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.

The remainder of the fifteenth season’s episodes of Supernatural are available on Netflix here in the United States, which I completely expected them to be sooner or later. (But will I watch them? Maybe once, just to say that I watched every single episode of Supernatural, and then I am not going to rewatch it.) But the thing that makes me laugh, you say? The fact that the Spanish dub is not available along with them when it usually is. Someone that I know stated that… this doesn’t ordinarily happen, but everyone’s guess is that the Spanish version of the show is going to be re-dubbed to conform more to the American version even though there are plenty of videos being disseminated around the Internet demonstrating the original dub where Dean Winchester reciprocated Castiel’s love for him. It’s not like you can put all of this back in the box here.

The actor that plays Castiel hasn’t said anything else about this aside from admitting that his initial (more than likely encouraged by the CW, at least as far as a lot of fans suspect) attempt at… quashing this was tone-deaf, and I’m inclined to agree with him. It was. But I’m still annoyed that a show that managed to last fifteen seasons, that broke a world record and is now the longest running sci-fi show ever, managed to go out as poorly as it did and us fans are just expected to sit here, there, wherever we’re sitting and gladly take table scraps. It seems that we’re supposed to be grateful for them, and we’re not. Oh, we are really not…

They should have waited until the pandemic was over to film and complete the series, and they should really have re-thought the last three episodes and the finale. They seriously went out on the poorest possible note.