#basically what im saying is u have to allow dean to be complicated and fucked up

[thegeminisage]

Wait wait wait I have to check. Are you going into this fic with the “fuck John Winchester” mindset?

(for reference anon is referring to this fic which i am posting excerpts of as i write but that is not online in full yet. sorry for the long response, this turned into a bit of a meta. cw for abuse)

okay so! yes and no. yes i think john was a bad parent and physically and emotionally abusive. yes i think the actual episode where he comes back (14.13) is bullshit propaganda they wrote because JDM wanted to redeem his character, and i am rewriting it out of sheer fury. but no, i don’t care for all those fics where sam and dean cut him out and mary divorces him and cas breaks his nose...put simply, i think they lack nuance. obviously they’re great wish fulfillment - who among us would not like to break john winchester’s face - but in real life things are often messier than “realize/accept your parent is abusive > react in an appropriately healthy manner > become Free of your past”

i think that dean in canon is incredibly protective of his family, even/especially his dad. i think that that dean and john bonded by sharing the trauma of watching mary burn on the ceiling and having to raise sam alone. i think john teaching dean how to shoot and fight back against fear and darkness is what gave him back his voice after a year of being nonverbal. i think that giving dean the mission of protecting sammy is what motivated him to get out of bed in the mornings and tough it out through the hard times. i don’t think dean will ever not be grateful for that.

i think when mary’s family died and she had wanted to be away from the death and violence of the hunting lifestyle for so long john took her away. i think they were in love for a decade and change - about the same amount of time as dean and cas. i think they’re in their own epic star-crossed love story. i think john the vietnam vet (before he was john the hunter) understood the impact that death and violence leaves on a person, understood trauma, understood when mary woke up with nightmares. i think the choice he made to be kind and sweet and gentle anyway (as he was described multiple times) was something that comforted her greatly and made her feel safe after a lifetime of feeling unsafe. i don’t think mary will ever note be grateful for that either.

does that negate the emotional and physical abuse? the neglect and the way john made his children feel as though his love was conditional? the way he abandoned his kids over and over, sometimes to suffer or starve? the way he raised them to be soldiers and never let them be children? the way he put so much on dean he became sam’s parent when he was still a child himself but trusted sam so little that sam grew up feeling unclean and unlovable? the way he had a whole secret family and never told anyone?

of course not. but it does COMPLICATE it. you can love someone who abuses you or is a bad person. oftentimes you can even love them unconditionally, especially if that person is your parent. if it was so easy to stop loving john winchester, dean probably would have done it a long time ago.

i really enjoyed the dynamic in 14.11-14.12 where dean was tailspinning (his plan for michael being an allegory for suicide), and his family/support network kind of triangulated around him to talk him down off the ledge. they texted and called each other to keep track of how he was doing, they coordinated to keep an eye on him. after a lifetime of dean managing other people - trying to fix his parents marriage at age 4, being the referee between sam and his dad - the rest of the family managed dean. i was interested in exploring that dynamic in a john-comes-back fic. what would this concept look like if, instead of focusing on what WE wanted - like breaking john winchester’s face - we tried to minimize dean’s pain?

dean wouldn’t want anyone to hit or kill his father. he wouldn’t even want anyone to shout at his father. he wouldn’t want to get his dad back only to then lose him or cut him out of his life. there is a vast, vast ocean between what i think (and what we think) john winchester deserves, and what dean thinks he deserves. a happy ending for dean wrt to his dad might not necessarily look like “john winchester, friendless, alone, hated, and possibly dead.” i think that ending would break dean’s heart.

so, the short answer - yes, FUCK john winchester. but this fic isn’t about punishing john, or redeeming him, because it’s not about john at all. it’s about dean. i love dean more than i hate john, just as other characters in this narrative might. i want to give him the ending he’d want, even if it’s not the ending i’d want. 

obviously i’m not going to say what i think that looks like because it would ruin the ending of my fic before i posted it, but basically what i am craving here is some fucking nuance. abusive relationships are complicated, especially parental ones. they’re allowed to be messy and fucked up. and i think most of all that after everything dean went through at john’s hands he has the right to feel whatever way he likes about john - even if that feeling involves still loving him - and no one else, not even sam or cas or mary or us, has the right to tell him not to.

