations of less than a thousand people, so watching the characters go through small towns, back roads, truck stops and service stations in the middle of nowhere just hit me right where it hurts.

The lore of the woman in white is thus: a husband cheats on his wife, and the wife, in a moment of insanity, murders her children. When she comes back as a vengeful spirit, she finds men who have been unfaithful and murders them. The character of Constance hitch hikes along the road waiting for men to pick her up, and even if they haven’t been unfaithful she seduces them before she kills them. Spirits are shown to have special powers: they can move objects, wield weapons, and kill with their hands or minds. They can also appear and disappear at will, making them hard to fight.

As with all episodes of tv shows, the problem they face is something out of the ordinary. The Woman in White is a ghost, something they’ve hunted before with ease. Sidenote: this show can be summed up as Pru from Ride or Die podcast says, “the Winchester school of boys who fight ghosts real good.” While a normal ghost would be taken out by salting and burning their bones, laying Constant Welch to rest isn’t that easy. Before they can find her bones to burn, she appears in the Impala while Sam is driving. But Sam figures out a plan: drive the Impala through the house she can’t go home to where her children are lying in wait to drag her into the underworld. And the monsters only get more interesting from there.

Now that the show has finished, it's interesting to examine what it could have been. We know what it is: a 15 year long experiment in family dysfunction and queerbaiting. We know it’s about choices and free will. But what could it have been? It could have been more than family dysfunction. Throughout the entire show, the premise has always been about two brothers, and that’s to its detriment, as there’s only so many times they can rehash the premise of brothers betraying each other. The showrunners were so bent on keeping the show about Sam and Dean that they neglected the other storylines that could have proved more interesting and killed off all the characters that were a threat to their dynamic. It could have been about characters becoming their own creators in stepping outside the narrative, usurping their writers and choosing love instead of violence. It could have stayed about found families, instead of focusing solely on Sam and Dean in the last episode, which undid all of the groundwork they’d laid out in the last 7 or so seasons.

But what we have is what we get, and while the show falls down in some respects, especially with regards to its treatment of people of colour and the queer community, it is still a show that I’ve loved since the Howard administration, and something that has changed and improved my life in numerous ways. If I hadn’t started writing Supernatural fanfiction, I wouldn’t have majored in writing, and I wouldn’t have the experience to write four books and some novel length fanfiction. Supernatural has inspired me so much over the years, and I will always considered it kismet that it entered my life. I know others feel the same, and you only have to step into the fandom for a day to realise the impact that Supernatural has on people all over the world. Few shows have had both the gall and opportunity to shape television in the way that Supernatural has and do the things that it has done. Falling in love with it again at a time when I was outgrowing a previous hyperfixation, feeling lost and adrift, and burnt out from writing 150,000 words in the middle of a pandemic, has been extremely serendipitous, and I can’t wait to dissect every single thing about this show.

You can find the show at holyhellpod on Instagram and tumblr, and patreon dot com slash holyhellpod. I’ll talk to you soon.

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