Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

aethersea asked: you know what also pissed me off about supernatural, though? the inability to commit to their own worldbuilding. even while clinging to a static paradigm, where The Masquerade is in full effect, they couldn't be consistent about what sort of underground magic communities do and don't exist. I know this can be blamed on multiple writers and all, but it drives me up the wall. f.ex. witches are All Evil and tend to work alone, until that episode with the familiars when you find a bunch of nice(r)

aethersea:

words-writ-in-starlight:

aethersea:

words-writ-in-starlight:

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?

I’m surprisingly bitter about the werewolves it turns out I feel like there should be werewolf support groups they can all rent an abandoned warehouse or smth every full moon and chain themselves up for a night in the morning one of their relatives comes by with a key and some donuts also it pisses me off when characters who are in it for the Saving Humanity schtick seem more into killing monsters than saving people and that’s never addressed at one point sam meets a childhood friend who’s killing rapists so she can nurse her sick child back to health with their hearts sam lets her go but it’s at least halfway due to nostalgia from when they were kids dean swings by later and straight murders her and not her kid which is just stupid really and I mean at least buffy goes ‘I’m the Slayer not the sheriff so I’m gonna do the job I was assigned at birth and not apply my-stake-is-law rules to a criminal-justice-system society’ and there are episodes where that frustrates her or where she comes really close to crossing that line and it’s a big deal here they just kind of pretend human crimes don’t exist and ignore them

I TOO AM SURPRISINGLY BITTER ABOUT THE WEREWOLVES.

Like?  Just fucking chain them up?  Rather than doing murder?  AND OH MY GOD THAT EPISODE WITH THE WOMAN AND HER KID MADE ME FUCKING F U R I O U S.  The sliding scale of humanity is the most aggravating thing about this phenomenon of not knowing their own rules, because it means that they talk a really big game about protecting humanity but then they do shit like killing werewolves who ARE ONLY DANGEROUS FOR MAYBE FORTY-EIGHT HOURS A MONTH.  And like the whole thing about killing the woman and not her kid–like, if Dean was really trying to prove committment to the ‘monsters aren’t people and they ALL have to die,’ which would at least be a consistent character trait, he should have also killed the kid, who is implied to inevitably have to do the same thing as her mother.  As it is, it just comes off as petty and vengeful because it’s someone that Sam cares about and Dean can’t handle that (see also: PLEASE AT LEAST PRETEND THAT THESE TWO BROTHERS LIKE EACH OTHER WTF).

I’m so fucking aggravated about this y’all you don’t even know, I hate this show.  It was not an amicable breakup.  You know how with some shows or book series or whatever you can AT LEAST still watch the earlier seasons before things were COMPLETE trash?  Nope, noPE, NOPE, can’t even watch the first couple seasons that I genuinely enjoyed, I divorced this show with fucking prejudice.

I’m sorry for stirring such terrible memories. I hope you’ve found new and better shows, that treat you right, and don’t act all wishy-washy about their dramatic moral quandaries.

I TOO HAVE FOUND WYNONNA EARP, AND DAMN THAT IS MY SHIT.

Honestly, let this be an open letter to anyone as aggravated with SPN as I got to be.  Wynonna Earp is wonderful and I have tentatively high hopes for the second season.  It’s on Netflix.  Finx explains it really well.

