#250notes

[torturedpoetemotions]

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

[advanced-procrastination]

Yall if you’re gonna tag your gifsets

#gay #gaymen #bimen #queermen #bi #queer #lgbt #lgbtq #men #gaylove #lovewins #50notes #100notes #250notes #500notes #1k #2k #5k #10k

Can you at least include one goddamn motherfucking tag that actually has anything to do with WHAT SHOW THE FUCKING GIFS CAME FROM SO I CAN LOOK IT UP AND PUT IT ON MY LIST JESUS FUCK YALL ARE EXHAUSTING. It is 2019, we shouldn’t have to look in the comments for two characters’ bland ass generic names, google every show with characters of those names, and then rapidly google the cast on every one of those shows until we find the people we’re looking for from the show the gifs are from. JUST TAG YOUR SHIT CORRECTLY

[shopequip]

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[askkagaminelen]

#dere #250notes

[torturedpoetemotions]

I like how Cas eventually learns enough about humans to realize that Dean is actually a fucking weirdo and his response to this is to fall even more in love with him.

#supernatural #destiel #that's MY weirdo - castiel probably #lizawords #25notes #50notes #100notes #250notes #500notes #1knotes #2500notes

[torturedpoetemotions]

Something about Dean being the main character when he wasn't supposed to be and Cas being the endgame love interest when he wasn't supposed to be and Dean being bi when he wasn't supposed to be and the story being queer when it wasn't supposed to be and just the irrepressible power of queerness and queer identity and queer stories and queer love taking this hypermasculine power fantasy and turning it into a queer love story despite the network's best efforts.

All their token background queers and their bury your gays and their white picket fence heterosexual ending and their endless fucking attempts to give us some palatable watered-down backup singer version of queerness that would let them keep the toxic manly-man b.s. intact and we said NO, FUCKER. This story is queer this story is ours your red-blooded American heroman is QUEER in fact the archetype he's based on is QUEER TOO and you can't do shit ABOUT IT.

Supernatural is the story of a few small, mean, unimaginative little men trying to straightwash the archetypal American man so they could stand in his skin and claim he always belonged to them, and millions of queer people dragging them out of that holy place and saying NO, this story is ours and you do NOT get to steal it from us.

#supernatural #dean winchester #it's queer honey and you can't do shit about it #dean is bi #cas is queer #jack is enby #lizawords #25notes #50notes #100notes #250notes #500notes #1knotes

[torturedpoetemotions]

Okay so. Dean asked Sam to be his best man. And of course Sam said yes. But then Cas pouted because HE wanted Sam to be HIS best man. So now Charlie is Dean's best woman and Sam is Cas's best man and this means Dean is going to a karaoke drag bar for his bachelor party and Cas is going to end up arrested by the end of his.

#supernatural #destiel #destiel wedding #they'll get him out in time for the wedding but it'll be close #lizawords #50notes #100notes #25notes #250notes #500notes #1knotes

[torturedpoetemotions]

Get rid of John's name this take Jimmy's name that NO.

Jimmy has given quite enough to the union of Dean and Cas. He gave them a body and a daughter and yes I DID recently rewatch The Rapture why do you ask?

My point is. If Dean and Cas are going to be taking a new name because John was a shitty father and Mary's parents weren't a whole lot better, the answer is obvious.

Singer. It's Singer. Dean and Castiel Singer.

#supernatural #destiel #destiel wedding #bobby would be stoic about it until he got into the open bar #and then he would just be leaning on ellen full on SOBBING #lizawords #25notes #50notes #100notes #250notes #500notes #1knotes

[torturedpoetemotions]

You think Dean ever just stops and looks around and goes “the fuck is my life?” With a bemused little grin on his face?

Like...he’s making breakfast for Cas and Jack and Sam and Eileen. Or he’s at Target helping Jack get school supplies. Or he finds a funny t-shirt that he impulse buys for Cas and Cas wears it. Or he’s mortifying Sam with his terrible sign language (”Don’t let him fool you, the first time he tried to sign to me he said ‘fuck you’ by mistake.”).

Or he’s just on a drive with his angel next to him, their hands curled together on the seat between them, no particular destination. Or he’s watching Cas try to get his hair to look just so without the help of angelic grace. Or he’s curled up on the couch with Cas watching a movie. Or they’re on a date. Or they go to lunch with Claire and Kaia.

And he just has a momentary out of body experience where he’s just looking around at his life like “how did I get here? How did I get to have all this?” And then he gets this soft little grin and Cas squeezes his hand to ground him because he knows Dean all too well after all these years, and they go back to whatever they were doing, but the smile lingers for a long time.

Yeah...yeah, I think so.

#supernatural #dean winchester #destiel #team free will final form #lizawords #25notes #50notes #100notes #250notes #500notes #1knotes

[torturedpoetemotions]

You really think this many lesbians and one gay angel would gravitate to a STRAIGHT MAN? Oh hon.

#supernatural #dean winchester #dean is bi #lizawords #25notes #50notes #100notes #250notes #500notes

[torturedpoetemotions]

I actually kinda love Jensen’s emphasis on the fact that Dean isn’t making any choices in Cas’s confession scene, instead of confirming Dean’s feelings leaning in one way or another. Partly because I’m pretty sure the network would only LET him confirm one direction, and I’m glad he declined to do that. But also because when you watch it, that’s 100% accurate. Dean isn’t making any choices whatsoever. He’s completely broken down by everything that’s happening and then he’s gobsmacked by what Cas is saying to him and he doesn’t really have time to react or say anything but. Here’s the thing.

