The Supernatural fandom is hurting. It may also be imploding. Supernatural Season 15 Finale
By: Valerie Mercado
Tags: Supernatural, Bury Your Gays, Television, LGBT, Dean Winchester

Supernatural ended a week ago and the fandom is still tearing itself apart, right down the middle like Rumplestiltskin in a fit of rage. But they have cause to feel hurt. The finale to a 15 season show was far from good and came short in more ways than one.

While many will wave away the fandom’s outcry, their accusations have merit. They are deeply hurt. The hurt lies in hoping, in devoting so much time to loving something that led its hero back to square one with no acknowledgment of more than a decade of growth.

After all, what does Dean love more than bullets, bacon, and booze? Nothing apparently. Only Sam, pie, and the impala.

The finale sure seems to think that this is all there is to Dean. Forget 15 years of character development. Heck, forget season 15’s entire plot.

Forget Castiel’s confession. Castiel declaring that Dean was worth more than the worst others see in him. Castiel saw through to the soul of Dean, he knew what was good and holy about Dean. But alas, like so many other lgbt+ characters in Supernatural’s history, he was zipped away to The Empty, to be forgotten along with his heartfelt speech, because otherwise, Dean would have to reply.

The writers wrote themselves into a corner.

If Dean had to speak to Castiel on-screen just one more time, well, the elephant in the room would have to be addressed. If he didn’t reciprocate the feelings, there would be chaos. Dean and Castiel who had been fighting all season only to make up and finally understand each other enough for Castiel to confess. These two would have died for each other.

If Dean had indeed reciprocated Castiel’s feelings a new light would have been shed on his character. In one fell swoop, the entire show would have changed. Dean, the rugged man’s man, the heartbreaker, would have been canonically bisexual.

But Dean is straight!

Is he? Those maddest about the way Dean’s arc ended are convinced that there is so much more to him than the cheap jokes about eating too much, drinking too much, and sleeping around, no strings attached.

Is Dean just a dumb hammer meant to kill anything and everything? Are all his wants and needs satiated with pie, cheap beer, and the impala? We had reason to believe that the answer was no.

Dean Winchester lived his life constantly taking care of his family. He played the father role to Sam from the moment Mary died. He was forced into it not out of love or loyalty but out of survival. If he didn’t take on the role, what would have become of him and Sam?

John Winchester was a deadbeat dad. Any glossing over that fact seen in later seasons is a blatant lie. Anyone who has seen the first few seasons saw just how awful John was.

Sam expressed repeatedly how Dean protected him from John. We saw this touched upon in season 15.

Why then were we fed the garbage that was the finale? Sam dying in a bed with a massive photo of the Winchester clan above him? John smiling innocently as if his actions had nothing to do with his children’s fate. A legacy of hunters destined to “die bloody”.

Dean deserved better.

He was more than the superficial qualities he wore like armor. They were his defense mechanisms. They were the shallowest interpretations of him. Season 15 gave us the line that perfectly surmised him when accused by Fortuna of being a “beach read, sexy but skimmable”, he doesn’t miss a beat before replying “Lady, I’m Tolstoy.” And that he is.

Dean is smart. He is very likely even smarter than his little brother, who went to college and passed the LSAT all those years ago. But no one ever encouraged him to want more than the hunter’s life. John made sure he stayed entrenched in it.

So Dean played dumb, played coy, and flirted his way out of trouble. He kept himself under the radar and buried all the complexity that was just waiting to burst out of him.

The fandom saw this, this is what is killing them more than anything.

It’s not about Castiel’s confession. That was beautiful regardless of the classic case of bury your gays. The problem is that Dean never got to express what this meant to him. In every instance before this, when Castiel died, Dean was bereft. He was destroyed. He was ready to die, by anyone’s hand, even his own.

But in the finale, he brushed off Sam bringing up Cas’s death.

Why? Because now that Castiel had confessed his love, he didn’t want anything to do with him? His best friend? The man he spent an entire year fighting for in purgatory, suddenly didn’t mean anything to him?

