serah[DOT]nu

When an actor in a show literally tells the fandom that they should create the desired ending of their own in fan work (namely fanfiction), and so many people are extremely dissatisfied and upset with said show… you know that you have a problem. Or you should, at any rate. Growing up, I read fanfiction when I was a child — I am dating myself by even allowing this sentence to show up on my blog, but I digress — and the legality of it was so… questionable then (definitely not advocated with by the Fair Use doctrine so long as the creator does not make any money off of it) that we wrote long disclaimers at the start of every single one of our fanfics begging the creator of those characters and that world not to sue us for daring to write that fanfic.

You should not have to write your own happy ending because your favorite show botched the entire landing.

One of the biggest problems that I had with the Supernatural finale is that Dean, at least in their eyes, could not find happiness in life — that he could only find happiness in death, in Heaven, after he had passed away, but not in life. For a character that was passively suicidal for much of the show’s run, whose character arc demonstrated him finally beginning to turn away from that, see the worth that was in life, and want to do something beyond hunting (since there was a job application on his desk in his room), to have killed him off like that sent the worst possible message to fans of the show. And mind, the show is rated TV-14 — this means that minors, and impressionable minors, can watch it if they so desire. And this was the message that was sent to them: who cares about the here and now? Your only happiness, or salvation, is allegedly in death. The CW should not have sent people that message, but they did. And they know that they’ve done it due to all of the negative backlash that the show has gotten in respect to the finale. They absolutely know.

Soon, I will have a fourteen-year-old of my own who can, at least in theory, watch Supernatural after his fourteenth birthday. But for an array of reasons that don’t have as much to do with him being autistic as they may seem at first glance, I will not be letting him watch this show, whether it is with me — assuming that I eventually do a rematch — or on his own. I loved this show until the finale and I am consciously choosing not to share this love with my child out of respect to what the finale tried to make the show.