#i just think chuck's narrative is so much more interesting if hes not god himself but another victim of the narrative

[shallowseeker]

Was it you that pointed out that Dean gets showered with hate for allowing Jack to make himself into a bomb, when in season 11 his entire family was willing to let him do the same? I've been thinking about this a lot...

Sorry, not me. But I do talk about this and other Jack stuff in some of my ramblings about #SPN parenting, and I believe @jackgirlbluntrotation and I batted the tragedy of the Jack-and-Dean soul bomb parallel back-and-forth a few times, so you could look there as well.

But to get what what I think you're getting at, I think yes: Dean, is judged more harshly for this. I have some vague ideas why below. And I can't answer without being longwinded about all of it, and because I am NOT feeling very cohesive this week, behind the cut it goes...

Not meta, just random thoughts... I tried to edit it into something that made points. But I couldn't. Sorry. I'll try to revisit it later. This is like...three separate unrelated topics.

Sam & Cas + violence + getting onboard with Dean's sacrifice:

Sam and Cas do not object to Dean becoming a live bomb in season 11 to serve God's Big Kill-Amara-Cause. I haven't seen this held against Cas or Sam, and certainly not as a moral transgression. (This is not a hit piece against Sam or Cas. It's just a note that they're a little differently tied up with the idea of war-as-sacrifice.)

Furthermore, when talking about child sacrifice, I don't typically see a lot of Emma or Oskar or even Jane the Nephilim crop up in conversation, and when it does, people sometimes get annoyed about it ("I just don't care about them that much.") I do occasionally see Cas re:Jessie the Antichrist and May Sunder. Occasionally I see Sam:Emma. But hardly ever Oskar or Jane. But Dean is the caretaker. He's not supposed to cross this line of killing complete innocents. Also, as "parent," he has an obligation to Jack that adds another layer.

My point is...and I'm not certain about this...but I suspect that if Dean had overseen any of these above murders, it would be a much more daily appearance on the dash, especially Jane and Oskar, who were completely innocent.

Of note, re:Oskar.. Sam and Cas are The Two Men post-Lucifer that Rowena identifies as Love Matches. (She reserves her ire and hatred re:Oskar for scapegoat child, Crowley.) To Rowena, maybe even to the audience(?), the violence of Sam and Cas is expected, maybe even sexy? Maybe even the mark of a strong protector. Who knows? All I know is that we politely look the other way. And so does Rowena...

And I'm not trying to keep score in a murder show. Just...yeah. Something about this is tied up with Dean's role as heart/hearth/caretaker, I think. Maybe. Also parental roles. But that's always going to be conjecture. Let's look at more interesting stuff, which is how family sacrifice gets passed around:

Dean + sacrificial bomb

Dean -> The bomb sacrifice is framed as Dean's choice, even though it is just as coerced as what we see in season 15 with Jack. To make Dean's bomb even uglier, the reason Dean is the bomb in the first place is part-strategy, part-gross. "The enemy is sexually attracted to you, ergo, you can get closer to her." Dean is, once again, rendered as sexual (?) bait.

Cas -> Cas is the one who came up with the idea of the soul bomb, but he immediately shows regret and offers to die with Dean. Which releases the tension of how awful it is that he doesn't object... After this, Cas is forevermore anguished at the thought of sacrificing Dean and in season 14, he completely Objects to Dean's Suicide as Solution, even when solider mode!Jack suggests it. Of note, it may also be that in season 11, Cas put up a strong front about sacrificing for the God partially because Chuck was present(?)

Sam -> We are sympathetic to the idea of Sam being "okay" with sacrificing Dean because, at the start of season 12, we-the-audience are shown Sam's guilt over it, and that eases the narrative tension of how horrific it is.

Maybe the guilt over everything wrought in season 10 is what makes Sam and Cas more willing to not object to the bomb in season 11... But overall, for the audience, Sam and Cas's emotions about it make us more likely to look upon the situation favorably. Plus, neither of them is Dean's "parent." We'd be much harsher if John came up with the bomb idea, or Mary for that matter.

To reiterate, no one is responsible, exactly. I'm really just bringing it up as a point of contrast. Each character's relationship to war swings like a pendulum and is greatly affected by their psychological-wounds-of-the-moment. They all tend to swing the extremes, from Apple Pie Escapism to Holy Cause to Black-and-White Rules, etc. (And no one, save Metatron, has the proper mindset in season 11 with regards to war. And he gets killed for his trouble, too...)

Dean + Ma'lak box + "Jack iSn'T fAmiLy"

Notably, in season 14, Sam and Cas flipflop on the idea of sacrificing family. They strongly object to Dean climbing into the Ma'lak box--a stark and welcome contrast to season 11's soul bomb.

Of note, sacrifice MUST BE a complicated topic for Dean here... When you look at the two sacrifices, in Dean's mind, they were collectively rewarded for his hero's sacrifice/soul bomb (the return of Mary) but punished for his "selfish" non-sacrifice/Ma'lak box (the loss of Jack's "personhood" + Mary's death). So yeah, sacrifice is complicated topic. It never emotionally feels like the right thing, but in media and religion and hero stories, it's the heroic thing.

Finally, Jack's bomb is also complicated by the "Jack isn't family" of it all. Dean has more trouble sacrificing and walking away from "family," whereas Sam n' Cas, were always more pragmatic commanders by nature, and have seemed, at least from a distance, way more comfortable sacrificing their (military) family members (See: Balthazar, Rowena, etc). Thus, Dean sunders Jack from family role in order to make the loss more tolerable. It's awful! But very real.

Honestly, I think it gets at the heart of the matter that they're all soldiers struggling with soldier relationships to Cause, especially Dean. The longer Dean fights, the more he becomes like season 4 Cas or AU Earth Michael in terms of feeling insecure in his wayfinding.

The grayer morality gets, the more he can feel the tension of his own wrongdoing and the less "real" everything all feels (derealization/depersonalization). The soul bomb parallel plays into what they're ALL struggling with in season 15--purpose. Purpose/meaning is The Answer to AU Michael (and Chuck's) nihilism/nothing matters theme. But they don't even know what's real anymore.

The war and the horror and the heartbreak has dissolved all the meaning.

That plays into what each of them is struggling with in the terminal seasons. Their shadow selves and their best selves.

Sam - "Martyrdom Versus Heroism" -> You and you alone can do it / Save the world / I won't break your independence even when your safety is at stake / Saving the world at the expense of your own life is brave and noble and heroic -> (Sam's tentative answer to that problem: "I still think it's wrong, though.") He seems to realize, somewhere in there, that restricting power can be protective; that disinhibition of all boundaries doesn't look so great from the other side of parenting. He has an "aha!" moment where he understands Dean's relationship to him re:the complex nature of protection. Yet, Sam's eureka moments don't quite hit. It needs more time to resolve, possibly in the form of parenting his son, Dean, IMHO.

Cas - "Destiny Versus Genuine Hope for the Future" -> Serve the right cause and even heinous actions take on noble meaning / Live up to the big destiny / Be the God I couldn't be / If you're alive, then your life has to Mean Something Big and Awesome / Wield the totalitarian power the right way, in My Image and in Your Mother's Image and in My Chosen Family's Image, and bring the universe to its feet -> (Cas's tentative answer to the problem: "We don't love you because you're part of some grand design. We love you for being you." Cas squeezes in a late "aha!" moment only after the revelation of Jack's incoming second death. Cas rediscovers his faith, but it takes him awhile to have faith in the Small Things, not just the Big Things. Having faith in the future is healthy. Having faith in predestination is not. Like Sam, Cas is not quite given enough room to resolve, but his gets the closest of the main three.

Dean - "The Law of Purgatory Absolutes Versus the Complicated Gray of the Real World / Nothing matters I don't matter" -> Kill the right enemy and the law becomes just / "My life's work is a hoax" / I've been burying my anger all my life and it's finally spilled out like angry Leviathan chompin' at the bit for blood / So, get revenge / Take out the threat / Serve the ugly cause at the cost of our own lives so others can be happy / We are already ruined heroes / We don't matter / Save our loved ones (Dean's tentative answer: "The ultimate killer is not who I am." ) Like the other two, Dean never quite resolves. It would need another good one or two seasons to do so. The Winchesters actually helps with the above! He specifically talked about it in 1x12: The Tears of Clown. However, in SPN Prime he at least doesn't seem to be languishing in a complete loss of hope, which is one positive way to spin the finale. Nor is he switching to a complete pacifism at the expense of the lives of the two Crowther boys they wind up saving. He's not running away/escaping. He's really trying.

And finally... Through all this, there is also the parallel of giving up ("sacrificing") your son to War or to God's Cause, so that you can finally retire, which is the entire Ugly Thing with War as a Concept. Non-fighters (typically symbolic mothers & daughters) + aging fathers are sold the lie that they must give up sons to the Cause in order to preserve and enjoy Freedom (which is WHY Jack's AU Earth nightmares are directly juxtaposed with Dean's dreams of Hawaiian shirts and beaches in 13x23).

Always peace OR freedom, never peace AND freedom.

More than any other character, Jack is symbolic son. He is treated as Heir to his fathers' burdens and responsibilities. And the burden is too heavy.💔

One last set of parallels, then, with Jack AS each main character's Symbolic Fate:

Jack as doomed child (Sam; Boy-king/gold)

Like Sam at various points, Jack becomes the cursed child, kneeling to accept his execution for the crime of "murdering" his own mother.

It's the Sacred Executioner's suicide, too, because this is truly, as Cain said, "The murder that Dean would (literally) not survive." Like with Sam, Dean balks at the order from the father-God and throws the gun away. Tragically, Dean is excommunicated and tossed into a literal headstone, a motif for his eventual Death in the story. Jack dies. Dean "dies."

Sam wounds God in the shoulder and suffers a left shoulder / heart connection with God. For a time, this "infects" Chuck with hope.

Jack as tool of war / blunt instrument / bomb (Dean; Death/myrrh)

When Jack takes the rib-bomb, he becomes Dean from season 11. He feels "unworthy," so he "might as well be the hero / blow himself up to ensure the happiness of others."

The would-be victims and civilians even thank him for it. As Dean told Death, "I don't matter." Heroes matter only so much as their sacrifices are worth.

Also, in comparison to Sam, Jack is fundamentally WAR SON. Whereas Dean was love-offering-object-sacrifice chosen by Amara's hunger, Jack is simply "Simba." He is heir to the burden of Heavenly hero by birthright, outranking Sam and Dean in terms of hierarchy.

Furthermore, Jack is not Earth-son; he's a Heaven-son (the "son" to Sam's earth-son "daughter" role here...I hesitate to use gendered language, but it's about the hierarchy an the expectations of War as a Concept. Jack outranks Sam in terms of hierarchal expectations).

It's also why it's a rib that is blowing up Jack. The rib also calls to mind "Mother," or the simpler, non-gendered poetic: "Earth," as Jack is literally being sacrificed by Earth.

Like with Dean's soul-bomb, Jack survives the lighting of the fuse. Dean survives by getting defused, and Jack survives by detonating in The Empty.

Paralleling the Equalizer confrontation, Death tries to take Jack anyway, the way God took him even when he survived his initial Moriah trial. This time, it's Dean who takes action. He wounds Death with her own scythe, in the shoulder, just as Sam injured God's shoulder.

Jack "escapes" bomb death and Death!Billie, and Dean sets into motion the death of Death!Billie. (Sam's enemy is Chuck!prime and Dean's enemy is Death.)

Jack as God (Cas; God-king/frankincense)

Finally, when he takes God's power, Jack accomplishes what Castiel could not.

This is the final destiny that Jack seems unable to escape--"eating" up all the power and becoming more God than God.

Despite Cas's change of heart in the final episodes, it is ultimately Castiel's burden of Being God and the expectation of Heavenly destiny that Jack inherits when he ascends.

Since during the Equalizer confrontation, Sam wounded God, and with the rib-bomb confrontation, Dean fatally wounded Death, the narrative parallel for Cas here would be to fatally wound or seriously injure powered up!Chuck-mara. But instead, he sacrifices himself for love. (I saw a meta about SPN being a battle royale between Chuck and Cas...this lends some WEIGHT to that!)

In the final confrontation, Cas is absent (dead!KIA in this case), as Cas tends to be. (It's one of his absent!father motifs.) So Jack, as Heavenly son in terms of rank, has to stand-in for Cas, and the price is TOO HIGH. :(

It's a terrible fate. Even when Jack wins, he loses. He becomes nothing and everything.

Sorry. sorry. That was a lot. I was stuck at medical facility, so.

#spn + the three wisemen #asks #and stuff you didn't ask FOR #in MY DEFENSE #i'm dying inside #kinda #so i ramble

[tiktaalic]

what do you like most about supernatural and what are your favorite seasons and episodes?

