Supernatural feels
Dec. 13th, 2020 04:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficETA: Thought this went without saying, but don't repost without permission.
I hear tell Supernatural ended. (And by hear tell, I mean it’s been rather hard to avoid.) This has meant that there’s been a lot of Supernatural retrospective content coming out.
Supernatural has always been an odd fandom for me—I watched it for the first five seasons, and was as prolific as I’ve ever been in any fandom (which is admittedly not much). I’ve never been a fan of any note, but I was more active in SPN as it was airing than I think I’ve ever been in a fandom before or since. I read the meta, subscribed to the newsletter communities, participated in the Big Bang. I went to real life hang outs with other SPN fans. And for me at the time, the experience of fandom was the lj experience of fandom—it was in continuity with fandoms like SGA and Sentinel. It was don’t cross the streams fandom.
Then Supernatural kept going, and for me became the poster child for the changes in fandom overall: the fandom community moved almost entirely to tumblr; the main fans became people who weren’t old enough to watch it in its first few seasons; the show’s creators and stars (particularly Misha Collins) became incredibly involved with fandom. The show went meta. The people behind the scenes were not only aware of fandom, but read the fic, encouraged the fannish community, created ARGs for the fans. All of that was and is still DEEPLY alien to me and how I do my fannishness.
So running across some of the retrospectives is kind of a mindfuck for me. Youtuber Sarah Z just put up an 1:45 video on Destielgate. Pretty much 100% of everything she talks about in that is post any engagement I had with the fandom. But she linked to a reddit post about the first five years of fandom, and this post, written by someone who joined the fandom in 2013 in the tumblr years, honestly pissed me off. Partly for the sanctimony taken towards early fandom, and partly to the general misrepresentation of the concerns of early fandom. I mean, I get that doing internet archaeology is hard, and this is a humorous summary post, but I found it *really* skewed from what my experience was at the time. And then I started thinking about everything I would have to explain to try to explain just how different fandom was at the time. And let’s be honest, I don’t even have a reddit account to reply to this post with (or tumblr, or Instagram, or twitter…this isn’t a luddite stance, it’s mostly laziness). So I’m putting it here on DW, the exact place where I can guarantee that the few people who read it were probably there anyway, and none of the tumblr fans the reddit post is for will ever see it.
A Fan Is Born
I feel like to start I have to talk about the difference in expectations I have of media, borne of starting to watch TV dramas in the nineties. This is a lot of why I feel so alienated from younger fans’ experiences of fandom—because there are certain things I have learned to just never expect to get in a TV show, and that has shaped what fandom is *for* for me.
1. Romance
My first experience of fandom was after college, but the first show I was fannish about was Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as fandom at the time—I certainly didn’t have internet at home. I didn’t hear about sci fi conventions til post college. So my experience of this show was just that—my experience.
If you haven’t seen this show, it’s still a fun, very campy watch. It was a Superman TV show (starring an Asian actor as Superman, though he passed for white and was marketed as white, so I didn’t even know that at the time), but very very focused on the romance between Lois and Clark. I was in middle school. This was one of the first romance stories I consumed, and I was gaga over the romance.
There were early signs that they might not know how to handle this across the series (first season focused on a love triangle with a young, hot, and not bald Lex Luthor), but as they moved into seasons two and three things went very, very bad. They have their first date—then there’s another love interest introduced. Lois finds out Clark is Superman in a time travel episode (which was HILARIOUS, one of my favorites) but then has her mind wiped.
Finally, finally, we get to the wedding. Clark and Lois get married! But no! They are not actually married! Because Lois isn’t Lois but is in fact a frog eating clone! The real Lois has amnesia! And thinks she’s the lounge singer main character of the Harlequin romance she was secretly writing! And Lex Luthor finds her and doesn’t tell her the truth!
Friends, this went on for FIVE EPISODES, which, in nineties television, was a frelling eternity. My love for the show curdled. I have been betrayed by shows many times, but everyone remembers the first time a show broke their heart. Even after that, when they finally did let them actually get married, it’s in a sort of a heaven where they are married by an angel…it was all very, very bad.
And it’s not like Lois and Clark was the only one. I was very into the romance in The Nanny as well (we’ll just set aside the rich employer falling in love with the nanny part of this), and in that, the first episode where they kiss, Fran then gets conked on the head and forgets everything.
I loved the show Pretender. In that, Miss Parker got a love interest, Thomas Gates, who was sweet and lovely and perfect for her, and got fridged SO HARD (in one of the rare examples of fridging a man).
There are a lot of other examples—I would later discover Moonlighting, which is infamous. Ross and Rachel on Friends (the resurgence of this show is also very weird to me—I keep trying to explain to people who’ve only watched it in a binge what it felt like to be dicked around for SEVEN YEARS in real time in the nineties). Mulder and Scully, where the romance is consummated off screen after Duchovny exited the show due to a contract dispute, and Scully got a complete personality transplant. There are some rare exceptions, but for the most part, suckage.
What I was learning through all of these early TV experiences was: TV show writers do not know how to do romance in a serial format. If you are watching a show for the romance, you will be very, very disappointed. So—don’t ship the canon couple. If you want to enjoy your romance, your OTP should not be canon.
2. Queer characters
This is going to be short. There weren’t any. Youtuber Matt Baume has done an awesome series on queer representation in American sitcoms that you should definitely check out. But if we’re talking about hour-long dramas in the era when I first started watching them, if the existence of gay people was acknowledged at all, it was in one-off appearances in individual episodes. I mean, Star Trek DS9 gets a whole lot of credit for having two women kiss in an episode, then we never see that other woman again.
The representation changed a lot through the nineties, with shows like Buffy starting to have main characters who were gay. But in my formative TV watching years—my procedurals, dramas, and genre shows were just never going to have queer characters, and there was zero chance of ever having a queer romance on screen.
3. Men in media
My favorite movie of all time, The Hunt for Red October, technically has two women in it. For a total of less than a minute of screen time, with maybe three lines between them. My favorite book in middle school was The Three Musketeers. I’m a fan of action adventure, sci fi, genre, procedural shows. Those shows usually do not have women in the main roles, and where they do have women, they are usually not as fully imagined as the men. The men have the meaty emotional story arcs. The women don’t.
