When stories fail, there’s usually a reason.
Three months out from Supernatural’s depressingly hollow finale, fans are still searching for answers. Themes destroyed, arcs unfinished, entire characters erased, a decade-in-the-making queer romance granted and immediately killed. How did we get here? Or, more cynically, why did anyone expect things to be different?
This is not a show people went into with their eyes closed, queer fans above all. Most knew their own history and the risks posed inherently to their stories, but are nonetheless left with these devastating, seemingly avoidable questions.
Would they have traded the validation of Supernatural’s queer narrative for safety.
Why do queer stories even have a price, and what do we do after it’s been paid.
Tragedy is a toll frequently demanded of us, both in fiction and reality. The cost of overt queerness being our own lives is a direct reflection of the violence and shame queer communities face just for daring to exist, to speak, to love where it can be seen. When our stories mirror this— when queer characters are permitted, but only when they lose, only when they serve to reinforce their own powerlessness to survive or gain agency in a narrative that will not, ultimately, protect them— it reinforces the tangible struggle to survive and claim power in real life.
This is not to say queer stories cannot and should never end in tragedy, or that these struggles cannot be explored meaningfully. Of course there is value in narratives and themes that deal with pain, grief, trauma. Horror. But we cannot ignore our history, the landscape in which our stories interact. Queerness has a complicated relationship with the undercurrent between ambiguous and tragic storytelling.
Queer representation is mired in a history of subtextual, subtle conventions necessitated by legal and sociopolitical censorship, communicating meaning to the initiated while flying under the radar of those who were not. Queer authors used these tools to tell their own stories at least as often as they were used to limit their visibility, if not more so, and they manifested in complex ways— themes, codes, narrative cues; entire allegories of queerness that reflect one another and evolve throughout an ever-building social history. These mechanisms, established at the same time the very language of film was being developed, are deeply entrenched to this day and remain both limiting and empowering tools even in a world where the sociopolitical constraints have begun to change.
When queer stories did find their way to the surface there was, for the most part, a price to pay for abandoning these subtextual shields. Herein lies the trap. Overtly queer characters could speak, but they would also die, they would also be the bad guys, their queerness would be an emotional and narrative burden for all to bear. This has not changed as much as we would like to think, even today. Narrative burdens are not just about pain, after all, but rather the reduction of a character’s purpose and story to their queerness. The pervasive reluctance to let queer characters experience a full spectrum of humanity is alive and well in contemporary media.
The selection of queer stories and characters over the last century of visual media that do not focus on struggles directly related to queerness, serve to educate or support the journeys of non-queer main characters, villainize queer-coded attributes or behaviors, or end in tragedy is limited to this day. And in many of these cases they are still consigned to subtext, to intrinsically queer stories crafted for plausible deniability or easy dismissal through the heteronormative lens. Sometimes by force, sometimes by pure artistic and creative circumstance, sometimes by defiant, subtle protest. Sometimes by acts of love.
Or, as we have so fascinatingly followed over fifteen years on Supernatural, by all of the above.
Supernatural does not exist in a vacuum, as a queer narrative it works in conversation with and in reflection of its predecessors and contemporaries in fiction. This wasn’t just one story that ended in tragedy on its own. This was a show absolutely steeped in the roots of its deeply queer predecessors, from 50’s road narratives to 80’s B horror, and its own mechanisms for exploring their themes drew directly from how queerness was portrayed and interwoven through these foundational genres and stories. Its characters were based on their archetypes, its mythos was fueled by their allegories. This story was in creative conversation with queer history, queer horror, and queer subversion. With its own soul and predestined limitations.
You don’t have scenes like Dean’s tap dance with the lamp in The Heroes’ Journey in ignorance of the Hays Code, you don't have his attraction to the siren in Sex and Violence in ignorance of queer horror, you don’t have Ash dropping a Pink Flamingos reference to Dean in ignorance of transgressive queer cinema, to scratch the surface of examples. Hell, this story was operating in a post-Brokeback Mountain world, even trending the tag #Brokebacknatural after a particularly brazen episode involving Dean, Castiel, bears, and cowboy role play. These stories and social histories inform and build on one another. Supernatural is a frayed thread in a much wider and messier cinematic fabric.
What made Supernatural so valuable, and so unexpected, was that this was not just a conversation about recognition, but about subversion. This show knew the trap, there was an intimate understanding of the choice between quiet queerness and overt tragedy that had bound the forerunners in its very DNA. This was not a program greenlit with queer leads, its audiences were fraught and miscalculated, and it was playing by a different rulebook from the seeming contemporaries ten years its junior that are afforded queerness with varying privilege. Supernatural was playing a sophisticated, risky game. Push the subtextual restraints until they break. Hold the pieces up to the world’s eyes. Dare it to put them back.
