not me jumping in here with some thoughts that probably no one will ever read because i’m usually a fandom lurker and no one here knows who i am? well here we go kiddos because i was invested and i have some fucking THOUGHTS #Supernatural

first of all let it be known that i have almost no follow through with shows. I rarely watch them through to the end and this experience has not given me much incentive to change my ways.

I spent the better part of yesterday trying to turn words into a cohesive piece on what this show means to me and i feel like the rug’s been pulled out from under me. I don’t think i can write that anymore.

now, oof, where do i start? this was always going to be impossible to end. they were never going to satisfy everyone. I had at least hoped they would satisfy the story and the characters, but it just didn’t land for me.

all other complaints aside, the pacing was weird and the whole thing felt uneven.

here have a caveat before we dive in: i hate any conception of heaven where you retain consciousness and it’s basically just earth lite so i was always going to hate this and i’m ready to admit that within the confines of the show, that might have been an unsolvable problem

but dean’s death? it’s fucking tragic. you’ll never convince me that it isn’t tragic. thwarting chuck just die a couple weeks later on some rusty rebar is tragic. and if tragedy is what i’d signed up for i’d call it fitting. but it’s not.

I signed up for beating the odds. I signed up making your own destiny. I signed up for forging your own path against the conscripted narrative and this ain’t it.

I’ve seen a few people arguing that dean’s death does in fact subvert chuck’s story because he never would have let it happen this way, but you know what else he never would have let happen? dean dying of old age.

and if, as dean says, it was always going to end this way for him, something that was true while chuck was in control of the narrative, then it isn’t really a subversion at all, is it?

god, i’m just so sad for dean. you know what would have been a subversion of chuck’s story? dean getting to define life on his own terms.

I wanted dean to believe he deserved to live not because he was tasked with saving the world but because he was worth more than his ability to watch out for sammy or avert the most recent apocalypse.

I wanted him to have a chance to prove his own self worth. not just take it on faith when cas told him he was not the ultimate killer or daddy’s blunt little instrument that he believed himself to be for so long. WHICH IS ALL TRUE.

but i wanted him to get to prove it to himself by fucking living. it’s not subversive to kill off the character that’s had a low-key death wish for the better part of 15 seasons. I wanted him to have time to figure out who he was without chuck

and i’m just genuinely so sad that he didn’t get that chance. and this is part of why i hate this conception of heaven because figuring that out in heaven is not life. I don’t care how pretty they made it. I hate the idea that death becomes your chance to get it right.

fuck that. I want him to LIVE.

going back to taking care of sammy, he never really managed to get out of being sam’s defacto parent, did he? dying isn’t breaking free of that. it is instead, and upsettingly here, considered the natural order for parents & children. the parent dies first.

now i haven’t rewatched that scene because i have at least some iota of self-preservation, but the impression it left on me was that of a parent and child and i hate that. I have always wanted dean to realize his self-worth beyond being sam’s big brother and again this ain’t it.

not to mention that it doesn’t even break the codependency if one of them has to die for them to achieve it. and how much have you broken the codependency anyway if you’re just going to spend eternity together in heaven? (there’s that heaven problem again)

and here we are, arriving at my big conclusion and the crux of the thing for me: it didn’t feel intentional. it felt, instead, like they simply didn’t know what else to do.

like they couldn’t conceive of any other way to wrap up dean’s storyline and god i fucking hate that more than anything else. because here’s what it boils down to: they couldn’t conceive of a happy ending outside the structure of getting married and having kids.

that’s where my dissatisfaction and rage truly lies. with the implication that if you’re not falling into the heteronormative ideal of societal expectations, you can’t possibly get a happy ending. you’re only happy ending is some sanitized heaven.

and even worse it’s an expectation that this show has always always subverted. they did it in 300 when dean said he was good with who they were. when he insisted that they had a family.

this is a show where the american dream has always been a lie with monsters lurking under the surface and this is how it ends? sam and dean spend 15 seasons subverting one scripted ending only to fall prey to one that is much more insidious.

and i hate that. I fucking hate it. I love this show, but it’s going to be extremely hard to rewatch it now, knowing what’s coming. everything thing about dean is now the apex of tragedy. and i wanted so much more for him. he deserved so much more than that.

anyway, special thanks to @CharCubed for me keeping me sane with their tweets and righteous rage last night. i'm going to go rewatch Leverage now