Yes. This sums up my take away as far as feeling out the overall sweep of the narrative--OK, its last word has been to tie its heroes up in a familial love knot, kill heaven and hell (their reps, anyway), and tear itself a new A...U. Could be a cosmic clusterfuck. Could be a narrative clusterfuck. Or both. In a way it's bold, like taking a grenade launcher to your own text. Breathe air into it like those Bunker fans kicking to life. Sort of.
I am weak to postapocalyptic AUs. Weak. Even if it's a narrative/worldbuilding clusterfuck I am guaranteed to get something out of it. And I really want to know why the AU demons sprouted horns. Mutation? Adaptation? Cosmetic?
With re: the colonial/frontier rugged individualism vs authoritarian Old World, I've been chewing over how that narrative acts as a kind of American comfort food. How it's one of our favorite tales to tell ourselves about ourselves, that time when we were the underdog standing against the grasping, floundering empire (ragtag army in need of a shower//somehow defeating a global superpower)...And how it's paired with our other favorite song of ourselves, the one about the time we (almost!) singlehandedly saved the West from the Nazis. We got both this season, with all the subtlety of a grenade...hell, I think the grenade-launching motif was executed with more subtlety. And those narratives are...I think even when you're trying to do values-clarifying things with them, it's easy to blinker and whitewash. Because they just feel so good, so reassuring and affirming--telling us that we're the good guys because it's in our blood and we don't drink tea or speak with funny accents or take orders from fascists. Not like those foreigners. So. I don't know. It's possible that I'm projecting current-events baggage on this that it doesn't warrant. Maybe I'll look back on it differently in a few years.
Yes, though, s12: thank you for the witch twins! And the amnesia episode! And all the Mary stuff that wasn't too bogged down with BMoL stuff!
First, the comfort-food frontier narratives: yep. I confess this is no small part of my academic stock-in-trade, how frontier narratives are *the* American weakness, how we gotta tell ourselves over and over the one about that "primitivized" European (white dude gone native, ya know, and maverick and rebel and individualist and gunslinging anti-colonial colonizer) who went into the wilderness and won it (and we do tell ourselves that story, over and over, in film and TV and ads that sell SUV's by planting them on the tops of buttes and the political rhetoric we buy that we shouldn't. Fallout: yeah, xenophobia, whitewashing, erasure, the current-events baggage you're referring to, etc etc. They feel good, yeah, national-mythic-good, that story that connects a diverse people to a land (but leaves out the diversity); all the stuff you said. Paired with the American anti-Nazi war hero--also as you said, a devastating double song-of-self. Laughablelament was hoping for anti-fascist plots this season, I think she said, but how much of what we got was really, richly, that? I think of of SPN as sort of trying to evade the explicitly political (despite LOTUS, heh) but...there's a way in which you know that more than usual they might have thought about how a conservative element of the fanbase (as opposed to fandom, though that's here, too) might respond in a different way to some of these stories than the not-conservative element. I don't read the Sam-led farmers-with-pitchforks raid as simply fuckyeahAmerica because I don't want to, but, well...these kinds of stories do warrant the projection you spoke of. I think they do.
I was gonna say something about SPN's history with frontier fictions, Winchesters and hunters and class/underclass, monsters and natives and other stuff, hmm...for later.
I also confess that despite what I said about the possibilities of metalandscape I am not generally into post-apocalyptic/dystopian. Or at least some of the most common modes of it. I like "The End". *You* could write the hell out of post- (post-) apocalypse, which I guess this one is. I wonder what they'll do?
Fave things from S12: witch twins! "Asa Fox" and "Twigs & Twine." Yes, the "Regarding Dean" witchery and mirror and brother stuff. Parts of "The Raid" and "The Foundry" and "Middle". Some particular Sam and Dean bits, which I'll have to think more about. The way they made Mary not what the boys thought/wanted/expected.
One other interesting thing is the mirroring with Sam and his hunter posse storming the BMoL in their compound and the vampires doing the same in "The Raid.'' Same motive--survival of the species. I feel like there's something in that that could be capitalized on more, tapping into that rich vein (heh) of how vampires have served as multifaceted mirrors throughout the series.
that story that connects a diverse people to a land (but leaves out the diversity) Yeah, exactly.
I don't know if it was trying to evade the explicitly political...I'd say floundering, like it wanted to say something but couldn't find a voice that rang true? I do think there's an anti-fascist thread, but it never quite hits close to home, because it's a sin that originates in a foreign country that doesn't share our values and that American hunters prove largely immune to--for all the frontier-narrative reasons you mentioned. Of course, that foreign country is also the one most commonly called our motherland--(which is kind of funny in a season as much about mommy issues as anything). It's the original empire that we've defined ourselves against--against their rigid class system and colonial exploitation and church/state issues. Telling ourselves that we do things differently--better.