Dean danced with a lamp on his way to a partner, he made Cas dress like a cowboy so they could cozy up on the couch and watch Tombstone. Supernatural took conventions that defined queerness through the margins, through uncertainty and anxiety, through monstrosity and asked the audience not only to love the monster, but to wonder how it takes its coffee in the morning. The monster at the end of the book was never a character, after all, but the preconceptions— who is bad, who is deserving, who even put those pages in the book— that led us to construct the very monstrosity we feared. The monster we punished.
The show used the tools of its predecessors to build queerness into its narrative until it was too fundamental to the structure of the story itself to deny. The story became so profoundly tied to the subversion of its own foundations that it couldn't uphold its deepest one.
Supernatural, finally, said no, the system that punishes characters for their identities is the villain, has been all along, and they will break free of the both the repression and the tragedy it would force upon them.
A gritty Americana horror show, a show that “isn’t about that” and doesn’t have room for something as frivolous, girly, or queer as romance, could break free of its own falsely mythologized masculinity and violence— its expectations, its narrative shields— to allow a more genuine story to be told. The one that had organically grown in the cracks where culture meets fiction, where queer roots had against all odds managed to blossom, and the sunlight it had finally reached would not require darkness to follow. This story could weaponize its own cultural underpinnings to highlight and subvert the controls of both the real world and the storytelling it ordains.
Supernatural was not building toward a tragic end, it was actively commenting on the ultimate uselessness and sin of demanding tragedy in a story about love, self-acceptance, and truth. In a story where queerness has broken free of its textual and historical restraints, because the story itself has, the characters can escape the tragedy prescribed by this freedom.
So yes, while not all queer stories need to end happily, this one did. Its very nature demanded it.
Supernatural’s ending wasn't just a betrayal of its themes, characters, narrative, creatives, and audience. It was a betrayal of its own history.
In its wake, the audience is left sorting through the confusing wreckage. Trying to separate what was from what could have been, to appreciate, to mourn, to extricate some semblance of meaning from the journey both because of and despite its final moments.
What did this cost them, and what are they left with.
The cost, most evidently, lies in what the story itself meant to people, and what parts of themselves they got to see in it and understand through it. Building on Supernatural’s place in a broader cultural framework of queer storytelling, this is about who the characters themselves were, and what they could have been. Landmark representation, an unprecedented romance— Dean and Castiel are significant. But the nature of their significance has changed, undeniably, in the aftermath.
Dean Winchester is a rare character in popular media, let alone queer media. This is someone we got to see grow over fifteen years, watching his psychology and relationships explored and developed consistently over what, for some fans even, was nearly a lifetime— this is remarkable for any character, and nearly nonexistent with regard to queer representation.
A character introduced beneath a veil of superficial masculinity, whose complexity is gradually teased out year by year as he grapples with guilt, shame, self-hatred, and the overwhelming responsibility to live and die for a punishing father and god. Who slowly learns to overcome those expectations, to choose who he wants to be and accept that his love is not wrong, his vulnerability is not shameful, his life is his own. It is a meaningful journey, and it is clear why it is so immensely resonant for queer audiences. The idea that you can be all of these things, that you can survive all of these things, and still come out the other side whole and strong. That you can come out the other side and be loved. It is a narrative that is rarely granted to queer characters.
Moreover, seeing this play out for a blue-collar, bisexual Gen X man, a rough monster-hunter who loves hugs and Scooby Doo pajamas, whose identity and its expression are not at odds with one another but all simply part of who he is? This bisexual man finding romantic love in his forties? Name five characters off the top of your head, right now.
Dean began as an archetype enmeshed in the shadows of Dean Moriarty and Han Solo, simultaneously queer and fitted into conventions of hypermasculinity that, through their history and through our own biases, endeavored to convince the audience and the characters themselves who Dean was supposed to be and what he was supposed to want. Conventions working in tandem with our assumptions of their inherent conflict, that a character like this cannot be like that even as he so clearly is this and that on our very screens. Dean’s journey as a character to redefine these foundations reflects his journey as a person— authenticity’s victory over a prescribed performance. Integrating who you choose to be with what rings true to your soul, to define what that means to you and use this definition to claim space.
Dean’s story was a coming out story in many ways, but it wasn’t him coming out to the audience. It was the audience coming out from its own preconceptions about what it understood or expected of queerness and masculinity in the first place.
This is incredibly meaningful, even cut short and undermined by his powerless death and silent departure. Dean Winchester is, and will always be, representative and validating to those who connect with his journey and see themselves in him. He is a queer character— not just queer-coded, not subtextually queer. Dean is a bisexual character by any reasonable standard of media analysis. But one can’t help but reflect on how much greater his impact would have been if he’d been allowed to answer Castiel’s “I love you”, if his story had ended the way it had obviously built toward, if the themes of the story at large had been permitted to carry through. Had he been allowed to choose, finally, what he wanted. Had he gotten to live a life, unapologetically and peacefully realized in the identity he had fought for.
