stacked day 47: 4.08
half baked...
There is a man named Wesley in the backseat of the Impala. He whines about how, since Sam and Dean are handsome, they do not understand his struggles. His struggles: no one wants to fuck him!
This man is in the car with our protagonists because he wished upon a cursed Babylonian coin that a woman, Hope, would fall in love with him. After installing the coin in the fountain of a local Chinese restaurant, many a resident of the town’s wish comes true. This includes: a teen boy who becomes invisible so he can spy on women, a little girl’s teddy bear comes to life, and a really good sandwich for Dean. The problem is these wishes go bad—the woman who is wished into love becomes violently possessive, the teddy bear becomes a suicidal alcoholic, and the sandwich makes you vomit. An episode with the basic premise “be careful what you wish for”—fun!
This episode is very funny; you really cannot beat a giant teddy bear shooting itself in the head and then wailing in misery that it did not die (you can’t blow your brains out if you don’t have a brain!). The little girl who wished for this is not nearly concerned enough, not by the bear itself or the random adult men that come to her home claiming to be teddy bear doctors. There is a child who wishes to be strong enough to beat up his bullies; he lifts a car over his head and kicks Dean’s ass. It’s all great! Wesley was patient zero for the wishes and so he is the only one who can remove the coin from the well. He does, and everything is undone. Hope, kind of disgustingly horny and frantic throughout the episode, now looks at him like a stranger. I like this conclusion: Wesley starts to feel guilty as Hope’s behavior becomes more erratic; she wishes for Sam to get hit by lightning when she realizes he is hoping to reverse the spell. This is not love, even a pretty gross loser guy can recognize. Hope basically having no memory of the experience works for me—she doesn’t need the trauma of coercion, he doesn’t deserve the courtesy of attention even if it’s getting told off for what he did. Instead, he is just as alone as before. Nice.
There are a lot of incel-adjacent characters in Supernatural. Thee are a lot of guys Sam and Dean dismiss because of the type of masculinity they fit into. These characters sometimes overlap; scrawny kinda guys, maybe really into nerd shit. They probably resemble the guys that write Supernatural! There is so often a sinister, specific type of violence potentiated with this form of masculinity (or emasculation), as opposed to the retributive violence of our Big Strong Tough guy leads. Male power fantasy is one thing, but I find the villainizing of its counter to be really interesting—of course, toxicity lives in every form of masculinity, which Supernatural knows, too.
This is one of the reasons I really love “Mint Condition,” the way it engages with these archetypes with giddiness instead of malice. There’s nothing particular about Wesley outside of the fact that he’s a frumpy dude with glasses who coerces a woman into being with him—but, he’s a flavor of the film student in 8.04 “Bitten” and each shapeshifter we’ve dealt with. In the car, he tells Sam and Dean they don’t understand his struggles, because they meet a specific male beauty standard. They are irritated, of course, because their lives kinda suck—Dean is quite literally working through his hell trauma—but I find Dean’s response to be so fascinating. He says, “we never get what we want.” Wanting, desire, the notion of what is deserved—these are threaded throughout Supernatural, pretty much always out of reach. It’s interesting, I think, this brief exchange that demonstrates Sam and Dean’s disdain for this brand of male entitlement; Dean expresses that they never get what they want—and despite his discontent, he’s not doing anything to change that. I think about this against Season 6 of Buffy, in which toxic nerdboys were the villain despite the show never really seriously dealing with the reality of Xander, ever-present in the main cast. The show struggled to distinguish between these entitled behaviors, ultimately choosing Spike to demonstrate the potential of harm from men close to you. But, rather than a coherent dissection of masculinity, Supernatural plays with the lack of fulfillment of each brother’s desire in order to give them fodder for self-hatred—they both fear monstrosity them meeting, both actively dealing with some proximity to it this season: Sam is literally drinking the blood of the demon he is sleeping with, and Dean is dealing with hell trauma. This sort of outright rejection of fulfilment from Dean, very quick and glib, nods to this: no, he doesn’t get what he wants, because he does not think he deserves it.
Stray Observations
I almost didn’t send this one today cuz I didn’t really feel the passion for what I wrote but I find it useful to at least have a log of all of this shit…surely one day I will write an entire book about nerd man violence in genre television
I was suuuuper nauseous while watching this episode and so when Dean was throwing up I had to keep telling myself don’t throw up don’t throw up don’t throw up. Luckily it worked!
Sam and Dean pretty privilege <3