okay i’m going to rant about Supernatural here for a minute, as a head’s up, but i’m just seeing so many people not understand what the show is actually doing - which is fair, i don’t expect anyone to have 15 seasons of genre tv show memorized - and assuming the worst when i’m pretty sure that it’s a fucking beautiful, galaxy brain story playing out.
like, just. the final season 15 big bad is literally God - but he’s not really God, the Christian God, he is the incarnation of the writers themselves. the character of God was originally a tongue-in-cheek avatar of the actual writers as the author of the Supernatural books (yes, inside Supernatural there are Supernatural books, and Supernatural conventions, and a Supernatural musical), Carver Edlund - as in Jeremy Carver and Ben Edlund, two of the primary writers at the time. he was, at the time, a ‘prophet’ who could foresee the future and write what was supposed to happen.
the character of God is the author of this story, and this entire season has been about how the protagonists have to defeat God - they have to literally defeat the story itself in order to be victorious. in a fucking unprecedented level of meta, the villain of the final season is literally the story and the writers themselves.
and then you have Castiel, a character who was supposed to be in a handful of episodes 11 years ago and then permanently killed off. a character who was meant to be permanently killed off again three years after that, who was kept and brought back again and again because the fans demanded it, because Cas and Misha Collins became so intrinsic to the story.
at the end of his first season, the ‘prophet’ (God) told Castiel that he wasn’t supposed to be in this story, and Castiel replied, Yeah, well, we’re making it up as we go.
and then, in the episode before the one with this confession, God confronted Castiel and called him the one thing that he couldn’t ever control. God, Cas’s “father” (the writers who created him) shouted at Cas for never doing as he was told, for always being the spanner in the works.
and then, Castiel culminates years of character development with a beautiful speech about how happiness is in the being, not the having, and comes out as explicitly queer. he confesses that everything he’s ever done has been for love.
and what is Supernatural about? Supernatural is about love saving the world. that was literally the final message of the season 5 finale, which was originally intended to be the series finale. the first time Supernatural ended, “love will save the world” was its final message.
Castiel is the queer love that the writers never intended to exist but that they couldn’t control and couldn’t stop, that they tried to kill and couldn’t.
Castiel didn’t die, Castiel is the queer love that couldn’t die.
and, i think many people don’t realize, the deal that Cas made with the Empty was something put into action - two seasons ago, i think? it was quite a while ago that he made this deal. this has been planned for a long time, it wasn’t a last minute fan service thing. there are people putting meticulous care into this story and they’re not playing around with it, they are laying out their final hand with deliberate intention. the writer who crafted Castiel’s confession (a gay man, fyi) wrote that speech as the first thing he wrote for the season. there is care here.
people unfamiliar with the show may also not realize that when Castiel first came on the show, he saved Dean from hell - because Dean had also made a deal, a deal trading his life for the one he loved most, his brother. Castiel made a deal trading his life for the one he loved most, his son.
that is a parallel, a rhyme to this story, that can only be completed with Dean saving Cas from hell. that is a beautiful, poetic, fucking incredible way to bring this to a close. i have been very wary about actually trusting this show after getting burned over and over, but even i can’t deny the care being written into this and the self-aware beauty of the story that is unfolding.
Castiel has died a dozen times before, at least, as has Dean - in fact, two seasons ago Cas escaped the Empty, the “hell” he was just taken to. leaving your story there would be hella weak sauce, and make no narrative sense.
but Dean, who has been galvanized by rage for so long - Dean, who has been lost and furious knowing that he’s a puppet whose strings have been pulled for a capricious God’s amusement and who now knows that maybe the only real thing in the universe is that an angel is in love with him - laying down his anger and choosing to fight for love, saving Castiel the same way that Castiel first saved him? our protagonists, collectively known as Team Free Will, defeating the Author and choosing their own destiny, choosing love and saving the world?
now that’s a fucking story.
i’m still nervous, of course i am. but all of the pieces have been set in place, and with two episodes left, for the first time i’m actually excited to see how this story ends.
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