Well, friends, Supernatural returns for its fifteenth and final season tomorrow night. I recently finished the seventh season of Supernatural, yet somehow I am not even halfway done. It is, experientially, the longest show that has ever aired on television, the show that launched a thousand gifs, the show that has never let a woman or a black character survive in all its years of running. (I love Supernatural but OMG it’s a mess.) And as it veers into its final season, freeing up its leads to spend all their time making the con circuit and charge $2500 for photographs, we come to bury Supernatural with the following list of fifteen things that did not exist when Supernatural premiered on 13 September 2005.
1) the network that Supernatural airs on
Yup, that’s right! The CW did not exist in 2005! It launched in September of 2006 with a slate of programs gleaned from the newly defunct UPN and The WB, may their memories be a blessing. Every good program that aired in the mid-aughts was on one of those two networks, so it is no surprise that the CW has become home to many of the greatest television shows of our time, by which I mean Jane the Virgin, Vampire Diaries, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.
(Ask me about my conspiracy theory that Supernatural kicked up its use of gendered slurs as the CW began to target women audiences more heavily.)1
2) Breitbart
Remember the Time Before, when Nazis weren’t that big of a thing in America and we could kind of relax about Nazis? I vividly remember going to England and learning about their politics over there and thinking “Well, America’s fucked too, but at least we don’t have literal Nazis in the government.” Now we do, and it’s Breitbart News’s fault. Fuck you, Steve Bannon.
3) Not one not two BUT THREE media formats (HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, and streaming)
I recently put the DVD of North and South into my DVD player and watched it on DVD, and I felt as old-fashioned as if I were playing the Cabaret cast recording on vinyl. But it’s worth noting that when Supernatural began, we were not one but two jumps away from our current media consumption habits: DVDs had not yet been supplanted by Blu-Rays, which were officially released on 20 June 2006 and had won the arms race against HD-DVD by February 2008.
But Blu-Ray’s primacy over DVDs, never uncontested by old farts like me who are still using their same $25 DVD player they bought at Walmart in aught-three, soon fell to services like Amazon Unbox (remember that? Ha, what a terrible name), Netflix, and Hulu. Soon I guess we are going to enter into a new phase where everything is just Disney and nothing’s not Disney and we all serve the Mouse, forever and ever, amen.
4) the perma-recession that tanked millennials’ homebuying capability and any possibility most of us had of building equity
When Supernatural began, we thought that if we went to college and behaved in accordance with our parents’ expectations, we would someday be lawyers and own homes. What fools!
But seriously, baby boomers tanked the economy for the rest of us, decimated what little wealth black communities in particular had managed to amass after centuries of oppression, and now want to write articles about how we don’t own houses because we eat too much avocado toast. Along with the hope that Supernatural would ever not kill a lady character, our dreams of financial stability have slowly perished. We’re also all going to drown in the rising seas. This is the world corporations have built, and the wealthy have the only lifeboats.
5) Fiona the Hippo
I mean, obviously. Fiona’s just a baby. But that last one was pretty dark, and I wanted us to have a breather. Look at this lil hippo bb.
6) the Marvel Cinematic Universe
For some reason, this is the one I keep tripping over. The MCU? Did not exist? Before Supernatural? There have been so many movies in the MCU, and I have grown so accustomed to its omnipresence, that I struggle to believe it ever didn’t exist. But I have fact-checked this claim repeatedly, and I am now prepared to share the results of that fact-check with you: The MCU began with Iron Man One, and Iron Man One came out in 2008. When Supernatural started in 2005, we believed that superhero movies were over. But see above wherein Disney.
7) Twitter
Yes, Supernatural predates the blue bird hellsite. And most of the other social media used by non-olds to this day. Instagram. Tumblr. Whatever Tik Tok is, with its VSCO girls, whatever they are. The empire of Vine rose and fell whilst Supernatural was trying to decide whether Misha Collins rated being made into a series regular.
The above gif could never have happened when Supernatural was first airing. There was no such hellsite.
8) JK Rowling’s habit of saying at-best-oblivious-and-bigoted-at-worst nonsense that slowly kills our love for her and our childhoods
In 2005, we did not yet know that I WAS RIGHT about Snape knowing Lily and Petunia as children, a high-level act of rightness by me that goes grievously unacknowledged in our contemporary discourse. More importantly, because the Harry Potter books weren’t finished yet, we didn’t have to put up with JK Rowling getting on the internet every twenty minutes to give us retconny updates to make her past self seem woker.
There was no History of Magic in North America. The Grindelwald/Hitler analogy remained reasonably unfleshed out. If you had asked 2005 me whether JK Rowling would knowingly support and defend an admitted domestic abuser, I would have blithely assured you that that would never happen. Ah, for lost innocence.
ETA: This got so much worse since I first wrote this post. JK Rowling had been lowkey seeming TERFy for years, but then she went all in on being a TERF. Support trans authors! JK Rowling sucks!