Who, among the audience, would have gotten to live along with him?
Castiel’s story leaves us with similar, painful questions.
In terms of representation, Castiel is both unique and familiar. A genderless being who has had female and male forms, though he is presented primarily through a male body, with no particular attachment to the sexual or gender norms of human societies. Castiel’s identity is ambiguous and it is his own, and there is great value to his character’s ability to speak to so many different experiences throughout an authentic, moving journey of self-determination and love.
Castiel was a queer character from the start, in a way Dean wouldn’t have explicitly been allowed in the not-so-distant media landscape of 2008. His queerness was different from Dean’s in its accessibility through the established, practiced lenses of sci-fi and horror— the queer alien, the queer monster, packaged in a conventionally attractive white man’s body. “Other”, but “normal” enough to sell down the middle. Yet Castiel’s character, like Dean’s, like the narrative of Supernatural as a whole, superseded the conventions he was built on. As he broke free of heaven’s control and began his own journey of actualization, the character began to reclaim autonomy from both the storytelling mechanisms that would limit him and the standards of masculinity and heteronormativity that limited the story itself. Cas became the exception to the rules, within the story and without.
This journey is powerful. It is a story about developing your identity and sense of self and fighting to be loved for who you truly are. A story that tells you no matter how many times you fall, no matter how many times you think you can’t be wanted, forgiven, or loved, there is still hope in your choices. Because you can, always, choose, and you can be chosen in return. Castiel’s fundamentally queer narrative led him through it all to learn that his own love is beautiful, that it is the truth of his soul— it’s the truth that defies control or expectation.
He learned that happiness, it’s in just being.
And when it comes to queer representation, just being is one of the rarest privileges of all.
Even after its traumatic, sacrificial end, Castiel’s story is consequential. People will always be able to connect with his character, to find hope in his growth and strength in his freedom. And though he was already canonically queer, his confession to Dean is still a beautifully validating, profoundly emotional, expectation-shattering moment, and deserves its place in making queer media history.
Yet Castiel’s story remains unfinished, his bid for true release unanswered.
Yes, the being was monumental. But what about the having? What about the living. What an impact it would have made to see Castiel not only accept his truth, but experience it openly and without fear. What a point Supernatural would have made to let him remain happy, to find power in this happiness rather than his own undoing. To see him receive the love he deserved and finally realize that he deserved it.
What a statement it would have been for Supernatural to not only embrace Dean and Castiel for everything they were, but to reward them for it. Who deserves a happy ending, who can be a lead character, what queerness can look like, what identities have a place in self-enforced “masculine” or cis-heterosexual spaces.
What love can overcome.
Or, as we were reminded, what it can’t.
Supernatural had a chance to finish this story in a way we’d never seen before. It had a chance to allow queer narratives, queer authors power— over the media conventions that would contain them, over a history that would deny them space, over a world that had refused to see them. What makes the ending so particularly painful is not just that it failed to deliver, it’s that it so purposefully undermined everything the show had been built to subvert, and the very real movements and communities that the empowerment of these messages would have served.
The collective end to both Dean and Castiel’s character arcs and their romantic narrative has done irreparable damage to the story, its legacy, and its fans. It signaled, once again, what happens to marginalized people when they get too close to gaining ground, when they can no longer be ignored. Their deaths were violent and senseless, even Castiel’s nobly-intended sacrifice was rendered meaningless in retrospect of Dean’s own demise two episodes later. Their romance, left emotionally and structurally unresolved, was erased in its final moments, and with it one of the last chances to ever see a story like it claim space.
Dean and Castiel’s romance truly was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. An imperfect and chaotic storm of casting chemistry, vacillating authorial intent, semiconsciously queer and romantic narrative foundations and themes, evolving social norms and audience expectations, fandom interconnectivity, shifts in the priorities and structures of the entertainment industry— and, importantly, a huge heaping of pure luck, culminating in a decade-fought battle between creative purpose and narrative, social, and financial demands to produce one of the most emotionally resonant slow-burn queer love stories to ever grace a primetime evening slot. We will never see anything like it again.
As the last of the legacy network shows die out, there just will not be another opportunity for a queer story to grow in quite in this way— over fifteen organic, messy, defiant and painful years. By accident, and then not. That’s a good thing, in many respects, but there is value in the imperfection and authenticity of a story that was never meant to be so resoundingly doing so anyway.
That’s what it’s all about, after all. Dean and Castiel’s love story is, at its core, about defying the odds. It is liberation from the things that control us, whether from within or without, to find ultimate salvation and power through love. Through the truth. This is the significance of their romance to the show itself, but also to its place in a broader history of queer narratives and the dismantling of what controls them in the real world.
