HBO Supernatural tepid takes
Hey, hereâs a fact that none of you like to acknowledge:
Sam and Dean werenât visibly tattooed and pierced with wild hair colors because they were high-profile criminals.
Being average-ish looking white dudes, it was easy for them to melt into crowds and be mistaken for other people. Easily identifiable marks like tattoos, piercings, and variant hair colors would have been the first descriptors on their rap sheets and all law enforcement would have circulated that information right up there with âtall, white male, mid-thirtiesâ and whatever.
They lacked visible tattoos on purpose.
Fun side note: This is why I headcanon that the Winchesters both have strict skincare regimes!! They got beat to shit and sliced up and Dean had that huge crack on his head for several episodes. But they didnât paint the scar on JAâs head in subsequent seasons. The Winchesters rarely carried around injuries for more than a few eps.
Broke: Dangerous-looking bad-boy sigil tattoos
Woke: Few distinctive features for the FBI to track
Bespoke:Â Moisturize, moisturize, moisturize
I am telling you, these motherfuckers BATHED in Mederma. Also, like. Logic is a thing and I can tell how many of you are unprepared to be even half-decent criminals.
ON THE OTHER HAND, if youâre going to introduce lore about the Winchesters having certain powers to mask this (lmao okay BRL but whatever) or go harder on the point of the Winchesters actually being supernaturally different, right down to the biological level and/or powerful witches capable of covering their identifying marks in an instant?? NOW Iâm tuning in. But you canât make a prominent point about the Winchesters having burned their public identities (as they did, several times, in very clever and story-changing ways) without giving them the ability to anonymize themselves.
Their ability to do all they did, for years and years, almost completely under the radar, was a skill in and of itself. This probably would have even been something that John drilled into them along with offensive tactics because disappearing is, in itself, a defensive tactic as strong as any which uses a weapon. For the hundredth time, I point to (imo) one of the best episodes in canon, 02.12, Nightshifter, where the get-away is super fucking clean. So clean that you know it was something they were able to get away with from moment one, when the bank doors were locked. So clean that they had no qualms about staying there to finish the job, completely unarmed, because the work still had to wrap before theyâd leave. So FUCKING smooth that the ep ends with one of the most breathtaking, quietly badass moments in the history of the show.
If you donât buy what Iâm saying here, well, itâs okay pooky. The first step is admitting youâre fucking wrong.
But the second step is recalling all of oh, hmm, what was it, oh yeah almost the entirety of Season Seven, where their arguably nondescript black car without distinctive outward modifications was still used to track them to the point that they had to abandon the Impala from 07.06 to 07.23, a period spanning 9 months and only ending because they deliberately break cover in the attack on Dick Roman. To emphasize the point, it was only possible for the Leviathan to make Sam and Dean notorious in 07.06 after doubling them and reproducing their car only by showing their doubles committing mass murders on video. Without the video element and with no outward marks like ink and hair color to define them, well, uh. This is America. They would have just been another two white dudes gunning down people wherever they went. It would have made them a part of a slow news day, tbh.
Side-note: Big connection between 02.12 and S07? Ben Edlund. One of the few real logic-followers who ever contributed to the show. He wrote Nightshifter and he was heavy in the producer credits from S06 through S08.
As a final point, I know pretty boy hot (âĄâżâĄâż) and pretty boy hotter with tattoos (ĘâżĘâż) . Okay. I get that. But letâs also talk about the Winchestersâ outward opinions on these things. Dean Gotta-Look-Hetero Winchester wouldnât be down for hair dye or piercings except maybe as a phase after high school, thinking he could recapture the magic and keep dating high school girls (ugh) by dying his hair and looking a lil dangerous.
Sam Already-A-Longhair WinchesterâŚ. had his long hair, which was already to some degree a stalwart defiance of John Winchesterâs Regulations For Hunting Good. Iâm pretty sure Sam also just, like, kinda liked his hair? He kept it long after Johnâs death. He always kept it long. It was just a level of comfort for him and probably the kind of preening he allowed himself. Dean had leather jackets; Sam had nice hair. It was just a thing.