*You* could write the hell out of post- (post-) apocalypse, which I guess this one is. I wonder what they'll do? Aww, flattered you think I'd be good at writing the thing <3! I've no idea what they'll do. If I had my way, we'd have at least ten episodes of Sam and Dean on a road trip to find Mary in the no-deal verse, and they'd still be doing cases-of-the-week, they'd just have to adjust to the different rules of this next-door universe. And I'd probably wind up going totally indulgent and have them gratuitously run into the full angsty gamut of people they knew before. Jess. Gordon. Ava. Uriel. Harvelles (all three of them would be alive!). I'd be shameless.
I'm so with you when it comes to postapocalyptic AUs, even though seeing it on screen felt a little like watching a fanfiction come to life, kinda too surreal to make me buy it, but Im still really excited for it!
Also, your point about the British vs the American hunters clarified a few things for me. As a not-american, I something felt that the story was less morality against following orders, free will against fascism, but more the American way as the only right one and your historical references helped me to put some of these impressions into place:) On the other hand, maybe you are right and that's simply too much interpretation, I mean, they wanted to explore the other branches of the Men of Letters and for the sake of a story there had to be conflict, meaning they had to be evil or at the very least different from the hunters wenn already know. In any case, thanks for the witch twins, season 12;)
The British MoL read as very specifically British to me, as opposed to villains who happen to be Brits because it's convenient for casting purposes. I'm sure it's partly by default--they had to be from a predominantly English-speaking country and one that an American audience would take seriously as a threat. We have historical memory of Britain rivaling/threatening us. We also have a bunch of Anglophobic tropes and stereotypes on stock which we can brush off whenever we want to revisit that narrative--for example: the Brits are all snobbish and hidebound to tradition and conformity and out to undermine us because they hate us for our freedoms. Hess even refers derisively to Americans as "colonials" which made me snort. We can frame ourselves as the underdog rebels vs the empire because we've got that constantly refreshed historical narrative. And we don't have to feel bad about it because we assume our cousins across the pond know we don't mean anything by it.
It's a similar thing with the Nazis. Don't get me wrong, I think the great majority of Americans hate Nazis for the right reasons! But we also love how important and virtuous the cultural memory of fighting Nazis makes us feel. We killed Hitler (sort of). You're welcome.
If you're watching American media you're likely to find there's an evil German or Brit around somewhere, (or if it's set in space they've at least got the accent and the snazzy uniforms) and they're out to colonize/genocide somebody. Only a hero aggressively imbued with American values can stop them. ("For freedom!")
They didn't have to explore other branches of the MoL via out-and-out villification--the Winchesters could have had conflict with the BMoL that wasn't so black and white the only possible solution was to shoot 'em all. I do think the writers wanted to tell a story specifically about authoritarianism and xenophobia--Sam's confession/rallying speech confirmed that for me. But it ends up being a kind of...American-exceptionalism affirming take on resisting fascism, neatly resolved by taking our country back via bloodbath.
That "constantly refreshed historical narrative", that frontier mythology, is something SPN has always trafficked in, but maybe not this...nakedly? I think the British MoL is very specifically British too, and I think the exceptionalist message as connected to frontier tropes is, despite the potential for complication (which they missed), more than reinforced by this season. Set against the current political baggage, as you called it, it's not uplifting if you don't want to read SPN as a grenade-launching gunslinging make-America-great-again (there I said it) story. Since it's done so old-school ("colonials" v the motherland/monarchy) it reads as yeah, American values (democracy, individualism, self-reliance, expediency, etc.) v. foreign authoritarian ones, rather than as any sort of topical meditation on where fascism/authoritarianism (not to mention xenophobia) might be coming from now (again, despite LOTUS, lol.) As you said, we can keep casting ourselves as the underdogs despite superpowerdom, keep revisiting in stories how the west was "won" and the West was saved, how the great wilderness stripped the classist confines of distant monarchs and remade the overcivilized European as a new American, the renegade who rallies Lexington and raids British compounds.
Where are/who are the monsters in this narrative? (Yeah, the vampire raid/hunter raid thing; I liked that.) Of course Eurocentric American frontier narratives erase/rename Native genocides....
P.S. This is one academic article about American exceptionalism and SPN that I know about Cowboys, Angels and Demons; there are several about hunters & class systems and one at least about...hunters and militias ...(!)