I’m not the first and won’t be the last to say there’s a lack of representation of women in the media. What this meant for me growing up, though, is all my favorite stories, all the most interesting stories, were about men. So that meant that if I were to imagine myself into that world, either it would be as a romance interest (and believe me, in my head I have a massive multi-canon Mary Sue epic that I never wrote down but worked on for years), or I have to imagine myself as one of them.
This also plays out with the above lack of queer representation. If there is ZERO possibility of there ever being a gay character on the show, and NEGATIVE A MILLION PERCENT possibility of your two main male characters being in a romance, that means that you can instead get incredibly meaty, emotional, complex stories of these men’s relationships with each other. And you can get a lot of meaningful glances, touching, walking around half naked, and invading each other’s space. A lot of shows did that. A lot of shows were filled with things that would be read as romantic if romance were a possibility, but as it’s not even imaginable, there’s no reason to avoid raw emotionality between men.
Some of this is also very rooted in misogyny—I recently watched a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby buddy film, of which there are many. In these, usually there’s some woman that they’re both interested in, but they end up staying with each other because no woman can bust up their friendship. To a modern eye, these movies read SUPER gay. But really it’s that their friendship is more important than any woman because women aren’t people. It’s not possible to have an emotionally meaningful relationship with a woman.
There’s a long history of the Hayes code and how gays were represented in film (I recommend The Celluloid Closet documentary.) But there’s also a part where because women don’t count as people the only relationships that are given emotional depth in media are those between two men.
4. Slash
These things together heavily informed my early experience of slash. The first time a friend asked me if I liked slash, I’d only ever seen the term in reference to X-Files, so I assumed that it referred to the dark fucked up shit in those fic (ie, slasher). Which, given that fandom…I feel was a reasonable interpretation. This friend then turned me on to Smallville fandom, but my first real fandom—and my still true OTP—was due South. It was already off the air at that point, but I’d loved it when it was on the air, so finding the wealth of incredibly deep, complex, and well-written romance novels in this fandom was just gold.
In the current fandom discourse about slash—a sort of historical perspective from younger fans—the analysis usually discusses lack of queer representation being remedied through fic, and just the desire to sexually objectify beautiful men. While those are both true, I find the analysis misses one of the main themes that I experienced about slash at the time—and that I remember being part of the meta discussions about slash at the time.
Early on in fandom for me, I experienced it as a straight woman (ha ha—turns out I’m not straight so much, but that’s another story for another time). Queer women were always part of the community, but so were a lot of straight fans. For me, why was I drawn to slash?
- Because mainstream heterosexual romances (at least on TV and in movies) were almost all sexist as fuck. I still cannot watch most rom coms because it’s like having a wall of patriarchy shoved at me. Oh, she’s a career woman who has to learn to be a homemaker before she can have a man? fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou
- Because romances on TV shows were almost universally poorly written.
- Because the majority of the media I watched only had emotional development for the relationships between men.
- Because if my OTP was never going to be on screen, the writers couldn’t fuck it up for me. And if I was into a slash pairing, it was never going to be on screen.
Coming up through these male-focused shows with no gay representation, you learn to read a head canon into them. Smallville, Highlander, Sentinel, Stargate, due South, Starsky and Hutch—none of them ever had authorial intent for there to be a gay romantic pairing, but you spend years in the fandoms and you start learning the cues to pick up to support a counter narrative that the fandom explores (“hoyay,” as we called it in Smallville). NCIS is a very not good show, in a lot of directions, but if I watch it as the story of the tragic and doomed romance of DiNozzo and Gibbs, I enjoy it in a way I know was never the intent of the makers. That’s how I got used to reading my media, and used to enjoying my media.
Enter Supernatural
A friend introduced me to Supernatural at the end of Season 1. I immediately bought the DVD set to catch up (which was still a new and wonderful thing for me—being a fan of a TV show before DVDs was a 100% different experience). I loved the show immediately for two reasons:
1. It felt like the spiritual successor to X-Files. This wasn’t an accident. It was filmed in Vancouver, same as the first 5 seasons of X-Files. And one of Supernatural’s main directors through its first seasons, Kim Manners, had directed 52 episodes of X-Files. It looked like X-Files. It had the same creepy darkness in the photography, the same haunting woods. Kim Manners directed five episodes of the first season, including the season finale; six episodes of the second season, including “In My Time of Dying”—still my all-time favorite episode—and that season’s finale; four episodes in season 3, including fan favorite “Mystery Spot”—you get my point. Kim Manners was very influential in the early look and feel of Supernatural. He died in the middle of season 4 of Supernatural, and I remember being very saddened about it at the time.
I also loved that it was about American folk lore. I’d grown up with the “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” books, and I genuinely loved that they were doing Bloody Mary and the Woman in White and the other classics.
So to me, this was a show that was continuing the tradition of X-Files, which had only gone off the air three years previously, and was putting an American ghost folklore on top of it. I remember being disappointed when the show confirmed that angels were real in its mythology, because I felt that moved it away from its nihilistic vision of the hunters against a world of darkness.
I think that’s kind of impossible to grasp if you started watching the show much later and went back to the early seasons already knowing about Castiel etc. The reddit post linked above seems to find it ridiculous that early fans wanted the show only to be about these two characters and all monster of the week. But yeah. That is EXACTLY what I wanted. It’s hard to excavate what people with only the first season of the show thought the show was. But to me, that early version was the show I was enjoying and the show it morphed into is just not one I’ve ever been interested in watching.
I recently got a comment on a fic I wrote in season 2 telling me my Dean characterization was OOC. I was like, o.O Check the date on that fic. I had not watched 15 years of canon when I wrote it.
2. The show started out with a compelling arc in the relationship of the brothers. You had at first only hints of how difficult their childhood had been, and all you know is that Sam walked away from it and Dean felt he couldn’t. The first season is all about this rupture—Dean, who only cares about keeping his family together and has an unresolved betrayal that Sam left him, and Sam who doesn’t understand how Dean can’t want a normal life.