How could the Dean that had grown from John’s good little soldier, into a man with his own hopes and dreams, wants and desires, regress so suddenly? How could he have gone back to square one so swiftly?

For the sake of narrative symmetry? The return after the hero’s journey? The great ouroboros Andrew Dabb had meticulously crafted?

It doesn’t make any sense. Especially not to those who have invested 15 years into these characters. Characters, not the story, because the show itself wasn’t all that important in relation to Sam and Dean. The Monster of the week got old, the overarching narrative wasn’t always that interesting.

How many times were we going to see Michael and Lucifer duke it out? We didn’t care about that all that much anymore.

All we truly wanted was to see Sam and Dean happy. We wanted to see them as fully integrated adults capable of living independently. We wanted to see them able to be themselves, for themselves.

This sentiment was explicitly stated in the show itself by Becky, the voice of the fandom, in episode 4 season 15, Atomic Monsters.

The narrative of the past three seasons positioned Sam into being a leader for hunters. He could have turned it into an actual business. We see the potential for this in episode 13 season 15, Destiny’s Child, when alternate universe Sam and Dean talk about how rich they are thanks to capitalizing off hunting. Why couldn’t Sam have done the same?

And Dean? He finally beat God, he was free. He didn’t have to answer to anyone. He could have just been happy. He was ready to finally hang up his knife and his gun and let Sam take over. His work was done. He didn’t have to die.

Why? Was heaven Dean’s only prize? He gave a lifetime of sacrifice and devotion to the greater good, every moment of it fought for tooth and nail, and for what? What did it amount to? Dying, impaled on rebar? What for?

The entire barn scene makes no sense. Why waste screen time with a character from season one whose most memorable contribution to the show was a stomach-churning forced lesbian kiss? Jenny from season 1 episode 20, Dead Man’s Blood, whose entire story is about being abducted and forced into a vampire family, and apparently, never leaving it.

Were the writers trying to tell us something? Did they want to make a point at the last minute about how gratuitous lesbianism is allowed but a genuine, heartfelt and good story about a bisexual man is not?

Would it be giving the writers too much credit to say this?

Or were they trying to call our attention to the impassioned speech Sam gives Dean in the same episode, saying,

“Yeah well, maybe that worked when we were kids but not anymore, all right? Not after everything you and I have been through, Dean. I mean, are you telling me you’re cool with just falling into line, and letting him run the whole show?”

Were the writers told the same? Were they silenced as the fandom seems to have concluded? Were they forced to give Dean a dog instead of a boyfriend, à la The Puppy episode 2.0? Are the writers that clever? Were they looking at a bigger picture than the fandom seemed to grasp?

We genuinely don’t know the answers. We want to believe that the threads they’ve been weaving for the past three seasons were headed exactly where the fandom predicted. That the craft of writing spoke for itself through context clues. Any thoughtful literary analysis could have come to the same conclusion. Dean Winchester would finally be free to be happy, to experience “things, people, feelings” in a different light.

To the credit of the writers, there do seem to be some very vague answers to the fandom’s lingering questions.

After all, we find out that Castiel is in Dean’s heaven too. And although Sam’s wife is never named, or even shown as anything other than a blurry baby making woman, it may very well have been Eileen. The problem is there is no concrete answer within the show. Do Dean and Castiel ever speak to one another or is Cas relegated to doing heaven’s work, him being the good little soldier for heaven that never rebelled and never defied his father? Oh, wait.

Supernatural’s finale was going to be a hard pill to swallow regardless of how it ended. The journey has been long, and it’s been beautiful.

Fans simply wanted an ending that the story deserved. Not one cobbled together shoddily.

Covid-19 restrictions couldn’t have made the writing this bad, you don’t lose your skills as writers because of a virus. And it certainly doesn’t turn a 15-year journey into a gratuitous shirtless advertisement for Walker, a show that doesn’t even have a pilot yet.

Fans wanted an ending that didn’t make them feel stupid for believing that the story they had seen all along was going to come to fruition. These were deliberate choices made by the network and the writers. Whatever fandom backlash they will face is justly earned. Unfortunately.