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torturedpoetemotions · 3 years

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The reason SPN is both quintessentially queer and quintessentially homophobic is because it's a straight man's fanfiction of a queer text. That’s really it. It's a straight man seeing the isolation and liminality and impermanence of queer life in the mid-20th century as told in On The Road and romanticizing it, and wanting to claim it for himself.

Which of course doesn't work, because in positioning his main characters as protectors of the middle American heterosexual nuclear family, he has already fundamentally misunderstood them. Their very existence is something middle America views as a threat, and middle America is to these characters a trap, a prison, a slow death rather than a quick one for which they nevertheless yearn because we are all taught to do so. (Perhaps what they truly yearn for is to want that life, but I digress.)

The American road story, the drifter’s story, is (among other things) a queer story. It is not compatible with the white picket fence, in fact the white picket fence's primary purpose is to shut it out. The white picket fence is a symbol of stability, comfort, prosperity (conformity, stagnation). The road, on the other hand, is a symbol of upset, disquiet, transience (freedom, transformation). Adventure and uncertainty are the cornerstones of the road story. It simply makes no goddamn sense to take characters from the road story and position them as protectors of the middle American nuclear family behind their white picket fences when these characters' very existence is positioned as a threat within the cultural context of middle America.

This plays out in the show, over and over again! Who are hunters? Well, they used to be “regular people.” They used to be part of the American Dream, the nuclear family, the white picket fence. Until a monster came along, came in from the road, and destroyed not only that state of existence, but all possibility of its return in the future. Hunters are what Reagan-era scaremongering rhetoric thinks about queer people.

Over and over, the show hammers home that hunters are never children, or are “broken” as children, hunters don’t get to retire, hunters don’t get happiness, hunters can’t just quit. Hunters die horribly, and they die young. Even those who try to leave, try to be “normal” are drawn back into it, one way or another, always, until it kills them.

Despite their humanity and their uh, particular aesthetics and their (predominant) whiteness and all the other things that seek to mark them out as belonging to a particular vision of middle America, hunters are also positioned in the narrative as Other, as monsters themselves. Hunters become the things they hunt eventually, literally or figuratively. They become unsuited to “civilian life.” They become incapable of living peacefully with “regular people.” They become the threat.

This happens with many hunters, but we need look no further than the Winchesters themselves. John, Dean, Sam, and even Mary destroy lives by mere proximity, despite good intentions, over and over. Sometimes they simply follow the trouble into town, but sometimes--and increasingly more often as the show goes on--they lead it there. Their presence is always a threat to the families they seek to help, so much so that the audience learns fairly early on not to get attached to the latter. Even the boys themselves accept it as somewhat inevitable.

And Castiel, the third lead of the show and the boys’ longest-lived ally, is possibly the most blatant example of this acceptance, not to mention another particularly egregious example of the show being both super queer and super homophobic.

Castiel is, for the first two seasons he appears in, possessing a man named Jimmy Novak (and the implications of that for his relationship with the Winchesters is something that needs a lot of unpacking but I’m gonna play the Mulaney card for now and move on).

Jimmy is the idealized version of a Midwestern family man. He’s a cis, heterosexual white man, a devoted father and husband and a Christian. He has a steady white collar job and lives in a nice house. He’s doing everything right, by a certain standard.

Then Castiel comes into his life, commandeers his body, and takes it to perform his holy duties (duties he eventually abdicates in favor of, you know, being gay and doing crimes, as you should). But one of the first things he does, before going to meet Dean Winchester face to face for the first time? He removes Jimmy’s wedding ring. He removes the symbol of Jimmy’s heterosexual marriage, tells Jimmy’s daughter “I’m not your father,” and then embarks on the simultaneously queerest, best, most homophobic, and worst love story of all time.

Let me just...restate that for you. The decade-plus-long queer love story starts with--no, actually necessitates--the dissolution of the American nuclear family.

That’s. That’s some extra spicy homophobia.

Then there’s the fact that Claire, Jimmy’s daughter, grows up to be--you guessed it--a hunter. A hunter, which is an inevitable metaphor for queerness given the show’s inspiration and despite Eric Kripke’s worst efforts. She’s subtextually queer and also canonically, textually queer. She falls in love with a woman named Kaia who can dreamwalk to alternate realities.

Something something preying on our children and turning them gay. Because there are always going to be people who see queerness and go looking for some traumatic source, because to them queerness is inextricably linked to trauma (hm, wonder who’s to blame for that).

Ahem. Like I said. Extra spicy homophobia.

Then there’s the way Castiel literally steals a child heavily hinted to be a savior figure from the Devil and his Republican mom (in all fairness, she was on board with the kidnapping) and raises him in a queerplatonic household of hunters, demons, and the occasional monster.

Because by this point in the story, the line between hunters and “monsters” has blurred so much for Sam and Dean that they readily count many of the latter as their allies, friends, and family. At final count their circle includes (or has included at some point) a family of werewolves, the Queen of Hell, the King of Hell (RIP), a ghost, a former ghost, a dreamwalker, an archangel (RIP), a witch and his resurrected sister, a seer, a former vampire, a former werewolf, an undead former Man of Letters, another archangel who’s wearing/cohabitating with their half-brother, and like...God’s actual sister. And tbh I’m probably forgetting someone.

They have not only accepted, but embraced their place as the Other. They’ve even found power and heroism in that identity. And again, it’s not perfect. It’s messy and inconsistent and self-contradictory, because predominantly straight people are writing a story that’s meant to be queer. They’re trying to write about finding yourself outside of your blood origins when those origins reject you and forming communities and support networks through shared adversity when they don’t have any idea what that fucking means.