That’s the sort of thing you can’t sustain over 15 seasons. In the first season, Dean is always afraid Sam will just walk away. You can’t keep that tension up in the long haul—at some point Sam has to make the decision to stay. I’ve heard there were a bunch of contrivances to continue to introduce conflict between Sam and Dean. But for me, I was there because I wanted to see them learn how to heal their relationship after the betrayal (or, Dean sees it that way, anyway) of Sam walking away.
I honestly thought the show would only go three or four seasons. When I stopped watching, I figured I’d wait for it to finish it’s run, then go back and rewatch the whole series. Yeah, no, I’m not doing that.
The elephant in the room—Wincest
Let me be upfront—I read a lot of Wincest. I wrote Wincest. I read and wrote RPS. To say that the reddit post has a dim view of that would be an understatement:
I feel like I need all the 3,000 words of context I just wrote to explain why this ship. But first, for the fan writing the reddit post—um, we knew it was taboo. Most of that shit was locked down. One of the BNFs I read would put her fic up for two weeks only then pull it. So I don’t even think you can see enough of the iceberg from 2020 to have a fair idea of what it was. It’s one of the weirder fandom experiences to me that the ship that ate fandom from 2005 to 2008 not only fell out of favor but was essentially disavowed and abandoned. Like, I don’t even remember there being a ship war? (Like the Ray wars, of which we will not speak further.) It was just like—it was over all of a sudden.
So to me, the main things that people who weren’t in fandom don’t understand about Wincest are:
1. The way fans watched media at the time. With all the above, about how I learned to read emotional arcs between male characters as gay as a counter reading to the intent of the show, SPN fell bang into that. Dean and Sam had all the classic tells of a slash fandom, including a deep and complex relationship with each other. This is not just “they were the only options to have bang on the show, so people made them bang,” it was that they had a deeply compelling relationship narrative on the show, the kind that fans love to explore. And explore they did. There was gen, sure. But if what everyone wants to write is romance and what everyone wants to read is romance, you get romance. I’ve always thought this was kind of a limit of the imagination of other genres, that the ONLY genre whose sole focus is the emotional intimacy between people, then when you want to write about the emotional intimacy between people…it becomes a romance. This is not to say I didn’t find it hot. I did. But it was also a set of genre and fandom conventions for talking about relationships.
2. The constructs of the fic. Wincest was huge, so what I’m about to say is #NotAllFic, but I found the majority of the wincest fic had certain basic constructs to them that made them not *feel* like incest. Like, people were not trying to write realistic stories about incest (most of the time—sometimes they were). Fic fell into a couple of tropes: there was the very common amnesia or raised apart AUs, where the two fall in love and later realize they’re brothers. There were various succubi made them do it stories. The most common, though, was that their childhood meant that they were both so isolated that they never had any other meaningful relationships with anyone else, and so this feeling between them was always there (with the subset of these fic where this was why Sam ran away to Stanford). A lot of them would either have no outside observers at all, or would have outside observers that were explicitly supportive. Or if they weren’t supportive, they were coded as BAD HOMOPHOBIC PEOPLE. Wincest fic ranged from shmoopy curtain fic to suuuuuper dark (I remember a discussion at the first con.txt SPN panel, after its first season, where a fan said, “We don’t know what the end for these boys is, but we know it’s not going to be a happy one”).
What I’m trying to get across is, if you read the fic, there are a lot of conventions in how it is written to explicitly remove it from something that would actually feel like incest. I actually wrote a fic to specifically remove those conventions and make it squicky again—and in fact to make it destroy their relationship. I’ve gotten a lot of comments over the years on the lines of, so glad someone else hates Wincest! And no, I don’t. I was just fascinated by the idea of the function of these conventions and decided to toy around with what would happen if they weren’t there.
I also can’t emphasize enough the role of good authors. I followed a lot of good authors into SPN from other fandoms, like due South, Stargate, SGA, Sentinel. And basically, if I enjoy an author’s work, I can pretty much go along with anything.
3. Don’t cross the streams. I think this is also a part of the disconnect in modern fandom. I wrote at a time where I never believed the actors or show runners would ever be exposed to my fic, or made aware of its existence. I was writing at a time where sharing fic with the actors was verboten, and fans who did it were essentially run out on rails. There were numerous occasions where some fan “crossed a line” and the rest of fandom went after them with pitchforks, because don’t you understand that what we do, we do in the shadows. I mean, I’m still from the generation of you put your fic under a pseud and you wall off that pseud because if anyone ever knew you wrote fanfic, let alone erotic fanfic, let alone GAY erotic fanfic, you could lose your job. It’s weird, cause doxxing is still a very bad thing, but the idea that doxxing would be used for real life harassment honestly didn’t cross my mind in the mid-oughts. I was afraid of my real identity being revealed because it would make me unemployable. (And I would like to point out that at the time, I worked on an erotica line at a publisher.)
So if your fandom is totally walled off from the creators and any thoughts or feelings they would have about it, you don’t worry so much about what they—or the world—would think. They don’t matter. We’re in our sandbox over here, and the rest of the world can go fuck itself. And honestly, at the time, it’s not like there was MORE censure for it being incest than there was for it being fanfic at all.
I also want to touch on RPS. The reddit post calls it Padackles, which I’m sure was a thing? But I knew it as J2. Like, that’s what it was called in the Big Bang, that’s what everybody labeled their stories.
I feel like RPF has really come out of the closet in more recent years. There are celebrities who create RPF about themselves (like Bruce Campbell’s whole ouevre). At the time, though, it was JUST AS TABOO, if not MORE taboo, than wincest. I feel like that’s another thing people miss. You were more likely to get into a flamewar about RPF than about wincest. I had a HUGE argument with a real life friend about it at the time. The J2 fic was more likely to be behind lj-friends locks and to be deleted. I really don’t think there’s a way to excavate it now, except for what people transferred to AO3.
So here are a couple things about it that I feel have been forgotten:
- At the time, it was really common to include Smallville’s Michael Rosenbaum and Tom Welling and One Tree Hill’s Chad Michael Murray as recurring side characters. The assumption was that they all lived in Vancouver and shot shows for the CW, so they all must be friends.