Really good. Question. I love that they jump the shark I really do. Over and over again. Parody of itself. I love that shark jumping necessitates that they hop tone switches. I love that they do things badly. My favorite thing about season one is that. The John dean sam dynamic feels like getting walloped in the teeth. And season one dean haunts the narrative forever you see forty year old dean and you see 26 year old dean beneath him completely unrecognizable and you want to die. 2 is just a fun motw show that’s interesting and has you engaged in the plot until again. Dean wallops you in the teeth. I would describe 4 as the first major shift because suddenly Real Consequences show up. The Big Plan shows up. Cas is there and it is genuinely so moving to watch him struggle through defecting from everything he’s ever known to become a softer more human thing. 4.01 genuinely really engaging episode even when you know what’s coming it’s fun to watch! It’s fun to go oh ho ho they’re trying to solve the Mystery of what’s powerful enough to Raise Dean From Hell! This Mystery Entity is pulling out all the stops! Doing things we’ve never seen before! What could it be! It’s cas :-). Six mostly sucks but then there man who would be king. Seven mostly sucks but there’s godstiel and born again identity. Eight is. Epic highs and lows for sure. There are some god awful episodes in there. Unwatchable episodes. Skip every time I remember they’re coming up episodes. But. There’s goodbye stranger. There’s the finale. There’s purgatory. Hunter heroci. Cas lobotomies. Naomi. Season 8 is the easiest one for me to romanticize because there’s a heaping pile of shining elements in it. Dean has a spray tan cas is getting brainwashed for caring too much sam is dying of consumption it’s all really quite good except for the episodes that are bad. After that it gets good again in s13. Except for the bad parts zksidnejc. Jack really shook up the show in a good way imo! Stakes ballooned out starting. Season 9 ish? And I think he grounds the show a bit so that interpersonal stakes are the ones that you’re invested in. 14 GREAT season stellar season the best season of supernatural in ages. Start to finish. Jack has a great little plot he wrestles with the entire time about his own development. And there’s the god reveal!!!! Wonderful season. Definitely a favorite. And I know people have mixed feelings on 15 but I think it’s a fun romp until it’s not.

Favorite seasons chronologically: 1 4 8 14

Favorite episodes: oh. Skin. What is and what should never be. All hell breaks loose. Lazarus rising. Monster at the end of this book. That episode in season 4 where cas kills himself by archangel with chuck. Free to be you and me. Head of a pin. Endverse. Man who would be king. Season 7 opener. The purgatory flashbacks are scattered between a few different eps so I just watch the compilation on YouTube. I like the eps with Linda and Kevin. Goodbye stranger. S8 finale. S9 is fucking. Dire. But 9.01 is fine. 9.06 for cas with a baby. Meta fiction. Fan. Fiction. Season 12 opener. Oh that casifer episode where they’re on a submarine that’s fun. That episode where dean yells at Mary in her head. Season 12 finale. The future. The first six episodes of s13 back to back to back to back. I like scorpion and the frog. I like stuck in the middle with you. I like mint condition. Asa fox. Lily sunder. Twigs and twine. Season 14 honestly all bangers once you get past the first 3 eps. INCLUDING! Lebanon. Ouroboros is included in this but I am mentioning it by name because today when I drove to work it was all. That I thought about. Coffin ocean done. Byzantine? I think is the one with Naomi. But again 14 all bangers. 15 I have to say the rupture and the trap. Legally. Belphagor eps those too. Atomic monsters. I liked. I think it was the gamblers? . FRENCH MISTAKE. Um. End of the list from the top of my head.

#ask #anonymous #spnwatch #long post

[antigonewinchester]

S13 Jack rewatch thoughts under the cut.

how did I not type this dude as a Enneagram 9; so much of Jack's personality clicks when you see it. think I've said before, but I read Sam as a 1, Dean as a 2, and Cas a 3.

in retrospect, Jack's becoming God ending seems obviously foreshadowed, although idk exactly when the writers decided on it. say: 13x01 establishes a God Who Doesn't Care in Chuck, which ultimate leads to the God Who Does Care in Jack in 15x19. in 13x02, Donatello literally mistakes Jack's power for God's. there's a Simba comparison! it's really right there.

I do still love the last scene in 13x02 -- it's unsettling in a way that really works. there's Jack's guilt and fear about his powers / who he is, if he's going to hurt someone w/ them, those feelings coming out in self-harm, how Jack stabbing himself directly mirrors Miriam attacking him in 13x01, and also Jack exploring the limits of his body and healing powers. in a very messed up way.

there's also this previous exchange from the ep (DEAN: Okay, see, sometimes, things hurt, so you just man up and deal with it. / JACK: Yes. I understand. Pain is a part of the complete human experience. Accepting it is a sign of maturity.) which is Dean having some not great ideas about pain/masculinity (altho tbh he's not entirely wrong either) but also Jack going way far with it too. I read Jack as not only responding to Dean but very much influenced by Kelly / her sacrifice / her knowledge passing down to him, and Kelly's explicit decision to endure something really painful and die to allow Jack to live. [yes, I am still fascinated w/ the implications of Jack in 13x01 saying he "was" Kelly and that's how he got his knowledge of the world.]

Dean telling Jack he'll kill him if it comes to it is obvs very messed up and understandable as to why Dean would say / think this and I like how Jackles plays Dean calmly, pragmatically in this scene; it's more interesting (and frankly more disturbing) than Dean's more simplified anger in the next ep. it's a heightened, horrible situation for both of them that's darkly compelling. I just love characters having a terrible time! what can I say!

kind of related: Jack's mirroring of Sam as the family black sheep / scapegoat was less frustrating the 2nd time around. or while I do still have issues w/ the framing, I can at least see what the story is doing with it. however, I do think the writing runs into the "super-powered character" problem where the story frames Jack as a good dude who's unfairly judged for his powers... but Jack can actually hurt or kill people with his powers, so isn't some caution & skepticism warranted? but metaphorically Jack's powers are connected to his self, so push-back against his powers becomes push-back against Jack as a person, even if those 2 things aren't technically the same thing. it's in the same vein as supernatural power as metaphor for difference (queerness, neurodivergence, etc.) which is a trope that can be problematic, or has limits, in its metaphorical usage.

where is the sicko version of the Lucifer - Sam - Jack scene in 13x23. the whole ep stands out to me as very indicative of Dabb's style and narrative interests -- dysfunction and violence within the family, the disturbing choice of "kill one of you or I'll kill you both," cycles of violence, hunters and monsters not being so different -- but without much... sexualized or eroticized subtext. (besides the one line of Lucifer to Sam, which contrasts to Lucifer being violent towards Jack but he's not creeping on him in that way.)

there's also a meta about S13 (and possibly later seasons / Jack's story overall) being modeled on the Hero's Journey, at least somewhat:

#1 = Ordinary World > Jack's birth and meeting Clark and his mom, doing normal things (eating candy!) #2 = Call to Adventure > Jack meeting and then hunting / learning how to use his powers w/ Sam, Dean, Cas #3 = Refusal of the Call > Jack running away from Sam, Dean, Cas / hunting #4 & #5 = Meeting w/ the Mentor & Crossing the First Threshold > Jack ending up in the Apocalypse World and finding Mary #6 = Tests, allies and enemies > Jack fighting in AW w/ the humans against the angels #7 = Approach to the innermost cave > Jack meeting Lucifer & engaging w/ him (and almost being swayed by Lucifer into leaving w/ him) #8 = The ordeal > Jack deciding to go back to save Sam, Dean, Cas, and Lucifer stealing his power / attacking him in the church #9 = The reward > Jack being saved by Dean (because Jack ‘chose’ right in picking family over power), Jack being accepted by both Dean & Sam as a part of the family

tbh I don't like the Hero's Journey as a narrative framework but it's obviously influential w/in contemporary screenwriting and explicitly w/in SPN, too.

#jack #also sort of general Dabb-era thoughts #queue

[qwertyfingers]

decided in my secret good spn rewrite chuck wouldn't Be God all along; in s4 he really is just a prophet channeling the inspired word, the narrative is exactly as terrifying and out of his control as it seems. prophets are not just vessels for the word of god, but also vessels of god. the first hint of this we get is in season 8, when something possesses kevin to protect him from gadreel, but we don't find out what. kevin doesn't remember anything, and gadreels only recalls seeing an incredibly bright light. chuck's appearance in fanfiction is exactly the same, as is don't call me shurley. we only learn about the prophets being god's vessels in all in the family, when kevin steps out from behind chuck and tells us about it. kevin's not a prophet anymore for Reasons

#i haven't actually decided what happens besides this #i would probably add a rapture-style episode where we see chuck and god is no longer inside him for whatever reason #he gets a cool monologue about knowing the ending but not being able to articulate it #he's like i saw it all in chuck's head but i'm not a prophet any more i can't write it #and we're left with the knowledge that chuck knows everything that's going to happen before it happens but he has no way of telling anyone #also the finale would be all about chuck in the aftermath of god and like. what the fuck that's like #i just think chuck's narrative is so much more interesting if hes not god himself but another victim of the narrative #chuck being god all along just makes his episodes way less interesting to watch it kind of. washes out the strength of the narrative to me #can yiou tell i rewatched the end of season 4 tday #spn #metafictions #chuck shurley

[godsquad]

the narrative (especially in the later seasons) bends over BACKWARDS to make sure that sam and dean are never wrong (or at least they’re never wrong in-universe; WE can see when they are, obviously, as a removed audience, but almost nothing they do within the story has genuinely lasting consequences for them). this is specifically BECAUSE god himself likes them and thinks they’re interesting. that is so FUCKING scary. because as soon as they get on god’s bad side, they instantly lose their plot armor, and their actions start having consequences. and this is the number one reason why i think something was fishy with sam and dean leaving adam in hell for a decade, because along with it being just kind of out-of-character for them (they’re assholes, but they’re not THAT big of assholes, and they’ve done more for people they cared about less), sam and dean face absolutely NO consequences for doing it. for me that is literally the biggest clue that something is not right with all of that. after dean tries and fails to bargain with death to get both sam and adam’s souls out of the cage in 06x11 appointment in samarra, that’s adam’s last mention until season fifteen (not counting that bit in 10x05 fan fiction). they brought lucifer back instead in season eleven and wrote in an entirely NEW michael to avoid sam and dean facing consequences for what happened with adam. it’s important to remember that, canonically, the only being in the UNIVERSE with true free will is castiel; sam and dean are still characters in the story able to be manipulated up until the very end. the sheer DEPTH of the plot contrivances invented to absolve sam and dean of responsibility for SPECIFICALLY this transgression is almost comical and i’ve said before that i can’t stand the “oh well these characters can’t have done something wrong because they were manipulated” literal deus ex machina or whatever but this is like the ONE thing that i DO think chuck was absolutely responsible for. and it was because he didn’t want to write michael and adam anymore. so he wrote them out as much as he possibly could and took every avenue possible to ensure they were forgotten about (adam) or replaced (michael). he created some characters and then got bored with them

#its so FUCKED #especially because theres hardly any like. legit in-depth serious discussion about ANY of this in-show #they scratch the surface but they do NOT go into how fucking terrifying this entire concept is #on the winchesters (broadly speaking)

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

The shifting narrative of God’s interventism and how it reflects on the narrative on John

This post will ignore the issue authorial intent entirely because I can, but it’s also about authorial intent in a way, but I also don’t like to talk about things as happening “accidentally” because a) a serialized story like Supernatural, especially one that got renewed for much longer than anyone could possibly expect or hope in their wildest ambitions, structurally relies on serendipity, because that’s how stories work when they’re work in progress, b) a television show is an extremely multi-authored text and the chance that something happens out of the intent of any of the multiple layers of creators is kind of... statistically negligible. So, yeah, that’s my stance on the topic. Anyway.

The shifting narrative about God is simultaneously something that hangs on fortunate storytelling clicks on an essentially programmed narrative. At first, we don’t know where the fuck God is. Cas starts looking for him with little success. Raphael says he’s dead, Cas doesn’t believe it. Dean relates to his struggle because he knows the feeling of not knowing where the fuck your father is and going looking for him with little success, not knowing if he’s even alive. Then the theory that gets assumed as the truth is that God has left. He fucked off who knows where, who knows why, leaving his creation to struggle alone. Also essentially how Dean had felt after John had died; in that case there was guilt for his demon deal and everything, but the most cruel weight on Dean’s shoulder was that John left him alone to struggle with his devastatingly horrific instructions he doesn’t understand. The angels are also left with horrific instructions they don’t understand. No wonder Cas does his own ‘demon deal’ in season 6, as he desperately tries to do what he assumes his father wants from him, but he doesn’t actually know what that is.

