[sourtimesmachine]

Article Masterlist - Supernatural

Collection of my pieces breaking down the Supernatural finale, its context, and its aftermath.

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"This is about stories, and the intricate ways in which they become part of us and our world– the ways our lives and struggles are reflected, subverted, and reinforced."

Supernatural’s Legacy: The Trauma of Silence

Understanding the unique grief of Supernatural fans, and the power of stories to liberate and to punish. [Warning: spoilers for season fifte

"At the end of Supernatural, the same institutions and cultural powers that have always suppressed stories and voices were still waiting on the other side of the screen. Our gods had not been defeated."

The TV Gods Are Watching: Why Supernatural’s Metanarrative Matters

The importance of how stories are told and who gets to tell them. [Warning: Spoilers for season fifteen of Supernatural.]

"Supernatural was not building toward a tragic end, it was actively commenting on the ultimate uselessness and sin of demanding tragedy in a story about love, self-acceptance, and truth."

Supernatural and the Trap of Queer Tragedy

Reflecting on queer storytelling, representation, and the cost of a failed escape.

"If Supernatural is about the denial of self and breaking cycles of manipulation, anger, and retribution through the truth, our experience in its aftermath has been about what we do when that truth gets fed back into the cycle."

It’s Something I Know I Can’t Have: Supernatural and the Truth

When stories can’t move on from us.

"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."

Spirals All the Way Down: Anxiety and Supernatural’s Queer Paradox

It’s been five years, and here I find myself again. Dwelling on the end of Supernatural.

Bonus:

"Rather than avoiding the narrative burden of Dean’s death and all the circumstances, both in story and out, that led us to it, The Winchesters is breaking it down. It is examining each theme that was regressed by the finale and pointedly reaffirming it. It’s telling us that what happened to Dean was wrong, that there is something to be done about."

The Winchesters: Misdirecting the Cycle

What Supernatural's prequel tells us about healing, trauma, and beginning new endings. [Spoilers for The Winchesters and Supernatural]

[clairenatural]

gay sex wasn't legal in kansas until 2 years before supernatural started airing. just btw

[clairenatural]

charlie was introduced as canon lesbian 3 years before obergefell v hodges legalized queer marriage nationally

[clairenatural]

don't ask don't tell was repealed when supernatural was on season SEVEN

[worrynoodle]

( @deancasforcutie )

( @angelsdean )

[sourtimesmachine]

Spirals All the Way Down: Anxiety and Supernatural’s Queer Paradox

It’s been five years, and here I find myself again. Dwelling on the end of Supernatural.

The search for meaning continues.

[deancasforcutie]

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.

[beatsheetromanroy]

supernatural isn’t even a tv show to me anymore it’s a field of study and also my friends live there

[sourtimesmachine]

Spirals All the Way Down: Anxiety and Supernatural’s Queer Paradox

It’s been five years, and here I find myself again. Dwelling on the end of Supernatural.

The search for meaning continues.

[sourtimesmachine]

It’s like, you turn on this show. And it’s casual, it’s a show like any other, honestly. The story is familiar because you’ve seen it before, because it’s so clear who these characters are meant to be and what they’re supposed to do, what they’re supposed to want. Until, somehow, they’re not. And they don’t. 

And you slowly start to realize that no, they aren’t familiar because they’re predictable, they’re familiar because they’re you. And it hits you, it’s hit you before but it hits you that you’ve never seen your story told, not really, not like this. Until now. Maybe.

You see them being strong in ways you never thought you could be. You see them grow in ways you never got to, in ways you’re waiting to. You see them being loved.

And their story becomes the thing you think about sometimes, when you’re bored. And then you find yourself thinking about it when you’re sad, too, because somehow it makes you feel just a little bit better. You’re thinking about it when you need a friend, you’re thinking about it when you need to feel strong or distracted or just to relax.

And it starts to get complicated, the way it’s becoming part of your life, the way it’s connecting to the things that are inextricable from what makes you you. You find hope in their love, that hell and mistakes and flaws and fears can’t keep people apart if they choose each other. You find strength in their queerness, in the way they weren’t meant to be but so powerfully were. You see your history in the quiet moments, in the way they move through empty spaces, the way they’re always there even when no one wants to look. You find comfort in their family, in the love they built around themselves despite a world that would rather take it. 

