Why I started watching: For the heck of it.
Will I continue watching: Maaaybe.
So, neither of us have blogged here in a LONG time. Kit, because she's super busy, and me, because I'm super lazy. Trufax. Anyway, in my lazytimes I haven't been watching as much Japanese dramas, because hey, they use up more brains for me. Not that I haven't been watching ANY, though. Just not as much. Because of books. And American TV. I have been watching Glee on and off (it keeps pissing me off and making me quit, but it's on Astro, and I love show choir, so I still do watch when I happen to catch it), and started on a How I Met Your Mother re-watch (but then stopped, because I HATED the finale), and finally started on the second season of Elementary. All of which I'm NOT writing about in this post. Instead, I'm writing on the first episode of the first season of Supernatural... which I'm watching for the first time!
Why haven't I watched this before? I don't know, really. It could be that after Buffy, I didn't really feel like watching anything supernatural-ish, not even Angel. (I did watch it, though) It could be that I realised that I've become a much more easily spooked person as a grown-up, than I was as a teen. I can't deal with horror - a certain brand of it, anyway. I could - and have - sleep through stuff like Hannibal and lap up manga like Gantz and Shingeki no Kyojin (the anime versions, I'm not keen on - they're nowhere as violent). Gore is absolutely fine with me. But horror, now. That's another story. But I do like mythologies, and urban legends, and almost everyone I follow on Tumblr are in the fandom, so I knew I'd eventually watch it. And watch it I eventually did.
Rather than giving a blow-by-blow account, which I'm sure isn't needed, there are other blogs that do that and everyone's probably watched it anyway, I'm just going to say - yes, I found this episode scary. The woman in white story is one I'm familiar with; it's one of the ones my cousin used to tell when we're staying with our grandmother during school break.
I've been reading this manga, Mokke, about two sisters who are sensitives, growing up in rural Japan. One sister sees yokai, and the other easily gets possessed/haunted by them. The fact that Dean and Sam are brothers, and they hunt down demons/ghosts, made me think of the manga. I find it interesting, the different cultures' take on supernatural beings. Yokai can be scary, and they can be very dangerous, but even with the more dangerous types, the girls' shaman grandfather had said, they don't destroy these beings, or drive them away. What they do is negotiate, work up an agreement, and hope for the best. This has been the same approach in most yokai stories I've read. The approach to American ghosts in the books/comics/movies I've consumed had always been to destroy them, or "lay them to rest" at best. At first I wondered if it's because many yokai are part of the natural world, but there are a lot of yokai that were originally human or inanimate objects. I guess the yokai stories had always portrayed these supernatural beings as part of the world - we merely share this same borrowed space - while in American ghost stories, these supernatural are deemed not of this world, and ought to be banished from it.
I'm probably just thinking too much. And am waaay off topic.
Anyway. This episode was scary to me, yes, and it made me rethink watching the second episode, as much as I find it interesting and really want to know what Sam and Dean encounter next. I'm such a wuss with these stuff. While I appreciate the narrative full circle of what happened with Jess, I really do not appreciate that in this episode, two women died just to further the plot for the male characters.
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