Sam and Dean will mourn the death of a demon or hug it out with their friend the werewolf and then kill a couple of vampires that were drinking from blood bags and tell their abusive shitty father he did his best! And they grapple with zero cognitive dissonance for this, because the writers fundamentally do not understand the material they’re working with. The presence of one or two gay men doing their damnedest is not enough to fix it! If anything, it unfortunately just serves to make the homophobic parts of the show worse by making their queer subtext more adamant.

Finally, there’s the fact that for several seasons now, Sam and Dean’s story has been less about saving the world in and of itself, and more about just...healing. Fixing their own mistakes, overcoming past traumas. Defining a life for themselves outside the expectations and demands of their parents. Coming to understand their parents as flawed people who didn’t hold all the answers. Healing from the trauma and violence of their childhood indoctrination into a very on-the-nose metaphor for Christian fundamentalism (hey, more mess! Hunting functions as a metaphor for queerness but also John raising them as hunters functions as a metaphor for fundy Christianity because *pats Eric Kripke on the head* this baby can fit so many contradictions).

And in a well-written story, crafted by someone who understood the themes they were playing with, the resolution for all these threads is obvious: the only harmonious, satisfying resolution to Sam and Dean’s story is the one where they achieve self-actualization, where they accept not only themselves but that the people they are and the lives they want don’t quite look like what their parents might have imagined for them, or what they’ve been conditioned to want.

For Sam, it’s a life as a hunter that actually integrates who he is as a person (studious, a bit supernatural himself) rather than making him feel like a freak. It’s using knowledge and information and organization and leadership to build community among hunters and make hunting a less dangerously isolated and isolating way of life. It quite possibly also means seeking to find solutions to supernatural problems that don’t go straight to murder and bloodshed. A hunting that admits and embraces the similarities between “monster” and “hunter” and seeks harmony and cooperation between the two wherever possible.

And a relationship, not necessarily marriage, with a Deaf woman who is also a hunter, who understands his life and his past, and embraces both without reservation because in many ways they reflect her own. Sam’s childhood of isolation, Othering, being infantilized by his father and brother is turned on its head, traded for a life of community, inclusivity, and becoming not only an individual in his own right, but leader others can look up to.

For Dean? His perfect ending looks like settling down into a domestic life and a romantic relationship with an angel (current or former) who is also a man. No more world-saving. No more putting his own happiness on the back burner for the sake of everyone else around him. No more denying who he is, no more subtext. No longer a soldier or an instrument, just...a man, who gets to be in love with another man and be loved back, and who gets to live.

The parts of himself that he’s always felt were liminal, dangerous, Other...seamlessly integrated into a version of happiness he never thought he could have. If we wanted to get into nitty gritty details, this would probably also include an occupation or hobby/ies that centered around creating and nurturing, rather than killing and harming. More inversions of the things he was taught he was made for.

Both their endings the opposite of what they expected, what they were conditioned to want or chase or be. Neither of them what their father intended, nor quite what their mother hoped for, and definitely nothing God had planned.

Neither of them typical “straight” endings, either (whatever some dumbass on Twitter might think, two men falling in love is simply not straight), which makes perfect sense because their stories aren’t straight stories.

And that’s not only why the ending falls so flat, it’s also why the show never quite works even in the best of times. Because the heart of it, something that’s interesting and important and revolutionary, the story of queer people seeking and finding fulfillment and happiness in a world that wants to kill us, is constantly being pushed and pulled and overshadowed by the fact that the show is written predominantly by straight men who refuse to accept that the story they’re trying to claim for themselves is a queer one.

So you get the main characters disrupting and destroying the American nuclear family, dirtying the white picket fence, queering the straight Midwestern dad, stealing children from abusive parents, breaking free from the burden of parents’ expectations, building a found family, defying God’s plan...and being called heroes over and over even as their actions are somehow also painted in a horrifying light, spattered with blood, and hurtling toward an apocalypse over and over again. They’re being hailed as the protagonists and God’s favorites, but simultaneously being punished textually and subtextually by the narrative just for being who they are. Always. Constantly. For fifteen seasons.

Because they are both hero and villain. Man and monster. Savior and bringer of damnation. Dean, Sam, and Castiel. All three of them embody this duality in different ways, and more strongly at different points in the story, but they all embody it. And they are all punished and killed for it with an ending that undercuts everything that came before and insults the intelligence of every viewer who was paying the slightest bit of attention. The final message of the show seems to be “defy God/the status quo and die pointlessly,” which is...an interesting choice for a show that’s ostensibly been about humanity and free will and romanticizing the American road story from the get.

The real mindfuck is that if you’re a queer viewer a lot of this is still weirdly empowering! Watching the heroes create chaos in middle America and create home in the midst of chaos is empowering! Because where the SPN writers or “general audience” may see dissolution, predator, threat, we see freedom, possibility, hope...room for different types of people and families and existence. Because that white picket fence is a symbol of oppression, that nuclear family is where many of us suffered horrific abuse. That apple pie life is a trap, and it comes at the sacrifice of us, and it’s not freakin’ worth it.

There’s just this constant tension between the two stories: the one the writers are trying to tell/think they’re telling, and the one they’re stealing from/actually telling. The queer origins and experiences and themes stubbornly shine through even when covered in layers of toxic masculinity and homophobia. There will be all of these rare, shining moments where the story understands itself and what it is before being dragged back down to what some unimaginative little straight man wants it to be. And both the queerness and the homophobia only serve to drive more attention to each other in a seemingly endless cycle of revelation and obfuscation.

And it’s so frustrating.

#supernatural #spn meta #on the road #fuck the finale #appropriating queer stories #lizawords #i don't even know what else to tag this #it's convoluted and long and probably could be broken into like 3 different metas but #i'm not doing that #25notes #50notes #100notes #250notes #500notes #1knotes

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