I was trying to think of a show to recommend that would not do this
the only truly safe show I could think of was leverage
I’m tempted to rec wynonna earp but that could hypothetically devolve into terribleness in further seasons
the first season was solid though
it felt kind of like watching supernatural but good and starring women
it’s got great monsters w/ diverse characterizations
within consistent framework/rules for what they are and how they work
the main characters are all really cool and an absolute delight to watch
and all pretty different
wynonna likes drinking and motorcycles and sex and being an utter goddamn mess
she is not shamed for this (except a little bit the mess part bc getting your life together is a thing you should aim for doing)
waverly likes pretty dresses and having a boyfriend and making friends and doing history research
she is not shamed for this
(also she’s badass and gets seduced by someone WAY better than her loser boyfriend and it’s cute and great)
dolls the too-serious special forces guy ends up a really well-rounded character with fears and flaws
(he even smiles a couple times)
doc holliday is in it and starts off morally dubious before picking a side
it’s great
there’s a love triangle which is unfortunate but in season one at least it doesn’t implode
there’s an episode with a cool blacksmith who is totally underutilized and it’s downright tragic how much potential they squander with her
but other than that it’s a pretty great show
and it doesn’t take itself too seriously
it knows it’s got a bit of campy horror going on and it runs with it

aethersea asked: you know what also pissed me off about supernatural, though? the inability to commit to their own worldbuilding. even while clinging to a static paradigm, where The Masquerade is in full effect, they couldn't be consistent about what sort of underground magic communities do and don't exist. I know this can be blamed on multiple writers and all, but it drives me up the wall. f.ex. witches are All Evil and tend to work alone, until that episode with the familiars when you find a bunch of nice(r)

aethersea:

words-writ-in-starlight:

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?

I’m surprisingly bitter about the werewolves it turns out I feel like there should be werewolf support groups they can all rent an abandoned warehouse or smth every full moon and chain themselves up for a night in the morning one of their relatives comes by with a key and some donuts also it pisses me off when characters who are in it for the Saving Humanity schtick seem more into killing monsters than saving people and that’s never addressed at one point sam meets a childhood friend who’s killing rapists so she can nurse her sick child back to health with their hearts sam lets her go but it’s at least halfway due to nostalgia from when they were kids dean swings by later and straight murders her and not her kid which is just stupid really and I mean at least buffy goes ‘I’m the Slayer not the sheriff so I’m gonna do the job I was assigned at birth and not apply my-stake-is-law rules to a criminal-justice-system society’ and there are episodes where that frustrates her or where she comes really close to crossing that line and it’s a big deal here they just kind of pretend human crimes don’t exist and ignore them

I TOO AM SURPRISINGLY BITTER ABOUT THE WEREWOLVES.

Like?  Just fucking chain them up?  Rather than doing murder?  AND OH MY GOD THAT EPISODE WITH THE WOMAN AND HER KID MADE ME FUCKING F U R I O U S.  The sliding scale of humanity is the most aggravating thing about this phenomenon of not knowing their own rules, because it means that they talk a really big game about protecting humanity but then they do shit like killing werewolves who ARE ONLY DANGEROUS FOR MAYBE FORTY-EIGHT HOURS A MONTH.  And like the whole thing about killing the woman and not her kid–like, if Dean was really trying to prove committment to the ‘monsters aren’t people and they ALL have to die,’ which would at least be a consistent character trait, he should have also killed the kid, who is implied to inevitably have to do the same thing as her mother.  As it is, it just comes off as petty and vengeful because it’s someone that Sam cares about and Dean can’t handle that (see also: PLEASE AT LEAST PRETEND THAT THESE TWO BROTHERS LIKE EACH OTHER WTF).

I’m so fucking aggravated about this y’all you don’t even know, I hate this show.  It was not an amicable breakup.  You know how with some shows or book series or whatever you can AT LEAST still watch the earlier seasons before things were COMPLETE trash?  Nope, noPE, NOPE, can’t even watch the first couple seasons that I genuinely enjoyed, I divorced this show with fucking prejudice.

aethersea asked: you know what also pissed me off about supernatural, though? the inability to commit to their own worldbuilding. even while clinging to a static paradigm, where The Masquerade is in full effect, they couldn't be consistent about what sort of underground magic communities do and don't exist. I know this can be blamed on multiple writers and all, but it drives me up the wall. f.ex. witches are All Evil and tend to work alone, until that episode with the familiars when you find a bunch of nice(r)

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.

