#the plato's allegory of the cave version of the cw's supernatural

[shinelikethunder]

i've been going on archaeological expeditions into the depths of the SPN tags on AO3, and tonight i got drop-kicked into an out-of-body experience so cursed that it'd require LAYERS of explanations to convey to a civilian how fucking funny it was:

unfortunately, SPN fandom is as enamored of mundane AUs as every other goddamn fandom seems to be these days

noted gay angel Castiel is, as you may have heard, a celestial entity possessing some poor guy named Jimmy Novak

apparently standard practice when mundane-AUing Castiel is to just give him the surname of the guy he bodysnatched?

and since SPN angels are all referred to as siblings (and are, of course, highly normal about that) it seems pretty common to just slap the same name onto other humanverse'd angels too

in the middle seasons one of Castiel's endless procession of dickwad angelic bosses is named Naomi

now you gotta bear in mind that i was not thinking about ANY of this. my brain had to backfill it. while reeling after almost blacking out when i scrolled past this character tag:

me, sitting there with my soul about to vacate the premises, thinking this fic is doing something WAY more interestingly cursed than it really is: listen man. listen. just because it's possible to reductively summarize the origins of AO3 as "Naomi Novik wanted a site she knew would never take down her Wincest fic" doesn't mean you gotta--

[nonasuch]

as you may know, reading tumblr posts about Dean Winchester is an experience surprisingly akin to auditing classes on gender performance and masculinity at a graduate level media studies program. at least if you read enough of them.

which unfortunately I have! and now I have some thoughts.

see, there are character archetypes that crop up over and over again, and particularly often in 90s and 00s genre TV shows. I am vastly oversimplifying, but let’s boil them down to the Three Main Kinds Of Dudes you are most likely to see in these shows.

Let’s start with the Guy Who’s Not Cool, And Knows It. he’s all over the place: he’s Xander on Buffy, and later Wesley. he’s Julian Bashir, Rodney McKay, Seth Cohen and (at least early on) Alec Hardison. he’s usually not the main character, but he’s up there in the main credits.

and he’s textually, overtly anxious about his masculinity. this is something that other characters comment on, and sometimes he admits to it himself. his long-term character arc is — at least in part — about resolving that anxiety, confronting it and growing past it over time.

(he’s also, often, a self-insert for the guys in the writer’s room. but we don’t have time to unpack all of that.)

our second category is a bit more of a grab bag, because in some ways it covers all the guys who don’t fit into categories 1 or 3. but, broadly, we can call him the Guy Who Doesn’t Need To Make A Big Deal Out Of It. he’s the guy who comes across as quietly secure in his masculinity, who has nothing to prove on that front and whose story doesn’t need to be about proving it. Sometimes he functions as a foil for the Anxious Guy, sometimes he’s just quietly ticking along in the parts of the story that aren’t about Proving anybody’s Manliness. He’s Giles and Oz and Gunn, Eliot Spencer, Ronon Dex, Benjamin Sisko.

and then there’s the Cool Guy.

the Cool Guy is a main character, or he has top billing in an ensemble cast. the Cool Guy is a walking, talking grab-bag of heroic mannerisms. He’s tough and strong and he doesn’t talk about his feelings. he’s a ladykiller. he’s a flirt. he has the popular imagination version of Captain Kirk’s personality, and the popular imagination version of Han Solo’s sex appeal. he kills bad guys and drops a witty one-liner afterwards. he can fly a plane, or a spaceship, or drive a cool car or ride a motorcycle. he walks away from explosions without flinching. he’s not doing this ironically. he’s not performing. he’s just Cool.

as written, he has the depth of a cardboard standee.

but he’s played by an actor who’s, you know, a real human person, and wants his character to have some kind of interiority. so this weird alchemy happens, over and over again.

here’s the thing about that grab-bag of Cool Guy traits and mannerisms: there are real men, in real life, who do most of those things. and most of them probably aren’t overcompensating for anything! but also? none of them have the whole grab-bag. They have, like, two at most.

no one does all of them unless they’re doing them on purpose — unless they’re putting on a performance. but the Cool Guy as written isn’t performing. and the actor playing him has to embody that impossible character while giving him some kind of depth.

So what happens? Dean Winchester. John Sheppard. All the Cool Guys who are meant, textually, to be Effortlessly Performing Masculinity... and subtextually read as desperately overcompensating for their queerness.

whoops!

and somehow tv writer’s rooms keep doing this! they think that if they just pile on more Cool Guy traits, they’ll make the performance convincing, when they’re actually just undermining him more and more.

(sometimes the Cool Guy isn’t even meant to be heroic! the writers of Smallville tried, as far as I can tell, to make Lex Luthor come across as a suave, worldly, sophisticated ladykiller. what they got was a man who makes way-too-intense eye contact with a buff farm boy while suggestively drinking fancy bottled water.)

