stupid opinions about the cw’s supernatural that would’ve gotten me ostracized in 2017

I am (was) a relatively well-known writer in the Supernatural fandom for many years. As a result, I unfortunately have cultivated a number of opinions about Supernatural, many of which I have often joked would get me utterly obliterated by the same audience that currently enjoys my Supernatural fanfiction. If you started following along later in the timeline during my MDZS phase, this blog post will mean absolutely nothing to you. Because I’m not in fandom anymore and have done a lot of work to become less terminally online and more terminally normal (something I would wholeheartedly recommend and is still a work in progress for me), I feel little trepidation about posting my explosive fandom opinions on a blog that three people read.

Intro paragraph complete. Let’s go!

• My favorite season is season 3

This is an unpopular opinion, though not a hugely offensive one. I like that it’s Dean-centric, I like the hopelessness that pervades the season as Dean’s deal comes due and they seem no closer to a solution, I like that ultimately there is no solution and Dean goes to hell, regardless of the fact that he did only because of the writers strike of 2007. There are a number of great episodes in this season (Bad Day at Black Rock, A Very Supernatural Christmas, Mystery Spot, Jus in Bello, Ghostfacers), many of which feature what I used to refer to as the patented emotional whiplash, where the majority of the episode is funny, and then, boom! What if it ended on a very sad note :) Also, I love Bela. She is one of the many complex and interesting and funny and tragic female characters Supernatural created over the years, only to panic and kneejerk kill them off because they didn’t know what else to do with them, and boy, did they do that all the way to the bitter end of the series!

• Despite its flaws, the initial five season arc was by far the most successful

This is my mainstream Supernatural opinion that the fandom itself largely hates. I’m not sure how much this idea still pervades the fandom world, but there was a period of time where people were convinced Supernatural should only be about Sam and Dean going to the beach and hanging out. Fandom hated conflict. The big refrain at the time were variations on, “Why can’t they just be happy!” Of course, this is a completely warped understanding of how narrative works— conflict drives narrative. This isn’t me defending Supernatural’s many, many writing flaws or bonehead story decisions. Conflict exists in many forms, and Supernatural almost always took the easiest, least interesting road when it came to resolving it. They often presented interesting themes and ideas, only to completely drop those threads an episode or two later because, y’know, complexity is hard.

I know that seems like an unrelated tangent, but hear me out: the first five seasons had a narrative and an overarching conflict that was (relatively) neatly resolved when the show was originally supposed to end. The seasons after that took the idea of an overarching conflict, but most of them were singularly contained seasons with one big bad and one resolution/cliffhanger ending that springboarded into the next season. Not only that, but the whole reason this narrative exists in the first place is resolved in the five season arc. When the show continues to get stacked on top of that, you’re left with an ever taller jenga tower with less and less foundational support as seasons go on. This is how life works, but it’s not how long-form content should work. Life should not go on after the driving conflict of the narrative has been resolved. It does not get better.

At the end of season 5, ignoring the parts I don’t like or that were shoehorned in because they got renewed last minute, the emotional arcs of the past five seasons have also been resolved. The mystery of the Winchester family has been solved and the revenge taken. Sam has finally found agency after years of being emotionally smothered by his brother and his future stripped away from him by external factors that came into play when he was only a baby. Dean, parentified all his life and having bent himself around Sam as a result of his mother’s death and his father’s neglect, has finally accepted that he is his own person, with his own life to live, and that all those years spent under his father’s shadow (literally carrying John’s weight on his shoulders in the form of his hand me down leather jacket!!!) may not have been the badge of honor he always pretended it was.

Maybe I just wasn’t paying attention, but there isn’t an equivalent emotional payoff in any future seasons that wasn’t a result of fandom supplementing and cherry picking (no judgement, I did it too! what were we supposed to do…) There are parts of post-season 5 Supernatural that are good, of course, 99% of them revolving around Dean or Dean/Cas, 0.5% revolving around bringing Mary back, and 0.5% miscellaneous (Sam fighting off clowns in Plucky Pennywhistle’s and them exploding in a cloud of glitter all over him… Dean’s slinky… for example…)

But it’s just not really cohesive, which, like, is the goal for storytelling.

