witches who go to witch
bars and hardly ever poison each other’s drinks, oh and also familiars are a
thing. a while later spike and cordelia are witches who’ve had a tempestuous
relationship for… centuries I think, aka witches can live for a really long
time, so there’s no way the bigger/older ones don’t all know each other. there
ought to be SOME sort of witch ‘society’, even if it’s just loose
communication. but no, after this you never hear of witches ever again, much
less familiars or witch
bars. then you’ve got
Bela, who caters to rich people who know magical artifacts exist, but there’s
no exploration of what that could MEAN – if Bela can hold down a job, then
enough of the country’s elite own and exploit magic stuff that it could –
SHOULD – have at least some effect on US politics, as in who gets power.
there’s never a whisper of that, but okay, this isn’t exactly the winchester
boys’ social scene. but failing that, some of these magic-obsessed rich people
should turn up for a
few episodes, either
haunted or else guilty of inflicting a monster-of-the-week on someone. heck,
one of them could be a recurring vaguely-helpful character that the boys stop
by and menace a bit whenever they need access to some excessively obscure
artifact. you already mentioned the mess of all those Alpha Monsters who were
powerful and unkillable and stuff, and had their own dread agendas with
potentially far-reaching consequences for their respective species, and then
just… vanished. I don’t
even remember how. and
then there’s the hunter community, which is the most inconsistent of all. first
it’s just these two and their dad, and then they start finding out their dad’s
old friends were all actually hunters or oracles or whatever. so far so good;
these are just Mysteries Of Our Father’s Past, and valid character/plot
development stuff. but there’s Bobby, who Knows Everyone, and Ellen, whose bar
every hunter in the country frequents sooner or later, and this means hunters
know each
other, know about each
other, they have a network of communication and they share intel, gossip, trade
secrets. but the moment the bar blows up there’s just no network, no
connection, nothing at all binding hunters together, even though Bobby still
knows everyone and Ellen and Jo are still around and plenty able to found a new
bar if they wanted to, or at least keep in touch with at least half of the
people who used to swing by their bar. oh and also the demons! they talk about
complex politics
happening in Hell, they
have some sort of prophesied demon queen who takes the body of a young girl and
has glowing white eyes (I don’t even remember what happened to her), they have
demon religion and spirituality to the point where Lucifer is basically Demon
Jesus – I’m pretty sure this is explicitly stated, Lucifer is to the demons
what Jesus is to really devout Christians, semi-mythical status and prophesied
second coming and everything – and the show makes an effort to flesh out its
demonic
characters, give them
personality and desires and drives, and it shows distinct differences in how
different demons feel about humanity, and about what they do, and all that. yet
despite all this, the only demon we meet who doesn’t immediately try to murder
the boys is Ruby. no one tries to bargain honestly with the boys, no one but
Crowley tries to aim the boys at their own enemies, no one begs for mercy or
lies about repentance. nothing. can you imagine if those demons who told Sam to
take up
his antichrist mantle
and lead a demon army decided that, since their Chosen One was unwilling, they
ought to convince him? what if a bunch of demons had started discreetly tailing
the boys, showing up sometimes to rescue them from really bad fights or offer
up dead monsters like housecats offering dead birds? ‘hey chosen one, we caught
you this demon who’s high up in Crowley’s hierarchy, do you want to torture him
for information yourself or do you want us to do it?’ they solemnly swear that
that they’ve stopped
killing humans, they keep quietly growing in number, and they always scram
before the boys are conscious enough to kill them properly. sam and dean have
many arguments about whether they were REALLY too concussed to stab their
latest demonic rescuer and get absurdly angsty and argumentative about it. I
know my rant has gotten pretty thoroughly disorganized and this is moving back
into must-have-a-static-paradigm territory, but I am a little bitter.
THIS IS ALSO SUCH A GOOD POINT there is just so much to be bitter about with this show, like, good god, you’d think that sooner or later they’d run out of basic narrative rules to fuck up.
Speaking of rules, I think this is a manifestation of one of Supernatural’s wider problems, which is that they just DO NOT SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THE RULES OF THEIR OWN UNIVERSE. Like, all they’ve REALLY nailed down is that demons can be exorcised, but anything that isn’t a demon is pretty much at the mercy of the plot for A) how powerful it is, B) how hard to kill it is, and C) how ‘human’ it’s considered. Like, everything from werewolves to wendigos are stated to be at least PART human, but basically their ‘humanness’ and subsequently the amount of sympathy accorded to them is predicated on how benign (or how attractive) they look in their human form. The magic of this universe is wildly unpredictable–the Winchesters sometimes do/dabble in magic themselves, but we never really learn how magic works. Does it require a focus? Does it require badly-pronounced Latin? Is it an expression of the user’s willpower? Is it similar to what demons do (implied when All Witches Are Wicked for the first few seasons) or not? Does it require natural talent or can anyone learn it? THERE ARE SO MANY QUESTIONS THAT ARE TOTALLY IGNORED. THEN there’s the question of societies in this supernatural underworld. Like, I think I’ve expressed in my John Wick comments how much I like functional underworld societies with rules and systems, but honestly it’s CRITICALLY necessary if you’re doing what SPN does and having the society Matter. I cringe every time I think about how clumsy and slapdash the hunting community was in Supernatural, because it had SO MUCH POTENTIAL, don’t talk to me about it, I made it work better when I wrote my spite novel. I’m sure I can think of fifty million more incomplete universe rules, but I can honestly feel my blood pressure rising right now so I’m going to stop.
