back to this essay (wright 2008) that I have serious issues with. author included the above kripke quote and being a true kripke understander and thus kripke hater the ellipses made me immediately suspicious, so I looked up the full quote from 2007, in the context of the question that was asked.
wright’s essay wasn’t just trimming the quote for brevity; her shortened version of it changes the meaning to better serve her points about supernatural’s supposed portrayal of class disparity between the brothers and her insistence on dean as the sole character between the two through which the narrative’s supposedly “competing ideologies and values” are seriously explored, with the early show’s sam-centric mytharcs - in her view - serving as nothing but scaffolding for these dean-centric messages.
first of all, that is evidently NOT what kripke was saying. I don’t agree with his points much more than I do wright’s, but they are so clearly not on the same page about the show’s “heart” (hotly contested topic that it is to this day!)
secondly it is funny that she frames her position as subverting popular fan response when the fact that kripke was apparently being asked so frequently about dean’s prominence in the story relative to sam’s as early into the show as mid-s2 that he was griping about fans “worrying unnecessarily” and reassuring them that “it’s never going to be a show about just sam” is so obviously indicative of the actual slant that was developing in even the earliest of writer/fan conversations.
I won’t get into MY take on the themes of the early seasons and how exactly they are explored through sam and (obviously) dean because I can promise you it is more complicated (to me) than either kripke or wright have laid out here.
in the meantime I’m realizing that this particular essay is most likely where a lot of the core deangirlisms that have been subsumed into broader fanon originally came from, which is like. of course they came from an essay that was written when only 2 full seasons of the show had aired, and of course nobody is interested in reexamining these (thin to begin with) points with the complete narrative arc of the show in mind.
