We Should Call The Internet And Find Out As Much As We Can.

[rionaleonhart]

I just checked my phone and discovered that I'd apparently written the line 'You'd think, with all Rimmer's interest in military history, he'd be keener to be executed by firing squad' on it, with no context, at six in the morning.

Did I think this was a line I could use in a Red Dwarf fic? It's hard to imagine a context in which it would be appropriate, given that Rimmer is already dead for the vast majority of his screentime.


Here are a handful of notes I've made here and there while watching Supernatural, between seasons nine and twelve, because apparently I'm still slowly working through Supernatural!

Supernatural 9.02, 'Devil May Care': that was a pretty hot scene between Dean and Abaddon. (I made this note so long ago that I cannot remember this scene at all, but I'm going to trust my past self on this one. Knowing myself, I suspect it involved blood.)

When speaking to Ezekiel-in-Sam's-body, Dean always looks like he's painfully aroused and really uncomfortable with it.

I'm confused by how much I wanted Ed and Harry to kiss in '#Thinman'. It was a lot!

There's almost no Ed/Harry fanfiction! What?? I'm genuinely surprised by this. I thought Supernatural fandom had everything! It's not as if Ed/Harry doesn't have a solid basis in canon!

I can't believe it took so long for anyone to call Castiel 'Asstiel'.

'Everything you have, I will watch it burn,' Rowena says to Crowley. Rowena, it's Hell.

I'm predictably fond of Claire, the angry teenager making terrible decisions.

11.11, 'Into the Mystic': I love Eileen and Mildred, I love that they defeated the banshee together, and I hope they end up becoming a hunting duo. (Also, I was mildly disappointed that Dean and Mildred didn't bang.)

Season eleven has managed to perk up my interest in Supernatural a little, when it had struggled to engage me since season eight! I'm liking the writing of the boys more than I have in a while.

Season twelve: I like Mick a lot more than I expected to at his first appearance! He kills people but feels very bad about it, which is exactly what I want in a character.



Goddammit, and then he got killed in the episode I was watching when I wrote that. I really, really liked him! 'Wow, I think Mick's the single Supernatural character I'm most invested in right now,' I thought, twenty minutes before he was unceremoniously shot.

I can't believe the last couple of episodes I watched shot Mick up into the position of my favourite Supernatural character, and then just shot Mick. I loved him and he was only in five episodes and this is an outrage.


While I'm under a spoiler cut, a few other spoilery notes I've made here and there:

Misha Collins was clearly having a whale of a time playing Lucifer and I was slightly sorry when he switched vessels.

Mary Winchester is great and I like her enormously.

Sam and Dean say to two hunters named Walt and Roy that they haven't seen each other 'since you killed us', and they've died so many times I genuinely can't remember when this happened. 'Dark Side of the Moon', maybe?

OKAY, NOTES OVER, BACK TO BEING SAD ABOUT MICK. I thought Supernatural had lost its ability to get me invested; if only I'd been right! Maybe I should rewatch the FIVE EPISODES he's in and see if there's scope for fanfiction.



The trouble with Supernatural is that the stakes have been so relentlessly high for so long that I've more or less run out of emotional investment. Can't we occasionally just be trying to save a person? Does it always have to be the whole of creation?

I think this might be a preference of mine for stories in general, actually; small, personal stakes tend to grab me more than save-the-world tales. I'd like to see small stakes more often in JRPGs.

Comments

[wolfy_writing]

I just checked my phone and discovered that I'd apparently written the line 'You'd think, with all Rimmer's interest in military history, he'd be keener to be executed by firing squad' on it, with no context, at six in the morning.

Oh man, that's actually pretty clever.

My favorite thing about Rimmer and history is that "Alexander the Great's chief eunuch" makes the most sense as a reference to Bagoas, a Persian eunuch who won favor with Alexander. Apparently, after Bagoas won a dance contest, the Macedonian troops started yelling that Alexander should kiss him, and then they kissed. At least according to Plutarch, they did. (I don't think Rimmer would ever have read Plutarch. I used to have a vague fic idea "Five books Rimmer never read, and what would have happened if he had", but I couldn't think of enough books. Plutarch's Lives, obviously, probably something on the Kennedy assassination with a photo of the three tramps, and As I Lay Dying, specifically due to the "My mother is a fish" chapter).