- J2RPS essentially functioned like romance novel dress up. Like Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland films. You were casting your original characters with these actors, with an assumption of certain fanon character traits about them. Some J2RPS was about them as actors on Supernatural, but most of what I read was them as anything else. The one I wrote, they were counselors at a summer camp. (Really, my summer camp. A very poorly disguised version of my summer camp. If anyone else who went to my camp reads it, they’d be like, wait a minute…)
- There was a lot of toxic shit about their real-life girlfriends. In the early seasons, they lived together and basically spent all their time together. When they started dating women, fandom went REAL bad. Especially when Jared got engaged to Genevieve Cortese, who he met on set, and who played Ruby. That’s another thing missing in the reddit analysis—the incredibly shitty toxic way the Wincest and J2 fandoms turned on Genevieve Cortese because she was “messing up” both the ships. Some J2 fic included the girlfriends/wives, usually as hateful bitches. I was not/am not okay with that. Much of the fic left them out.
Leaving Supernatural
I stopped watching Supernatural mid-season 5. For a bunch of reasons. Partly life reasons, partly show reasons.
I want to start, though, with a quote of the main thing that ticked me off in the reddit post:
Now, were fans shitty to female characters? Yes. Always and everywhere. That is not new. But.
But.
Excuse me, tumblr fandom—you think you are the very first people to notice that Supernatural was misogynist as fuck and be bothered by that?
No.
I remember first seeing more and more posts criticizing how much Dean said “bitch” and “slut.” And how the show portrayed witches (lots of Dean calling them bitch). At first, I had the classic fan reaction of stop pointing this stuff out to me, I am trying to enjoy my show.
Then came Women’s Work by Luminosity and Sisabet. This video still makes me cry. Having a video lay out in disturbing detail the violent misogyny of the show. It came with a post analyzing the difference in how kills were portrayed of women and of men, of how women’s kills were sexualized. Showing how the boys relate to women as madonnas or whores. Showing how female monsters in the show are sexualized.
It was pretty much impossible to continue to watch the show having had that argument made so effectively. So I REALLY object that fandom *learned* to be better about women. No. I’m sorry. We were having this debate at the time.
So the reasons I stopped watching:
- Life. I was unemployed for a year, which is still the worst year of my life. After that year, I started a job that was a career dead end for an emotionally abusive boss and focused my effort on first researching what career move I wanted to make next, then in starting to take evening accounting classes and applying to grad school. My job 2005-2008 allowed a lot of time AT WORK for writing and reading fanfic. My job starting 2009 didn’t. Then I went to grad school and started a job that is 45 hours/week in a slow week and 85 hours/week in busy season. Like I said above, I never transitioned off of LJ/DW fandom. That’s largely cause I don’t have the time.
- Friends. The friend who got me into SPN was also my main beta reader (and vice versa). Our friendship ended. Not a lot of drama, just, collectively realized that we weren’t getting what we wanted from each other and drifted away. Not having a good friend who was a fandom goad meant I wasn’t spending as much time writing, and I no longer had that person to pull me into the new hotness.
- Fandom. As pointed out above, there was a lot of discussion especially of misogyny in Supernatural. But also a lot of other drama. And racefail. I started watching episodes mostly afraid that the episode would contain something that would set fandom off, and that’s not a way to enjoy anything.
- The show. The show started going in directions I wasn’t interested in. It expanded away from the MotW, X-Files format and became more mythology driven. It became very meta (I still HATE meta in my shows). There were two episodes in season five that ended it for me.
First, “The Real Ghostbusters,” where they first encounter a fan convention. I had learned through hard experience that when show runners looked at their fans it always hurt (just ask West Wing). As discussed above, I was very don’t cross the streams. So I didn’t like this in principle. But then the episode itself—showed only male fans. I was so angry. These writers went to their conventions, they saw that their main fanbase was women. They SAW us, they knew we were there, and then when they wrote an episode about their own fans ALL THEY SAW WERE MEN. And fanboy cliches at that. I was like, you’re going to look right at me and erase my whole gender? Fuck you.
Second, “Hammer of the Gods.” I doubt this episode is even remembered? But it featured the Trickster and a bunch of “pagan” gods doing horror show type things. Most of these gods were from dead religions—Odin, Baldur, Mercury—fine. Then they had Ganesh. Eating people. Ganesh, and actual god a lot of real living people really worship, and they were putting him in a line up with defunct gods as if that was equivalent. Did we not learn this lesson on Xena. You, a show written in a judeochristian culture, playing with those beliefs, don’t get to go and pull in Hindu gods and pretend you have the right to do what you want with what is, in the US, a minority religion. (And Baron Samedi too!) This to me was just representative of the overall issues the show had with representation on a lot of fronts and I was done.
- The characters. Like I said above, I was there for the character arc between Sam and Dean. By this point in the show, I felt like neither of the characters were changing or growing anymore. I felt like they’d said everything they needed to say about Dean, and it was just static now. No reason to keep going.
So that’s it. My big (>5,000 word!) pile of feels about Supernatural now that it’s ended. I’ve started getting a lot of kudos on my decade old SPN fic, so I think everyone else is feeling nostalgic as well.
But my main takeaway from this is—what the bulk of fandom is now is not a thing that I recognize. And I don’t think I’ll ever be as involved in a fandom again as I used to be. It’s moved past me, that’s fine, but it’s also seemed to have forgotten its roots and looks down upon the older fans who were watching and writing in a totally different media world. So I’m glad I haven’t tried to keep up, cause I think I’m happier not hearing what the young’uns have to say about us.
I hear tell Supernatural ended. (And by hear tell, I mean it’s been rather hard to avoid.) This has meant that there’s been a lot of Supernatural retrospective content coming out.
Supernatural has always been an odd fandom for me—I watched it for the first five seasons, and was as prolific as I’ve ever been in any fandom (which is admittedly not much). I’ve never been a fan of any note, but I was more active in SPN as it was airing than I think I’ve ever been in a fandom before or since. I read the meta, subscribed to the newsletter communities, participated in the Big Bang. I went to real life hang outs with other SPN fans. And for me at the time, the experience of fandom was the lj experience of fandom—it was in continuity with fandoms like SGA and Sentinel. It was don’t cross the streams fandom.