“God has left” is maddening, and everyone is angry about it, but it has its own dignity. God has left us without clear instructions, we are confused and in pain and evil runs amock but at least, we suppose, the evil of it is our own doing. We are alone and we do our best, our best is simply not enough. We wish he gave us guidance, but he won’t. He wants us to figure it out ourselves, possibly. We don’t actually know what he wants. But maybe that’s the point. It’s possible he doesn’t even know what’s happening, he just has left the building entirely.

But then Chuck reveals himself. We find out that he never actually left. He was there. “I like front row seats. You know, I figured I’d hide out in plain sight”. He simply chooses not to intervene. He chooses not to answer. He chooses to be hands-off. He presents himself as a laissez-faire parent, because, he says, it’s better for his children to have the responsibility they need to grow up. He’s absent, but in a different way than we thought! It’s not that he doesn’t know what’s happening or isn’t interested in knowing what’s happening. He’s here, he knows what’s happening, he just stays there and watches as you stumble and struggle and scream. It’s worse, and it pains Dean so much he isn’t even afraid to yell at God. You know we’re suffering and you just don’t give us any support, any comfort.

You’re frustrated. I get it. Believe me, I was hands-on, real hands-on, for, wow, ages. I was so sure if I kept stepping in, teaching, punishing, that these beautiful creatures that I created... would grow up. But it only stayed the same. And I saw that I needed to step away and let my baby find its way. Being overinvolved is no longer parenting. It’s enabling.

But it didn’t get better.

Well, I’ve been mulling it over. And from where I sit, I think it has.

Well, from where I sit, it feels like you left us and you’re trying to justify it.

I know you had a complicated upbringing, Dean, but don’t confuse me with your dad.

At that point of the show, the writing team almost certainly didn’t have the s14-15 twist in mind. So this was probably intended to be Chuck’s truth. Later it gets twisted (retconned?) into a lie, but about that later.

Here, Chuck is really good at manipulating the conversation. Dean has a perfectly valid point, because there IS a middle ground between being overinvolved and not being involved at all. There is a middle ground between enabling your children and abandoning them completely. But Chuck hits Dean where it hurts, plays the emotional card, basically tells him that he’s too emotional to understand, too emotional to think rationally about it, because he mixes his feelings about his father to the issue and thus cannot see it clearly. He basically tells him he’s too close to it to get it. You don’t understand parenting, Dean, because you’re too blinded by your emotions about your own little life and cannot see the big picture.

It doesn’t really matter here if he’s telling the truth or lying, it already says a lot about Chuck that he’s emotionally manipulating Dean, silencing him by hitting the painful spot.

But the thing is, 11.20 immediately presents Chuck as a liar. He makes Metatron read his autobiography and the very first line is a lie (“In the beginning, there was me. Boom – detail. And what a grabber. I mean, I’m hooked, and I was there.” “I’m hooked too, and yet... details. You weren’t alone in the beginning. Your sister was with you.”) and the stuff he talks about his experience as Chuck is not exactly truthful about anything (“That, you know, makes you seem like a really grounded, likable person.” “Yeah, what’s wrong with that?” “You are neither grounded nor a person!”). Metatron calls him out (“Okay. There are two types of memoir. One is honest... the other, not so much. Truth and fairy tale. Now, do you want to write Life by Keith Richards? Or do you want to write Wouldn’t It Be Nice by Brian Wilson?”). Chuck SAYS he chooses truth and gives Metatron a different manuscript, supposedly containing the truth, to which Metatron reacts positively. Metatron believes it, and we believe it with him.

Oh! Oh, this! This is what I was talking about. Chapter Ten “Why I Never Answer Prayers, and You Should Be Glad I Don’t”, and Chapter Eleven “The Truth About Divine Intervention and Why I Avoid It At All Costs”.

Nature? Divine. Human nature – toxic.

They do like blowing stuff up.

Yeah. And the worst part – they do it in my name. And then they come crying to me, asking me to forgive, to fix things. Never taking any responsibility.

What about your responsibility?

I took responsibility... by leaving. At a certain point, training wheels got to come off. No one likes a helicopter parent.

This is sort of what he later says to Dean, except that to Dean he talks about “beautiful creatures” “my baby”, talks about helping, none of the harsh tone he’s using here. When Metatron accuses him of hiding from Amara, he retorts “I am not hiding. I am just done watching my experiments’ failures”. What a different language, uh? Then Metatron asks him why he abandoned them, and Chuck answers “Because you disappointed me. You all disappointed me”. Then, he admits he lied about “learning” to play the guitar and so on, because he just gave himself the ability, and then appears to Dean and Sam, after Metatron’s passionate speech about humanity.

So, no matter the authorial intent at the time - the truthiness of Chuck’s words was already ambiguous. He kept lying and being called out, or silencing the conversation with some good ol’ gaslighting.

The season 14 finale introduces the big twist: it was, indeed, all a lie. The whole of it. Chuck didn’t abandon shit. It was all him, minutely controlling the narrative of the universe, putting the characters through all the pain and struggles for his own amusement.

The “absent father” narrative was a lie.

What does this tell us about John? Nothing, according to the authorial intent that shines through Dabb’s Lebanon. But we don’t give a crap about Dabb’s authorial intent about John! He’s just one dude and plenty of other authors have painted a different picture. So I’m going to read the narrative the way I want, because I can, and the narrative allows me to. It’s all there.

I’m suggesting that the fact that Chuck lied when he talked about being a hands-off/absentee father parallels how Dean and Sam prefer to think of their father as an “absent father” when that’s not exactly a reflection of the truth.

You left us. Alone. ‘Cause Dad was just a shell. [...] And I-I had to be more than just a brother. I had to be a father and I had to be a mother, to keep him safe.

Setting aside how “I had to be a father and I had to be a mother” sort of retcons and cleans up the Winchester family picture painted by ealier seasons, the fact that John didn’t really count as a functional father figure and Dean and Sam were essentually alone is not incorrect or anything. It is true that John would leave them to their own devices a lot, thus the long stays in motels, the hunger, the food-stealing, and all. But John wasn’t always absent, at all. He trained them as soldiers, he disciplined them, he was around enough for them to be intimately familiar with what happened when he drank. He drove them around.

It’s almost like it’s preferable to Dean and Sam to spin their own “absent father” narrative, putting the accent on the time they spent alone, painting their childhood as a time they had to grow up on their own, rather than acknowledge they grew up under the thumb of a controlling, looming figure they would regularly live in fear of, even when he was not physically present.

The “absent father” narrative is what Dean and Sam need to use to avoid confronting the reality of the father figure whose moods and whims they had to dance around. “I know things got dicey... you know, with Dad... the way he was. And I just... I didn’t always look out for you the way that I should have. I mean, I had my own stuff, you know. In order to keep the peace, probably looked like I took his side quite a bit.”

John shaped their lives. He shaped their identities. Even in the episodes where he abandons Dean or both children somewhere, he’s portrayed as the figure who drives the car. He symbolically drives the car, you know? John shaped Dean and Sam’s relationship with each other, both on a surface level (the conflicts) and on a deeper level (the parental dynamic).

Heck. The entire first season of the show plays on John’s disappearance as the “elephant in the room”. John is there by not being there, you know? And after he dies, his death - his absence - is again the elephant in the room for Dean, the weight on his psyche that he shatters under.

It is not wrong that Dean and Sam had to spend long periods of time without John. But John structured their lives in quite minute detail. Where they needed to be, what they needed to do, what they must not do, everything had to follow John’s instructions. A drill sergeant, the narrative called him, ordering how his sons needed to live their lives. That’s no absence, except on a level where Chuck not showing himself and pretending he’s not there can be considered absent. That’s a presence, not necessarily always physical, but semiotical and psychological.

John is an absent father as much as Chuck is a hands-off god. He even writes himself into the story around the time Cas has the “season 1” phase (let’s go look for dad/let’s go look for god), which is when John actually was alive and appeared. Then he was no longer physically there, but he was still shaping his characters’ lives, just like he’d always done.

The “absent father” narrative on John is that - a narrative. Spun by the characters themselves because it’s easier and actually kinder on John. Or, better, it allows them not to be crushed by the psychological implications of having to accept that their father was such a looming, minutely formative figure in their lives. They know, but they can wave the “absent father” idea around to avoid thinking about it.

“I had to be a father and I had to be a mother” is something easier to tell yourself. I was the one who did it all. But he wasn’t, and that’s the problem. The fact that John was their father - Dean’s and Sam’s - is the problem. But ironically, blaming himself for every failure is a better option for Dean than fully acknowledging John’s abuse. As long as he blames himself, he has control over it. The moment he acknowledges the extent of John’s influence, he loses control over the entire narrative of his own identity and the family identity, the family dynamics. That’s scarier, just like realizing that God manipulated everything is much scarier than the alternative. “God abandoned us” was indeed a better option, and “John left us alone” was a better option. But neither was true, and the characters faced the implications of the cosmic level, but never got to face the implication of the familial level, because the narrative always danced around it and then Dabb’s apologist version “won”.

But what’s been put in the show is still there. The narrative of John’s abuse is still there. Nothing can take it out of the story.

#my spn thoughts #spn meta #dean and john #dean and sam and john #dean and chuck #dean and god #spn 11x20 #spn 11x21 #spn 14x20 #spn 12x22 #et alii #spn #long post

[blorbosondeck]

fic rec masterlist

canon divergent/finale fix its

Anamnesis

THIS! FIC! this fic lives in my head rent FREE it is so good and it makes so much sense in the narrative that the shitty finale concocted, as to why they wouldn't mention cas or anyone else and its just. so good and they write chuck in the most villainous way that i love!!!

"Chuck is depowered, Jack is the new god, and the world is free. Dean and Sam get into the Impala and chase down the miles on an endless highway, and their story is finally, finally their own to follow. At least, that's what Dean tells himself. But the diners and motels and painted interstate lines are blurring together and the smallest details keep catching at his brain like tiny fishhooks and he can't quite shake the feeling that not everything is exactly as it should be. Fix-it/alternate series finale. Canon-compliant through the end of 15.19."

Sunset Sound: Stairway to Heaven by @adhdeancas

GOD FUCKING CHRIST this is so good and sweet and im such a sucker for team ups and reunions!!! its 3:30 am rn and i just finished it and i love it SO much it made me laugh a lot and the last few chapters i had the stupidest grin just plastered to my face

The Closer the Star, the Greater the Parallax by @rocksalts​

repressed bastard dean submits to the mortifying ordeal of being known and receives the rewards of being loved but only after some miscommunication i LOVE this i read it last night and it’s a fast favorite. my interests have overlapped and i am INTO it

“When Dean sits down to watch some bullcrap Discovery Channel episode with Cas, he doesn’t expect to actually learn anything. Except, with Cas explaining, he makes an effort to connect the dots.”

Don't We All Deserve To Be Happy?

VERY sweet and a VERY good pick me up. all around feel good fic!!! 

"Post-canon fix-it, divergent from 15x19 where Jack stays and Dean doesn't die and Cas comes back and everyone is happy. Take a shot every time I'm salty about the finale."

Keep Your Love Alive

okay. okay okay okay this may be my favorite finale fix it just because of how well reasoned it is. like this feels what should have happened i love it SO much

"Dean gets to spend eternity sharing beers with Bobby on the Roadhouse porch and riding around in his Baby with Sam. He’s at peace… or he feels like he should be. But a few things nag at him: Where is Cas, and everybody else Dean had been hoping to see in Heaven? Why does he feel like he’s stuck in a loop, reliving the same memories over and over again? And who are the strangers wearing Sam’s and Bobby’s faces?"

The GoldenRod Revisions by @aethylas​

this is one of the most well written things ive ever read. the script format DID make it feel more real and honestly? this is better writing than this show deserves. the finale that could have been ♥️

“A rewrite of Supernatural’s final two episodes, expanded into a five episode arc - in which Chuck needs to be defeated, Castiel deserves to be saved, and the characters in this story get a very different ending.“

Ascend by @wanderingcas​ 

THEE finale fix it fic!!! written by the AMAZINGLY skilled and talented @wanderingcas !!! it’s 50k of angst and hurt/comfort and pure bliss

“Something in the world is wrong.

Demon activity is rising where mysterious black substance oozes and unusual ecological events are shaking the world. Dean, grief hanging on his shoulders, restlessly searches for answers that might lead him to the Empty… and to Cas.

But what Chuck wrote can’t be undone. The narrative thread pulls Dean along, forcing him to comply. Because once a story already has an ending, it can’t be rewritten.

Or can it?”

