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kitewithfishYeah, so the show with the characters who cannot stay dead is, apparently, not staying dead. The end of Supernatural has felt like a shockingly active time for the fandom!
Which is not to say that I recommend getting into it. I don't. This show is Not Good. As Benoit Blanc says, it compels me, though.
I've been undertaking what I'm calling A Fully Spoiled Rewatch with my friend, iphys. My idea is largely modeled on a podcast I have really enjoyed (and highly recommend!), Still Pretty , a 'fully spoiled' podcast with Lani and Noelli hosting it and analyzing each episode in the context of the canon and their media studies background.
So, what's the ethos behind this rewatch?
1. Queer Reading - The show does not really *want* a queer audience or a female audience, but, we're here and we're going to be reading the show with a particular interest in that. Why do people read Dean as queer? What parts of the text support this? What parts have heterosexual explanations that we, two queers, would not have noticed without careful analysis?
2. Fully Spoiled - Taking each episode in the larger context of the canon, and drawing parallels where we find them. (Example: Season One's "Faith" has the DNA for Season Four's "Lazarus Rising," and also echoes into the Series Finale.)
3. What You See Is What You Get - Fandom tends to really encourage reading the text with an understanding that there are generous margins, places where you can set a story or speculate a headcanon into being, or tease out a thread they left dangling. Fandom lives and breathes in the nooks and crannies of a text. But, there's also something to saying, This is what the show put on the screen, so let's give that more weight in our analysis than the spaces they left blank. As a corollary, deuterocanonical sources like the Journal of John Winchester (as available online) are also sources we're looking at - but where the show contradicts those external sources, the show wins.
4. Do Your Homework - Season One is really a love letter to horror films, so we've been doing our homework and watching those (Example: Season One's "Home" does not really make sense without watching Poltergeist, and I liked the episode a lot more after having watched it. I watched Texas Chain Saw Massacre yesterday! It was really good!) Kripke cited Kerouac's On The Road as an influence, so we're going to read that. We're also doing some academic reading - I've got Carol Clover's Men Women and Chain Saws out of the library for this very reason.
5. Who's the Main Character? - Some episodes are clearly meant to highlight of the Winchester brothers above another, some are balanced, and some of the later ones are not even really about the Winbros at all! It makes it a fun question to ask.
Already, this approach has yielded some really interesting insights!
One of the weirder, but more revealing episodes of season one, "Home," where the Winbros return to their childhood home to find it haunted, are really much more comprehensible with the source material that they are drawn from -the film Poltergeist, which focuses really intensely on a mother saving her child from a spiritual/supernatural danger.
Likewise, I had a really interesting insight into John Winchester that I never had before - that he reads to a straight audience as feeling tremendous but unspoken *guilt* for failing to save his wife from a supernatural death in their own home prior to the start of the series. Which might be one of those things that the show's writers, largely straight, had assumed would be Too Obvious To Need Saying, but honestly was quite a revelation to me! (Not one that reflects well on John, not even a little, but inflects his abuse towards his sons in a different light.) It's implied that he failed as a husband/man in a duty to protect his wife - and that's not a dynamic I had ever once considered as being even a little bit part of *my* conception of marriage! But is very clearly part of some ideals set out for a heterosexual couple.
Which is not to say that I recommend getting into it. I don't. This show is Not Good. As Benoit Blanc says, it compels me, though.
I've been undertaking what I'm calling A Fully Spoiled Rewatch with my friend, iphys. My idea is largely modeled on a podcast I have really enjoyed (and highly recommend!), Still Pretty , a 'fully spoiled' podcast with Lani and Noelli hosting it and analyzing each episode in the context of the canon and their media studies background.
So, what's the ethos behind this rewatch?
1. Queer Reading - The show does not really *want* a queer audience or a female audience, but, we're here and we're going to be reading the show with a particular interest in that. Why do people read Dean as queer? What parts of the text support this? What parts have heterosexual explanations that we, two queers, would not have noticed without careful analysis?
2. Fully Spoiled - Taking each episode in the larger context of the canon, and drawing parallels where we find them. (Example: Season One's "Faith" has the DNA for Season Four's "Lazarus Rising," and also echoes into the Series Finale.)
3. What You See Is What You Get - Fandom tends to really encourage reading the text with an understanding that there are generous margins, places where you can set a story or speculate a headcanon into being, or tease out a thread they left dangling. Fandom lives and breathes in the nooks and crannies of a text. But, there's also something to saying, This is what the show put on the screen, so let's give that more weight in our analysis than the spaces they left blank. As a corollary, deuterocanonical sources like the Journal of John Winchester (as available online) are also sources we're looking at - but where the show contradicts those external sources, the show wins.
4. Do Your Homework - Season One is really a love letter to horror films, so we've been doing our homework and watching those (Example: Season One's "Home" does not really make sense without watching Poltergeist, and I liked the episode a lot more after having watched it. I watched Texas Chain Saw Massacre yesterday! It was really good!) Kripke cited Kerouac's On The Road as an influence, so we're going to read that. We're also doing some academic reading - I've got Carol Clover's Men Women and Chain Saws out of the library for this very reason.
5. Who's the Main Character? - Some episodes are clearly meant to highlight of the Winchester brothers above another, some are balanced, and some of the later ones are not even really about the Winbros at all! It makes it a fun question to ask.
Already, this approach has yielded some really interesting insights!
One of the weirder, but more revealing episodes of season one, "Home," where the Winbros return to their childhood home to find it haunted, are really much more comprehensible with the source material that they are drawn from -the film Poltergeist, which focuses really intensely on a mother saving her child from a spiritual/supernatural danger.
Likewise, I had a really interesting insight into John Winchester that I never had before - that he reads to a straight audience as feeling tremendous but unspoken *guilt* for failing to save his wife from a supernatural death in their own home prior to the start of the series. Which might be one of those things that the show's writers, largely straight, had assumed would be Too Obvious To Need Saying, but honestly was quite a revelation to me! (Not one that reflects well on John, not even a little, but inflects his abuse towards his sons in a different light.) It's implied that he failed as a husband/man in a duty to protect his wife - and that's not a dynamic I had ever once considered as being even a little bit part of *my* conception of marriage! But is very clearly part of some ideals set out for a heterosexual couple.