Then Supernatural kept going, and for me became the poster child for the changes in fandom overall: the fandom community moved almost entirely to tumblr; the main fans became people who weren’t old enough to watch it in its first few seasons; the show’s creators and stars (particularly Misha Collins) became incredibly involved with fandom. The show went meta. The people behind the scenes were not only aware of fandom, but read the fic, encouraged the fannish community, created ARGs for the fans. All of that was and is still DEEPLY alien to me and how I do my fannishness.
So running across some of the retrospectives is kind of a mindfuck for me. Youtuber Sarah Z just put up an 1:45 video on Destielgate. Pretty much 100% of everything she talks about in that is post any engagement I had with the fandom. But she linked to a reddit post about the first five years of fandom, and this post, written by someone who joined the fandom in 2013 in the tumblr years, honestly pissed me off. Partly for the sanctimony taken towards early fandom, and partly to the general misrepresentation of the concerns of early fandom. I mean, I get that doing internet archaeology is hard, and this is a humorous summary post, but I found it *really* skewed from what my experience was at the time. And then I started thinking about everything I would have to explain to try to explain just how different fandom was at the time. And let’s be honest, I don’t even have a reddit account to reply to this post with (or tumblr, or Instagram, or twitter…this isn’t a luddite stance, it’s mostly laziness). So I’m putting it here on DW, the exact place where I can guarantee that the few people who read it were probably there anyway, and none of the tumblr fans the reddit post is for will ever see it.
A Fan Is Born
I feel like to start I have to talk about the difference in expectations I have of media, borne of starting to watch TV dramas in the nineties. This is a lot of why I feel so alienated from younger fans’ experiences of fandom—because there are certain things I have learned to just never expect to get in a TV show, and that has shaped what fandom is *for* for me.
1. Romance
My first experience of fandom was after college, but the first show I was fannish about was Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as fandom at the time—I certainly didn’t have internet at home. I didn’t hear about sci fi conventions til post college. So my experience of this show was just that—my experience.
If you haven’t seen this show, it’s still a fun, very campy watch. It was a Superman TV show (starring an Asian actor as Superman, though he passed for white and was marketed as white, so I didn’t even know that at the time), but very very focused on the romance between Lois and Clark. I was in middle school. This was one of the first romance stories I consumed, and I was gaga over the romance.
There were early signs that they might not know how to handle this across the series (first season focused on a love triangle with a young, hot, and not bald Lex Luthor), but as they moved into seasons two and three things went very, very bad. They have their first date—then there’s another love interest introduced. Lois finds out Clark is Superman in a time travel episode (which was HILARIOUS, one of my favorites) but then has her mind wiped.
Finally, finally, we get to the wedding. Clark and Lois get married! But no! They are not actually married! Because Lois isn’t Lois but is in fact a frog eating clone! The real Lois has amnesia! And thinks she’s the lounge singer main character of the Harlequin romance she was secretly writing! And Lex Luthor finds her and doesn’t tell her the truth!
Friends, this went on for FIVE EPISODES, which, in nineties television, was a frelling eternity. My love for the show curdled. I have been betrayed by shows many times, but everyone remembers the first time a show broke their heart. Even after that, when they finally did let them actually get married, it’s in a sort of a heaven where they are married by an angel…it was all very, very bad.
And it’s not like Lois and Clark was the only one. I was very into the romance in The Nanny as well (we’ll just set aside the rich employer falling in love with the nanny part of this), and in that, the first episode where they kiss, Fran then gets conked on the head and forgets everything.
I loved the show Pretender. In that, Miss Parker got a love interest, Thomas Gates, who was sweet and lovely and perfect for her, and got fridged SO HARD (in one of the rare examples of fridging a man).
There are a lot of other examples—I would later discover Moonlighting, which is infamous. Ross and Rachel on Friends (the resurgence of this show is also very weird to me—I keep trying to explain to people who’ve only watched it in a binge what it felt like to be dicked around for SEVEN YEARS in real time in the nineties). Mulder and Scully, where the romance is consummated off screen after Duchovny exited the show due to a contract dispute, and Scully got a complete personality transplant. There are some rare exceptions, but for the most part, suckage.
What I was learning through all of these early TV experiences was: TV show writers do not know how to do romance in a serial format. If you are watching a show for the romance, you will be very, very disappointed. So—don’t ship the canon couple. If you want to enjoy your romance, your OTP should not be canon.
2. Queer characters
This is going to be short. There weren’t any. Youtuber Matt Baume has done an awesome series on queer representation in American sitcoms that you should definitely check out. But if we’re talking about hour-long dramas in the era when I first started watching them, if the existence of gay people was acknowledged at all, it was in one-off appearances in individual episodes. I mean, Star Trek DS9 gets a whole lot of credit for having two women kiss in an episode, then we never see that other woman again.
The representation changed a lot through the nineties, with shows like Buffy starting to have main characters who were gay. But in my formative TV watching years—my procedurals, dramas, and genre shows were just never going to have queer characters, and there was zero chance of ever having a queer romance on screen.
3. Men in media
My favorite movie of all time, The Hunt for Red October, technically has two women in it. For a total of less than a minute of screen time, with maybe three lines between them. My favorite book in middle school was The Three Musketeers. I’m a fan of action adventure, sci fi, genre, procedural shows. Those shows usually do not have women in the main roles, and where they do have women, they are usually not as fully imagined as the men. The men have the meaty emotional story arcs. The women don’t.
I’m not the first and won’t be the last to say there’s a lack of representation of women in the media. What this meant for me growing up, though, is all my favorite stories, all the most interesting stories, were about men. So that meant that if I were to imagine myself into that world, either it would be as a romance interest (and believe me, in my head I have a massive multi-canon Mary Sue epic that I never wrote down but worked on for years), or I have to imagine myself as one of them.
