Blacknatural
I've been rewriting and recasting Blacknatural in my head so here's the updated cast + storylines. Some of these casting decisions have fundamental story changes, but some of them don't have to change at all (gee it's almost like Black people are just as capable of representing the human experience as white people..........)
Mary Campbell Winchester: Nicole Beharie
Mary comes from a long line of hunters who balance hunting and living a life by operating more as defenders than hunters. They never seek out threats, they only defend their community against monsters that do harm. She's good at what she does and loves doing it. When she announces she's marrying John Winchester, a white man her parents have never met who actively enlisted to fight in Iraq, they're understandably against it. She's constantly self-sabotaging the relationship bc "something" is telling her it's not right (it's her free will resisting the Cupid match with everything she's got). The night of the fire, she's finally gathered up the ability to leave them. Sam cries and she goes to comfort her one last time (she does love them even if she never wants them and can't be maternal) and that's when the fire strikes. When she comes back, it’s like no time has passed for her but suddenly her children are adults. She tries to be their mom again, thinking it might be easier since they’re grown, but they still want and expect things from her that she can’t give, so she strikes out on her own again.
When she learns she and John were a Cupid match, she’s both angry that she wasn’t given any agency in her life and relieved that she wasn’t the one who fucked up her life with bad choices.
Dean Winchester: Keiynan Lonsdale
His only frame of reference for masculinity is the middle-class white masculinity shown on motel cable TV and the movies they snuck into (man cave, cars, objectifying women, beer, physical strength, etc). His performance of this + skill at hunting attracted something close enough to approval from John, and raised no eyebrows from almost anyone else, so it let him fly under the radar. But he's cultivated this performance so thoroughly that he's not even sure there is an authentic self underneath it.
Sam Winchester: Storm Reid
Sam has struggled her whole life with other's perceptions of her. The siblings' upbringing is seen by others as very white trash, but she obviously doesn't neatly fit into that category. But being raised by John, who made no effort to celebrate or even recognize their Blackness, gave her no connection to her own Blackness to draw on. At Stanford, she double majors in pre-law and African-American Studies, joins the BSU, and does everything she can to make her narrative #BlackExcellence despite constantly feeling like an imposter. Her dating Jess, a white girl, doesn't make that much easier. She and Jess are a Cupid match, though we don't find this out until later.
Mirroring Mary, she doesn't have a maternal bone in her body. When she's suddenly left with Kevin when Dean and Cas get sent to Purgatory, she does her best but is struggling and resentful the whole time. When Kevin is taken by Crowley, she's secretly relieved and makes no effort to rescue him. The guilt of this haunts her for the rest of the show, even though she's fully aware that she would do it again if she had the chance to do it over. Because of this, she isn't resentful of resurrected Mary being unable/unwilling to be a mother to them the same way Dean is.
Rufus Turner: Steven Williams
Rather than leaving the kids with Bobby, John would instead leave them with Rufus, with Bobby instead being a fellow hunter that Rufus knows (essentially flipping their roles narratively). Rufus and John didn't get along, with John devaluing his years of experience and dismissing his approach to hunting as focusing on defending his town of Greenwood, Mississippi (similar to the Campbell family). With this ideology, he would take the kids hunting for animals rather than monsters, and did his best to plant the idea in them that the only supernatural beings that need to be hunted are the ones actively causing harm, encouraging them not to "chase trouble". While he would never send them out on hunts across the country, he would assist them with advice, resources, and fake FBI verification whenever asked. He also gave both of them The Talk about police, since John didn't know or care to.
Castiel: DeRon Horton
Compounding his difficulty in understanding and interacting with humans is the added layer of racism. White people are less forthcoming at best and outright hostile at worst. When interacting with Black people, he misses most if not all of the cultural references and understandings they expect him to have. (Someone tries to dap him up. This does not go well for him.) This also strains his relationship with Claire; he looks like her father but has no context for family in-jokes and stories, Black cultural references and understandings, or American references.
Because he has no context for these references, but recognizes that they seem to be important, he looks up every reference that someone makes that he misses. Sam is the only person who will explain a reference to him, having had to do the same thing to try and fit in at Stanford.
Eileen Leahy: Treshelle Edmond
Being a Black Deaf lesbian hunter has made her used to taking care of herself, being either infantilized or disregarded by most in whatever situation she finds herself in. Not only is she excellent at taking care of herself, she knows that even the most well-meaning people cannot take care of her as well as she can. Sam's instinct to respect her skill and defer to her understanding makes Eileen feel finally seen, and is why Sam's attempts at being protective feel so smothering to her. They're both independent people who come together by choice, not by necessity. She's thrown by the revelation of Chuck's interference because it calls into question whether she's done so well because of her own merit, or because of his interference. It also means that every fucked-up thing she's endured hasn't been from the random chaos of life, which she can understand and accept, but has instead been deliberate decisions caused by yet another person in a position of power who decided their narrative was more important than her own autonomy.
Rowena Mcleod: Dominique Jackson
Condemned to death by the British for practicing Obeah, which they called witchcraft and devilry, she was able to escape and survive through a mix of cunning and magic. She aimed to survive and thrive despite the colonizers running rampant through her country, and viewed Crowley as an obstacle to that and so abandoned him. As she and Sam bond, she helps her tap back into the abilities that were there that the demon blood enhanced. As Sam, still wrestling with ideas of purity regarding human and non-human, struggles with this, Rowena points out that ideas of purity like that are colonial philosophies. It is pure because it is innate to her, denying it is the real impurity.
Adam Milligan: Jaboukie Young-White
Azazel/Yellow Eyes: Lakeith Stanfield
@daalcuntynatural and I talked about this before. He just has an otherworldly and unsettling vibe that makes him absolutely perfect.
Mr. Tran: Osric Chau
Mr. Tran is a devoted single father to high school student Kevin Tran. Unlike John, Mr. Tran goes out of his way to celebrate Kevin's dual heritage. Kevin's mom passed away when Kevin was a baby due to complications from birth that the hospital staff didn't take seriously. Because of this, Mr. Tran is a bit overprotective because he is very aware that people will not always take Kevin's concerns and struggles as seriously as they deserve. Kevin, in turn, pushes himself very hard (too hard) because he doesn't want all of his father's hard work to be for nothing.
Osric was done so dirty on this show (killed off over and over), and deserves the opportunity to have some fucking dignity.