(also I didn’t watch Teen Wolf but I am given to understand that Derek falls in this category? and Stiles is for sure an archetypical Anxious Guy.)

the thing about the Anxious Guy is that because his anxious masculinity is textual, it can be addressed and resolved in the text. Because the Cool Guy is not textually performing, not textually anxious, he just has to keep on being that guy without the text ever acknowledging that there’s anything weird about it. and all the while the subtext is screaming that this! man! is! trying! too! hard!

and we as viewers with eyes in our heads can see that tension, between what’s said and what’s shown, and tbh most of the time the simplest and most obvious way to resolve it is to say “ah. okay. that man is Not Straight.”

so that’s why Dean Winchesters keep happening. thank u for coming to my ted talk.

[shinelikethunder]

one of the few things i respect late SPN for is having custody of one of the most toxic ship wars on the internet and going "you know what, screw it, all three of them are functionally married and raising a child together and their sex lives aren't our business." like solving everything with threesomes except without the sex part or, indeed, the solving anything part. and then the final season shat out two noxious turds that each allowed one side of the ship war to claim victory, departed the battlefield, and left anyone who still gave a shit to keep slaughtering each other forever. truly a show and a fandom that deserve each other.

[shinelikethunder]

yesterday was SPN s16, but today is SPN s16 too...

[shinelikethunder]

consequences of NBC Hannibal's year on netflix in 2020 include an unspeakably rancid river of wank, dumb bullshit, and general toxic runoff from the SPN -> Hannibal fandom pipeline, and also a reverse slow-drip of fine fucking wine as some of the most deranged little freaks in Hannibal fandom finally got their asses SPN-pilled

(it's me, i'm freaks, but seriously sometimes it feels like "watching SPN the way you ship Hannigram" is not only a distinct interpretive lens but its own extremely based subfandom, because every time i step out of this bubble i end up standing there going "dear god WHAT lethal combinations of household chemicals are you people huffing")

[shinelikethunder]

btw THE way to have fun going down the SPN rabbit hole is to find one (1) gifset that makes you insane, scroll through OP's blog or organizational tags for a while, go back to the notes, find some reblog tags that make you want to gnaw on drywall, scroll through that person's blog for a while, and lather rinse repeat until you've told on yourself all over 12 different people's activity pages with your strings of likes. and - crucially, cannot stress this enough - do not touch the sitewide tags. do not touch the blogs that seem to share your interests but in a way you find a tiny bit annoying. find one tiny corner of the behemoth whose derangement is vibrating on your frequency and isn't full of dumb discourse, and blog-hop to construct a protective filter bubble of weird little freaks who are making shadows on the cave wall that fucking slap.

(if you're here because i told on myself all over your activity page but i haven't followed, it's because i'm still telling myself this is a brief fling and i will get well soon. know that your takes are sexy and i am kissing you on the mouth. if you're into that or whatever.)

[shinelikethunder]

It's 95% certain I will never touch Supernatural (2005-2020) but I love Supernatural (2005-2020) The Secondhand Tumblr Experience as mediated through your blog so thank you for that.

you're welcome and believe me, it's a wild ride either way

(watch out for that stray 5% though... it's how i got sniped out of the proud ranks of SPN Refusers)

[shinelikethunder]

i followed you for Hannibal tbqh, but your blog gives me a lot of joy even when you are posting about SPN (which i remain clueless about). ty for being you

haha thanks, hope it continues to be enjoyable for you! "SPN as experienced vicariously through other people's shitposts and screaming meltdowns" is a worthy and longstanding fandom in its own right

[nonasuch]

I’d like to thank the supernatural fandom for never ever cluttering up my dash with whatever the fuck actually happened in the ongoing 16-car pileup, so I get to experience it exclusively via incomprehensible reaction posts.

[nonasuch]

Love when you post about the spn Fandom Fandom experience. I, unfortunately, am deep in the trenches, but i had been a casual outside observer until recently and I miss that experience, its so cool to see about it vicariously through your posts!

you want to know something funny? i did actually watch the first 2 seasons and a bit of s3 when they originally aired.

one of the reasons i bailed out was that i wasn’t vibing with the fandom. the main reason for that was that most of the fic was gen casefic or wincest, and i had minimal interest in the former and negative interest in the latter. i distinctly remember thinking, at the time, well i don’t know what i expected. the whole show is just two guys. there’s barely anyone else to write about.

and then, not very long after that, they added a third guy. and here we are.

[nonasuch]

“this fic is written for the plato’s allegory of the cave fandom version of supernatural, not the actual show which I still refuse to watch”

Love this for us tbh

yup! very grateful to the brave soldiers who actually watched the show so i wouldn’t have to

[nonasuch]

it’s the BEST feeling. yesterday a friend came into the shop and I (a person who has not watched Supernatural since 2008) got to be the one to tell her about the 16-car pileup of its series finale and aftermath, which I have tremendously enjoyed rubbernecking from a safe distance.