It starts to become about your identity, about making history, about sending a message that you’re here and you’re intense and you’re gentle and your story is actually one of the most beautiful things anyone could get to see. You find inspiration, friendship, support in the people you meet along the way and the boundless creativity that suddenly surrounds you. It becomes so much more than just you. Yet through it all it’s still about this thing that you reach for when you’re sad, or happy, or bored, or scared. It’s about this familiar thing that lets you escape, but it’s an escape to you. It becomes a way for you to be kind to yourself. It becomes a way for you to see a world that could be kind to you, if only people could see you through it.

So you have this story that’s not a story, because no story is. It’s you and it’s the world, like all stories it’s the way we see ourselves and the people around us, it’s the way we know each other and treat each other and shape the path of our culture and future. You have this story that’s not a story, and you’re watching and waiting and it’s becoming clearer and clearer that it’s finally going to happen. That the only thing left is the thing you’ve finally let yourself hope for, you’ve finally let yourself want, because everything is telling you it’s safe. At long last, it is time.

You’ve spent your life fighting, fighting yourself and fighting the quiet, fighting what a lifetime of fighting has done to you. But it was worth it. This story that’s not a story, these characters who have brought you comfort, fulfillment, and love through it all– who have saved you because you saved yourself– are about to receive the same in return. Their story is free. 

And then they die.

[sourtimesmachine]

funny how the most common monsters of the week on supernatural are restless spirits with unfinished business, usually due to some sort of great pain or injustice, who linger in places they once knew stuck in a moment of unending, violent stasis until whatever put them there is set right or they get literally burned out and now that's basically the fate of its fans

[queermania]

fundamentally i cannot vibe with the posts about feeling left out of the gay ship canon parties because like 1. if you don’t think destiel was canon by the end of the show that’s on you and more importantly 2. the decade plus we got of dean and cas falling in love and persevering through fights and deaths and break ups and make ups and choosing each other and the family they made together over and over and over again is so much better to me???? like congrats on your first or second season canon kiss. ill be over here watching destiel play out every romantic trope known to man in a decade long slow burn that permanently rewired my brain ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[queermania]

what im saying is destiel flew so those other ships could skip a little

[charcubed]

Dean Winchester – Somebody To Love - [ on Youtube ]

A mini character study of my favorite canonical bisexual; a look at his "potential for love in all places" and the people he lost; and a tribute to the greatest love story of all time.

In five minutes :)

[chuckwon]

The Winchesters: Misdirecting the Cycle

What <i>Supernatural's</i> prequel tells us about healing, trauma, and beginning new endings. [Spoilers for <i>The Winchesters</i> and <i>Su

My incomparable friend Deirdre T. (aka @sourtimesmachine on here) has posted an article about The Winchesters that perfectly encapsulates how and why the show is a masterpiece, what its depths highlight about Dean’s story in-narrative and out-of-narrative, and how what is ostensibly an exploration of the past is actually commentary on Supernatural and a path for the future.

Nearly every monster on this show takes its victims to another place— hidden lairs, pocket dimensions, buried spaces inside their own minds. Escape, every time, means the same thing: transformative catharsis centered around truth and the breaking of traumatic cycles. Telling your parent you believe in yourself, letting go of your father’s plan even if making your own is scarier, telling your childhood self that you’re going to fight for them and give them back their choices, confessing your guiltiest secrets and allowing your friends to accept and love you as a whole, giving up false peace for real love. Characters are offered ways to forget, to live free of their guilt, pain, and trauma, but this is never the answer. This isn’t real. They learn instead to let themselves examine the bad, embrace that it is part of them, and use it to inform and strengthen their ability to fight for the good as a more complete and centered person. It is fundamentally a story about healing, being told to us by someone whose own story ended with profound pain. Whose story ended in a trap, never escaping the cycle, never getting to speak or fully embrace his own truth or choice. Never getting to live. Rather than avoiding the narrative burden of Dean’s death and all the circumstances, both in story and out, that led us to it, The Winchesters is breaking it down. It is examining each theme that was regressed by the finale and pointedly reaffirming it. It’s telling us that what happened to Dean was wrong, that there is something to be done about it. It’s, maybe, trying to help us heal too.

