Further thoughts on something @prelawboy said while talking about how a rich world can spring out of contradictions & fuzzy details: "[Sam and Dean] spent their whole childhood hunting but at the start of the show don’t seem to know what any monsters are."

On this particular point, I actually think the details we get at the beginning are pretty consistent with a world full of supernatural creatures, beings, & forces so diverse that it's hard to immediately identify what precise flavor of monster you're dealing with.

That's why they don't leap to "shapeshifter" right away in S1:E6 "Skin," for example: there's other stuff it could be. Their first thought is some kind of doppelgänger, something tied to Zack specifically, like we see (much later) with "dark Charlie." Another possibility is mentioned within the episode, as well, when Sam is trying to test shifter!Dean & says, "Didn't Dad run into a shapeshifter in San Antonio?" And shifter!Dean reminds him that that case turned out not to be a shapeshifter: "It was a thought-form, a psychic projection." But they're familiar with creatures that change their shapes as a general category of monster that exists, at any rate — Sam mentions in an earlier scene that werewolves fall into this same category...

Likewise, in "Wendigo," the brothers don't miss the fact that it's a wendigo because they're unfamiliar with them — they miss it because this particular wendigo has roamed far outside of their usual range. So at first they think it's more likely to be a skinwalker or black dog. But as soon as Sam pegs it as a wendigo, Dean grimaces in frustration & holds up his gun, saying, "Great. Well, then, this is useless." It's clear he knows immediately how to take one of these down, and it's not bullets.

In "Dead in the Water," they think they might be dealing with a lake monster à la Nessie, but then — after the next victim drowns in a sink — hypothesize that it must be a water wraith or something else, eventually homing in on the fact that it's a ghost. All of these are solid guesses, though, based on the information they have at the time.

Even as far back as the pilot, Sam & Dean seem like they know their stuff. They clock right away that John was hunting some kind of angry spirit when he disappeared & link it quickly to the death of Constance Welch. Then, when Sam sees "Woman in White" on the wall of John's motel room above an article about Constance's death, he obviously recognizes the term — and clearly expects Dean to know it, as well, telling his brother (without further elaboration) that their dad ID'ed Constance as a Woman in White. Dean reacts by smirking slightly & shaking his head at the photos of the victims, saying, "You sly dogs." (Because now that they know it's a Woman in White, they also know what all those men had in common: they were all unfaithful.)

Counterpoint: I'll admit that there are monsters that seem relatively common in later episodes that they — strangely — have no history of ever having run into before (the most obvious being vampires), but it's also possible that those monster populations changed significantly over the ensuing years (since we know that Lucifer's rise encouraged some groups of monsters to act differently, as did Eve's return, as did the freeing of the Darkness, etc.).

Also, it's clear that the writers were still hashing out some of the details about how things like demons worked in S1 (with EMF & "Christo" being used to detect them in E4 and then basically never used again). But it's not uncommon for a show with such complex lore to still be finding its footing at that point. Overall, I feel like they managed to be pretty consistent with their handling of the lore in particular (and Sam & Dean's personal experience of it), with only a handful of noteworthy errors over their 327-episode run. There are other places I see contradictions, tension, ambiguity. But the Winchester brothers' pre-series exposure to hunting monsters is not so much one of them.

[Making this a new post to avoid derailing the other, as this is sort of tangential to your main point, @prelawboy, which I thought was quite insightful!]⁰

The take-a-walk type (inspired by this post by @prelawboy, which really tickled me)

thank u for your support lee

not even a lawboy...a prelawboy

sam before the stanford era call that prelawboy

do you have any blog recs? not just mutuals but like ppl who post good content

hiii yea heres some blogs i follow who post more original content not all are samdeans obviously ! @roadmotel @girlbossjared @stanfordera @freakyaccidents @samsflannel @catgirlsam @samdeanblog @lgbtqsam @id-rot-in-hell-with-you @s2e11playthings @prelawboy  @itstartswithbloodshed @jaredfuckerkripke @queersamwinchester @saintsammy @carryonchesters @theyshotmyclown @samwinchesterstan @marymotherof @trapperjohn

Oops I did not mean to post that to prelawboy. Guess it’s for spn eyes only

just saved the url prelawboy should i use it