This also plays out with the above lack of queer representation. If there is ZERO possibility of there ever being a gay character on the show, and NEGATIVE A MILLION PERCENT possibility of your two main male characters being in a romance, that means that you can instead get incredibly meaty, emotional, complex stories of these men’s relationships with each other. And you can get a lot of meaningful glances, touching, walking around half naked, and invading each other’s space. A lot of shows did that. A lot of shows were filled with things that would be read as romantic if romance were a possibility, but as it’s not even imaginable, there’s no reason to avoid raw emotionality between men.
Some of this is also very rooted in misogyny—I recently watched a Bob Hope/Bing Crosby buddy film, of which there are many. In these, usually there’s some woman that they’re both interested in, but they end up staying with each other because no woman can bust up their friendship. To a modern eye, these movies read SUPER gay. But really it’s that their friendship is more important than any woman because women aren’t people. It’s not possible to have an emotionally meaningful relationship with a woman.
There’s a long history of the Hayes code and how gays were represented in film (I recommend The Celluloid Closet documentary.) But there’s also a part where because women don’t count as people the only relationships that are given emotional depth in media are those between two men.
4. Slash
These things together heavily informed my early experience of slash. The first time a friend asked me if I liked slash, I’d only ever seen the term in reference to X-Files, so I assumed that it referred to the dark fucked up shit in those fic (ie, slasher). Which, given that fandom…I feel was a reasonable interpretation. This friend then turned me on to Smallville fandom, but my first real fandom—and my still true OTP—was due South. It was already off the air at that point, but I’d loved it when it was on the air, so finding the wealth of incredibly deep, complex, and well-written romance novels in this fandom was just gold.
In the current fandom discourse about slash—a sort of historical perspective from younger fans—the analysis usually discusses lack of queer representation being remedied through fic, and just the desire to sexually objectify beautiful men. While those are both true, I find the analysis misses one of the main themes that I experienced about slash at the time—and that I remember being part of the meta discussions about slash at the time.
Early on in fandom for me, I experienced it as a straight woman (ha ha—turns out I’m not straight so much, but that’s another story for another time). Queer women were always part of the community, but so were a lot of straight fans. For me, why was I drawn to slash?
- Because mainstream heterosexual romances (at least on TV and in movies) were almost all sexist as fuck. I still cannot watch most rom coms because it’s like having a wall of patriarchy shoved at me. Oh, she’s a career woman who has to learn to be a homemaker before she can have a man? fuckyoufuckyoufuckyou
- Because romances on TV shows were almost universally poorly written.
- Because the majority of the media I watched only had emotional development for the relationships between men.
- Because if my OTP was never going to be on screen, the writers couldn’t fuck it up for me. And if I was into a slash pairing, it was never going to be on screen.
Coming up through these male-focused shows with no gay representation, you learn to read a head canon into them. Smallville, Highlander, Sentinel, Stargate, due South, Starsky and Hutch—none of them ever had authorial intent for there to be a gay romantic pairing, but you spend years in the fandoms and you start learning the cues to pick up to support a counter narrative that the fandom explores (“hoyay,” as we called it in Smallville). NCIS is a very not good show, in a lot of directions, but if I watch it as the story of the tragic and doomed romance of DiNozzo and Gibbs, I enjoy it in a way I know was never the intent of the makers. That’s how I got used to reading my media, and used to enjoying my media.
Enter Supernatural
A friend introduced me to Supernatural at the end of Season 1. I immediately bought the DVD set to catch up (which was still a new and wonderful thing for me—being a fan of a TV show before DVDs was a 100% different experience). I loved the show immediately for two reasons:
1. It felt like the spiritual successor to X-Files. This wasn’t an accident. It was filmed in Vancouver, same as the first 5 seasons of X-Files. And one of Supernatural’s main directors through its first seasons, Kim Manners, had directed 52 episodes of X-Files. It looked like X-Files. It had the same creepy darkness in the photography, the same haunting woods. Kim Manners directed five episodes of the first season, including the season finale; six episodes of the second season, including “In My Time of Dying”—still my all-time favorite episode—and that season’s finale; four episodes in season 3, including fan favorite “Mystery Spot”—you get my point. Kim Manners was very influential in the early look and feel of Supernatural. He died in the middle of season 4 of Supernatural, and I remember being very saddened about it at the time.
I also loved that it was about American folk lore. I’d grown up with the “Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark” books, and I genuinely loved that they were doing Bloody Mary and the Woman in White and the other classics.
So to me, this was a show that was continuing the tradition of X-Files, which had only gone off the air three years previously, and was putting an American ghost folklore on top of it. I remember being disappointed when the show confirmed that angels were real in its mythology, because I felt that moved it away from its nihilistic vision of the hunters against a world of darkness.
I think that’s kind of impossible to grasp if you started watching the show much later and went back to the early seasons already knowing about Castiel etc. The reddit post linked above seems to find it ridiculous that early fans wanted the show only to be about these two characters and all monster of the week. But yeah. That is EXACTLY what I wanted. It’s hard to excavate what people with only the first season of the show thought the show was. But to me, that early version was the show I was enjoying and the show it morphed into is just not one I’ve ever been interested in watching.
I recently got a comment on a fic I wrote in season 2 telling me my Dean characterization was OOC. I was like, o.O Check the date on that fic. I had not watched 15 years of canon when I wrote it.
2. The show started out with a compelling arc in the relationship of the brothers. You had at first only hints of how difficult their childhood had been, and all you know is that Sam walked away from it and Dean felt he couldn’t. The first season is all about this rupture—Dean, who only cares about keeping his family together and has an unresolved betrayal that Sam left him, and Sam who doesn’t understand how Dean can’t want a normal life.
That’s the sort of thing you can’t sustain over 15 seasons. In the first season, Dean is always afraid Sam will just walk away. You can’t keep that tension up in the long haul—at some point Sam has to make the decision to stay. I’ve heard there were a bunch of contrivances to continue to introduce conflict between Sam and Dean. But for me, I was there because I wanted to see them learn how to heal their relationship after the betrayal (or, Dean sees it that way, anyway) of Sam walking away.
I honestly thought the show would only go three or four seasons. When I stopped watching, I figured I’d wait for it to finish it’s run, then go back and rewatch the whole series. Yeah, no, I’m not doing that.