Anonymous asked: The thing about SPN is that all of its characters have such good potential, y'know? Like the Sam's Boy King of Hell thing you mentioned. And the Antichrist. And all the other characters whose potential was wasted so the show could revert back to it's lazy formula. I'm just really bothered about this. Idk man it pisses me off.

ANOTHER THING ABOUT THE WASTED POTENTIAL. AMARA. THE DARKNESS. PRE-BIBLICAL. GOD"S SISTER. THE BE ALL END ALL OF VILLIANS. Her plotline was so crap????? Season 13 confirmed and that was the best they could give us? I truly believe if they had played their cards right they could have created an amazing story arc that would’ve kept people engaged and saved the show from itself.

I’m just so much enjoying that people actually agree with me.  Because you’re right!  The characters by and large have a lot of potential!  The dynamics have the potential to be really interesting!  AND YET.

Fuckin’ Supernatural, seriously.

Anonymous asked: Idea for a Buzzfeed quiz: We Can Tell How Old You Are Based On What Season You Stopped Watching Supernatural. Stopped watching in season 5? You got: 20 years old *that gif of Adam still in Hell*

I’m fucking wheezing this is so funny, someone with a friend in Buzzfeed do it and link me.

Also I have no idea if this is the gif you meant but it was the first one that came up under ‘adam supernatural’ and I’m cackling.

Originally posted by netflix-enslaved

okay so I’m totally with y'all that spn sucks, but that’s not gonna stop me from watching season 13. I’ve sunk 12 years of my life into this show, i will see it through

And I want you to know that I admire the fuck out of that bloody-minded stubbornness.  *fist bump*

Anonymous asked: I hope you don't mind if I rant a bit, but I'm just re reading the SPN rant and I'm remebering how mad I am about this show??? Because I used to really like it, and up to Season 5 I had issues but I dealt with it because y'know it was good overall. But then like as the seasons kept on going I was left in a permanent state of "wtf" I actually made it 5 episodes 1/?

of Season 8 before I was like… what am I doing so I bingewatched a bunch of crime shows. But then Season 11 started airing and I still had “kept up” with SPN because of “nostalgia” or wtfever and I heard they were introducing “The Darkness” the “biggest bad ever, pre-creation, sister of GOD” and I’m like eh, but then the fandom was coming up with all these theories and 2/?

I’ll give it a try and then I heard they had Season 13 confirmed so I was like hey, it’s going to be 3 season arc! Hey, maybe it’ll turn out alright! I started mid way through the season so when I started watching it was pretty obvous they’d already set Amara/the Darkness as Dean’s love interest but I was like… well if it was Sam she’s be dead but since it’s with Dean 3/?

hey might create a heartrenching arc about sibling? (How naive I was..) And as the season went on I kept cringing but Season 13 confirmed! EVEN BIGGER BAD THAN ALL THE OTHER BAD! GOD REAPPEARENCE! It’s going to turn out all right! And then they literally had the most STUPIDEST ENDING EVER 4/?

SPOILER: IT WAS LITERALLY I’M SORRY I WAS OS MEAN TO YOU BRO< IT’S COLL SIS, YOU WANT TO GO HAVE A SPACE VACATION EVEN THOUGH YOU NEARLY KILLED ME AN EPISODE AGO AND HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO BE A DEEPLY COMPLEX VILLIAN??? AND ALL THIS BECAUSE YOU TALKED TO AN OLD LADY WHO FED DUCKS?!?!?!?! 5/?

THEN MOTHER OF ALL PLOT TWISTS (SPOILER) THEY BRING BACK MARY! SO GET READY FOR SEASON 12 WINCHESTER ANGST + MUM AND MOST PROBABLY AN EVEN BIGGERER BADDAERER BAD!!!! *inhales* It was at this point I switched off the t.v and screamed into my pillow 6/?

