kitewithfish: (Default)
kitewithfish ([personal profile] kitewithfish) wrote2021-01-04 10:31 am

Back from Holidays! and also The Great Queer Rewatch of Supernatural

Back from my Holiday Hiatus!

Visiting my sister (with pre-visit covid testing and a quarantine before and after) was lovely and I was very happy that neither of us had to spend Christmas alone.

I have totally failed to investigate the Yuletide posts and I am going to be working thru a LOT of backlogged recs. Yay! 

I  have a bunch of notifications to sort thru from DW, so if I have not yet replied to your comment, forgive me! 

The Great Queer Rewatch of Supernatural has reached 1.20- "Dead Man's Blood," and wow, the show loved making John Winchester a terrible father right up until they narratively would have to make him the real villain of the show, and then they dodge! In a Season One that is full of stories that portray real world male violence and give is a small-s supernatural excuses so that the white men in authority are never at fault, wow, this one is real specific and real bad! 

(Spoiler for Season One thru "Dead Man's Blood"

(- even if we never examine later issues with John Winchester's behavior to sabotage his sons' futures, Season One REALLY leans into the 'hunting=alcoholism' narrative for John. The reveal that he'd put money into college savings funds for his sons Before Their Mother Died is meant to be a sign that he wanted something different for them, but then the reveal that he 'spent the money on ammo' is just a fucking stab in the gut. Yeah, they laugh, and there really ought to be more bitterness to it.  This is SO CLEARLY the addiction trope of a parent raiding the kid's savings for their drugs, and the show doesn't seem to realize how deeply unsympathetic that makes John.
(As my dear friend has said before, "He did his best. But he should have tried the best of somebody better.")
 

yourlibrarian: All the Winchesters (SPN-WinchestersAlways-savedean-e0wyn-swi)

[personal profile] yourlibrarian 2021-01-04 09:11 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes, both John as a parent and Sam and Dean's sibling relationship was supposed to be much more dysfunctional and broken than it was, significantly because the actors got along so well and JDM didn't want to play a bad dad.