You can't hide behind social graces
After lagging behind the whole of the season and basically slipping off LJ because I was so habituated to avoiding spoilers, I finally got caught up with the whole of Supernatural Season 6.
The show took a big downturn for me the second the angels showed up, so the way large stretches of this season were basically the Castiel show didn't really do it for me. 'The Man Who Would Be King' left me particularly old, since I've never really warmed enough to Castiel to care about his angst or bought his relationship with the Winchesters enough to care about the OMG betrayal. The focus on Castiel also meant they basically wasted the huge build-up to the destruction of the block in Sam's head - there could have been a whole episode just dealing with that and instead it felt like it had to be quickly zipped through so they could get to the big reveal of invincible!Cas. So, that was annoying.
More important than my issues with the plot, though, I was just staggered by the amount of race and genderfail in these last few episodes. Watching SPN has always required a certain amount of wilful blindness to its failtastic ways, and IDK, maybe my lack of engagement with the storyline has made that wilful blindness harder to maintain, but seriously? When you start to think 'cannon fodder' the second you see a black character, something is very very wrong. I guess Lisa's new boyfriend was doomed regardless, but as soon as he appeared I knew he would not even get the chance to make a futile heroic gesture. And as for Raphael... I've been PROFOUNDLY uncomfortable with having him set up as the Big Bad all season, because the show's total failure to have any characters of colour means that it's hard not to read the evil as colour-coded, but then they start with the gender switching as well. Like, let's make this character black AND female (and make disparaging comments on hir gender fluidity), because it's not enough to kill a black man when we can have two fails for the price of one. Given the way the show has made overt references to various fannish things, I find it hard to believe that they haven't come across any of the criticisms of how it's handled race and gender, which makes the consistent and continuing racefail and genderfail feel like a calculated insult. How hard would it be to have one awesome character of colour or female character who wasn't killed off?
Supernatural was my show, my first really big fannish love where I stopped lurking and wrote and went to cons and met amazing people. I've persevered through this season, even though the storylines weren't really doing it for me, because I love the show so much and I want it to be awesome. But I think I might actually be done. Apart from anything else, I'm starting to feel embarrassed about subscribing to something that maintains such a high level of fail. :( I'll probably at least try watching next season, because I am an optimist/masochist, but I'm pretty sure I'll just be inviting them to kick me in the teeth some more. Sad times.
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