• Cas got utterly nerfed as a character circa psych ward arc in season 7 and never recovered aka cas and the fucking bees

Years ago, this opinion would have gotten me crucified online because the corner of fandom I existed in was normal. This is also a controversial opinion because this implies Cas was nerfed for longer than he wasn’t, and unfortunately, this means I lose and the Cas/bees people win. Big L for me. Big L for deancas. Not saying characters can’t have layers, but it’s like Cas went through his rawr xD phase and the writers never let him forget it. Actually, this happened to Lucifer in season 7 too. Originally he was acting so zany because he was a figment of Sam’s imagination, but when they brought him back (🤮) in later seasons he was also, like, super zany?? which didn’t make any sense. alas, such were the later seasons of Supernatural.

• Jack ruined everything!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Lots of things made twilight years Supernatural bad. Jack made it nigh-unwatchable, for so many reasons. My pettiest grievance was how readily fandom became obsessed with him. Say something to me about nougat. I dare you.

My more substantial grievances are twofold: misogyny and thematic.

Misogyny is an easy finger to point. First, Kelly Kline. So much to unpack there. Then, for seasons, Dean (and Sam, to a lesser extent), served as something of a mentor for troubled teenage girls (Krissy, Claire, and others that I can’t remember because I am already deep in the memory weeds here, it’s been a while). This was how the writers felt most comfortable representing their mostly-female fanbase onscreen, because they just could not have adult female characters exist around Sam or Dean without some sort of romantic tension (Charlie excluded for lesbian reasons, obviously, but she met the same fate as every other female character, so, it evens out) or as a motherly figure. Supernatural, despite it’s surprising ability to create interesting female characters over and over, just could never be normal about women all the way. Neither can the world, so I suppose that’s a point in the art imitating life column.

Thematically, what drove me bonkers about Jack was how he changed the main thematic thrust of the show. At its loosest interpretation, Supernatural is a show about family (even as I type this, I hear my second year fiction instructor asking, “what about family? family isn’t a theme on it’s own. what’s the aboutness?” but this isn’t about her!!). Supernatural had a complex relationship with the concept of a family— sometimes being blood related was the most important thing, sometimes choosing your family was the most important, very oxymoronic of them. Either way, what Supernatural mostly dealt with was the family unit of Sam and Dean, and the subsequent, concentric circles reverberating out from that core duo. You could argue Cas eventually got enfolded into that center circle, but it’s tenuous at best (see: the finale, and don’t worry, we’ll GET to the finale on this list). Then, later and much to my chagrin, came Jack.

Circling back to the first sentence of the last paragraph, Jack changed the thematic thrust of the show from being about the complexities of the Winchester family unit to being about, what if a toddler/manchild/wunkerkid had three dads with conflicting opinions on how to raise him? My preferred way of referring to the situation was Dean, Cas, Sam, and their one-third son. So basically, the show turned into a show about parenting. And boy, oh boy, did I hate that! I never signed up for a show about parenting god-toddlers (goddlers?). The petty part of this complaint was I also hated how much discussion this generated in deancas fandom about Dean and Cas with Their Son Jack. Like, I just want deancas content! Get that baby out of here!

I don’t have very strong maternal instincts.

I don’t have any confirmation, but I suspect this change was meant to reflect the growing families of the three stars of the show. It’s not an inherently bad change, I suppose, but it’s about the worst possible change they could have made for me and my tastes, specifically. It also didn’t help that it created a weirdly nuclear family dynamic when before that, the blurred lines of familial relationships was actually a pretty interesting concept, how Dean and Sam were siblings, but also parent and child (Dean had to be a mother and a father 🥺🥺🥺) and then Mary came back and whew, blew the whole lid off everything. Or, well, she would’ve if the writers weren’t COWARDS.

(sidebar: i always told myself if i were to ever write spn fic again ((i will not be doing that)) i would write about dean and mary and how what they need most from each other is what they can never possibly give. dean is a grown man who wants his mommy and mary is a grown woman who wants her baby and they can never be those things to each other again! waghhh!!!!)

A lot of my hatred of Jack really is just personal taste. Oh well, it’s my personal blog so that’s what you get.

• The finale

Three bad covers of Carry on Wayward Son, and for what?

