Do you ever think about the episode Ghostfacers, in which Sam and Dean swear profusely and come across as more dangerous and intense and even more unhinged than they usually do? The outsider PoV emphasizing how they move like predators and the anger and violence that casually radiates from them?
And the obvious implication of course is that this is them in actuality, without the network-TV filter applied, a meta-message to the audience.
Do you ever think about how when Chuck talked to Sam in season 4, how he said he hadn’t written the blood drinking into the books because it would make Sam look unsympathetic? The little curiosity this instills because we as the audience have only actually (finally) seen that two episodes prior, with the intervening episode being the angels’ little alternate universe office au.
And the implication of course being that Chuck has known all along, but hasn’t disclosed it in the books, the way the writers of the show have known all season but hadn’t disclosed it to the audience for so long.
Do you ever think about how Kripke was grabbing us by the shoulders and telling us that the version of Sam and Dean that we see is the network’s sanitized for the censors version, is Chuck’s sympathetic version (not unlike the self-aggrandizing bullshit Metatron later calls him out for writing), and that we actually should question the unreliable narration?
Do you ever think about how truly unhinged Sam and Dean must be and are, once the censors are pulled back and the hero-filter is scrubbed away?
this post is getting notes (freaking love that it resonates with so many folks) but so much of the discussion on it is about #hboSPN and i just wanted to say that as much as i love hboSPN and its vibes, that’s not at all what i had in mind when i wrote this.
this post isn’t about the (absolutely sexy) vibes of dean with knuckleduster enochian tattoos or sam snorting coke in rest stop bathrooms after 30 hours of no sleep. it’s not even about wincest (though to be clear i do ship that, yes).
it’s about what we see on the hit CW show supernatural and what we can infer about it -
someone (Elsi? V?) mentioned that supernatural is all the better for how unhinged it is and how that’s a counterpoint to the pseudo-normal lens with which we see the brothers and that’s exactly it.
this post is about knowing that yes, sam and dean definitely swear, but also that they are terrifyingly physically powerful. that dean lifts a locker in Ghostfacers and Ed or Harry stammers about how strong he is and dean is passably annoyed and little else. it’s about sam drinking goddamn demon blood and the narrative literally telling us it didn’t want to make him look unsympathetic but holy hell, that boy was literally drinking demon blood! and some people (who i adore keep on being unhinged my friends) still say “that was the right thing for him to do” as if it didn’t turn him into an actual demon and as if he didn’t murder an innocent woman tied up in a trunk!
it’s about dean murdering the kitsune who happened to be the first girl his brother ever kissed and about the fact that we as the audience see dean as this heroic figure but moments like that drop the veneer, let something else slip through the cracks, and outsiders are right to be terrified and horrified and disgusted by these monstrous brothers who will savage and kill with a sneer on their face and claim its for the greater good.
outsider pov is everything when it comes to the winchesters because even other hunters are leery around them. they are unsocialized but manage to get trauma victims to open up about grievous crimes and manage to effectively impersonate child psychologists and manage to woo all manner of women into their beds and it means they can turn on a dime, flip the switch from unfeeling violence to charming and harmless sweetheart and that! is! terrifying! dean knew something was wrong with soulless sam but even he was halfway convinced at times because that serial killer smile is part of who they are!
it’s like this: the narrator of supernatural loves sam and dean and wants to paint them in a sympathetic light, wants the audience to love them as the narrator does, but knows it would be wrong to outright lie. so the narrator is obfuscating just a bit, making sure we experience and understand sam and dean’s points of view, but when we push just a smidge on that narrative voice, the cracks are intensely apparent.
anyway thank you for coming to my ted talk tl;dr the winchesters don’t need to be on hbo to be unhinged, we see exactly what they are already.