I think this might be a preference of mine for stories in general, actually; small, personal stakes tend to grab me more than save-the-world tales. I'd like to see small stakes more often in JRPGs.

I think that's particularly true in episodic fiction, where the world needing perpetual saving gets exhausting, but having the overwhelming majority of the stories be about saving a few people, or a few dozen, or sometimes just the one, tends to work better.

[rionaleonhart]

Apparently, after Bagoas won a dance contest, the Macedonian troops started yelling that Alexander should kiss him, and then they kissed. At least according to Plutarch, they did.

Oh, wow, yes, Rimmer definitely needs to read this.

I think that's particularly true in episodic fiction, where the world needing perpetual saving gets exhausting, but having the overwhelming majority of the stories be about saving a few people, or a few dozen, or sometimes just the one, tends to work better.

True! As Supernatural's gone on, it's started having more episodes focusing on the overarching plot and fewer one-off 'hunt a thing, save some people' episodes; maybe the stakes would feel less exhausting if it returned to the 'frequent small victories against a larger backdrop' format.

[wolfy_writing]

His reaction would be amazing!

Yeah, I think that format tends to work better in episodic media.

[(Anonymous)]

The trouble with Supernatural is that the stakes have been so relentlessly high for so long that I've more or less run out of emotional investment. Can't we occasionally just be trying to save a person? Does it always have to be the whole of creation?

This is definitely part of my problem with Supernatural, and I stopped watching well before you did. It’s almost become too wrapped up in its own lore; I liked when it was about two brothers trying to save people (I have no issue with monster of the week stuff!) and failing to understand eachother (and one of them is psychic). THAT’S ENOUGH PLOT FOR ME. I would have happily had a season of Sam having crippling visions and Dean having an existential crisis of being unable to help him, even! I feel like part of the reason the tension is gone, too, is that when you make a habit of killing off members of your main cast but also bring them back to life, it makes death not particularly an obstacle anymore, more a minor annoyance.

I suppose it’s a problem of long-running shows in general. Supernatural in particular is a show that has overstayed its welcome (wasn’t the original plan for it to be around 5 seasons, or is that an Interfact Fact, That May Not Match Reality?). You’ve already used this set of high stakes, but the people want more: we can’t have anyone less threatened than they were last season! How can we up the stakes more?! How can we keep the audience interested?! (These two questions may not be mutually exclusive.)

I don’t consume a lot of long-running media: I don’t watch much TV, and I can count on my fingers the amount of films I’ve ever watched. I’m going to try and think of how this applies, or doesn’t apply, to some of the things I’ve watched/consumed though!

The classic series of Doctor Who (haven’t seen enough of the new to be able to comment!) actually avoided this well enough as even though it was 26 seasons, the nature of the show meant it changed itself a lot. You can break it down into eras of which Doctor, you can also break it down by showrunner (who often had different ideas on how to broach themes and different preferred themes) or even by TARDIS teams since the dynamics could be very different. It often felt quite small scale (at least to me) rather than constant “and the whole universe is threatened!” – though it did so that sometimes, but it felt sparing. I could be wrong as I’m mostly relying on memories. Although, let’s be fair, there were plenty of enemy repeats.

Also from the 60s, American series Dark Shadows did 5 years, but started running out of material – it pulled a lot from fiction, and gothic horror, and there’s only so much to go through. It repeated various plots (the Phoenix loops around a few times, for instance, and I’m convinced the second loop of the Taming of the Shrew exists purely because David Henesy played a great possessed person) and liked to try and please its audience, writing more for clear audience favourites and seemingly reacting to audience feedback on various plots. It’s hard to stay emotionally invested when it starts repeating – I have an idea of where this is going!

…Gosh, I really don’t watch enough TV to be able to keep up this list. I could comment on Quantum Leap, being a series about making small differences to just random people who don’t really have anything special about them, starting to pick up episodes about jumping into random famous people later on? Not many of them, but a few. I’m sure this was a result of Executive Meddling, unless this is another Internet Fact.

