#it's 2023

[itsmoonpeaches]

Limiting who can reply to my posts. There is too much discourse happening in my recent ones, including the one about the casting for Annabeth.

I'll say this once.

"No matter what people say, remember I chose you." -Rick Riordan

[mushroomcarrotstick]

never gonna give you up~

...

Never gonna let you down~

[planet-marz1]

I feel like the common cold & flu just needs to be rid of

[hungry-skeleton]

Why am I still subscribed to xboxaddictionz

[mikuni14]

Between whatever happened to Sprite regarding his... umm... toilet department situation and Mhok's "FART Proudly.. Stand Behind me?" T-shirt, today's Frigay is….. I'm sorry to say, but it's 100% Thai BL 😶

..sigh..

[littlemxmisfit]

Turning electricity off should be illegal period

[thiswaitingheart]

@bibliophilecats

Putting this here as a screenshot because I actually have Thoughts that I think will be longer than what fits into a reply.

First of - yes! Yes to both points!

It's actually what drew me to the series in the first place! I can't get the timeline straight anymore because my memory is not the best and I have no sense of time, but I think I first watched SPN in about 2011? I think? Definitely before I had a tumblr (there is evidence on facebook from 2012-13), and definitely before I was involved in any fandom spaces that were not Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. At that time, it was just me and my assorted readings of the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson, and a recent-ish, first-time watch of X-Files. (I somehow missed out on a lot of horror movies that ran on TV in the 90s and early 2000s even though I would have had access; I really can't explain how that happened, I never consciously tried to avoid them.)

Ho boy, I imprinted on the show immediately and for 2 reasons:

a) the soundtrack

b) the horror tropes.

Season one has all the good stuff: A monster of the week structure, strong influences from X Files (made explicit in the pilot), and main characters who are extreme weirdos and social outsiders whose perception no one trusts anyway.

Some of the first season episodes are extremely creepy.

1x6 Skin is pretty much straight up body horror and doppelgänger horror. What if someone who looked exactly like you went around killing people? What if someone looked straight into your head and knew all of your darkest secrets? What if your body wasn't your body because someone else also used it for sinister purposes? All followed by a deeply consequential ending where Dean is essentially dead to the world (something that will come back to haunt him more than once). Sorry to go all Poe on this, but:

"You have conquered, and I yield. Yet henceforward art thou also dead - dead to the World, to Heaven, and to Hope! In me didst thou exist - and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself." (William Wilson)

1x15 The Benders? Well, as the episode points out, 'they're just people'. But they're people who come with a whole boatload of cannibalism, serial killer, and incest baggage. They're also, rather unsubtly, a mirror inversion of the Winchesters: an extremely close-knit, co-dependent family who hunt monsters people.

Sadly, we never got an episode tackling survival cannibalism as a concept because ho boy I'd be so curious where the Winchesters' boundaries are in that respect.

1x12 Faith draws on a whole library of cult, saint, and Christian revivalist stuff. Faith healing is both creepy and fascinating and, people seem to forget sometimes, old. Not just because the imagery goes straight back to Jesus. European kings healing scrofula and other illnesses? Our Lady of Lourdes? Or, if we want to go the full reviving the dead route, Herbert West: Reanimator, Edgar Allan Poe's obsession with the recently departed and premature burials, and Frankenstein creating the creature from human body parts. Who are your gods, and how many of them are false gods? How can we tell? Who gets to create and who is responsible for the creations? (I wasn't joking about the parallels to Stephen King's Revival).

Ironically, season two's 2x4 Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things has Dean declare, multiple times, that 'what is dead should stay dead'. Rather hypocritical, I might add, because guess who's been miracle-healed twice by this point.

Speaking of which, ill-guided faith shows up as a theme more than once, including in 1x7 Hook Man.

And sometimes, the true horror is racism (1x13 Route 666), mistreatment of the mentally ill (1x10 Asylum), or (child) abuse (1x14 Nightmare).

Season two still has many of these features, although the episodes are much less monster-of-the week and much more 'the Winchesters work through their messed-up feelings'.

And, season 2 subverts some of the horror tropes. Suddenly, we get vampires who don't kill, werewoves who don't know they're werewolves (and don't want to live as such), and hunters who are much more violent than their prey. It's all very Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde in the way it questions what constitutes 'monstrosity'. (And, of course, a buildup to Sam's demon blood storyline and the whole mess of emotional turmoil that comes with that.)

And then there are the explicit horror references. Most of them, I think, coming from Dean. Because if Sam is the lore guy, Dean is the one who has apparently seen every single big-hit horror movie that came out between approximately 1970 and 2005. Off the top of my head (because I haven't actually made a list): The Shining, Pet Sematary, Ghostbusters, The Sixth Sense, and, indirectly, It (the damn clowns).

... they also literally named the vampire Lenore. Poe would be so proud. XD

I don't know where I'm going with this except that this is precisely the kind of intertextuality I like: No straight-up copying but clear enough if you're even remotely genre-savvy. No idea when exactly the series went off the rails but I would have watched 15 seasons of this.