Things Happen (They Do, And They Do, And They Do) by THEE @sobsicles

i KNOW everyone has already recommended this and likely you’ve all already read it. but it has to go here bc REPRESSIOOOOOOOOON i LOVE this so much it is one of the most perfect things i’ve read. are you bisexual? did you have a kind of weird relationship with your best friend and not realize that how you felt about them wasn’t necessarily how other people felt about them and you were maybe a little bit in love with them but were too repressed to realize it? you’ll feel seen. maybe a little too seen

Closer (isn't close enough)

are you a sweet and sappy yet horny bastard? do you like cas exploding light bulbs? you will like this.

“the one where they finally talk about what cas said before the empty took him”

You and Your Husband

it is exTRMELY sweet!!! repression dean strikes again <3

"Five times Dean corrects someone about his relationship with Cas, and one time he realizes he doesn't need to."

Tall Grass

miscommunication and a slowburn! despite being written in 2017 and finished in 2018, it feels like a fix it. ft. plant obsessed cas <3 

Invictus

a LOVELY and short (relatively) finale fix it

“They saved the world. They're free. It's done.

Except it's not, and carrying on is the last thing any of them are thinking about.

They still have someone they need to save.”

Unchained Link

post finale- it’s a great case fic and i am compelled i want more!!!

"It's after the end of things. Life continues on while Dean is "livin it up" in heaven. But it's never that simple, is it? A freak occurrence sends Dean into another time stranded back on Earth. And he thought his hunting days were over. But, no worries. His knight in shining armor comes to the rescue. Hijinks, therefore, ensue."

fun and time unspecified

Ladies and Gentlemen, This is Love Potion No. 5

very funny and sweet! miscommunication at its finest ♥️

"Cas gets drenched with a mystery potion from the ‘love spell’ shelf and... Dean has a sneaking suspicion, angel or no— the spell may have taken effect. And Cas might be in love with Sam."

The Way We Were

Y'all. It is so good its a great mix of funny and serious- extremely fun to see dean as like a base bisexual

"Dean and Castiel pose as a couple to gain access to a gated community known as 'The Glen', a pleasant if secretive location that the boys believe might be linked to several dead bodies showing up over the years bearing signs of ritualistic sacrifice. All seems well until Dean's memory is affected from an incident during a solo exploration, leaving Dean convinced that their cover story is true. Castiel is left trying to resolve their case without taking advantage of an increasingly enthusiastic Dean"

While You Were Sleeping

this is basically just the movie but replacing sandra bullock with cas. this is my comfort movie and imo, one of the most perfect rom coms. the fic isn’t finished but i still have the tab open on my phone and i will straight up go back and re read it when i need a pick me up. 

aus/rewrites

The Harvelle Gospels: Offscript

i know everyone ever ( @jewishcharliebradbury ) has recommended this fic. and for good reason go fucking read it

“The Apocalypse is averted, the angels are in Heaven, and Jo is free from the threat of possession. Somehow it couldn't be farther from a happy ending.“

absolute riots

An Ineffably Profound Bond

i honestly would have put this in the finale fix it section! look. i know. i know you've been burned by crossover fics before. but this is Thee good omens/spn fic you want. its funny as hell and immensely satisfying. im weak for everyone working together tropes and that is this

"After Chuck sets 'The End' in motion, the remaining members of TFW make a miraculous escape. Not willing to waste any time, Castiel comes up with a plan to travel to one of the other worlds to try and get help from the angels there, but after a fight with Dean, it's the hunter who gets sent into an alternate universe,with seemingly no hope of return.

When a mysterious human with a heavenly weapon shows up in Aziraphale's shop, he and Crowley learn that their world is not the only one. Now it is up to them to decide whether or not they want to join forces with the human and help him save his world or simply find a way to send him home."

Somebody Up There Likes Me by @lafilleredige

cas is hit with a spell that turns his vessel into a woman, hijinks and sexuality crises ensue etc etc sam is a supportive and bitchy little brother and its all SO fucking funny and also. horny as hell i love it i love it i LOVE it

“’Dean doesn’t want to talk about your breasts, it’s making him uncomfortable because he hasn’t acknowledged the complex fluidity of human sexuality.’“

Stray Cat Strut

a long crack fic that IS one of the funniest things i’ve ever read and i can’t explain why. it’s so ooc but its so funny that i don’t care. if you need a laugh you gotta read this

"Sam and Cas are immediately in love with the adorable kitty they find outside the bunker door, and occupy their time planning how to convince Dean--who they believe is off sulking after a botched hunt--to let them keep their cat. Along the way, Dean learns to use a litter box and hears some confessions he maybe wasn’t supposed to hear, all while realizing just how much he loves Castiel.

Now all Dean has to do is convince Cas and Sam their new pet cat is actually him before they do something crazy--like neuter him!"

canon compliant or slight canon divergence

Give

by @doublestuffedimpala post season 7 episode 7, kind of ambiguous ending but truly a cas is happy to bleed for the winchesters fic

Punch Like Bones 

short, post 5x04 homoerotic moment that i wish we’d gotten

#lmao please interact with this i spent so much time on it #i had to go onto desktop for this #ill keep adding on to it #my fic recs #fic rec #spn fic rec #deancas fic recs #charlie.txt

[autisticandroids]

i am inclined to think that it is implied by the canon of the supernatural universe that the afterlife as they are set up - heaven, hell, purgatory - are like... how do i put this. catchers? like, they’re like the world of the dead in his dark materials. they’re filters that catch souls, which are actually naturally bound for the empty when they die. 

i have four main pieces of evidence for this:

one: demons go to the empty. but the thing is, demons aren’t really metaphysically different from human souls. they are human souls that have been warped and changed, but they’re not on a basic level different. like, it seems like ghosts can do a lot of the same stuff demons can. and certainly soul eating beings (amara; famine) can feed happily on demons.

so it seems like the reason that demons go to the empty isn’t that angels and demons are similar in any meaningful way - they’re not, angels have nothing to do with humans, they’re totally unrelated - it’s that chuck just didn’t bother to set up a catcher for dead demons, since demons just don’t die that much most of the time. plus, demons have already had their afterlife - they’ve gone to hell. chuck is done with them. he is no longer interested in giving them a satisfying conclusion to their narrative by sending them to an afterlife.

two: angels seemingly aren’t supposed to die that much either (that’s how they manage to wipe themselves out the way they do). they don’t breed, they seem to be created/built - more machine than sapient being. it also seems like they’re bespoke - created individually, not just popped out. 

this is suggested to me by the fact that they seem to know each other by name on sight, but don’t necessarily all seem to have actually met, plus the fact that cas can identify the owner of an angel blade just by looking at it - it seems like angel blades are part of or intertwined with their users in some way, and that they’re unique. (tangent, but also: we are ignoring that jack made angels out of humans in the late seasons, that’s stupid and doesn’t make any sense, cas is fucking older than life on land he wasn’t made from a human.) 

this suggests that angels aren’t meant to die that much either. they don’t have a strong population replenishment mechanism. it seems implied by the fact that only four angels have actually met god (as of lucifer rising) (tangent, but zachariah’s information is likely wrong here; he seems to be implying that only the archangels have spoken to god, but we know at the very least metatron and joshua have done so as well, and as of the canonization of god!chuck, technically at that point so has cas. but zachariah seemingly believes that only the archangels have spoken to god, which implies that the vast majority of angels have not met him), and the fact that archangels canonically are capable of creating angels, that most of the angels were created by the four archangels, so there is some hope of population replenishment while god isn’t there, but it still seems like not enough. certainly archangels aren’t meant to die; there’s only four of them, and unlike regular angels there is absolutely no way to replenish their population without god himself. it seems clear that no archangels were meant to die until the big michael-lucifer prizefight.

plus, angels are tools - chuck doesn’t care about their interiority. they’re agents of fate, wavelengths of celestial intent. what they are supposed to do is obey. chuck doesn’t care about sorting them into good angels and bad angels when they die; he’s just finished with them. like, their lives are not stories chuck is concerned with giving a satisfying ending, they are just tools.

three: we’ve already seen chuck make an afterlife for utilitarian reasons - purgatory. we know for an explicit fact that the reason chuck sends monster souls to a different, non-heaven non-hell dimension when they die, is that he wants to keep the leviathans busy. 

like, he’s concerned if the leviathans are left on earth they’ll eat everything, but he doesn’t want to destroy them. so he makes them their own dimension, and sends them all the monster souls.

like, it doesn’t make sense that monsters would be exempted from the heaven/hell sorting, it’s totally arbitrary. it’s pretty clear that chuck just needed a bone to toss to the leviathans.

three point five (a later addition): billie threatens to toss dean into the empty when he dies so like. human souls must be ABLE to go there.

four, and this is the big one: the season six soul as power source stuff. like, we know for a fact that a soul is a power source in the supernatural universe. we know that crowley as king of hell can lend cas fifty thousand souls to use to power an attack against raphael. so it seems like the afterlives are kind of power banks of some kind. 

this implication is never drawn out or dealt with in the text, but it’s there. like, is this where chuck’s power comes from, or, some of it? souls collected? 

and like all of this is a pick-and-choose of canonical evidence, hole-patching, and head-canon, but it seems to me, for what it is, to be preeeeetty well supported.

#spn

[slipper007]

p ☀️art museums: what’s your favourite museum, or type of museum? 💕💕

☀️art museums: what’s your favourite museum, or type of museum? (doing this)

Word Count: 1,864

Also on AO3 [masterpost]

Two years after the world didn’t end, Team Free Will 3.0 started traveling.

They didn’t always stick together, or even stay in the United States (Sam and Eileen made the trip to Ireland), but they knew they all still had a home in the Bunker.

It was simultaneously freeing and terrifying to be in control of their own fates, something that Sam, Cas, and Jack had all taken in stride. While Eileen struggled at times, Dean was the only one held back by it, as much as he tried not to be. The moment he had first realized that his life was not his own, he’d fought against it out of instinct and righteousness, but now that he had it…

As much as Castiel and his brother both assured him that he was who he was on his own terms, rather than whatever Chuck’s machinations had wanted to him to be, he worried he didn’t know himself. He was just as adrift as he had been in his teens and twenties, desperately trying to emulate his father in order to find a sense of self; as he had been freshly back from hell, violent and afraid of everything he had done and become; as he had been standing in that graveyard with God telling him to kill when he knew revenge wasn’t what his mother would have wanted and wasn’t what he truly wanted.

Castiel had told him in his confession, his brother in several passing speeches over a lifetime, and Dean himself had said it straight to God’s face, but was it true? Who or what was he outside of saving people and hunting things, outside of the narrative Chuck had constructed his entire lifetime?

The vastness of the question was enough to make anyone spiral, so he tried to avoid it.

Charlie helped when she came over. With Sam and Eileen abroad, and Cas all too willing to have deep conversations Dean wasn’t ready for as much as he loved him, she and Dean became closer. She had been staying at the Bunker for a time, not long after Jack and Billie brought her back. She, too, was finding it difficult to adjust to the new world they found themselves in – she had tried for a full year and a half to get her legs under her on her own, but the world had changed in the six years before she had been brought back. Even though she had managed to reinvent herself numerous times before, it was difficult. The Winchesters were more than willing to offer her a place to stay in the meantime.

It worked well for everyone, though it was particularly chaotic now that Sam and Eileen were taking a brief vacation abroad. Dean was constantly with his two best friends (one of whom was his lover), as well as Jack. Charlie and Cas had become close, something that Charlie had deemed “WLW/MLM solidarity” (neither Dean nor Cas knew what that meant). To Jack, Charlie had taken the role of cool aunt, which was both wonderful and terrifying in equal regard, especially given that Jack was, at this point, back to being in a body his own age with his original powers rather than those of a god. The combination of a super-powered six-year-old and a nerdy LARP-enthusiast was certainly an interesting one, especially given how their energies fed and built on each other’s.

It was this merry band that found themselves inside an art museum one hot August afternoon.

Charlie and Dean wandered the lower gallery for a short while as Castiel took Jack through a more kid-focused section, and for a time they wandered in silence.

“So how are you today?”

“You live with me,” Dean responded, only to be faced with a shrug. “How are you?”

“Today’s been good,” Charlie said with transparency. “I woke up again. Started sewing more of my Triss costume – from The Witcher video games, not the show, you know? Now I get to hang out with friends and see some pretty cool art. Maybe I’ll apply for another job today, or bake some bread, or we can finish getting me all caught up on Game of Thrones.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“Dude, spoilers!” She looked straight to him, and Dean shook his head. “Anyway, you’re dodging the question by asking about my awesome life. Not cool, so spill.”

Dean sighed as he walked by another painting of fruit. “I don’t know, Charlie. Could be better, could be worse.”

“Figured out who Dean Winchester is yet?”

“Do any of us truly know who we are?” Dean quipped back.

“Really?”