It’s common for series finales to look back to their pilots for a full circle moment at the end. That’s like, writing 101. I just don’t know if I’ve ever seen it done as hamfistedly as I did in the Supernatural finale. I understand it was filmed at a super weird time in the world where there were physical distancing guidelines in place and actors couldn’t cross borders and so on but at the same time like… it was really bad! Filming for TV is known to be a by-the-seat-of-your-pants endeavor that simultaneously takes months and months to prepare for, meaning you have to be ready to adjust on the fly. Like, that’s part of your job as a creative, pandemic or not. So it was just so strange to me (and also, because it was Supernatural, not strange at all) how hard they dropped the ball. Must we talk about Sam’s blurry wife, Sam’s child with his name stitched onto his overalls, Sam’s wig and old man makeup? Must we talk about how the finale ignored every single episode except the pilot? There was no, “look how far we’ve come” moment, it was more like, “i tried pressing the gas but forgot to shift out of park”.

So weird. My theory is for the last few seasons the Supernatural writers room was dipping into the communal Riverdale psychedelics stash.

• Cas’ love confession was bad and never should have happened

Ooh, here’s the biggie. the one I think would’ve gotten any cred I had managed to hang onto fully revoked had I stayed in fandom.

Listen. I rode the same high as everyone else on November 5th, 2020. Because Castiel confessed his love to Dean Winchester, and also because he did it on Jiang Cheng’s birthday, whose achievements had once again been overshadowed by gay people.

It’s funny because now that I’m on the outside looking in, I’m like, girl… chill. But at the time (and even then, I was much more removed from Supernatural fandom than I had been in the past) I was like, ascending. I was like, is this what happiness feels like?

Whatever I was feeling ended up being short-lived. Amazingly, I was one of the believers. I was like, they would never write a one-sided love confession two episodes before the end of the series without giving the receiving party a chance to respond and then just… never mention it again, right? RIGHT?!

🥲

So here’s the thing. I am aware that the writer of this episode is a gay man who had been gunning for something in this vein for some time. Much hay was made about the brave gay man who had fought for his right to write a half-baked and one sided love confession that the show frankly seemed embarrassed about and did everything in its power to pretend never happened the moment it was over. If this is true and it was really important to him that this got into the final cut, then, well, more power to him.

Less power to me, however, because it was bad. I’m not HAPPY about it being bad. It took me time to even admit to myself that it was bad, which was kind of mortifying in and of itself, to have been invested in something for so long, only to be given half of it, and deeply reluctantly at that. I was thinking, that’s really what you think of me, Supernatural? Sticking with you for all this time (okay, well, I dipped for a while because I hated Jack so much, sue me, I caught up), and my reward is a love confession so deeply cringeworthy and painful to watch (especially with hindsight knowing nothing would come of it) that the camera is practically recoiling from the secondhand embarrassment? Something so brutal to behold that I don’t need to see with my eyes to know that at least half the people on set are awkwardly clearing their throats during every take?

Having been a fan of Supernatural, the show that always took the path of least resistance, the show that had a storied history of sneering at its biggest fans (though mostly in the earlier seasons, and not always without merit), the show that, over and over, was allowed to be deeply mediocre 95% of the time, maybe I really did deserve it for thinking they could give me more. What’s one last disappointment for the road?

Something that really got me about the love confession? The utterly uncritical way that fandom received it. Just heap some more mortification onto the already overflowing pile. I wanted to scream, WHY ARE YOU GUYS ACCEPTING CRUMBS?! I felt like I was going crazy. The overzealous shapes fandom would twist itself into over the smallest perceived slights, and yet, this utterly milquetoast offering of solidarity (that, i stress, resulted in nothing!! there was no conclusion to this!!) was something to celebrate? A weirdly intense moment of disillusion with fandom culture as a whole.

Oh, I guess this also segues nicely into my opinion that deancas isn’t canon. Which people were saying in the wake of the confession. And was so weird. And still is weird. I don’t know if people are still saying it, but if they are, they are (unfortunately) incorrect. Like, it literally didn’t happen!

So, those are my big Supernatural opinions. There might have been more, but I don’t remember them.

A note to end on: some of the real life drama surrounding Supernatural remains, to this day, some of the funniest shit I’ve ever seen. I will never forgot Jared Padalecki’s insane tweets or the J2 divorce. The show sucked, but Misha Collins getting lost in the sauce at a convention and implying he’s bisexual then having to go on record later and come out as straight? That’s evergreen.