9) iPhones
Despite being the latest of iPhone adopters myself (I ungraciously accepted a hand-me-down iPhone 4 in 2016 only because I wanted to do group texting; I do not to this day have a data plan), a time without smartphones feels as far distant as, like, moral panic over the invention of the wireless. Nevertheless, and I am sorry if this makes you feel elderly, Supernatural existed before THE TOUCHSCREEN PHONE, of which the iPhone is the famousest. A fun adventures is to watch early Supernatural and confront the fact that Dean isn’t a technophobe—that’s just what phones were like.
(On a personal note, I did not own a cell phone at all when Supernatural premiered. If someone I was supposed to meet up with forgot about it or was running late, I waited twenty minutes and then just went the fuck home.)
10) the Large Hadron Collider
I do not understand what the Large Hadron Collider is. To the best of my understanding, it is a Very Advanced Science Object that bashes two tiny mysterious things into each other, and Science comes out. And maybe God. I include it on this list to commemorate a time when there could be science news that didn’t make us want to crawl into a hole and wait for death to claim us. Now all the science news is just more and more ways the world’s going to kill us. See above wherein: rising seas.
(Not for nothing, when Supernatural premiered, we still had nine planets. My very excellent mother just served us nine—what? Nine nothings. Science was better in aught-five, I think.)
11) AirBNB
I swear I’ll have a happy one next, but remember before when I said that our generation can’t buy homes because of the goddamn recession? Another part of the housing problem we now face is that AirBNB, founded in 2008, has accelerated gentrification while accruing financial benefit mainly to white, wealthy homeowners. In particular, short-term housing like AirBNB has decimated historically black neighborhoods by driving locals out, raising the cost of housing so future locals can’t move in, and generally prioritizing the needs of (largely white, largely middle-class-and-up) tourists over the housing crisis faced by actual residents of those actual cities. When Supernatural first aired, we only had to worry about garden-variety gentrification; now, VC-backed “disrupters” of the hotel/real estate industries can exacerbate income inequality even faster.
EAT THE RICH.
12) The resurgence of indie bookstores
Ready for some good news? Indie bookstores have bounced back massively since Supernatural premiered. Prophets of bookish doom predicted that ebooks would mark the end, the absolute end, of physical book-buying as we know it, especially after Amazon hopped into the ebook game with the Kindle in 2007. But then, in a true underdog story, indies across America grew by 35 percent between 2009 and 2015. I could not have predicted this, but we are all blessed by it.
(My wish for indie bookstores in the future is that they become more friendly to romance readers. Thanks in advance, indies! Love you!)
13) Gifs
Okay, okay, gifs were around long before Supernatural was, and I am, therefore, fudging a little bit. But you know what wasn’t around before Supernatural? Us using gifs. My own introduction to gifs came with a Tumblr blog entitled What Should We Call Me, and it’s been downhill ever since. I thought it merited a mention here because of how ubiquitous gifs have become. It didn’t used to be that way! I didn’t used to use gifs for every damn thing! And I’d like to think that Supernatural, which famously has a gif for everything, was a little part of that change.
This is your periodic reminder that gifs can be an accessibility nightmare. Twitter, for instance, does not have the functionality of adding an image description to a gif the way you can to a still picture. If you’re using a gif, don’t forget to include a description of what’s happening in it so that people with screen readers can enjoy them too!
14) Two entire countries
I take it back, this is the item on the list that surprises me the most. It’s not the MCU. I could have accepted one new country, especially because I was paying a lot of attention to the events surrounding the establishment of South Sudan in 2011. But South Sudan isn’t even the only country that has been established since Supernatural went on the air! Somehow! Montenegro was part of the former Yugoslavia, then part of a state union with Serbia, and only in May 2006 did it regain its status as an independent nation. Way to go, Montenegro and South Sudan! You are of much greater worth than this dumb demon-hunting show that I resent sometimes having feelings about!
(I don’t know anything about Montenegro, really, but I would like to take this parenthetical aside as an opportunity to mention that Grantland reviewed various national anthems for the 2012 Olympics, and their presumptive translation of Montenegro’s national anthem is really great. Go Montenegro!)
15) Archive of Our Own
This one seems wonderfully suitable, doesn’t it? For better or worse, Supernatural shaped a lot of fandom, not least by being ground zero for the Omegaverse, a concept I have now had to explain to more than two adult humans whose good opinions I still crave. The Archive went into open beta in 2009 and has been hosting more and more fanworks ever since then. It’s even won a Hugo, which the World Science Fiction Society wants you to know definitely means that every person who’s ever posted a fanwork on AO3 is now a Hugo winner. Please tell this to all your friends. The World Science Fiction Society really wants everyone to know that all creators on AO3 are definitely, indisputably, 100% Hugo winners.
Mmm, this has been a jolly tour through the past. I think the main thing we’ve learned is that the rich are monsters who would gleefully ascend a mountain made of our corpses in order to sit atop Corpse Mountain on a golden throne. If there is any joy to be found in this world by shopping at indie bookstores, gazing upon a frolicsome hippo, or watching a very dumb show that has somehow lasted fifteen seasons despite having run out of plot sometime in the Obama presidency, we must grab that joy with both hands and wrest the joy-marrow from its joy-bones using teeth made sharp by precarity and terror. Happy October.
- That’s it, that’s the conspiracy theory. ↩