They almost did it. After over a decade of pushing it was happening, they were so close— closer than most fans, out of hard-learned self-preservation, had ever let themselves believe they could get, who suddenly found themselves excited and hopeful in a way they had fought against for years. Castiel confessed his love to Dean, and the world held its breath. The world trended on Twitter over a U.S. presidential election as it held its breath. People had faith in what came next because the alternative was so unimaginably cruel, many simply didn't let themselves imagine it. Or let themselves remember the times it had happened before.
They wouldn’t elevate and outright confirm the queer romance— wouldn’t frame that love as the emotional foundation of the season, the story, reality as the characters knew it, wouldn’t make that love integral to the success of the show’s own subversion of its historical and artistic constraints— just to kill it, would they?
Would they.
This queer story was finally given a voice, only to be met with utter, purposeful silence. To be met with violence. It is not surprising that fans are left wondering if they ever should have asked to speak at all. Wondering why, this time, they let themselves.
Because that’s the crux of it, isn’t it. This question queer audiences find themselves so painfully faced with again.
Was the being worth the losing.
Would they give up their own stories rather than see themselves die, see themselves forgotten. Again.
Should they have ever tried to escape the trap.
Many will tell you they’d rather have never heard Castiel say “I love you”, if it meant he could have come back. If it meant they wouldn’t have to watch Dean die with his only words pointedly affirming the worst— that all along his sole purpose in life had been for his brother, nothing and no one else— that they were fools for thinking otherwise. They’ll tell you they would give up Cas’s confession, Dean’s prayer, the mixtape, anything, that they would have taken a quieter love if it meant they could survive to see it, if only in the sanctuary of their own spaces.
If it meant they wouldn’t have to experience the particular and purposeful cruelty of hope.
In your own more vulnerable moments, would you say the same?
It is the futility of these questions, the powerlessness of the trade that speaks to why this has become so real and so deeply personal. If we give up the stories that hurt us, how many would we have left? If we deny these foundations, what would we build on, whose voices would be lost? If we erase ourselves to spare the pain, what will be left to see? What would come after?
It is the grief of the realization that we can’t change what happened, what came before— that this is our history. That things have not changed as much as the last decade would have us believe. It is the painful truth of what we have been put through, and the innate desire to turn that pain into something beautiful, something powerful. And that this history in itself already was, still is, beautiful.
There is dangerous vulnerability in letting yourself hope that this time it might be different, and in understanding that nothing will change if you let yourself stop hoping. In a seemingly continuous cycle, we are kept in a position where love is both our weakness and our power, both the trap and the means to our escape. The sharp reminders of this reality come to us through our comforts just as easily as through our fears.
In their aftermath, the way forward is rarely clear. The immediate weeks of outrage over Supernatural’s finale produced thousands of posts, memes, and essays, millions of engagements on platforms like Twitter and Tumblr as people responded directly with their disappointment, confusion, and pain. Hashtags trended globally with demands for recognition and culpability. Even months out, the conversation is far from over and the spark is far from burned as these questions remain blatantly unanswered. People will continue to trend, talk, and create for years to come.
The awareness raised by these efforts is significant, as are the passions stoked in a generation who will undoubtedly take them elsewhere. The true legacy of Supernatural is yet to be seen through the people who have been inspired— whether through anger or love, grief or compassion— by what happened to this queer story, how close it got and how appallingly it fell. By the fact that it dared to question its own place, expectations, and limitations at all.
For some, the story can be reclaimed through art and transformative works. In a long tradition of empowerment through folk art and creativity fans will continue to celebrate their own renditions of Supernatural. There is power in this, and fanworks will always be channels for exploration, community, and resistance. Although, of course, it must be acknowledged that their existence does not excuse or minimize what was delivered by the canon. There is an underlying and normalized expectation that it is the responsibility of marginalized communities to reclaim and reinvent stories to salvage their own representation, which downplays the fact that this reclamation has historically been a response to and defense against the suppression, neglect, and disrespect of their experiences in the first place. Popular media does not get to claim transformative works as its own outlet for the representation it refuses to provide. That power, as they say, belongs to the people.
As it stands, there remains an empty space where Supernatural would have fit had it delivered its ending as intended. Our voices echo in it. Our own stories may one day come to fill it. But no one will quite forget what that emptiness felt like.
What happened to this show is a valuable, devastating study. It is an autopsy of queer resistance that, at great cost, managed to reveal the lie— that the deep-seated structures in place to limit queer storytelling are not inevitable, but enforced, and they are not immovable or inexhaustible. That we can push back, no matter how gradually or imperfectly, when we have our own truths to tell. Yes, Supernatural ended in tragedy, it did not escape the trap, but it did make us question who had set it. It challenged us to consider why it was there at all, and what escape means to each of us.
We can only hope that, with enough time, love may repay its price.
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