“Lil’ existentialism never killed anyone,” Dean said with a shrug. “But no, not yet. It’s all still just a big…mess…of what’s him and what’s me.”

“Well, here’s a start for you: Dean Winchester is my friend, and always will be, regardless of whatever some crack writer says.”

“Pretty sappy, but I’ll take it.”

“Shut up.”

Dean Winchester is a friend.

When Cas and Jack rejoined the pair a little later, they all wandered up to the 12th to 19th century European gallery. Jack and Charlie broke away when they came across the tapestries. Castiel, however, was drawn to a painting a little further in. The gallery was still and quiet as Dean joined him.

“St. Sebastian, huh?” Dean said, reading the label. “Know him?”

“My memory of 200 BCE is muddled at best,” Castiel said. “I don’t think so. The painting is beautiful, though, if tragic.”

Dean looked at it again, trying to see what Castiel saw. A beautiful mouth was twisted in pain as arrows lodged in the body, unstoppable. The arms were contorted and restrained, rendering punishment inescapable. The eyes were wide and dark, looking upwards as if begging for divine intervention that would never come.

In it, he saw himself. He saw his struggles with faith in a higher power, with the needless suffering he and his little family had been put through. He saw his loss, his fear, the control he lost when he realized he would never be free from Chuck. What he didn’t see was the anger.

Beyond that, however, he saw Castiel. He saw Cas’ expression when the Mark had worn Dean down, when he had thrown Cas to the floor along side the corpses of the Stynes. It was the same loss, the same fear. The expression was akin to brokenness yet not shattered. He was still faithful, still true. It was the same look on his face when he had confessed in the dungeon. Beautiful but tragic.

What had Dean ever done to deserve that resoluteness, that level of trust in spite of the fear.

“I’m sorry,” he started, words catching in his throat. How did he even begin to make up for all he had done? Yet, it was as if Cas had read his mind. Hell, he was an angel. Maybe he just knew.

Castiel turned to him, a familiar softness in eyes not tainted by pain or prayer for intervention. Dean could lose himself in the deep blue seas.

“You’re forgiven. You’ve been forgiven.”

They stood side by side, listening to Jack’s squeals of joy only a room over, for several minutes before Castiel spoke again.

“You’re unsure of who you are,” Castiel said. It was a fact they both knew, even as Dean started to protest the topic. “I’ve already told you what I think, but let me remind you. You’re the single most loving person I have ever known. You love in spite of Chuck. You care about this broken world, even when it seems hopeless. You always have.” He paused for a long moment before saying, “In plainest terms, you’re a lover, not a fighter.”

“I don’t know about that one. Can’t I be both?”

Castiel let out a long-suffering sigh at that before wandering away to look at the other paintings.

Dean stayed by the painting of St. Sebastian for another few minutes, trying to see what Castiel saw in it before hearing Jack call for him a little way away, his high, childish voice carrying through the halls.

Dean Winchester is a lover.

Downstairs, there was a special exhibition on the history of dance. Jack practically dragged Dean in, his eyes wide and excitement palpable. Charlie and Castiel laughed and promised to catch up in a few minutes – Charlie wanted to grab a print of an art piece from the museum store. Dean and Jack wandered from exhibit to exhibit, looking at everything from classic vinyl to tap shoes. Despite the artifacts and objects, news clippings and sound bites, Jack was fascinated by a video of people swing dancing projected on the wall.

“What’s up, kid?”

“I wish I could do that.”

“You can,” Dean said. “You just have to do what they’re doing.”

Jack looked up to him, eyes wide and a broad grin starting to cross his face.

“Will you show me?”

It took a little bit of practice, and they missed more of the moves than they got, even with Jack standing on Dean’s shoes, but they both enjoyed what they were doing, which made it worth it. Jack’s smile as he danced up to Charlie and Castiel a few minutes later made it all the more precious.

“Come dance with us!” he called out before rushing back over to where Dean still stood.

“Having fun?” Cas asked as

“Cas!” Jack called. “Come on, come on, come on!”

Castiel smiled and shook his head before turning to Charlie and taking her hands. They instantly fell into sync with the video, matching the moves in perfect synchronicity. Dean felt himself stop in shock as Castiel flipped Charlie over his shoulder as if it was no great feat.

“Woah, when did you learn to dance like that?”

“I do have some memories of watching humanity. I was even on Earth when this dance was invented.”

“And I took dance lessons a few years ago,” Charlie offered by way of explanation.

“I guess we’ll just have to up our game, huh Jack?”

Jack giggled, his gap-toothed smile looking all the more excited. They busted out a few new moves, even improvising for a while.

“Dude, you dance like a dad!” Charlie laughed, twirling Castiel as she did so.

Dancing there in the museum, Jack on his feet as Castiel and Charlie watched on, Dean came to a final realization of the day.

Dean Winchester is a father.

As the day drew to a close, the group started to head out. Jack clung to Dean’s back, wiped out after a long day of dancing and wandering the museum. He watched the birds fly overhead in the golden light as they wandered to the car. Cas took the backseat with Jack, who promptly fell asleep.

“This was fun,” Charlie said, setting the bag with her art print on the seat between her and Dean. “It’d been a while since I’d gone out like this.”

It had been fun. It was nice to enjoy the world rather than save it.

Even if he was still working on figuring out who he was, Dean finally felt content.

#fluff #domestic fluff #supernatural #spn fic #dean winchester #castiel #charlie bradbury #jack kline #kid!jack #spncreatorsdaily #creativecavier #userdee #userstarry #userpris #rambleoncas #tuserari #usershey #slipper007writes

[neongreengummiebears]

Disorganized Thoughts on Sex Education Season 3

I binge watched the entirety of season 3 on Friday, and after sitting with it for a couple days, I have composed myself enough to offer some thoroughly disorganized thoughts on what I’ve seen. 

     While I did enjoy many things about this season, I don’t understand the people who claim it was the strongest. In fact, I believe that it was the weakest. I don’t know what exactly happened during the delay, but I swear they have to have lost staff. Writers, perhaps editors? Whoever usually reins things in a bit, keeps the show grounded, and everyone in character. Whoever had that job, they’re either gone, or they’ve just stopped giving a fuck which, while relatable, is unfortunate in regards to this show. Now what do I mean by that? Let me elaborate:

1. This season was gross. And I don’t mean in general, like I didn’t like it. No, I mean that the writers decided that being sexually explicit wasn’t funny enough and decided to add just a fuck-ton of fart jokes and toilet humor. And I get it, okay? This show prides itself on being crass. But you can be crass without being disgusting. I acknowledge that this comes entirely down to personal preference, but I can’t stand toilet humor and I feel like this season really ramped it up. Every episode was someone farting or talking about shit, or that god forsaken thrice cursed bus scene. Sex doesn’t gross me out, talk about sex all fucking day I don’t care, but I don’t need to watch an extended scene of someone digging their own shit out of a bus toilet in a sock and chucking it out the window onto someone’s car. And even just smaller things, like Aimee talking about the flour constipating her or her taking a massive shit in Jean’s toilet when she and Maureen were there. Those scenes weren’t necessary for the plot in any way, which leads me to believe they were just there because someone thought they were funny and if that’s you’re thing go off, but it most definitely isn’t mine. 

2. Ruby and Otis. And more importantly, what was the point of Ruby and Otis? Now don’t get me wrong, I like Ruby as a character and I found their relationship interesting. And I think that it would have been even more interesting if the writers had devoted more time to properly developing it- Ruby was getting better as a person but she wasn’t there yet. I liked it once Otis started standing up for himself more, and demanding respect in the relationship and as she started to actually care for him she did come to treat him more respectfully. I think with more time they could have been really good. But they didn’t get that time- she said she loved him and they didn’t even work through that fiasco before he was kissing Maeve at a gas station. Overall it had a lot of potential but the way they played it left me just sitting here like...why? Like from a narrative standpoint what was even the purpose? Because from where I’m sitting it really only served as yet another roadblock standing between Otis and Maeve and even though I shipped them like CRAZY in season 1 and 2 the constant unnecessary roadblocks are getting a little old. Which leads me to my next point...

3. Why was Maeve and Otis so unsatisfying? That’s not actually a rhetorical question, I can tell you: Because the writers put so little effort into what is supposed to be the main couple on the show. I feel like they put more effort into keeping them apart and then when it comes time to put them together they’re just kind of like NOW KISS, they only talk like once after and then they ship Maeve off to America. Now I’ve heard rumors that Emma Mackey might not want to return to the show for season 4 so if I had to guess at all of this I would say that both this point and the last was a sloppy attempt to cover their asses in the event that they can’t get her to sign back on. If she does return, they can explore the relationship between her and Otis in season 4. If she doesn’t, they’re probably going to put him back with Ruby. But they couldn’t just write her off without at least touching on the relationship they spent the past 2 seasons building, even though Otis and Maeve barely interact in this season, which is frankly another reason why it felt so shoddy. They spent exponentially more time talking to other people and then half the time when Otis was talking to her he was super cringe. 

     Overall, despite loving their relationship initially, the characters have changed so much from their original dynamic, and have interacted so little, that I really don’t even know what’s pulling these characters together. It’s disappointing to admit that I’m kind of over it but honestly even the writers don’t feel invested. it kind of feels like they put them together because the audience expected it and after 3 seasons of anticipation the payoff was generally underwhelming. 

4. Otis. Just...Otis. I understand that Otis was introduced as being a very nice helpful character in season one. He was the quintessential good guy. And then in season 2 he got to explore being a douche for a bit- which is fine. He is a teenager and he was going through some shit. But I really felt that by the end of season 2 he should have resolved that particular plot point. And he was a little better in season 3 I guess? But he didn’t really progress until the end of this season and from a writing standpoint I feel like they really dragged that out for too long. 

5. What’s with this show and it’s hard on for cheating? Like seriously, why does almost every relationship have some kind of infidelity. Like, were Otis and Ruby officially broken up when he kissed Maeve? Maeve certainly hadn’t broken up with Isaac, and this was almost directly on the heels of their very emotional sex scene. There was the issue with Jean and Jakob last season, and Eric cheating on Rahim with Adam. And then Eric (for some reason) cheating on Adam this season with random Nigerian dude whose name I can’t remember. Just...why is this a thing? 

     But also can we just talk about how weird the break up was? And out of left field? Like they literally spent the whole season developing their relationship, and then they get to Nigeria and after hiding the whole time he is subtly able to talk about Adam to his grandmother. And he sounds so proud, and so nice when he’s doing so, and not at all like he’s planning to end this wonderful relationship he’s describing. And then when he gets back, guilty after cheating on said boyfriend (like he should be) he asks Adam, seemingly as a test, if he would go out to a club with him. And Adam says no because that isn’t his scene and like...Eric knows that isn’t his scene. But at the same time, I feel like if Eric had sat him down and been like “You don’t have to wear makeup or dress outlandishly, just come to the club with me because it’s important to me” I really think Adam would have gone. And if the clothes and make-up were a dealbreaker like...why? You know who you’re dating. And while wanting him to tell his mom isn’t an overwhelmingly outrageous request, when you start getting into his physical appearance then that’s just actually trying to change him as a person and that’s just a really shitty thing to do. 

6. I promise there will be some positives in this list at some point but before that...what the fuck Eric? Like, I understand that Eric wants to get out there and explore his options, find someone more comfortable doing the things that he wants to go do. That’s realistic I guess, your high school relationships don’t work out and just because Adam came out for him he still isn’t obligated to stay in a relationship with him. But from a fictional narrative standpoint? What the fuck is this? Adam and Eric were one of the most popular ships on the show. They have been foreshadowed since season one, and had so so much effort put into developing them both as characters. Adam has come such a long way. They have brought him so far out of him comfort zone that Adam in season 3 is almost a completely different person to Adam in season 1. They spent so much of this season further developing the relationship they established last season, and for what? To break them up at the very end? WHY? 

7. Following on the heels of point 6, Aimee and Steve. They didn’t need to break up. I understand the direction the writers were taking this- Aimee wants to be single for a while to fully process her trauma and get to know her own body again. And that’s valid. I just don’t like it because I very strongly suspect that she will have a new love interest next season and that all her stuff about being single isn’t going to be shown. It will all happen off screen during whatever time skip they employ between seasons and then they’re going to use the fact that she is single to introduce a new more dramatic love interest for her since golden retriever boy Steve wasn’t interesting enough for them. Maybe that’s just me being cynical but if anyone can come out of season 3 NOT feeling a little cynical it would probably be a miracle. 

