allofmystudentsrunaway:

misswhizzy:

“In the first three seasons, Kripke had a staunch “no angel policy.” Supervising producer Sera Gamble posited the idea of angels back in season two, with her episode ‘Houses of the Holy’, “but the reason [the creature] didn’t turn out to be an angel in that episode,” Kripke relates, “was because at the time I had the no angel rule – I just didn’t want them. I had this notion in my head that the only forces of good in the universe were humans, and that it was sweaty, disheveled, confused humans up against this overwhelming supernatural threat. But in humanity lay the power and the ability and those tiny moments of grace which allowed good to triumph. That’s my world view and it’s what I wanted to attribute to the show. I didn’t want massive supernatural creatures, who were good, to come in and save them. Salvation has to lie with your main characters, or else what’s the point? So I’d been very resistant to the idea, but then in between seasons three and four, I was thinking about the problem of how demon mythology was just getting kind of boring for us. Every time a demon came up as an episode idea [in season three], my co-show-showrunner, Bob Singer, and I always sort of sighed and said, “Alright, what are we going to do with the demons this time?’” But then Kripke had an epiphany. “I was just puttering around my house,” he says, “just stewing on the problem of what to do besides demons, and wondering, ‘How can we possibly expand and twist our mythology?’ I remember the moment, I remember where I was in my house, and I remember the thought clear as a bell: ‘Well, if you’re looking at it purely in a yin-yang way, if you’re looking at two sides of a coin, angels are the other side of the demon coin.’ Then one of my first thoughts was of Christopher Walken in The Prophecy – ‘Well, you know, you can do angels where they’re not good guys. You can do angels as nominally good in that they’re fighting for Heaven, but they’re soldiers.’ I started thinking about the smiting of the first-born, and of Sodom and Gomorrah. I was considering all that and I thought, ‘Well, you actually could have angels and have them be truly terrifying.’ To give credit where credit’s due, it’s Sera who showed me the poems by Rainer Maria Rilke about how scary angels could be, so in the back of my head there was already this notion that angels in their true forms were such overwhelming powers that they could be really terrifying. Along with the realization that angels could actually work on Supernatural, Kripke also realized that more than that, they needed the angels. “We were attempting to have this massive off-camera scope of the universe in which these sides were battling each other, but we only had one massive side,” explains Kripke. “We had the evil side, the demons. And then we had our hunters. With our production, we couldn’t afford the size of demon-human battles we wanted, we just didn’t have the ability. But what the angels give you is the other army. Now suddenly we can have these massive off-camera clashes. And massive off-camera drama that you can bring into the storyline that you never have to see, you can just reference in dialogue. With that, the world started to feel more epic and much more of the Star Wars/Lord of the Rings-on-a-budget mythos we were going for. We could have this massive war between angels and demons, but the story could still be about these two Midwesterners in a muscle car. It just gave us so much more territory to steer through and around.” “The other thing it did is for the first time it made Dean a coherent and central part of the mythology. We’d always had Sam being the dark side’s chosen one, but it never occurred to us to say, ‘Well, maybe Dean is the chosen one of the light side!’ Now he isn’t just a bystander to Sam’s mythology, and that provided much more of a story engine.” “I walked into the writers’ room on the first day of season four and looked at the writers, who up to that point had taken to heart my very staunch no angel stance, and I said, ‘Okay guys, angels… but they’re dicks.’””

— Knight, Nicholas. Supernatural: The Official Companion Season 4.
Titan Books, 2010: 8-9. (via justanotheridijiton)

A little taste of one of the poems sera showed Kripke..remind you of anyone???

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic

Orders? And even if one were to suddenly

take me to its heart, I would vanish into its

stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but

the beginning of terror, that we are still able to bear,

and we revere it so, because it calmly disdains

to destroy us. Every Angel is terror.

And so I hold myself back and swallow the cry

of a darkened sobbing. Ah, who then can

we make use of? Not Angels: not men,

Rainer Maria Rilke, Elegy one

Originally posted by inacatastrophicmind