However, on a more basic level, and a more story-focused one, at that, none of the Winchesters are going to have bodies full of tattoos while they live in a universe where djinn are a danger to the people they have vowed to protect.
The hunting uniform was not a thing but pretty obviously still a thing. With a few marked exceptions (like Bela Talbot who was not, strictly speaking, a hunter, and the Men of Letters who are collectively Above All That), the people who operate in this world on supernatural issues, saving ppl/hunting things/holding vendettas against a species like vampires, all looked pretty similar. The hunters we bumped into from Gordon Walker to Mary to the Campbells to Jesse & Cesar and, like, most the people at Asa Foxâs funeral all had a similar look. All wore similar clothes. All had distinct outward pieces of their personality on display, but largely took steps to make themselves a little indistinct in crowds of regular humans.
Again, this is a preventative measure against law enforcement intervention!! Even Donna and Jody, who WERE law enforcement, swapped out their uniforms and daywear when they clicked over to hunter mode. There is a recognized advantage to being indistinct.
A part of thatâthough likely a small partâis that we donât look like the things we hunt. The out-and-out fact is that djinn are recognizable because of their full-body tattoos. A hunter who was covered with mad tattoos and came across another hunter would likely get flack for that (no big deal; manageable) and, more importantly, they would probably get left for dead in an instant by a less-distinct hunter who didnât want to get caught working beside someone who was so careless as to appear unique (a big deal; could result in death, dismemberment, or prosecution).
Hunters didnât look like demons or angels. They didnât dress in suits like angels and the ones who did dress in suits (MOLs) were extinct in the US where the plaid-and-jeans hunter uniform is more ubiquitous among the working class. Hunters didnât dress in all-black-everything and body-hugging leather like demons because you look at a motherfucker like that, youâre gonna shoot first and go for the exorcism second. If it quacks like a duck.
Now, again: Give me some fucking lore or magic or historical input if youâre going to do this thing. Donât just slap tattoos on the white boys like âthis is gonna be cute and a spinoff or return to this world on a better network would absolutely do this.â If they did, they would be stupid to do that. This was an obvious narrative choice. Even the fact that they got the anti-possession tatt on their chests was an important choice. Itâs harder to find, harder to spot at a glance, and not on a single limb that can be lopped off. Abaddon had to try to dig it off of Deanâs chest when she was attacking him and thatâs obviously not easily done.
[Another side note with spoilers for the final ep: Infuriating that Sam would let his son get the tatt on his arm. All you have to do is cut that sucker off at the elbow, posses the body, and youâve still got another arm to keep doing demon shit with. I mean, actually, they could probably carve off the tattoo once they were inside the body and reattach the arm. Abaddon was still fully operational without her head, after all.]
Alternatively, historical and cultural input!! If youâre going to bring full-body tattooing into the story, then the first thing I want to see is someone who grew up in the hunting tradition from a MÄori family line. ???? Where are those kinds of fucking stories in your fucking HBO reboot universes? I mean thatâs the absolute LEAST of what I would want to see out of a fully-budgeted, laced-out reboot on a better network. I want to see how hunting worked in ancient Persia for fuckâs sake. I want Incan motherfucking rituals for spirit banishing. I want to see the MOL equivalent that quietly and successfully wiped out all monster infestations in a 3rd world nation that has subsequently protected itself and cloaked its successes like Wakanda. Frozen Siberian monster prisons. I want to see how the demigods that are broken out of ancient pottery and slapped down by Sam and Dean were originally rulers of bloody thrones that the Vikings teamed up with.
I want sex. I want cursing. I want some shits and fucks, donât get me wrong. Envelope-pushing. Queers who donât die. And sure they can have full fucking landscapes of protective tattoos on their torsos, maybe tatts hidden perfectly under their cuffs. But that is the LEAST of what I would want to see out of SPN rebooted on a better network. Thereâs a reason that certain elements were spun out the way they were on the show and not all of them are fundamentally lame or uninteresting. There was lame and uninteresting shit that weâre not even talking about and we still donât even really know what kind of playlists Sam listened to when music was such a big element on the show. Like, come the fuck on. Tattoos are the skin. I want the fucking meat.