The elephant in the room—Wincest
Let me be upfront—I read a lot of Wincest. I wrote Wincest. I read and wrote RPS. To say that the reddit post has a dim view of that would be an understatement:
In the modern Supernatural fandom, from what I can see of the iceberg, most fans dislike Wincest. Because, ya'know. It's incest. Fans who joined after Season 4 started never had a reason to learn to tolerate it, because it was no longer ubiquitous in the fandom and it was no longer the only ship possible, so the fandom slowly became less inviting to the Wincest shippers. The ship never went away, but it became a minority.
I feel like I need all the 3,000 words of context I just wrote to explain why this ship. But first, for the fan writing the reddit post—um, we knew it was taboo. Most of that shit was locked down. One of the BNFs I read would put her fic up for two weeks only then pull it. So I don’t even think you can see enough of the iceberg from 2020 to have a fair idea of what it was. It’s one of the weirder fandom experiences to me that the ship that ate fandom from 2005 to 2008 not only fell out of favor but was essentially disavowed and abandoned. Like, I don’t even remember there being a ship war? (Like the Ray wars, of which we will not speak further.) It was just like—it was over all of a sudden.
So to me, the main things that people who weren’t in fandom don’t understand about Wincest are:
1. The way fans watched media at the time. With all the above, about how I learned to read emotional arcs between male characters as gay as a counter reading to the intent of the show, SPN fell bang into that. Dean and Sam had all the classic tells of a slash fandom, including a deep and complex relationship with each other. This is not just “they were the only options to have bang on the show, so people made them bang,” it was that they had a deeply compelling relationship narrative on the show, the kind that fans love to explore. And explore they did. There was gen, sure. But if what everyone wants to write is romance and what everyone wants to read is romance, you get romance. I’ve always thought this was kind of a limit of the imagination of other genres, that the ONLY genre whose sole focus is the emotional intimacy between people, then when you want to write about the emotional intimacy between people…it becomes a romance. This is not to say I didn’t find it hot. I did. But it was also a set of genre and fandom conventions for talking about relationships.
2. The constructs of the fic. Wincest was huge, so what I’m about to say is #NotAllFic, but I found the majority of the wincest fic had certain basic constructs to them that made them not *feel* like incest. Like, people were not trying to write realistic stories about incest (most of the time—sometimes they were). Fic fell into a couple of tropes: there was the very common amnesia or raised apart AUs, where the two fall in love and later realize they’re brothers. There were various succubi made them do it stories. The most common, though, was that their childhood meant that they were both so isolated that they never had any other meaningful relationships with anyone else, and so this feeling between them was always there (with the subset of these fic where this was why Sam ran away to Stanford). A lot of them would either have no outside observers at all, or would have outside observers that were explicitly supportive. Or if they weren’t supportive, they were coded as BAD HOMOPHOBIC PEOPLE. Wincest fic ranged from shmoopy curtain fic to suuuuuper dark (I remember a discussion at the first con.txt SPN panel, after its first season, where a fan said, “We don’t know what the end for these boys is, but we know it’s not going to be a happy one”).
What I’m trying to get across is, if you read the fic, there are a lot of conventions in how it is written to explicitly remove it from something that would actually feel like incest. I actually wrote a fic to specifically remove those conventions and make it squicky again—and in fact to make it destroy their relationship. I’ve gotten a lot of comments over the years on the lines of, so glad someone else hates Wincest! And no, I don’t. I was just fascinated by the idea of the function of these conventions and decided to toy around with what would happen if they weren’t there.
I also can’t emphasize enough the role of good authors. I followed a lot of good authors into SPN from other fandoms, like due South, Stargate, SGA, Sentinel. And basically, if I enjoy an author’s work, I can pretty much go along with anything.
3. Don’t cross the streams. I think this is also a part of the disconnect in modern fandom. I wrote at a time where I never believed the actors or show runners would ever be exposed to my fic, or made aware of its existence. I was writing at a time where sharing fic with the actors was verboten, and fans who did it were essentially run out on rails. There were numerous occasions where some fan “crossed a line” and the rest of fandom went after them with pitchforks, because don’t you understand that what we do, we do in the shadows. I mean, I’m still from the generation of you put your fic under a pseud and you wall off that pseud because if anyone ever knew you wrote fanfic, let alone erotic fanfic, let alone GAY erotic fanfic, you could lose your job. It’s weird, cause doxxing is still a very bad thing, but the idea that doxxing would be used for real life harassment honestly didn’t cross my mind in the mid-oughts. I was afraid of my real identity being revealed because it would make me unemployable. (And I would like to point out that at the time, I worked on an erotica line at a publisher.)
So if your fandom is totally walled off from the creators and any thoughts or feelings they would have about it, you don’t worry so much about what they—or the world—would think. They don’t matter. We’re in our sandbox over here, and the rest of the world can go fuck itself. And honestly, at the time, it’s not like there was MORE censure for it being incest than there was for it being fanfic at all.
I also want to touch on RPS. The reddit post calls it Padackles, which I’m sure was a thing? But I knew it as J2. Like, that’s what it was called in the Big Bang, that’s what everybody labeled their stories.
I feel like RPF has really come out of the closet in more recent years. There are celebrities who create RPF about themselves (like Bruce Campbell’s whole ouevre). At the time, though, it was JUST AS TABOO, if not MORE taboo, than wincest. I feel like that’s another thing people miss. You were more likely to get into a flamewar about RPF than about wincest. I had a HUGE argument with a real life friend about it at the time. The J2 fic was more likely to be behind lj-friends locks and to be deleted. I really don’t think there’s a way to excavate it now, except for what people transferred to AO3.
So here are a couple things about it that I feel have been forgotten:
- At the time, it was really common to include Smallville’s Michael Rosenbaum and Tom Welling and One Tree Hill’s Chad Michael Murray as recurring side characters. The assumption was that they all lived in Vancouver and shot shows for the CW, so they all must be friends.