8. A positive! Finally a positive! I love the relationship between Adam and Rahim. Do I want them to date? Not particularly. I wouldn’t be mad if it happens, but I really just like them as like awkward begrudging friends. Some of my favorite scenes this season were the interactions between the two of them (Once again, the disgusting bus ride notwithstanding) I like Rahim a lot more when he isn’t interrupting my ship (which is a habit of mine. I liked Ola a lot more once she broke up with Otis) 

9. I don’t think Viv was out of character. Some people have been saying that she was, but I don’t think so. She has always been ambitious and even Jackson understand that about her in the show. And even when she was working for Hope and carrying out her rules, she was never an antagonist because she never gave up her personal morals to do it. For example, when Hope had them divided into boy and girl lines, Jackson asked her where Cal should go. She told him that boys went to the left and girls went to the right but as soon as Cal was like “Im not a boy or a girl,” Viv was immediately like, “ Oh! Right! Let me ask Hope.” She approached the situation in a way that made it clear that she recognized this issue as a legitimate problem and when she went to Hope it wasn’t framed like “This person is being an issue refusing to choose,” but instead like “We didn’t account for this possibility, that was our bad. How should we fix it?” Later on, on the class trip, Viv even lied to Hope and told her everything was fine because she didn’t want to get anyone in trouble. Viv took the opportunities presented to her, but I never interpreted it as her being an antagonist in any way. 

10. I love that Viv and Jackson remained friends, and I love that Viv has her sexy long-distance boyfriend who sexts about wheat XD Her sexting was one of my favorite scenes- well written, laugh out loud hilarious. No complaints. Sexy boyfriend was indeed very sexy and honestly, Viv absolutely deserves him. 

11. Mr. Groff better apologize to Adam next season, or at the very least have any kind of fucking conversation with his son at all or else why the fuck did I watch SO MANY scenes developing him as a sympathetic character? They could have spent that time developing ANYONE, but instead we were focused on him so like...I’m going to need some kind of payoff. Make it relevant

12. I want more bonding scenes between Adam and Maureen. I love Maureen- I love her friendship with Jean and I love how she always chooses her son over  her estranged husband (as she should) I especially love her very loving and supportive relationship with Adam, even though Adam is terrible at communication. It’s a self indulgent wish, I’d just like to see more. 

13. Isaac. I made many posts after the season 2 release, about how much I despised Isaac. Unlike Ola, I find that I didn’t have a complete change of heart but I don’t hate him AS MUCH as I did before. I still don’t like him though and while you might think “Yeah but you hate anyone who stands in the way of Otis and Maeve” no. This is historically accurate and yet, this season? Not true. For example, I don’t hate Ruby. Do I think her inclusion in the story was handled poorly in a way that made the entire plot point unnecessary? Yes I do. I also feel that way about Isaac, but less so because I feel like the relationship between him and Maeve deepening was better foreshadowed and was kind of the natural conclusion given the events of the previous season. As a character though, I still don’t really like him, and after 2 seasons of him I don’t think it has anything to do with him interfering with Maeve’s relationship with Otis- I just legitimately don’t like him. And I don’t like him with Maeve. I think the biggest irritant this season was the way that, after confessing about deleting the message he was like “yeah I fucked up but only because I like you so much, just forgive me” And then at one point I believe I remember Maeve apologizing to him for her reaction to everything. But then when he found out that she kissed Otis (admittedly a shitty thing to do) he got so mad and like, held a fucking grudge about it. And I get it, he has a right to be mad, but also boy you were the one groveling like 2 episodes ago get over yourself. They both fucked up in different ways but he acts like he has the moral high ground all the time and it gets really annoying. I don’t know, maybe I’m letting my general dislike of the character color my perception of events, but this show has managed to change my opinion on characters before but it still hasn’t made me like him so I think it’s just not going to. 

14. What the hell were they trying to do with Hope? Like legitimately, what? Because I can’t quite figure it out. And that’s mostly because I feel like they were trying to make her a nuanced and sympathetic villain, but they broke a cardinal rule- To make a villain sympathetic you must also ensure that nothing they do is inherently irredeemable. For example, principal Groff. He was a grade A dick for the past 2 seasons but I still feel that, now that we have a sympathetic backstory, if handled properly he could still come back from this. He can see the error of his ways and if he works really really hard to make amends to his family he could perhaps have his character turned around. In Hope’s case however, I would argue that they did makes her nuanced, but failed to make her sympathetic because as a character she went too far. If they had stuck to her just being a general tyrant of a headmaster - enforcing strict rules and regulations but doing so out of insurmountable pressure from her own bosses -  and then softened us towards the character by showing us her willingness to help Maeve get a scholarship, her troubled marriage, and her inability to conceive, it could have worked. The trouble is when they brought in her racism and general bigotry. Those weren’t flaws brought on by stress, those were deeply rooted character flaws that the character isn’t going to overcome because by the end of the season the character hasn’t even admitted them to herself. The issues were addressed by others, but not by Hope herself, leaving me to believe that the character herself still views them as a nonissue. I would be very surprised if she even appears in season 4 and moreso if they manage to even half-way redeem her. I’m relatively certain we won’t see her again, which makes me question the effort put into her character development. 

15. I like Jakob as a character, I don’t like him as a love interest for Jean, but I LOVE him as a father figure for Otis. It’s very conflicting because I want him to stay in Otis’s life, but I don’t like him as a romantic interest for Jean. also it’s pretty clear he isn’t Joy’s father so that’s going to be an awkward fucking conversation. If she even tells him. The way the show is going I kind of feel like she won’t, or will at least put it off for as long as possible. 

16. I want more interaction between Otis and Jean. Positive interaction, not just her being intrusive or Otis being a little bitch. I like their mother-son dynamic when they’re getting along so I just generally want more of it. 

17. Adam. Adam has become my favorite character in this show and I just generally want more of him and his relationships with others. I love his relationship with his mother but I want more if him and Emily, and him and Ola and now him and Ruby. I want to see him and Ruby discussing the Kardashians. I want him to train Madam and enter her in more competitions and just ultimately grow his social circle. Get all the love and support for god’s sake this boy needs it. 

Im sure there are plenty of things I’m forgetting and you can ask me about them if you like but for now it’s late and I’m tired. 

#sex education season 3 #sex education season 3 spoilers #sex education #otis milburn #eric effiong #adam groff #jean milburn #maeve wiley #Aimee #I don't know Aimee's last name #My bad

[slitherbop]

Thinking about Papa G...

I Like Him, here’s a post where I ramble about him and the theories I have about his past and future. This is the most open I’ve ever been about my thoughts on a hyperfixation have fun everybody Warning for spoilers

Hi I’m looking after my cats right now and had thoughts about Papa G on private while having a nosebleed and thought I’d write it out more on here since I haven’t seen anyone else point out some of these things and I have an evil brain that makes me want to think about Papa G because I love him he’s my favourite character right now, the more I think about Papa G the cooler he becomes and it’s true that I Do rotate him in my mind

Train of thought started with I was thinking about my OCs and thought what if Papa G had OCs, he’s an artist and has lived long what if he has just so many ideas for characters and stories that he’s accumulated over the years. Then now with his powers he could use his clones to help work on his stories and then he makes some sorta abstract and mysterious comic, like multiple comics and stuff and only shows it to Kid because he lives in the middle of nowhere and doesn’t really care about stuff like audience or publication he’s just living in some artistic bliss.

I think it’s cool that Papa G uses his clones to help with making his yard art but imagine having to wrangle multiples of yourself to create a narrative together. They’re all You but also Not You, think back to his character short where he’s making plans for a construction and makes a clone that instantly comes up with a different idea than him, so it must be wild having different versions of yourself that aren’t all on the same page as you (also in the short they like have different demeanours about them, shout out to silly balloon Papa G)

If Papa G let a clone of his live long enough they could become a completely different person. Different experiences and perspectives create a different version of Papa G. That idea is kinda scary to me especially if it were taken Long Term like a separate Papa G living separate from everyone. And I could see that happening in the show it’s just weird enough to happen. We had a Papa G be super traumatized, what if he let that clone exist longer.

Anyway you know how in that photograph in Mo’s Oasis that’s from around the 70’s that shows Papa G in the background looking Exactly how he does now... I really think time travel is going to be introduced in this, it could totally be the power of one of the thirteen stones and this show is wild enough to do it and is planned up to season 3. So I think what if some Papa G clones were left behind in the past. At this point I’d imagine that Papa G’s powers would be developed enough that his clones could live on without him (the team IS going to be understanding their powers more and gain new abilities, this could be one of Papa G’s.) SO what if those Papa Gs were scattered throughout time having to live out their lives. Imagine living the rest of your life in a different time and place knowing you’re just a clone and that you shouldn’t even exist :[ Papa G sadstuck (I’m sad at this thought)

ANYWAY I imagined a scenario in which one of the Papa G clones in the past contacts the Real Papa G in the timeline and tells him about the stones of power and THAT’S why Papa G said “if I had a nickel for every time I heard that I’d have a dime” to Kid who told him about the stones, hearing it the first time from himself. AND also WHY Papa G instantly knew how to use his powers. Plus also knew to trust Chuck (this ones a stretch I’m just being Gay here) this is where my initial thoughts ended

BUT NOW I HAVE MORE THOUGHTS!!! What if the reason why Papa G’s track record is “Surprisingly” long is because Well Papa G DID do some f*cked up things but also had the addition of some other Papa Gs stuck in the past to really muddle things up for his record as well. That’d be wild and could totally see happening, man. Man I love Papa G there is really no other character who is just a bundle of sunshine but have something Unknown and perhaps messed up implied about him, I want to know how much he has angered the government and want to know why he’s living out in the middle of nowhere with so few people to even know him. He’s just a silly old man.

Also this is because I never really venture out into looking into various media but he’s also the only character I know where their whole thing is creating clones of themselves and is actually given a focus into how f*cked up it is that he has to see himself die all the time and be numb to it, or clones doing things that his original self wouldn’t do and be traumatized by it. I know it’s WAHA funny gags but I think it’s interesting, it makes him a more interesting character to me. I like him I like that his name is George like me and is also an artist all he needs is to be trans gay and cree, alsoalso Green is my favourite colour and I love orange as well I like that he’s an old man in the middle of nowhere That’s The God Dam Dream

I don’t know if I have any more theories at the moment this turned into me gushing about a character who isn’t really too important but I like him ;_; thank you for reading once again I never usually talk at all but I like to when it’s about my favourite thing. I’m going to do things now goodbye

#kid cosmic #kid cosmic spoilers #papa g #after this I’m going to Shut The Up!!!!!!

[norahastuff]

the unrequited love thing just bothers me so much. No-one had any issues seeing Cas/Hannah as a valid ship in the show when Cas wasn't even really interested in her. We've had a decade worth of romantic signals from Dean, but somehow destiel is unrequited. such a goddamn tragedy that they couldn't find their way back to each other one last time when that is their whole ~dynamic~

Yes, all of this. Exactly. Honestly, it’s been so frustrating to keep hearing the word unrequited thrown around so much lately. What about this dynamic has ever seemed unrequited? I’ve done this before but I’ve been really annoyed about it lately so should we make a list?

What about Dean feeling so personally betrayed by Cas in The Man Who Would Be King? Or Sam and Bobby walking on eggshells around Dean and taking care to very delicately approach bringing up the possibility of Cas doing something shady because they knew how hard Dean was going to take it? They knew it would be different for him than it would be for both of them.

Or how about Dean keeping Cas’ trenchcoat, and not only keeping it - he could have stashed it at Bobby’s or left it in the trunk of the Impala - but no he kept it with him, moved it from car to car. And this isn’t a last-minute development that they decided to throw into 7x17 when Cas returned, we see glimpses of the coat in other episodes before this, a consistent reminder that Dean’s carrying it around with him. That losing Cas is weighing on him.

How about Dean wondering why he could usually get over things but for some reason with Cas he couldn’t and he just didn’t know why. 

For that matter...do you think there is anybody else that Dean would forgive for hurting Sam? For betraying him? Sure Dean is mad at Cas but more than anything he wanted to fix things. Despite everything, he needed Cas to be a part of his life. 

How about that time Dean spent a year in purgatory looking for Cas, praying to him every night? In Dean’s mind, Sam is out there alone doing God knows what trying to get him back. I mean Sam didn’t, he’d let Dean go, but Dean assumed he was still looking. And yet Dean didn’t go back to Sam even though he could. He stayed for a year looking for Cas. Because he needed to. He needed him. Purgatory was pure remember? Dean had clarity there. He understood his wants, needs, and emotions.

Or you know just that one little thing about how Dean changed his own memories of what happened when he got separated from Cas because the thought of failing Cas was less painful than the idea that Cas would choose to stay in purgatory instead of leaving with him.

“We need you. I need you.” You know all about this one, I don’t need to say more.

