Yesterday it was announced by the lead actors that Supernatural the TV show will end with the finale of its 15th season.
A few facts that came to mind when I heard the news:
The pilot episode (called, remarkably, ‘Pilot’) aired on 13th September, 2005.
The show went through the first 5 or 6 seasons of its life under constant threat of cancellation. However:
The show is older than the network that now broadcasts it - the CW launched 18th September 2006.
A few feelings that hit me heavier and heavier as the day went on:
Yes, it’s ok that it’s ending. After all, The Winchester Boys have been through everything they possibly could have been through. What do you write about after 327 episodes?
The friends I’ve made along the way - the fandom events, the writing fanfiction, the competitions, the rewatches, the hiatuses, and everything in between.
I remember going on the piss with friends, coming back to the flat, putting on the latest season disc of SPN and drinking at least 2 pints of tea before I went to bed.
I remember the writer’s strike of around 2007, which helped screenwriters get paid much more fairly for their work, and the fact that we all supported them, even though it meant season 3 was 16 episodes long instead of the usual 20-21.
I remember moving to a new flat on 16th September 2008, and scrambling to make damn sure my internet was plumbed in ready for 18th, when season 4 would premier.
I remember watching episodes live - for everyone else it was Thursday night, but for me it was Friday 6 - 7am as I was in HK at that time. But we all got on the SPN fan Hell Bus for tweeting shenanigans, so that we were watching along with a group of people just not in the same room, or had people to talk to about the episode and lots besides.
I remember making new ringtones every week from best lines from the show.
I remember the LOLcaps to reacp each episode on Livejournal, the SPN Headlines of the week, and the icons I made for a dozen smaller, lower resolution social media platforms of the time.
Most of all I remember the fanfiction. I remember the now defunct SupernaturalVille site. Taken out by a DDoS attack some years ago, it was just too much to try to get everything back and put it back together. I understand why the volunteers who had real lives didn’t have the resources to rebuild it, but it still makes me sad to know that everything there was lost. I learnt a lot about writing, a lot about cliffhangers, about giving the readers what they wanted but in such a way that it was satisfying, not placating. I learnt a lot about group writing, about round robins, about putting stories together, about pulling others apart, about citing references for other writers to help and communicate. It’s safe to say that without SupernaturalVille, I would not be writing today. It shaped me as a writer, as a communicator, as someone who had found something they enjoyed doing and also that some people enjoyed reading what I was producing. Luckily, at the time I was posting everything that went on the fic site to Fanfiction .net as well - so when the site went, I did at least have digital-ready copies (as well as my own back-ups offline). Some of these I have reposted at Archive Of Our Own, so my work is still out there. I haven’t done a SPN fic in ages, but that doesn’t mean I don’t feel it’s still around. I didn’t sit down and decide I would never write for them every again; when Constantine came along I really wanted a crossover with The Boys so I wrote it, for example.
And now we get to the crux of the matter; writing. Some of my best work ever (and my only script ever) was written for SPN. I was living in a slipstream back then; I was writing constantly, getting about 2,000+ words written a day (on a work day), and then upwards of that on a Saturday before evening parties and shenanigans. Sundays were reserved for polishing the latest chapter that was then posted online for the world, and then going over the week’s fresh writing on the new Work In Progress so far and tidying, checking, fixing continuity or changing plots. The links were posted to social media, and then once everything was suitably pimped out, I had a shower, jumped on the bus, and went out to the weekly pub quiz. Life was perfect - simple, exactly as I wanted it, and I was producing over 15 works a year, running to an average of probably 30,000 words each. To date, I have over 1,600,000 words on the FF .net archive, and the bulk of those are SPN fics or crossovers.
There were the banner-making competitions, the fandom events, the convention circuit write-ups, the swapping of contacts and social media handles - the friends we have made and the support groups we have become. It’s a huge, huge movement, and campaigns such as Always Keep Fighting, the GISHWHES and Wayward AF have only made things official and expanded the network of fans prepared to help other fans they’ve never met simply because they like the same things.
In short, the show may be ending in late May 2020, but everything it has given the fans, and the non-fans helped out indirectly by those same fans, will not. I have a lot more to say on the writing I’ve done over the years for this and other fandoms, but this is not the time. That will come later, when I’ve had a chat with myself over not writing as much as I know I want to.
For now though, we have the rest of season 14 to look forward to, and then season 15.
And that’s ok.
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