Well, hopefully he can come back.

I've only had to write a couple extra John defenses. The post's not going badly, even if I feel compelled to defend shipping and fic (gen exists!) to all the detractors.

I have never been mainpaged and gotten this many comments. Although one complained about be talking about Wincest and emotional incest because those don't belong on IO9. Damn, there's a post about rape and dubcon in sci fi romance on the front page. They're pretty bad too.

300+ comments. I don't know how to bow out.

Just don't go back. They'll talk among themselves.

Compulsion! And insults to me!

I wonder if it's true that the network still wants an SPN spinoff: [link]

God, I miss my show.

I think what I miss most is back roads and flannel and ordinary people with ordinary ghosts. I'm so tired of seeing Sam and Dean in suits, and Cas's "command center" was just absurd. And I couldn't give a shit about Metatron if my life depended on it.

Not that I won't watch next week, but man, do I hope S10 is an improvement.

Gee, your show that you miss is my show that I miss. Where'd that show go?

I don't know.

And every time the Mark makes Dean growl, it's very watch-from-the-hall for me.

Swan Song was on the other day (TNT in the morning) and looking back, maybe it should have ended there. I liked a lot of seasons 6 and 7, and even a lot of 8, but overall, they don't add up to the same kind of story that seasons 1 through 5 did.

I shouldn't be here, because I haven't seen the ep yet, but I got into a debate with Charlie Jane. She loves the 1-5 story, and I realise I do not. I would have hated the ending, assuming Sam didn't come back, leaving PTSD alcoholic Dean in a house with a young child and a woman he barely knows--fine, Charlie's right, not everything has to be a hero's journey, but what does that ending do for me? Talk about rescinding rights to Carry On Wayward Son.

I also think 1-5 wasn't an awesome story. I like 1-3 and 3 or 4-5 better, but the Boy King and Lucifier's meatsuit stories never worked well together for me. Treating Kripke as an inviolable auteur (not here, IO9) also makes me laugh, because he tossed the special kids and the Roadhouse on a whim and broke his "no angels" promise (for the best--it's just to say the first five episodes didn't spring perfect from his anus)..

He was just a storyteller, feeling it out as he goes along, and I don't mind seasons that are individual arcs instead of there being a big 1-10 story, because I didn't feel the 1-5 story in the first place.

I much prefer this sort of storytelling to "Hannibal is going to keep making cannibals for five years, as he slowly destroys the lives of people around him" that has so many people enraptured, for instance. It might be pretty, but I have pictures I can look at for that.

Supernatural still excites me. It still makes me laugh. It still makes me sad. And some of that is because they're working with 8 years of canon, and I'm not ashamed one bit.

If they, IMO, ruin Sam or Dean before the tale's out (I'm 90% sure I can't survive the trashing of Baby), then I'm likely in hatewatching mode. I need to get off LCDs right now, but I'm still eager to see what happens tomorrow morning even as most of fandom sounds like they're ready to chuck it.

Kripke wasn't perfect -- no one is, author or not -- but for me seasons 1-5 work as a complete story. It doesn't have the happiest ending, but I'm okay with that. Not all stories have to end happily. And for me, those were the seasons that were really focused on Sam and Dean as a unit, as brothers, the heart of the show as it was conceived -- two brothers trying to get to the bottom of their mother's death and their family's horrible fate, and growing up in important ways in the process.

I liked a lot of elements from the subsequent seasons, don't get me wrong. But those are more individual moments or storylines. I never felt they did justice to the larger arcs -- Sam's soullessness could have been so much better if they had really dug into what a lack of a soul means (and even as messy as Joss was about it, his version was much more precise than SPN's). Dean's time in Purgatory amounted to not much, really, and Gadreel possessing Sam just wound up as more of the same betrayal blah blah blah.

I loved that scene in the church at the end of S8, and I was really eager to see what they did with fallen angels, and I just don't like the direction they took. The Sam and Dean of S9 don't seem like they could be the same men from that church scene, and the angel war is, for me, ridiculous and boring. Metatron wanted to cast all the angels out of heaven so ... he could eventually bring them back?

And Sam and Dean -- the ups and downs and back and forth is just tiresome now. By the time S5 ended, Dean had learned he had to let Sam grow up and decide his own fate, and Sam had come to terms with his resentment of John and grown into his role as an adult who could make choices on his own, and learn from them. Ever since then, it's seemed like one step forward, two steps back.