If I might spare more unhinged English major thoughts (lol) I've appreciated your use of the word "sublime" to describe Supernatural's whole project, I've struggled to articulate this over the years but Cas' confession really struck me with how this is an EPIC romance like I swear we never get for queer representation. Every trope we rightly go crazy over in het romance -heroic sacrifices, love as redeeming, eternal love endgame- and we just get to have it for once?? It's genuinely so important I'll take the cost of it not being so explicit/the disaster finale, because knowing the fact they fought censorship for it and wrote that fact into the narrative for us to find, we've given something truly affirmational of queer joy/love/being. (So much credit to Robert Berens, the episode writer, who used the gnostic-inspired mytharc to say gay love is Pleroma -Cas frees Heaven and himself in the same process of Just Being, as opposed to the Empty/Kenoma he overcomes by assimilating his Shadow self in the Jungian sense- it's all there in the text. The man GETS IT and these characters, he applied years of activism writing From Thee Queer Experience to build it so structurally as the emotional climax of the series the network Couldn't erase it and it's all we'd be talking about years later.) And we cannot seem to talk enough about the specific power move of queering an established IP, like we can have the geeky staples of Fandom or Corporate Approved Queer Shows but never the twain shall meet; that and the queering of traditional masculinity is probably the ultimate takeaway about it. Is this making sense? I just wanna punch a hole in the big lie of false narratives about this, like Misha and others have gotten to more and more, and celebrate this SUBLIME deeply authentic queer story that means so much to so many of us yknow?? So I wanted to share.
Sublime is such an incredible suitcase of a word. It's what you say when you can't articulate, exactly, isn't it. It means "of very great excellence or beauty" or "producing an overwhelming sense of awe by being vast and grand" and finally "extreme or unparalleled".
We regularly, here in tumblrville, rightly say that Supernatural is an unparalleled media experience, and I say it because from where I'm sitting, Supernatural is somehow so much greater than the sum of its sometimes clunky and hamfisted parts. It's Homeric in scope and manages to be so much greater in totality than it ever imagined, and it's primarily because of what you say here, and yes: is makes sense. To say it was somehow sublime, all-tolled, is not to erase its flaws, or the constant battle clearly being waged between the creative forces and the suits, either, because those things are an indivisible part of the sum. this will seem like a crazy thing to say but the incredible fullness and simultaneous emptiness of the ending episodes are, for me, actually part of what makes it truly over-the-top great.
I'm sure it will be anathema to say this, but in a way, I wouldn't even change the end. It's a fucking broken narrative! I hate it and I want it to be fixed! but more than any other piece of media I know, Supernatural comes so very close to imagining a transcendental kind of wholeness, completion and peace, and it does that with NEGATIVE SPACE. It's as if it accepts the impossibility, and opts instead to project the shadow of it, Plato's cave-style, so that WE are left to imagine what wholeness and peace could be in a way that just endlessly aches, and it's because of that unfulfilled promise. It drives us to create it and recreate it endlessly in our minds, in literally hundreds of thousands of permutations. It makes it part of our collective imagination.
Like... is it just me, or is that staggeringly beautiful? Sublime. Unparalleled. It lives because it can't die like that, and we all know it in our very bones.
There's a beautiful line in a Wim Wenders movie I love called Der Himmel über Berlin, translated to English as Wings of Desire (but there is an awful English language movie with Nicholas Cage and that title and I am not talking about that one!!) It's a movie in which an angel falls in love with a human, and from heaven, and there's a character called Homer, an old man who spends his days in the public library reading stories who says "...no one has so far succeeded in singing an epic of peace. What is wrong with peace that its inspiration does not endure and that it is almost untellable?" I think we don't give the creative hearts involved in Supernatural enough credit for being able to come as close as they did; close enough to PROJECT THAT SHADOW and make us see it.
Like, are there things to bitch about re: Supernatural? Sure. But, none of them overwhelm THAT. And, I'll be honest: I have completely lost the ability to be moved by standard tropes in het romance. I simply don't trust them anymore. I think we force ourselves into their shapes, and I just don't fucking want to. I want to be MY shape.
Supernatural did something amazing with Dean and Cas: they let it fucking BE WHAT IT WAS. A profound bond. A deeply transformative knowledge of an other. A relationship that grew and grew, and deepened over time and made the love they felt for each other and their family the only real thing in a world where there was nothing else to hold onto. Like...RIGHT?
That is THE TRUTH. and anyone who has experienced queer/real love has experienced that profundity, transformation, and reification.
(And, for the record, It is the belief that fire cannot melt out of me that ALL actual love is fundamentally queer by one definition and part of the queer project of resistence, which is to say NON-COMPLIANT with bullshit, unique unto itself, composed of whatever weird, fucked up, actual one-in-a-million souls are part of it.)
Anyway. sorry. That got long and weird.
tldr: Supernatural is legit beautiful imho.