I’m just very frustrated about SPN and all the wasted potential with Amara/ the Darkness. THEY HAD SEASON 13 CONFIRMED. Idk why I sent you all of this, your rant just awoke the beast in me I guess. I’m just going to leave with all of this *gestures toward previous asks* and run away. Sorry 7/7

HONEY never ever apologize for bitching about Supernatural with me, I am here for you to get it the FUCK off your chest.  I am the most sympathetic ear.  Amazingly, my epic rant was a mere fragment of my complaints.  SO ANY TIME YOU NEED TO BITCH, I AM HERE FOR IT.

That being said, damn, anon, you stuck it out way longer than I did.  And wow, I have done some googling and I just.  I just give up.  I don’t understand the plot.  I am confused.  I tried to fucking figure out the Amara thing, I Wiki’d, I IMDB’d, but it’s incomprehensible.  And then fucking Mary gets resurrected?  Goddamn, I’m just glad I got out when I did tbh.

@SPN producers, let it end.

All right, @notsumma it won’t let me reply directly to your reply on the SPN Tirade because this website is CONSTANTLY in need of a white knight (I love X-Kit guys) and is currently acting up with that function, so here we go:

so assuming that by s7 the show you liked was 4 years dead, that lines up with Eric Kripke’s opinion. you know, the creator of the show. he wanted to stop at the end of s3, but the network was like ‘nah, we’re making  money.’ then at the end of s5 he didn’t reup his contract, so everything from s6 on is just high-production-value fanfiction.

THIS EXPLAINS SO MUCH, the first three seasons are good fun–it ain’t Shakespeare, but I knew what I was getting into–and even up to five…sort of hung together, at the very least, and then it goes OFF THE GODDAMN RAILS, wow, this answers so many questions.  And also, like, basically I was right?  It’s basically two totally different Frankenshows with the same characters and premise loosely divided by the whole Lucifer situation.

Anonymous asked: So your rant on Supernatural? Also I fell in love with the story you're talking about and basically want to know more. Sorry.

My buddy, you have made An Error, but let’s do this shit.  To any SPN fans who have wound up here through Ye Olde Search Function, I encourage you to stop reading now.

I watched up to about halfway through Season Five before I decided that I could Do It Better (I think this is the novel you’re talking about, anon, unless it’s Earth is where the trouble comes from), and dragged myself up to about halfway through Season Seven before I packed it in and gave up, resigned that the parts of the show I loved were about four to five seasons dead.  So like that’s the information I’m working on here.

So, obviously, lots of people have lots of legitimate complaints about Supernatural, including treatment of queer characters, characters of color, and women, as well as their fairly rampant history of queerbaiting.  And lots of people have covered this in more competent detail than I could ever manage, so like google “sexism in Supernatural” or something and you can do your own reading there.  Hell, if you want to do it the lazy way, you can knock out two of the above with this one article in friendly, easy-to-read Buzzfeed format.  To the nominal credit of the people involved, I will add that the cast seems acutely aware of these problems and finds it distasteful, HOWEVER the problems persist and therefore that credit is minimal.  Anyway. These things are covered much more thoroughly by many other people who are far more cogent than I could hope to be, so I’m going to leave those alone.

Instead, my rant is mostly summed up as “YOU CALL THIS SHIT STORYTELLING.”

So there are four basic parts to this rant, or rather four basic flaws that form the fundamentally weak foundation of Supernatural as a narrative.

1. Failure to commit to a single cohesive narrative arc, also known as “SOME OF THAT AND SOME OF THAT AND SOME OF THAT AND SOME OF THOSE” syndrome
   
2. The persistent and erroneous belief that character death = character development and narrative progression
   
3. Inability to commit to a major change of paradigm, also known as out and out narrative cowardice, which I personally call “flinching during Plot Roulette”
   
4. Total incapacity to put their characterization where their script is regarding the Winchester brothers and the other major players
   

*cracks knuckles*

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