- J2RPS essentially functioned like romance novel dress up. Like Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland films. You were casting your original characters with these actors, with an assumption of certain fanon character traits about them. Some J2RPS was about them as actors on Supernatural, but most of what I read was them as anything else. The one I wrote, they were counselors at a summer camp. (Really, my summer camp. A very poorly disguised version of my summer camp. If anyone else who went to my camp reads it, they’d be like, wait a minute…)
- There was a lot of toxic shit about their real-life girlfriends. In the early seasons, they lived together and basically spent all their time together. When they started dating women, fandom went REAL bad. Especially when Jared got engaged to Genevieve Cortese, who he met on set, and who played Ruby. That’s another thing missing in the reddit analysis—the incredibly shitty toxic way the Wincest and J2 fandoms turned on Genevieve Cortese because she was “messing up” both the ships. Some J2 fic included the girlfriends/wives, usually as hateful bitches. I was not/am not okay with that. Much of the fic left them out.
Leaving Supernatural
I stopped watching Supernatural mid-season 5. For a bunch of reasons. Partly life reasons, partly show reasons.
I want to start, though, with a quote of the main thing that ticked me off in the reddit post:
The way the fandom interacted with these characters changed, as more fans became concerned about things like Supernatural's habit of fridging female characters, instead of cheering it on. Fans started begging for more female (as well as POC and LGBT) characters to appear on the show, and realized that the cast being almost entirely composed of white men (angels are technically agender eldritch beings but we still see mostly white men on screen) was not the greatest thing.
Nowadays, there are many beloved female characters who are whole-heartedly embraced by the fans, and most of the ones listed here have become much more popular over time. One time in a more recent season, a female character was unceremoniously fridged, and fans complained so much the showrunners eventually brought her back, in a complete reversal from the early fandom. There's even a popular ship between Sam and a female hunter!
It just took time.
Now, were fans shitty to female characters? Yes. Always and everywhere. That is not new. But.
But.
Excuse me, tumblr fandom—you think you are the very first people to notice that Supernatural was misogynist as fuck and be bothered by that?
No.
I remember first seeing more and more posts criticizing how much Dean said “bitch” and “slut.” And how the show portrayed witches (lots of Dean calling them bitch). At first, I had the classic fan reaction of stop pointing this stuff out to me, I am trying to enjoy my show.
Then came Women’s Work by Luminosity and Sisabet. This video still makes me cry. Having a video lay out in disturbing detail the violent misogyny of the show. It came with a post analyzing the difference in how kills were portrayed of women and of men, of how women’s kills were sexualized. Showing how the boys relate to women as madonnas or whores. Showing how female monsters in the show are sexualized.
It was pretty much impossible to continue to watch the show having had that argument made so effectively. So I REALLY object that fandom *learned* to be better about women. No. I’m sorry. We were having this debate at the time.
So the reasons I stopped watching:
- Life. I was unemployed for a year, which is still the worst year of my life. After that year, I started a job that was a career dead end for an emotionally abusive boss and focused my effort on first researching what career move I wanted to make next, then in starting to take evening accounting classes and applying to grad school. My job 2005-2008 allowed a lot of time AT WORK for writing and reading fanfic. My job starting 2009 didn’t. Then I went to grad school and started a job that is 45 hours/week in a slow week and 85 hours/week in busy season. Like I said above, I never transitioned off of LJ/DW fandom. That’s largely cause I don’t have the time.
- Friends. The friend who got me into SPN was also my main beta reader (and vice versa). Our friendship ended. Not a lot of drama, just, collectively realized that we weren’t getting what we wanted from each other and drifted away. Not having a good friend who was a fandom goad meant I wasn’t spending as much time writing, and I no longer had that person to pull me into the new hotness.
- Fandom. As pointed out above, there was a lot of discussion especially of misogyny in Supernatural. But also a lot of other drama. And racefail. I started watching episodes mostly afraid that the episode would contain something that would set fandom off, and that’s not a way to enjoy anything.
- The show. The show started going in directions I wasn’t interested in. It expanded away from the MotW, X-Files format and became more mythology driven. It became very meta (I still HATE meta in my shows). There were two episodes in season five that ended it for me.
First, “The Real Ghostbusters,” where they first encounter a fan convention. I had learned through hard experience that when show runners looked at their fans it always hurt (just ask West Wing). As discussed above, I was very don’t cross the streams. So I didn’t like this in principle. But then the episode itself—showed only male fans. I was so angry. These writers went to their conventions, they saw that their main fanbase was women. They SAW us, they knew we were there, and then when they wrote an episode about their own fans ALL THEY SAW WERE MEN. And fanboy cliches at that. I was like, you’re going to look right at me and erase my whole gender? Fuck you.
Second, “Hammer of the Gods.” I doubt this episode is even remembered? But it featured the Trickster and a bunch of “pagan” gods doing horror show type things. Most of these gods were from dead religions—Odin, Baldur, Mercury—fine. Then they had Ganesh. Eating people. Ganesh, and actual god a lot of real living people really worship, and they were putting him in a line up with defunct gods as if that was equivalent. Did we not learn this lesson on Xena. You, a show written in a judeochristian culture, playing with those beliefs, don’t get to go and pull in Hindu gods and pretend you have the right to do what you want with what is, in the US, a minority religion. (And Baron Samedi too!) This to me was just representative of the overall issues the show had with representation on a lot of fronts and I was done.
- The characters. Like I said above, I was there for the character arc between Sam and Dean. By this point in the show, I felt like neither of the characters were changing or growing anymore. I felt like they’d said everything they needed to say about Dean, and it was just static now. No reason to keep going.
So that’s it. My big (>5,000 word!) pile of feels about Supernatural now that it’s ended. I’ve started getting a lot of kudos on my decade old SPN fic, so I think everyone else is feeling nostalgic as well.
But my main takeaway from this is—what the bulk of fandom is now is not a thing that I recognize. And I don’t think I’ll ever be as involved in a fandom again as I used to be. It’s moved past me, that’s fine, but it’s also seemed to have forgotten its roots and looks down upon the older fans who were watching and writing in a totally different media world. So I’m glad I haven’t tried to keep up, cause I think I’m happier not hearing what the young’uns have to say about us.