Dean making no choices is also important because I think we all know (and Jensen knows most of all) that if Dean were making choices in that scene, it would have gone completely differently. And that’s not something that we have to interpret out of thin air. We know Dean would choose to do whatever he could to stop Cas, to save him.

I mean, the man had to be dragged bodily out of apocalypse world by Sam, screaming Cas’s name the entire time. He had to practically be thrown out of Purgatory by Cas himself, staring in horror as he was swept away leaving Cas behind. Even when he was angry with Cas, when he felt they were on opposite sides, he still had to be told to run as an army of demons was sweeping toward him, and even then he couldn’t stop himself from one look back at Cas, trapped in holy fire. He followed Cas to the river even though the Leviathan were dangerous and unstoppable, he couldn’t do anything but witness his death but witness it he did.

The thought of losing Cas literally brought him to his knees just a few episodes before, and once had him praying, shamelessly begging God and Amara both when we know he never prayed to anyone but Cas before that point. He stood before God and said I’ll fight my brother to the death to save the world, but you have to save one person for me, and who was that person? Who was it?!

If Dean Winchester was making choices in that scene, he would have wrapped both arms around Cas and gone with him, and you can’t convince me otherwise.

#supernatural #dean winchester #15x18 #destiel #jensen ackles #lizawords #25notes #50notes #100notes #250notes #500notes #1knotes

[torturedpoetemotions]

@tearsofgrace I saw your Dean wearing eyeliner post and Loved it, and then I remembered that leather jacket from season 12, and...well.

My hand slipped. 🙈

#supernatural #dean winchester #deanedit #sorry if this is in your notifs like five times #it kept posting to a saved url and i kept having to delete and repost #tumblr fail #the onoy way in which this is a hellsite is the mobile app's lack of functionality #my edits #25notes #50notes #100notes #250notes #500notes

[torturedpoetemotions]

Imagine Dean and Cas reading in bed at night. Dean is sitting back against the headboard, a book by some beat or adjacent generation author or other open in front of him. Cas is leaning against him, half in his lap, chin propped up on his arm, reading some piece of YA fiction Jack recommended. Sometimes he takes a peak at what Dean is reading, too. Dean plays idly with his hair between page turns.

#supernatural #destiel #domestiel #occasionally he convinces dean to read something aloud #usually poetry #lizawords #25notes #50notes #100notes #250notes #500notes

[torturedpoetemotions]

Goddammit there was a REALLY good post and my dash refreshed and now I can't find it, but it was about masculinity in Supernatural and how it's almost like this emotional bodice-ripper type fantasy of "imagine you were going through the worst shit possible and were thus allowed to cry without being perceived as weak."

And I can't get that out of my head because like...yeah wow you broke it down to its bare essentials, and are the men writing Supernatural ok (no) but also. Something about that gets its way around Dean's relationships with men, too, doesn't it? Like imagine you and this man went through so much together and were there for each other so many times and in so many ways that your non-platonic, non-familial attachment to him was understandable, that you were allowed to look at him for too long and touch him tenderly and want him.

Except they never get there, even fictionally. The whole point of a bodice ripper is to provide the reader with an outlet where they can visit parts of themselves and their desire that are deemed unacceptable without guilt because it's "out of their control," but Supernatural never quite gets there, does it?

Dean loses his mom and his dad and his brother, sells his soul, dies horrifically, goes to Hell and spends 30 years being tortured. Becomes a torturer to survive, starts the apocalypse, is beaten within an inch of his life, and that's not even a full third of the show. And he doesn't get to cry, still, not really. He gets to have a husky voice and sad eyes and a quivering mouth. He gets one tear, just one. One tear so consistently that it's a Big Deal if there's ever a second one.

And he has these close, intense, important relationships with men that scream longing to anyone with eyes, but he doesn't get to want men out loud. Other men around him can, and do, and even want him specifically. But he can't, doesn't get to, because he's the hero and the Man and there is no allowance in the script of American Manhood where desire for other men becomes acceptable, doesn't compromise one's manhood.

He gets to skirt the edge of wanting men. He gets to talk vaguely about wanting something new from life. He gets to lament that his relationships with women don't quite bring him what he needs anymore, what he longs for. He gets to let his hands and eyes linger but he can't ever say it, because that would be too far, a second tear when only one is allowed.

So yes, Supernatural is an emotional bodice-ripper for masculinity but you never get to cry and you never get to want other men the way you want to and you never get release, just more pain, because at some point masculinity became so tied to heteronormativity and homophobia that you can't pick the two apart without destroying the former, apparently.

#supernatural #spn gender studies #dean winchester #this is incoherent but it won't leave my brain #toxic masculinity #homophobia #heteronormativity #is a helluva drug #also another example of how this construction of american manhood is fundamentally straightwashed from its archetype #but that's a whole other essay #lizawords #25notes #50notes #100notes #250notes

[torturedpoetemotions]

Supernatural is a liminal queer soap operatic horror dramedy, the first and (hopefully) only entry in this genre.

#supernatural #the most show #lizawords #25notes #50notes #100notes #250notes

[torturedpoetemotions]

When I say “X character deserved better” what I really mean is “all the people that loved this character and rooted for them and invested themselves in their story and saw themselves in this character’s struggles and trauma deserved better.”

#dean winchester #quentin coldwater #daenerys targaryen #finn #poe dameron #sabrina spellman #castiel #sam winchester #25notes #50notes #100notes #250notes