The angels knowing exactly what would hurt Dean, knowing how much he cared about Cas and using that against him: 

“The very touch of you corrupts. When Castiel first laid a hand on you in hell he was lost!” 

“I know you’re hoping Castiel will return to you. I only wish that he felt the same way.”

Miriam: Bieber in there he can do almost anything. Dean: Anything? (and for the first time since Cas died we see Dean experience a moment of hope...and then...) Miriam: Oh sweetie, almost anything. Castiel he’s dead, all the way dead, because of you.

Dean staring wistfully at Cas through a Gas n Sip window for god knows how long. Actually you know what, that whole episode. 

Cas being Dean’s Colette. That’s not subtext. You can argue with the execution, but the parallel was spelled out. And actually for that matter in Chuck’s drafts or alternate futures/ timelines or whatever that he was showing Sam, Dean was the one who was broken after losing Cas to the Mark of Cain, Dean was the one who had to bury him in Ma’lak box. Dean was the one who had to stop him. So I mean not only was Cas Dean’s Colette, but Dean was Cas’ Colette too.

Dean reacting very differently than Sam to Cas’ decision to say yes to Lucifer. Dean’s worry. Dean desperately calling out to Cas over and over again to try reach him and get him to eject Lucifer. Dean resisting Amara for Cas. Lucifer and Amara being very surprised by this. Amara using Cas to try to get to Dean. 

Dean’s very different reactions to all things Cas in s12. This one would need it’s own post, but let’s just say there was a lot of focus on Dean and Cas in s12 and most of it was on how intensely Dean felt for Cas. 

Dean made him a Led Zeppelin mixtape. And then proceeded to get mad at himself for letting Cas use it to come into his room and play him. Which isn’t exactly what happened (though it sort of is) but that’s exactly what went down from Dean’s perspective, and that kind of move would only work if Dean truly cared about Cas. Going into someone’s room and playing on their feelings for you by using a romantic gift they gave you, only works if that person has feelings for you that can be played with.

12x23. Sam having to pull Dean away from Cas at the rift because Dean was intent on chasing after Cas. Dean falling to his knees by Cas’ body unable and unwilling to think about anything else and leaving Sam to face the nephilim. Sam knowing better than to even try to move Dean.

Widower arc. I would elaborate but do I need to?

And finally all of their arc in s15. No part of that was one sided. 

I actually can’t believe we have to keep having this conversation. Before it seemed like we kept having to somehow “prove” there was a romantic element to Dean and Cas’ relationship. Now that they have explicitly stated in canon that there is, the conversation seems to have shifted to how it’s one sided. Look I’m as frustrated as anyone that Dean didn’t get to say anything, but we never considered their relationship one sided before. That’s certainly not what I saw in the show.  Dude pines after his totes str8 bro friend who’s not into him is not a story I would have had any interest in. Looking at that long list above does it seem like it was one sided?

Whatever Cas felt for Dean, Dean felt it too. This has never seemed like a one sided narrative. Like you said just because the last page of the story was ripped out/wasn’t written (ie whatever you think went down) it doesn’t invalidate years upon years of consistent relationship building and emotional growth. Their story is incomplete not erased.

(And in relation to the Cas and Hannah of it all, a while back I did get curious and look that up, and you’re right. People had no problem with thinking of Cas and Hannah as romantic - when she was played by Erica Carroll. When Hannah returned in a male vessel, both Misha and the new actor Lee Majdoub played their relationship exactly the same way, the same heart eyes, the same gentle touches and soft spoken appreciation, but no one seemed to want to discuss Cas and Hannah’s romantic connection anymore. For reasons. Whatever could they be? I’m putting this in brackets though because I don’t have the sources on that and I have no intention of trawling through reddit/entertainment review sites/wherever I checked last time to find them. I do not have that in me. So there’s a chance I could be mistaken and people did discuss it, in which case I’d love to be proven wrong. Anyway that’s why this point is just at the end in brackets)

#asks #destiel #anon trust me I'm in complete agreement #we're on the same wavelength #my spn thoughts #i got a little carried away #this has just been bothering me lately #love and...love #long post

[mittensmorgul]

As Above, So Below

I’m still trying to pinpoint exactly why the focus on “heaven is fixed and actually a paradise now!” is just so deeply unsatisfying to me. And I think I need to preface this with a bit of backstory about me, because I think that gives the rest of this essay some relevant context.

I know this isn’t relevant to my main point here, but this is a metatextual and thematically identical example of the exact thing I’m gonna lay out, because context is always helpful. So please forgive this seemingly irrelevant detour, because I promise it will be relevant by the end.

(plus, would it really be an Essay By Mittens™ without at least one baffling tangent? no, it would not!)

Tangent time!

I think everyone that follows me knows how skeptical I was... or should I say how WARY I was of the way Eileen was returned to the narrative this season. We were warned in the PREVIOUS EPISODE how much Chuck was attempting to interfere in their lives. I was accused of some very nasty things, of hating the ship, or hating the character of Eileen, or of hating Sam and not wanting them to be happy. No amount of pointing at obvious warning signs in the text, no amount of yelling about Sam’s God Wound or the absolute klaxon warning that the wound had become “quiet” and his Chuck-O-Vision Nightmares had apparently stopped seemed to matter. I was declared “wrong” and told to shut up.

And then 15.09 happened, and basically everything I’d been wary of was shown to be what actually happened, but there were still unresolved issues. Eileen doubted her own feelings and walked away. She doubted what was actually real. And at the time, I said many times that I would be thrilled to see those issues resolved by the end of the season, and for her to truly know that what she’d felt growing between her and Sam was real. And by the end of the season, despite my personal horror at her previous situation (and having that personal horror compounded by the fandom literally gaslighting me and attempting to bully me into ignoring this basic actual plot detail of this specific growth process which... in the context of what my personal objection was to accepting her return at face value in the first place having been personal trauma associated with gaslighting and manipulation...) by the time 15.18 aired, I was 100% convinced that Sam and Eileen had fully chosen each other, and felt the traumatic pain Sam suffered during that text conversation with her during the snap. She NEEDED to come back, because she had been set up to be part of Sam’s Win. They were clearly each other’s future.

The show literally put in all the work to make even *me* feel this to be True and Right and Good. And then after that point we never even hear Eileen’s name again. We never were told that she was even returned at the end of 15.19. Sam, who had been so entirely devastated by her disappearance in the previous episode that he couldn’t even process it was apparently hit with an amnesia hammer and just... never even thought about her again through a long greyscale life with a blurry baby Dean factory vaguely in the background of a single scene of his life. I can’t credit or justify how after an entire year invested in making us all truly care about Sam and Eileen and the happiness they found in each other if only the cosmos would allow them to choose each other in the end would just... erase all of that in the series finale.

Which brings me to the second tangent, which is specifically about *me,* and how I feel about the cosmic order in the television show Supernatural. Because I feel a lot about it. Probably more than most people ever did. And this is also important to understanding the main underlying point I need to make here.

Something I’ve been most looking forward to, for YEARS, about Supernatural eventually ending someday was writing a book, or a thesis, or even just organizing and compiling all my observations into a cohesive narrative specifically about the cosmology of the Supernatural universe. I’ve been cobbling together my observations and realizations about the nature of heaven, hell, purgatory, the empty, the alternate universes we’ve seen, and yes, even the cosmic function of the mundane level of the story as told by events that transpired on Earth. So of everyone watching this dumb show for the last 15 years, I don’t actually know anyone who cared more that I did about finding a satisfactory resolution and transformation of every plane of existence-- the mortal world AND the “afterlife realms” we’ve experienced on this show. And in the wake of the finale, I feel cheated out of that. Because in the end, it wasn’t about the triumph of free will and a flip of the script, it was just more of the same.

And now that I have those two preliminaries out of the way, I’ll finally get to the point. :’D

(hooray, it didn’t even take 1k words to get there for once!)

The “main stage” of Supernatural has always been Earth. It’s always been “Humanity.” At the very start, we meet two men whose lives had always been dictated to them by higher powers. At first, that “higher power” was their father who raised them in his vengeance mission, who trained them to hunt the supernatural. It was the inciting incident of the entire series, after all, their realization that forces outside of their control had irrevocably altered the course of their lives. It had forever torn down what they’d trusted in family, in personal safety, and would become something they couldn’t outrun or fight back against for long before another wave of cosmic discord would settle over them once more.

We watched this story play out in ever increasing spheres of cosmic significance, until Gabriel laid it out on the table for them in the simplest possible terms (in 5.08).

GABRIEL: You do not know my family. What you guys call the apocalypse, I used to call Sunday dinner. That's why there's no stopping this, because this isn't about a war. It's about two brothers that loved each other and betrayed each other. You'd think you'd be able to relate. SAM: What are you talking about? GABRIEL: You sorry sons of bitches. Why do you think you two are the vessels? Think about it. Michael, the big brother, loyal to an absent father, and Lucifer, the little brother, rebellious of Daddy's plan. You were born to this, boys. It's your destiny! It was always you! As it is in heaven, so it must be on earth. One brother has to kill the other. DEAN: What the hell are you saying? GABRIEL: Why do you think I've always taken such an interest in you? Because from the moment Dad flipped on the lights around here, we knew it was all gonna end with you. Always. A long pause. SAM and DEAN look down, then at each other. DEAN: No. That's not gonna happen. GABRIEL: I'm sorry. But it is. GABRIEL sighs. GABRIEL: Guys. I wish this were a TV show. Easy answers, endings wrapped up in a bow...but this is real, and it's gonna end bloody for all of us. That's just how it's gotta be. ***

And isn’t that all even 1000x more painfully ironic that it all still happened even 10 years later? It was always going to end with them. And lol, “I wish this were a TV show” because if it was then it wouldn’t have to end bloody.

But this… was a Major Acknowledgement that the meta level of this story was consistent, and was telling us something important. It demonstrated that the Cosmic Structure Itself was the cause for Sam and Dean’s “destiny” in this story. But that’s not what the point of this story has ever been.

Nobody (including me, who is literally obsessed with this aspect of the story) has ever invested themselves in the narrative of Supernatural because they cared about the fate of the cosmic order over and above the fate of the characters who had committed to overthrowing it all, to “tearing up the pages” and writing their own destinies. I mean, we became invested because Sam, Dean, and Cas as characters took us by the hand and invited us to come along with them as they battled against fate for the good of EARTH and HUMANITY.

And certainly, Heaven being a horrific sort of eternal replay of the “highlights” of individual souls greatest hits, where free will didn’t apply as everyone was just boxed away into their individual holodecks to serve as some sort of giant Heaven Battery powering the furtherance of this narrative, this “cosmic order” that had become so powerful it dictated the events and manipulated the lives of people who still existed in the ostensible realm of free will and human life on Earth… that couldn’t stand in the end. But what the narrative (and people I’ve seen attempting to justify the finale as narratively sensible) seems to have forgotten was that all of that was Chuck’s construct to begin with. That without Chuck holding his kingdom in Heaven together, the walls of all those soul cubicles ceased to even be relevant.

After spending their entire lives to this point constantly fighting their way to the absolute pinnacle of the As Above, So Below narrative and pulling the plug on the original creator himself, Humanity should’ve triumphed. And I’d argue that it DID, through Jack restoring the missing essential “humanity” to the divine condition. And, silly me, I thought they’d achieved the promise of “paradise” heralded by Jack’s birth at last, and truly “flipped the entire script of the narrative.”

Ever since they thwarted the original apocalypse, I had hope that they would continue to achieve the same result right up the ladder. Metatron trying to fill the role of Chuck Junior hit his own narrative wall in TFW, while Dean’s battle with the Mark of Cain, and Cain telling him he was “living my life in reverse” and would succumb to destiny by killing his loved ones in the “reverse order” to Cain’s own path to downfall cemented this for me. Dean not only failed to kill any of his loved ones (you didn’t kill your own brother. why?), he SAVED them. He didn’t fulfil the prophecy in reverse, he subverted it. He UNMADE it.

Perhaps I was thinking on too grand a scale, that the ultimate inversion wouldn’t be “God is overthrown and replaced by more of the same,” but “God is overthrown and the entire order of the universe is restructured from the bottom up rather than the top down.

I’d hoped against hope that the conclusion of the narrative would be “As below, so above,” with the fundamental power of human love becoming the new foundation of the cosmic order. It never even occurred to me that “taking back the narrative to rewrite it for ourselves” was not the ultimate goal of Team Free Will, or the ultimate expression of their biggest win.

This whole “well heaven really needed to be rebuilt, there was still work to be done!” seems… irrelevant to me if they’d truly won free of the cosmic narrative. The entire structure of the universe-- including Heaven and Hell-- should’ve defaulted to the paradise state that Jack was literally born to bring to fruition. Wasn’t that the point of his entire role in the story, ultimately?