…Actually, though it’s a videogame series, Trails might be a good one to discuss here, since it’s all a linked universe (of 9 games thus far). I suppose I need to try and give some context for this to make sense. I’ll try and be concise. It consists of three subsets of games, each with different protagonists:

-Trails in the Sky (3 games, set in a country called Liberl)
-Crossbell games (2 games, funnily enough set in a country called Crossbell. They aren’t released in English officially and I haven’t played them, so I won’t say anymore)
-Trails of Cold Steel (4 games, only 3 available in English currently, set in a country called Erebonia)

These countries, in case you’re wondering, are all in the same world. It’s the equivalent of, say, playing a series of games set in Balamb, then Esthar, then Galbadia.

The stakes are definitely raised as the series goes along, but what it does well is it keeps those lower stakes running alongside it. Part of the way it does this is that while there is a plot that runs across the course of the entire series and plans and villains that stretch across the subsets of games, they all also have individual subplots and antagonists confined to the smaller game series. If we use your Supernatural comments, about always saving all of creation and not just people, another thing that Trails does really well that it can due to being a videogame is that it pays a lot, lot, lot of attention to NPCs and worldbuilding. The dialogue also changes between events of plot, so you can get to know completely inconsequential characters really well, and see (and sometimes help with) their story, so you often feel like you’re helping people even when the plot is pointing at the “worldwide catastrophe!” scale. It’s really cool.

-timydamonkey

[rionaleonhart]

I feel like part of the reason the tension is gone, too, is that when you make a habit of killing off members of your main cast but also bring them back to life, it makes death not particularly an obstacle anymore, more a minor annoyance.

That's definitely part of it! I think they feel they have to focus on ridiculously high stakes because, by repeatedly killing and bringing back the main characters, they've made it clear that individual stakes don't really exist. If Sam or Dean's life is threatened, we know they'll be back anyway.

wasn’t the original plan for it to be around 5 seasons

This is true, I'm pretty sure, and the original showrunner left after that point. I tend to think of the first five as the 'canonical' seasons and everything after that as fanfiction with high production values.

I can't get my head around the fact that Dark Shadows only ran for five years but had well over a thousand episodes! I suppose it was pretty much daily?

[(Anonymous)]

I can't get my head around the fact that Dark Shadows only ran for five years but had well over a thousand episodes! I suppose it was pretty much daily?

Yup! Five days a week. It started off as a gothic soap opera (with suggestions of ghosts)*, so think of the scheduling a bit like that of a British soap. It stuck with the same scheduling when it became more supernatural.

It also had a shoestring budget and wasn't filmed far in advance of transmission, which meant it went out with flubs - costs time and money to reshoot things! You had to be very good at learning lines, with 5 episodes a week, especially if you were a main character.

*Literally here is the original premise/plot points laid down from the beginning: A woman called Victoria Winters moves to a great estate at Collinwood to be a governess to a troubled young boy, who has just moved back there (his aunt's house) with his father, who clearly loathes him. It's later when it got crazy. :D

[anirrationalseason]

The trouble with Supernatural is that the stakes have been so relentlessly high for so long that I've more or less run out of emotional investment. Can't we occasionally just be trying to save a person? Does it always have to be the whole of creation?

I dropped the show for (partially) that reason. It just seemed like they peaked with the angel arc and Brotherly Conflict and there was no going back to the personal, lower-stakes episodes where the boys were tightknit and mostly on the same page. I also consider everything after S05 fanfiction or "soft canon."

[rionaleonhart]

and there was no going back to the personal, lower-stakes episodes where the boys were tightknit and mostly on the same page

Yes, I miss those days! I also have issues with the characterisation of Dean in later seasons, which is a shame, because he's my favourite in early Supernatural.

[lokifan]

'You'd think, with all Rimmer's interest in military history, he'd be keener to be executed by firing squad'

Oh it's a great line though!

[rionaleonhart]

Thank you! Maybe some day I'll find a place I can use it.