lorebooks

[lorebooks]

#yes!!!

[lorebooks]

you know what actually i don’t think we’ve talked enough about mary haunting not just her home but specifically sam’s room and protecting the children that move in there from the evil inhabiting the house the way she couldn’t protect sam. azazel got her baby, but he won’t be getting anyone else’s.

[lorebooks]

#is this . . . webweaving?

[lorebooks]

do you think eric kripke is working through something

#scream!

[lorebooks]

misha never got a perfume genius erotica substack entry but he's getting a chuck tingle novel

[lorebooks]

SUPERNATURAL 2005 - 2020. (More)

[lorebooks]

the fun thing about the bunker is that they can just invent a new room every time the plot requires it

[lorebooks]

mary is the whole point of supernatural like she is the reason. and they killed her for what. for what. to make dean mad at jack..? girl get better at writing

#literally #mary winchester

[lorebooks]

the appeal of jensen ackles lies in how he consistently does his best acting when he’s not speaking. the type of tv that spn is (campy, cheesy, trashy, soapy, whatever -y you want) means that the actors often move through the dialogue more like action figures than people (they take turns announcing the themes at each other, everything unfolds with the inevitability of rehearsal, jensen ackles and misha collins are both Doing Voices). this isn’t a bad thing; it’s just a type of storytelling that relies on exaggerated emotions and broad, archetypal characters. to quote barthes’ essay about pro wrestling, “at this pitch, it no longer matters whether or not the passion being expressed is authentic. […] what is expected is the intelligible figuration of moral situations ordinarily secret.” jackles recites his lines like everybody else, but he happens to be good at physical comedy and have a very expressive face, and every once in a while there will be a shot of him so genuine in contrast to everything else that’s going on that it effectively disrupts the show’s architecture of signs. you wonder where it came from. this tension between spn’s inherent theatrical stiffness and jensen ackles’ flashes of unaffected physicality contributes to dean’s appeal to lgbt audiences; it gives the impression that dean can, both textually and metatextually, be freed from his own performance. in this essay, i will–

[lorebooks]

#it should’ve looked like this

[lorebooks]

Edward Rice (American, born 1953)

Meadow Garden, 2008-10

Oil on canvas

24 x 30 inches

Private collection

[lorebooks]

[lorebooks]

I’ve often wondered if Supernatural, especially the more bro-y early years, doesn’t constitute kind of a masculine equivalent to those old-school bodice-ripper novels, where the author obviously wasn’t able to and/or interested in deconstructing the virgin/whore stuff, but also wanted there to be lots of sexy bits.  So you’d have these elaborate rape-adjacent fantasy set-pieces that were like, okay, Our Heroine and obviously You, Dear Reader are very good girls, but just like...IF you had no choice but to have rough sex with a pirate king...well, hypothetically, that would be...what? How would that go?  Kind of exciting, maybe?  Kind of like being given access to a part of you that you can’t fully admit you’d like to access?

Supernatural was very obviously always (at least in part) about the traumas of masculinity, its violence, its ruptured relationships, fathers who couldn’t take good care of their sons, sons who couldn’t live up to their fathers, brothers who would die for each other but would die before they’d say that out loud, the thrill of power and freedom and also the horror of having no one to turn to for help.  And there was so much of that bodily vulnerability -- having your body invaded and violated, being driven to your knees, being forced to the point of blood and tears, it always seemed to me like there was a little edge of that same kind of fascination -- not literally about sex, but erotic in how tangled up it was with the idea of submission.

Our Heroes and obviously You, Dear Viewer are very strong men, but just like...IF you had no choice but to be exposed and dominated by powers stronger than you...hypothetically, that would be...what?  How would that go?  Kind of cathartic, maybe?  Kind of like being free of something you can’t fully admit is a burden?

[lorebooks]

#it should’ve looked like this

[lorebooks]

the way jimmy is the novak’s mary. the way amelia abandons claire in her grief and quest to find jimmy. the way cas is their azazel. the way claire forgives him and ends the cycle instead of letting it consume her.

[lorebooks]

#it should’ve looked like this

[lorebooks]

in a very real way in my mind’s eye I can watch a supernatural episode where somehow instead of going to the empty cas is in the underworld and I can hear the part of the dialogue where sam goes “according to the lore, once you make a deal with hades, the only thing you would need to do to get cas back is have him follow you out of there” and dean replies “so I just gotta throw a bone to some xena side character and frodo and sam hightail it back to the shire, no sidequest antics?” and sam clarifies like “well he just has to follow you out. the catch is that you can’t look back at him”