Can you do no wrong Supernatural?

An epic road odyssey for its beleaguered pair of brothers on a Hellbent mission to take back from the night from an army of demons and fiends, Supernatural has been a helluva ride: Mom killed in a fire of demonic origin, Dad becoming a shotgun-wielding wreck bent on avenging her death, sons Sam and Dean drafted for Ghostbuster duty as children and dragged all over Tarnation, and the family business becoming their responsibility when it all finally falls apart. Toss in some time travel, apocalyptic plagues, Devil’s bargains, damnation, resurrection, the War In Heaven, and the Mouth of Hell about to open up and consume the world, and you’ve got the makings for one of TV’s most beloved sleepers.

Who’d have believed that a gem of a series like this headed up by two vagrant orphans living off truck stop food and credit card scams managed to survive on a network populated by wealthy, slutty prep school twats and graceless celebutantes? It’s enough to make you believe in a little magic. Through five years of sacrifice, suffering, and a lot of miles on the odometer, there’s been nary a narrative misstep, nothing in the way of selling out to false comfort. The Winchesters haven’t seen the sun since ’83.

With Hell On Earth literally imminent in this the show’s fifth (and rumored to be final) season featuring its most ambitious and fearful story arc ever, the Winchester Boys — sensitive, strapping Sam (the Top) and butch, thick-skulled Dean (clearly the order-barking Power Bottom) — have officially become cult pin-ups.

When the Winchester Sons get dark, they get dark, staring down urban legends come to life, treacherous demons at the crossroads, dickish angels in America, hell hounds on their heels, and the End of Days on their long, strange trip down the highways and back roads of Rural Gothic U.S.A.

Still, there’s been laughter and hijinx as well down the long road to Perdition, and Supernatural‘s longest and most deathless running gag is the Winchester Bros side-eyeing each other every time a gay subtext between them appears. Which is often. Television — with its consistency, familiarity, and immediacy — has a perfect way of inviting viewers to transpose their private sexual obsessions upon its characters and worlds, and few series have unleashed such a monumental avalanche of audience-bred kink as this one has.

Could leads Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles have even fathomed the mind-boggling amount of porno tableaux they’d be digitally manipulated into upon being hired for roles in this relatively buzz-free netlet outing, much more the endless array of porn star bodies their heads would end up on? Within the span of a few brief years, their physiques have become the equivalent of Sex Doll Mr. Potato Head, rearranged and refigured into enacting the nastiest acts of brother-boning their audience can imagine.

If the gamut of fan-penned fiction (a fair share generated by female viewers, revealing guy-on-guy erotica to have a certain unexpected sway with the ladies) surrounding the palpable, Route 66-meets-Kristen Bjorn sexual chemistry between the duo wasn’t enough, the anything-goes visual brother2brother images dreamed up by the series’s heretofore (I suspect until relatively recently) unknown gay devotees is boundless — one of the most joyously transgressive and pervily explicit forms of fan worship/interplay you’ll even encounter. It’s entirely possible that no young pair of TV actors — especially ones playing brothers — have been the objects of such unfettered defilement. Hell, even the Brady Bunch kids were just step-siblings.

The sheer breadth of Photoshopped smut dedicated to the pair, be they alone, together, or mounting various other hot pieces — pretty Zac Efron seems to be a special favorite when it comes to being on the receiving end of their considerable charms — is staggering in its own right, but wrap your heads around the fact that the boys’ own doomed father (essayed by the Javier Bardem-esque Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and their trenchcoated heavenly ally Castiel (brooding Misha Collins) have themselves become popular ‘Shop fodder, often playing Daddy to the bent-over boys in a manner that has to have all involved laughing at the ever-raising bar of just how far fans are happy to take them.

The writers have clearly had their ears to the ground; the series hit its comic pinnacle thus far with Sam’s and Dean’s adventures becoming a string of underground novels that attract the adoration of a collective of sexlorn dorks, the boys ultimately discovering the myriad Web shrines devoted to their keep-it-in-the-family ass-saddling. Their bemused protestations amounting to “We’re not ‘Mos — We’re Bros!” never gets tired. This forbidden love has even spawned its own portmanteau slang: Wincest.

Let nothing — not God or Devil, succubus or seraph — tear them asunder. If they weren’t meant to break the Final Seal, then they shouldn’t have been born so goddamn pretty.

© 2010, Shawn Baker. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com