OH MY GOD GUYS, please, if you’re a writer, let me beg you right now in person to figure out the rules of your universe and then commit. Here are some pointers.
Magic should work in a conceptually similar way to gravity: its rules should be consistent and should be able to be broadly extrapolated from the general effect, and if you’re going to BREAK those rules you’ve got to have a damn fine reason.
The sliding scale of ‘humannness’ should…slide less, to be completely honest, work your shit the fuck out EARLY or make working your shit the fuck out a plot point (please see Stormdancer for a good example).
If you’re dealing with questions of what makes someone human (@SPN FOR LIKE FOUR FUCKING SEASONS) then you should actively question like “Hey, my dude, can we morally kill this person for something they have no control over” unless your character took the trait ‘Callous’ somewhere in their history (which is also fine).
If you have an underworld society–or any society tbh???–WORK YOUR SHIT OUT. How do they work together (ex: hunters pretending to be ‘the boss’ when someone calls the number on that fake business card)? How do they support each other (ex: safehouses? maybe? this is never discussed in SPN? and I hate it?)? What are the things people differ on (ex: whether or not to murder the Winchesters, which, like, I know you’re supposed to be against that because they’re the protagonists, but by the time I bailed I def wanted someone to shoot them)? Is there an assumption of free exchange of favors or is there a strict financial/bargaining system? How much does one person vouching for another matter in the community? ANSWER SOME BASIC QUESTIONS FFS
Finally, most crucially, for the love of all that is good, Pick A Plot. One plot. It can have subplots (example: an overarching plot broken up by smaller missions, a la your average TV show) or multiple acts (as in a play, where you’ve got a couple major pieces that assemble into the main plot, like Much Ado where you’ve got (roughly) the matchmaking, the wedding, the vengeance, and the resolution), but it should be One Plot and you need to tie up those motherfucking loose ends.
This has been “Hey look turns out that 6K later I have Even More Complaints about Supernatural” with Moran.
honestly though. this show is, as you said, a fantasy/horror murder mystery show with overarching apocalypse plots. if all we, as viewers, were interested in was the violence and brotherly angst, we’d be watching sons of anarchy. we’re here for the monsters, guys. we are absolutely here for the monsters. invest in your monsters.
the sliding scale of humanness in particular is really frustrating, at least when it’s coupled with such lazy writing. Think about it – they focus so much on What Is Humanity when it comes to Sam, but the show hardly ever asks that same question about the monsters, many of whom are ex-humans. When it does, it asks about a single character, not about whether, say, all werewolves should be given a second chance because they don’t actually know they’re killing people.
Like Buffy before them, the Winchesters draw a hard line between “killing monsters” and “killing humans,” but even while the writers are waffling back and forth on Sam’s humanity, they never explore why that difference matters. The debate on Sam’s humanity focuses a tiny bit on his capacity for empathy and ethics and mostly just on whether he’s got demon-based superpowers. It’s a fixation on the superficial, like what makes a monster is the scales and sharp teeth, not the rampant homicide. Dean is freaked out because Sam can kill demons by glaring really hard, and does, but killing demons has been their express goal for the whole show, it’s not like he’s done anything other than level-up his skill set.
Meanwhile, the debate on whether he’s Going Too Far centers on his demon blood addiction (and what a cop-out it is, making the power-enhancing substance so destructively addictive that your OP character has to quit cold-turkey and never have powers again) and on how trigger-happy he’s gotten with demons specifically. Who, again, are Universally Bad and have been their avowed enemies since episode three. It’s not like the writers have any space to suddenly get high-and-mighty about how you’re not supposed to kill monsters all willy-nilly, not this far into the game.
If the question of Is Sam Human can be answered by what ratio of hemoglobin to sulfur is in his veins, your setup is flawed. If having special abilities from questionable origins is monstrous, then they should throw away that demon-killing knife they get off a demon, and the demon-killing gun that Ruby fixes up special for them. If sympathetic monsters are occasionally introduced, but the show never explores whether that means some monsters can be relied upon to act morally in the long run, or what the consequences are of granting or denying them the ability to do that, then what is the point?