Yeah, that article reminded me that I didn't even touch on the religion angle--our American heroes, freshly divinely ratified, the firewall between the light and dark (the world's policeman, you might say).
Not to draw any equivalencies/direct lines with real world atrocities, but this season also brushed awkwardly over the genocide issue. Y'know, what was supposed to be the BMoL's raison d'etre. The line that grated on me the worst in 12x22 was in Sam's speech when he says that he thought the BMoL wanted what he wanted...to kill all the monsters. That should have been a sticking point--that wanting people killed for what they are is a heinous thing to want. Not just brought up in the particular cases of Claire and Garth but as a red line across the board.
we can keep casting ourselves as the underdogs despite superpowerdom, keep revisiting in stories how the west was "won" and the West was saved, how the great wilderness stripped the classist confines of distant monarchs and remade the overcivilized European as a new American, the renegade who rallies Lexington and raids British compounds. Beautifully put.
There's also an implicit endorsement of vigilantism in the contrasting of American hunters with the BMoL's bureaucratic organizational structure. (Soft-handed pencil pushers can't be trusted! They don't know the facts on the ground!) Hunters as militias--right, but not exactly a well-regulated one that has to answer to any legal/civilian oversight. Of course, vigilante justice is a big part of frontier narratives, whitewashed in the mythos, but with a horrifyingly racist/eliminationist history.
I am weak to postapocalyptic AUs. Weak. Even if it's a narrative/worldbuilding clusterfuck I am guaranteed to get something out of it. And I really want to know why the AU demons sprouted horns. Mutation? Adaptation? Cosmetic?
With re: the colonial/frontier rugged individualism vs authoritarian Old World, I've been chewing over how that narrative acts as a kind of American comfort food. How it's one of our favorite tales to tell ourselves about ourselves, that time when we were the underdog standing against the grasping, floundering empire (ragtag army in need of a shower//somehow defeating a global superpower)...And how it's paired with our other favorite song of ourselves, the one about the time we (almost!) singlehandedly saved the West from the Nazis. We got both this season, with all the subtlety of a grenade...hell, I think the grenade-launching motif was executed with more subtlety. And those narratives are...I think even when you're trying to do values-clarifying things with them, it's easy to blinker and whitewash. Because they just feel so good, so reassuring and affirming--telling us that we're the good guys because it's in our blood and we don't drink tea or speak with funny accents or take orders from fascists. Not like those foreigners. So. I don't know. It's possible that I'm projecting current-events baggage on this that it doesn't warrant. Maybe I'll look back on it differently in a few years.
Yes, though, s12: thank you for the witch twins! And the amnesia episode! And all the Mary stuff that wasn't too bogged down with BMoL stuff!
Reply
First, the comfort-food frontier narratives: yep. I confess this is no small part of my academic stock-in-trade, how frontier narratives are *the* American weakness, how we gotta tell ourselves over and over the one about that "primitivized" European (white dude gone native, ya know, and maverick and rebel and individualist and gunslinging anti-colonial colonizer) who went into the wilderness and won it (and we do tell ourselves that story, over and over, in film and TV and ads that sell SUV's by planting them on the tops of buttes and the political rhetoric we buy that we shouldn't. Fallout: yeah, xenophobia, whitewashing, erasure, the current-events baggage you're referring to, etc etc. They feel good, yeah, national-mythic-good, that story that connects a diverse people to a land (but leaves out the diversity); all the stuff you said. Paired with the American anti-Nazi war hero--also as you said, a devastating double song-of-self. Laughablelament was hoping for anti-fascist plots this season, I think she said, but how much of what we got was really, richly, that? I think of of SPN as sort of trying to evade the explicitly political (despite LOTUS, heh) but...there's a way in which you know that more than usual they might have thought about how a conservative element of the fanbase (as opposed to fandom, though that's here, too) might respond in a different way to some of these stories than the not-conservative element. I don't read the Sam-led farmers-with-pitchforks raid as simply fuckyeahAmerica because I don't want to, but, well...these kinds of stories do warrant the projection you spoke of. I think they do.
I was gonna say something about SPN's history with frontier fictions, Winchesters and hunters and class/underclass, monsters and natives and other stuff, hmm...for later.
I also confess that despite what I said about the possibilities of metalandscape I am not generally into post-apocalyptic/dystopian. Or at least some of the most common modes of it. I like "The End". *You* could write the hell out of post- (post-) apocalypse, which I guess this one is. I wonder what they'll do?