[spn masterpost]

[piratemadi]

please make your critical post of supernatural those are literally the only posts about supernatural i care about, especially since i side eye the heck out of the many people who give supernatural a pass because they ship two boring white dudes (dean and castiel) PLEASE

omg ok nobody make fun of me for posting an earnest criticism of this show i enjoy critical analysis and being a hater

i think most of why this show sucks has already been covered pretty thoroughly but these r the main things abt it that piss ME off.

the racism runs so SO deep. supernatural is supposed to be an exploration of americana thru horror (and i’ll give them that. like the idea of deconstructing america and all its fallacies thru horror is genius and in competent hands it would be absolutely incredible. but anyway) but it only really scrapes the surface of what is inherently horrific about americana! something like that is supposed to be an INTERROGATION of monstrosity and how america (and western society more broadly) creates monsters out of human beings and how white christian morals are established as the ONLY acceptable morals and how anyone who falls outside of those norms (non christian, non white, lgbt, people with substance use disorders, prisoners, the poor, indigenous people/cultures etc) are monsterized, so to speak, because of an oppressive and unloving colonial society. like u cannot have a horror narrative abt monsters attacking family values and white suburban life without invoking some very old and racist conventions! but instead of subverting that supernatural just reinforces it! it consistently fails to make any kind of real statement because the most demonized parts of society are the people who are also treated the WORST in canon! native american beliefs are stolen and turned into stupid bogeymen without the show ever featuring a native character or seriously grappling with the inherent violence of america as a colonial state, black men are consistently portrayed as angry and evil while black women are treated like shit (dean’s happy ending at the end of s5 is with a white woman he fucked one time instead of with the black woman who he was in love with??), impoverished people are mostly ignored and when they’re not theyre monsters (theres one episode centered around a poor rural family that commits murder and cannibalism. no supernatural stuff or monsters. just poor people. thats the scare).

theres this consistent fixation on preserving american suburbia, on saving “normal” (read: white middle class) people and it sets up this dynamic of like. the “real world” is the white middle class and then there’s hunters including our mains who defend that “real world” against monsters and demons, which is just Everything Else. and the writers PRETEND to struggle w the question of monsters and what makes one but they just toss it around without ever actually committing to answering that question with compassion or narrative coherency. they have multiple episodes about characters who were raised human, who want to be human, but have to be killed because of an inherent evil nature. there’s a plot in the early seasons about how one of the main characters has demonic powers, and instead of saying that doesnt make him inherently bad and he’s allowed to fully access all parts of himself without being fundamentally evil, they consistently frame intrinsically neutral traits as inherently evil specifically because they go against a christian ideal of morality! and eventually he learns to suppress these powers and that’s that!

and then it establishes christianity as the guiding principle of america, not in a way of like “american culture and history is deeply steeped in white supremacist protestantism that has led to incredibly fucked up views on god and love and morality and thats what we have to deal with as people who live here”, but in a way of like “the christian god is real and he’s a white guy who fucking hates you.” which like. Ok. they bastardize and trivialize any religions that arent christian while building the entire series on christianity. Ok. like i guess its possible to write stories about white christianity without implying that every other religion is full of shit but supernatural did not do that on any level

its also just. really poorly written. i genuinely loved the first season i thought it was really well paced and that the characters were introduced really well like the first season is a GOOD horror story in terms of family as horror and the inherent terror of americana. but the pacing and the character development started tripping up in s2. by s3 they started raising the stakes Exponentially which honestly is such a kiss of death for good fiction like every season mounting a bigger badder antagonist than the last one is the surest way to kill a story bc it means the earlier entries in that story become basically meaningless in the face of the new bad guy. u dont need to raise the stakes to write a good story! a well written story abt the horror and drama of a close knit and unhealthy family caught up in something they don’t really understand isn’t Less emotionally resonant than, like, having to stop the world from ending, because at the end of the day its Fiction and none of it matters beyond what u can make the audience really Feel. im not gonna feel sorrow if 7 billion fake little people die. i didnt cry when the death star blew up whatever planet it blew up. what DOES make me feel sorrow is a few truly well written characters whose relationships are complicated and tragic and whose motivations i can understand and whose inner lives i can imagine. raising the stakes destroys a good story and thats exactly what happened to supernatural (not that the racism and misogyny and american protestant moralizing wasn’t killing it already)

also, the misogyny makes the female characters basically impossible to watch. like not a single person on that show is a good actor (except sterling k brown love u king u were the best actor that show ever saw) but they didnt even give any of the women anything to work with. its literally so cringey to watch any woman onscreen except maybe like. bela talbot and she was treated like utter shit.

god. you know that expression dont fall in love with potential? i dont do that w people i do it w fiction. i came off black sails and the untamed and frankenstein and i watched the first couple seasons of supernatural with my friend and it was like...there was so much room for it to SAY something about monsters and how society creates them thru violence and how deeply horrific american protestantism is. like theres so many questions and concepts that it brought up that it never actually SAID something about. shithole of wasted potential. and yeah dean and castiel is stupid there i said it