Friend, Isn't It So Strange?

Friend, isn't it so strange?

How the only things that change

Are the ones upon the surface.

The restless moss upon the grave,

Seems they'll always love the sun,

Seems they'll always need one another,

Seems they'll always turn and run.

At the sight of our blood-covered countenance.

All is gone now.

Seconds fade but our hearts will still remain, love

They are endless.

(Wolf Parade/Against the Day)

Resource is from victoriaalxndr on Twitter!

can u tell ive been rewatching 

If you don't support the blm protesters right now because "violence is never the answer" then you don't get to celebrate pride month because I can promise you wouldn't have liked Stonewall either.

Why do you think Supernatural has such a large LGBTQ+ following? The representation of queer people ist piss poor and most of the time non-existent. Is it because of the IMO queerbaiting or are there other reasons?

I personally think that it’s a bit offensive to say that queer viewers are attracted to a product either because there is “representation” or because they’re “baited” into watching it. Gays watched television before Glee aired and they weren’t just watching Will & Grace. I’ll also go on a limb here and say that I suspect that Supernatural is more popular among an older queer audience while a younger queer audience is more likely to be critical of it. There is a generational divide in how the queer audience relates to media, after all.

Before “representation”, queer subtext was the way for queer creators or queer actors to convey “we’re here, we see you” to queer people in the audience. I am not saying that was good and the way things are now is bad, because it’s only progress to have actual explicit queerness in media. We’re not arrived to the end of that process, though, and a lot of explicit representation is highly unsatisfactory (token characters, “bury your gays”, stereotypes that are still hard to kill, narratives limited to coming out or dealing with homophobia, etc).

An older audience is used to see subtext and appreciate it. A younger audience sees the same thing and instead of subtext they see queerbaiting, i.e. creators - who are assumed to be nonqueer, or whose queerness is not considered relevant to the discussion - dangling a “promise” of queerness that is not delivered.

Supernatural is, at its core, a show based on nostalgia. I believe it deliberately plays on an “old school” way of crafting stories, including subtext, which is also why I believe it makes no sense to compare Supernatural with a Shadowhunters or a Lucifer and point fingers and say “that one does the thing”, because we’re talking completely different storytelling ways. While Supernatural has definitely evolved through the years and “modernized” itself in many ways, it’s still a narrative that likes to keep a foot in a 1980s shoe. You can like it or not, but it’s one of the things that have made the show what it is, given it a specific identity, and make it last this long.

But the fundamental thing in this discussion is that Supernatural is a story about identity, agency, bodily autonomy, corporeity and violation, abusive parental expectations, defying paternal or paternal-coded and religious-themed authority - what about this doesn’t seem interesting for a queer audience? There are themes of non-normative experiences including in the sphere of sexuality and relationships, there is an undercurrent of masculinity as a theme, and of course Supernatural is a horror story, with all the history of the genre it references and pays homage to, and the genre plays (in good or bad ways) on non-normativity, social subversion, corporeity, and gender. (A fundamental mistake, in my personal opinion, is to think of Supernatural as a drama show, because then it just becomes a bad drama show.)

Why do you think queer people flocked to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, because they were deluded that Marvel Studios would deliver queer representation or because of a narrative about identity, agency, bodily autonomy and defying the authority of the wealthy white male figure in a position of power used for imperialistic totalitarian purposes? (Not coincidentally, The Winter Soldier plays with tropes from the horror genre.)

The main character of Supernatural is a queercoded man who a lot of queer viewers have identified with - I don’t think that experience is worthless just because it’s not textually explicit that the character is queer. A lot of explicitly queer characters in television are not given the same depth and relevance in the story as Dean Winchester, and maybe they’re relatable for their experiences with coming out or dealing with homophobia but that’s it. Dean’s story is about things that resonate with many queer people, his struggles with finding his role in the world as an outcast who feels like a freak for social reasons (unlike Sam’s “supernatural” reasons), as a man in a model of masculinity that is too restrictive and toxic for him, as an inherently antiauthoritarian, subversive force in a conservative, hierarchical system - does all of this get null because the character isn’t explicited as a mlm? Dean’s story is pretty much a journey about embracing a queer experience, is that less worthy of consideration just because it’s not about (explicitly) embracing a queer identity?

There’s also another thing - the inherent value of a metaphor. Castiel’s story, for instance, is basically a metaphor for the experiences of a queer, specifically trans for certain aspects, person from a hostile family. But it’s not - does that make it void of significance for a person with those experiences? I don’t think so. It can be uncomfortable and triggering to watch the same traumatic experiences as yours, but it can be more emotionally useful to watch a metaphor of them. A queercoded narrative can offer the viewer the experience of identification with the character and their story, but with a distance: you don’t live the same traumatic experiences while you “are” Castiel, but you live experiences that have similar aspects, but in an “unrealistic” context, that allow you to elaborate emotions while maintaining an emotional distance.

This doesn’t mean that a queer viewers has to like it just because. Nor that Supernatural shouldn’t have done things differently/better. (It is really not a perfect show.) But it seems to me that there are pretty obvious reasons for its popularity among a queer audience, and I don’t think those are reducible to the queer audience being “baited” into watching something that eventually reveals itself as unsatisfactory and disappointing.

I do realize that my experience with watching Supernatural is not the same as many other fans here on tumblr & adjacent, but universal experiences don’t exist, so I suppose that neither is the “true” one. These were my two cents on the matter and I hope it was a satisfying answer! I probably came off as a bit abrasive but I’ve spent way too many years on this site surrounded by talk of queerbaiting so I hope you can understand :)

she’s so pretty i can’t stop drawing her ,,