Fave things from S12: witch twins! "Asa Fox" and "Twigs & Twine." Yes, the "Regarding Dean" witchery and mirror and brother stuff. Parts of "The Raid" and "The Foundry" and "Middle". Some particular Sam and Dean bits, which I'll have to think more about. The way they made Mary not what the boys thought/wanted/expected.
Reply
that story that connects a diverse people to a land (but leaves out the diversity) Yeah, exactly.
I don't know if it was trying to evade the explicitly political...I'd say floundering, like it wanted to say something but couldn't find a voice that rang true? I do think there's an anti-fascist thread, but it never quite hits close to home, because it's a sin that originates in a foreign country that doesn't share our values and that American hunters prove largely immune to--for all the frontier-narrative reasons you mentioned. Of course, that foreign country is also the one most commonly called our motherland--(which is kind of funny in a season as much about mommy issues as anything). It's the original empire that we've defined ourselves against--against their rigid class system and colonial exploitation and church/state issues. Telling ourselves that we do things differently--better.
*You* could write the hell out of post- (post-) apocalypse, which I guess this one is. I wonder what they'll do? Aww, flattered you think I'd be good at writing the thing <3! I've no idea what they'll do. If I had my way, we'd have at least ten episodes of Sam and Dean on a road trip to find Mary in the no-deal verse, and they'd still be doing cases-of-the-week, they'd just have to adjust to the different rules of this next-door universe. And I'd probably wind up going totally indulgent and have them gratuitously run into the full angsty gamut of people they knew before. Jess. Gordon. Ava. Uriel. Harvelles (all three of them would be alive!). I'd be shameless.
Reply
Also, your point about the British vs the American hunters clarified a few things for me. As a not-american, I something felt that the story was less morality against following orders, free will against fascism, but more the American way as the only right one and your historical references helped me to put some of these impressions into place:) On the other hand, maybe you are right and that's simply too much interpretation, I mean, they wanted to explore the other branches of the Men of Letters and for the sake of a story there had to be conflict, meaning they had to be evil or at the very least different from the hunters wenn already know.
In any case, thanks for the witch twins, season 12;)
Reply
It's a similar thing with the Nazis. Don't get me wrong, I think the great majority of Americans hate Nazis for the right reasons! But we also love how important and virtuous the cultural memory of fighting Nazis makes us feel. We killed Hitler (sort of). You're welcome.
If you're watching American media you're likely to find there's an evil German or Brit around somewhere, (or if it's set in space they've at least got the accent and the snazzy uniforms) and they're out to colonize/genocide somebody. Only a hero aggressively imbued with American values can stop them. ("For freedom!")
They didn't have to explore other branches of the MoL via out-and-out villification--the Winchesters could have had conflict with the BMoL that wasn't so black and white the only possible solution was to shoot 'em all. I do think the writers wanted to tell a story specifically about authoritarianism and xenophobia--Sam's confession/rallying speech confirmed that for me. But it ends up being a kind of...American-exceptionalism affirming take on resisting fascism, neatly resolved by taking our country back via bloodbath.
Reply
British compounds.
Where are/who are the monsters in this narrative? (Yeah, the vampire raid/hunter raid thing; I liked that.) Of course Eurocentric American frontier narratives erase/rename Native genocides....
P.S. This is one academic article about American exceptionalism and SPN that I know about Cowboys, Angels and Demons; there are several about hunters & class systems and one at least about...hunters and militias ...(!)
Reply
Not to draw any equivalencies/direct lines with real world atrocities, but this season also brushed awkwardly over the genocide issue. Y'know, what was supposed to be the BMoL's raison d'etre. The line that grated on me the worst in 12x22 was in Sam's speech when he says that he thought the BMoL wanted what he wanted...to kill all the monsters. That should have been a sticking point--that wanting people killed for what they are is a heinous thing to want. Not just brought up in the particular cases of Claire and Garth but as a red line across the board.
we can keep casting ourselves as the underdogs despite superpowerdom, keep revisiting in stories how the west was "won" and the West was saved, how the great wilderness stripped the classist confines of distant monarchs and remade the overcivilized European as a new American, the renegade who rallies Lexington and raids British compounds. Beautifully put.
There's also an implicit endorsement of vigilantism in the contrasting of American hunters with the BMoL's bureaucratic organizational structure. (Soft-handed pencil pushers can't be trusted! They don't know the facts on the ground!) Hunters as militias--right, but not exactly a well-regulated one that has to answer to any legal/civilian oversight. Of course, vigilante justice is a big part of frontier narratives, whitewashed in the mythos, but with a horrifyingly racist/eliminationist history.
Reply
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