It’s been five years, and here I find myself again. Dwelling on the end of Supernatural.
The search for meaning continues.
THANK YOU FOR ALL THIS and I just need to quote this part:
Queerness is inextricable from the evolution of Supernatural and its approach to love, and this is the crux of why the story was ultimately not allowed to embrace what it had become. As Dean and Castiel’s queerness and all it encompassed — free will, acceptance, unbound masculinity, healing love, the unrelenting spirit of people and ideas that grow in the very spaces their erasure creates — became central to the story’s freedom and resolution, systems that are built on its suppression could never let this subversion go unpunished. These real world controls are exercised by enforced rules of storytelling. Castiel broke those rules by confessing his love for Dean, demonstrating in his speech all of the ways that this love had changed him and by extension changed the very essence of Supernatural. Everything Dean had done was for love. That is who he is. That is what Supernatural is. By daring to openly acknowledge this truth, he sealed their fate. Death, erasure, silence. Emptiness. In our lives, we are taught by experience to fear much the same. It is not as simple as pointing to an individual, or even a company, as the villain in this story. There isn’t always a homophobic, mustache-twirling executive waiting to pull the trap door the second he hears a man say the “L” word to another man. This control is exerted by a culmination of institutional influences that stem from social and political systems built on erasure, exclusion, and exploitation. The executive is working in an industry built for wealthy men, controlling a medium invented under censorship, and selling products to an audience conditioned by misogyny and patriarchy. He doesn’t need a trap door when all of these forces will trap the artists, stories, and characters before they even reach him. Though if by some miracle they do, well, it’s no surprise when he reaches for the handle. It’s just good business after all. The spirals of control within Supernatural represent the way systemic control infiltrates our lives and shapes our decisions, from the institution to the individual. Its ending is a reminder of how difficult it is to cut it out by the roots. Reflecting on Supernatural now is such a tangled mix of nostalgia and chagrin, clarity and caution. All of the forces that suppressed its queer love story are alive and well, if not more prominent, today. Our culture is regressing, our politicians are stripping away queer rights and erasing our public existence, cultural transgressions pose mounting financial and political risk for even the most powerful institutions, and the policing of gender expression, sexuality, and binary social expectations is all but civic duty. Censors don’t even need to pretend. Why hide behind writers and profit margins when the President himself will give the order? [...] Throughout queer history, it is our persistent will to love, to live truthfully, to build community, to tell and hear our stories that leaves us open to threats. But it is also what nurtures our humanity. It is what makes us real. By virtue of their very retaliation, it reveals the vulnerabilities and failures of the systems that are built on the denial of this humanity in turn. In Supernatural, the characters got to be real, if just for a moment, and it was this moment of being that revealed how the story would fail without the having. No matter what came after, that is why we are still here. Our stories allow us to feel real, too, even when the world around us becomes a more dangerous place to show it. They help us give voice to our love. We can say beautiful things with it. As Supernatural itself affirmed, love is the most essential and powerful revolutionary force of all. All of our systems and the institutions that uphold them rely on love. We build roads to get us home, we make money to feed our families, we elect politicians to protect our people. Love is also what leaves us most vulnerable. It is through the control, conformity, and corruption of love that these systems coerce people into self-imposing their power.