I cannot recommend this full article highly enough. Unsurprisingly, Deirdre beautifully summarized a bird's eye view of much of my thoughts on this show. I feel like I want to print out pamphlets of this and hand it out in public!!!! But sharing it on this blog will have to be enough.

No matter what the events of the season one finale hold tomorrow, this show could not have been louder or clearer. Dean Winchester spoke to us for 12 episodes by comprehensively deconstructing every aspect of his ending, condemning it repeatedly and consistently, and showing us that he's doing his best to break free of it. And, through him, the real-world team behind this show conveyed the same in kind.

The Winchesters could not have been more validating and (in my opinion) thrilling at every turn. By design, there is SO MUCH in it to examine and talk about, all within the context of it being Dean's story. It's unbelievably dense in clever ways I don't think any of us could have expected.

(And it must be said that I did not watch this show every week expecting to see Chuck Won propaganda, and yet, EVERY WEEK...)

Anyway. Please read this article.

And if you've avoided watching this show, consider this your sign that you absolutely should watch it.

[sourtimesmachine]

It’s Something I Know I Can’t Have: Supernatural and the Truth

When stories can’t move on from us.

[sourtimesmachine]

chill-legilimens –> sourtimesmachine

[sourtimesmachine]

(x)

Castiel’s romantic love for Dean and Dean’s romantic love for Castiel, Castiel’s queerness and Dean’s queerness, are definitively part of Supernatural’s canon. I am at a loss to describe the particular insidiousness of singling out these specific aspects of the story, in a way markedly different than what's done for any others, to insert doubt and ambiguity where there is none.

Art IS open for interpretation. What's left out is that interpretation is open for doubt. That interpretations need bases; that some interpretations have little while others have such substantial and clear textual support that they become the soundest read beyond reasonable doubt. By refusing to acknowledge the difference and continuing to manipulate language— holding all reads equal under the vast umbrella of "interpretation”— the doors are opened to invalidate any read based on the lowest common denominator of doubt from least likely scenario to most. It's a sense of media nihilism which often does little more than clear the slate for the assumptions and biases that already hold power in the sociocultural consciousness— which are validated not by truth, but by privilege—to continue to exercise it.

It’s transparent what gets ordained “open” or not. What we see is rarely a good faith attempt to validate diverse, personal reactions to media but rather an effective tool (whether used with intent or not!) to protect a status quo that denies and bestows power through clarity.

The words we use and do not use matter. Their accuracy matters. There is power in being named— in being able to say who you are, to use clarity to claim space— or to remain unnamed for the same reason. But too often, the privilege of ambiguity is just a placeholder for the default. You don’t need to say your name when it’s on the building. 

But, “there are no words to describe it!” I can think of a few to start. “You changed me, Dean.” “I cared about the whole world because of you.” “The one thing I want, it’s something I know I can’t have.” “I love you.” “I need you.”

There’s only 10+ years of queer romantic text to provide the words to describe it.

And let’s be clear, the virtuous nondescription used plenty of words. “Junkless”, “incest”, “It’s not about that.” Queerness devalues connection; sex sullies love; queer love is only comprehensible through an alien lens and queer sex [gasp] is only palatable through its reduction and omission. We must avoid our own culpability in refusing to empathize with a human experience by removing it from humanity itself. Love who you want but don’t do it here. Open indeed.

At the end of the day, those words are irrelevant to the story’s validation. We have the text. The text says it’s queer. The text says it’s romantic. The text says that angel-human sexy times are on the table (with all possible entendres intended).

But man. We have years ahead of us. Your voices impact people. Whether warranted or not they shape conversations and perceptions. Instead of talking over marginalized experiences and stories, maybe silence would be better left open for interpretation. 

[write-nerdy-to-me]

Lord, show me if he really loves me Tell me does he truly care Give the love that only comes from above We pledge our love

And he says that he loves only me But I’m afraid, so afraid, someday he’ll want to be free You would know how much I love him And how hard it would be to bear -- Lover's Prayer, The Clickettes

[nikadd]

[sourtimesmachine]

this is what happens when every spn stan camp’s prayers counteract each other

[curioussubjects]

even when we lose we lose ✌

[smoothoperatorleclerc]

are you normal or did you experience the spn events of june 24th as if you were floating?