And if that wasn’t the case in the end, why did we never learn the fate of Hell? Was it just… irrelevant and unchanged after this? Or just… abandoned as a concept entirely? It’s just strange to me to put such a focus on heaven being the sole sphere of import in the end that it undercuts the essential humanity of the narrative for me.

The story itself had kept Heaven on a back burner for years, only occasionally mentioning that the structure of the place was falling further and further into disrepair with a dwindling force of angels struggling to keep the walls in place at all, that it seems like it could’ve been an afterthought at the end of the series rather than a focus so large it required the death of both main characters to make sure we all understood that Heaven Had Changed Now. Because TFW had never been fighting to make Heaven right. They’d been fighting to save the world itself, for humanity to all have a chance to live their lives as their own.

And we didn’t need to see that in the final hope they might get their own lives on Earth to explore. In the end, the fundamental narrative that Life On Earth was dictated by the cosmic structure of creation was never fully subverted. And for me, that’s the main reason I just… can’t accept the finale. It wasn’t a victory of free will and humanity, in the end it was just more of the same.

I appreciate the attempts to take the essential bones of the story we did get and apply a different polish to the surface of the skeleton, but to me it still feels like we’re looking at completely different beasts in the end. Like… to me this was as jarring a revelation as those drawing of modern animals reimagined as dinosaurs entirely based on their skeletons. Like, all along the narrative told me I was looking at a swan. They told me this skeleton they’re building out from is definitely a swan, without a doubt.  I know what a swan looks like-- a graceful feather-covered bird with magnificent wings. I trusted that in the end it would be at least remotely swan-looking. And then the finale ended up looking like this

and I just don’t even know where everything went so wrong. Or maybe all along I just assumed they actually knew what a swan looked like, but weren’t sure they could actually pull it off and settled for whatever the heck this is instead. Either way, I’m actually kinda grateful to the finale for being so entirely disappointing on every level, because otherwise I probably would’ve tried to adopt the monstrosity of it anyway. And I’m really, really glad I don’t have to.

#spn 15.20 #spn cosmology #heaven hell purgatory and the empty #and this is why no amount of narrative defense of the finale is capable of making me feel any better about it #i admit i thought too big... but it was all right there in the narrative to see #oh well at least all i have to do to hold on to my grandest notion of the universe is throw out the finale :'D

[dallonm-archive]

TABBY | SHORT STORY UPDATES #4

In Tabby, a reclusive man who’d rather exist as a phantom than a human notices the neighbours aren’t feeding their cat, and is sucked into a world that breaks the stillness of his own.

Genre: literary fiction, “soft” noir (??)

POV: 1st person present, very observational and detached for most of the narrative

Setting: late 1940s/early 1950s, unnamed US city but implied to be Los Angeles 

Atmosphere: a summer that’s sickly, orange juice, the smell of paint, shaky hands, peach skies, sunflowers, blood splatter, a cats purr, the gut feeling that something is very, very wrong

Literal Logline: this cat is my friend and he doesn’t judge me over silly little things like the murder i just committed (also i think he might be god??)

Hi I wrote a story about a cat and got way too into it and accidentally made it about murder and now it might be my favourite thing I’ve written! Lets talk about it! cw for murder and blood imagery!

general taglist ; @kowlazovdi​ @avi-burton-writing​ @ryns-ramblings​ @melpomeny​ @kitblogsthings​ @ezrathings​ @aetherwrites​ @bookphobe​ @haldimilks​ @alicewestwater​ @bookpacking​ @shaelinwrites​ @writingamongthecoloredroses​ @harehearts​ @zemnian​ @onlyganymede​ @theelectricfactory​ @write-like-babs​ @oceancold​ @notphilosopherstudentblog​ @veiliza​ @sidhewrites​ @wolf-oak​ @feverdreamwritings​ @oasis-of-you​

This entire story sparked from this photo, which I couldn’t find a specific source for, but is cute and a Mood nonetheless! 

My thought process was essentially “man sits on bench with cat...........and also.......murder?” I don’t know why my brain is like this!!! 

I imagine this story being set in the late 40s/early 50s, but haven’t pinpointed exactly, in a suburb of Los Angeles (but this also isn’t clear in the story as of now). This used to be my go to setting when I was really into noir, and it was fun to return to that in a non-noir piece! This started out as purely literary, but now I do see some noir elements here. They’re just very subtle - nor was I intentionally trying to capture any - and the story misses some of the fundamental conventions. To me it’s almost like...soft noir? Noir lite??  I feel like it’s inherently noir and inherently not noir at the same time but I love the vibes of it a lot. There’s this “glow” to the story that I can’t exactly put into words, like a very subtle golden hour that is very tranquil and strangely undisturbed by the general chaos going on in the actual story

I took this setting, the vibes, and the idea of a character with an innate connection to this cat, plus a murder chucked somewhere in the middle and ran with it.

I wrote this over the course of a couple days, and it came very naturally! The prose is a little more sparse than my usual writing which made the process much quicker, and I’m really into this style at the moment. A lot of it is also internal thought, which y’all know is right up my alley. I really, really love the voice in this. It starts very unremarkable, but there is an unsettling undercurrent that grows and grows and it’s been very fun to blend the mundane and the creepy. This story really reignited my drive for short fiction because the trend lately has been coming up with an idea I love that just doesn’t translate on paper, but this one despite needing a good deal of work was very smooth!

I’d say this is my first successful attempt at a nameless/faceless character and it’s one of the most interesting experiences of character development I’ve had in a long time?? The only other time I’ve done this is in my story Rinse Cycle, but the narrator never really felt much like a character (which is very unusual for me), whereas the narrator in Tabby feels as fleshed out and nuanced as any of my characters with names or faces. I rarely focus on appearances for short story characters anyway, but I’ve never struggled with finding a name for a character and this narrator just Does Not want to be named. But I think that really fits him! He likes to be invisible and drift through life unnoticed, where he is merely an observer rather than a participant; so when he does get chucked into the middle of a very messy, very chaotic situation he essentially shuts down. I really like the tonal shift this creates where we go from a very detached narrative to very in the moment, very vivid and intense, like we go from 0 to 100 real quick. I don’t want to share a lot of plot details (which makes writing this a little frustrating sigh), but it ends with him committing a murder that, whilst intentional in the moment, is entirely impulsive and practically out of his control. He is not a natural killer and goes from barely being an emotional participant in his life to fully immersed in the moment and absolutely terrified by that. I’m really looking forward to digging deeper into his psychological state as I work on this draft because Boy We Don’t Have Time To Unpack All This. A quick summary of him would be though

people watcher, picks up more than he realises

living in a house he inherited from his dead father 

made eye contact with a stranger and it was physically painful

quietly unhinged

doesn’t feel like he’s a person 

oh no, now i have to face the consequences of my actions!

I’m trying to limit the amount of excerpts I post when it comes to short stories [because I am always basing the value of my content on prose I share which is! not healthy!], so the only writing I’m going to share is this little description that’s not very plot relevant, but is a good demonstration of this narrator’s funky little voice:

Every morning, at seven sharp, I routinely sit on the swinging bench behind my house to eat over easy eggs and burnt sausages. I still don’t understand how to cook meat. Behind me, cars murmur and sputter into the city, housewives chatter from their separate square gardens and I do not exist in the same reality as them. I am boxed in by off-white picket fence. The fence dividing my neighbours and I – a saffron coloured house with sunflowers bordering the perimeter – is painted pinkish red like an infected tongue. Every morning, I routinely think, that I do not know what’s stranger: how the red jolts the sun house’s otherwise harmonious existence, or the way the job was never finished. It’s not as if the painter died, because if the painter died there would be a corpse; perhaps blood spatter would darken against red wood, perhaps paint would pool out of the dropped can and mimic the presence of an exit wound. 

Y’all might be wondering, where does the cat fit in all of this? And the answer is it’s complicated! In terms of form, we bounce between observations/interactions of the cats behaviour and the “main plot” of the story - which is to do with the rather unhinged new neighbours disrupting our neighbours unremarkable life. Thematically, the cat definitely symbolises a lot of things and opens up a lot of conversations that I still haven’t polished because well, we’re on draft one and I was focused on some funky Cat Descriptions. Some fun ideas include the distinction between human and animal, how capitalism is impeding on our chances to live a fulfilled life, and the idea that all humans do is overcomplicate everything. It’s presence also acts as a grounding technique for the narrator, since he so easily detaches himself from the rest of the world. The writing started with a scene of the act killing a mouse and how clean and simple it all is that I’m lowkey obsessed with, and is definitely some non-subtle foreshadowing for what comes later. 

I like to joke that the cat is God because sometimes the narrator says some weird shit like, how the Earth stops orbiting the sun when the cat goes to sleep and how the cat doesn’t need to worry about predators because it hasn’t invented any. So the cat is not officially “God” but like,...,,It Might Be

Quickly adding this to the end but! Your girl finally has a (working title) for her collection! I’m not ready to share it yet because I’m still not 100% on it, I feel it matches the stories thematically but not always tonally, however it captures the core idea that I’ve been following so it’s good enough for me. This was a really important step because as much as I tried I could Not Visualise a collection at all without a title, which is v annoying because titling a collection is the worst!!! I was fine just writing short stories and letting them exist but I really wanted to build them as a cohesive collection as I went, and now I really like where it’s going - it’s definitely got a long way to go but I feel like I’ve finally managed to take control of it and steer it into a direction that reflects what I enjoy to write. I spent a lot of months clinging onto the collection I started in late 2018 before The Great Writing Hiatus Of 2019, even though it really didn’t resonate with me anymore, so I’m very happy to feel like I’m now on the right path and I feel the collection really shows my growth as a writer this year! This is definitely not set in stone, but I have a lot of fun imagining the potential order of the stories and right now it looks like:

[Some of these are stories unfinished, and some of them are finished and I just haven’t talked about them because I am the Worst at remembering to write short story updates, but tbh I’m thinking of just talking about them all briefly in a big post about the collection when I write a proper intro for it in the future]

We love to see it! I’m hoping to put a lot of time into this collection in 2021 and get some submissions rolling too (I had the goal of submitting at least one story by the end of this year and I! Don’t know if that’ll happen but January definitely). I’m likely going to be taking most of the year out of uni due to the whole global and mental turmoil rn [also I’d have to apply for writing masters atm and that is NOT happening lmfao], so I’m v v excited to have some extra writing time and see where this all goes!

#atlastracking #am writing #short stories #writeblr #i am once again posting at an odd time when my dash is ~dead~ #also playing around w how i format these posts as always

[hen-of-letters]

Series 15 gives all of the characters you could ever care about their worst possible endings, but presents these endings as somehow good or satisfying or acceptable.  Here's a list.

The short version: they're Chuck's endings, and Chuck is a bad writer.  

None of the characters can escape the fate set out for them or break the cycle of trauma begun by Chuck.  The show itself doesn't even realise how truly awful these endings are - it dresses up a tragedy in pie gags and pretty colours and calls it a happy ending.  And in order to inflict these worst possible endings on its characters, the narrative has to be twisted and contorted in the most absurd of ways.

So, onto the list:

Adam: Forgotten and left to languish in the pit, he's finally freed, only to suffer an anticlimactic offscreen death and be forgotten again.  Michael, his only companion for so long, is also killed off.  In the finale, blood family seems to be all that matters - and yet he isn't mentioned.

Alternate Kaia: She helps rescue Kaia from the Bad Place, but chooses to remain there to face certain destruction rather than return to earth with Kaia, Dean and Sam.  This world is so hostile to her that death is preferable.  Her horrible, pointless death stands as a powerful statement about the real harm caused by exclusion, but the text doesn't seem to acknowledge the full horror of this.  Her death isn't remarked upon; it seems to suggest that both Kaia and her double are returned to their rightful places.  It's just one example of the show creating awful endings without seeming to understand how awful they truly are.  (I rant a lot more about Alternate Kaia here.)

Amara: After being betrayed and locked away for millennia, we see Amara's initial impulse for revenge and destruction transform into an admiration for creation.  She becomes an advocate for humanity and the world.  And yet she ends up being betrayed (by both the Winchesters and Chuck) and locked away again.  She's absorbed by Chuck in a way that doesn't fit within the logic of the show.  Chuck and Amara are equals - it doesn't make any sense that Chuck could overpower her.  Wouldn't they become a blend of the two of them?  And, since their separation caused the Big Bang, wouldn't their unity end the world?  Anyway, having the cosmic feminine be voiceless and invisible is the worst way for Amara's story to end.  Having Jack speak for her, saying that they are 'in harmony' tries to make this an acceptable fate for her, but only makes it worse.

Benny:  Another offscreen death, and this one feels particularly spiteful.  It really seems like he was killed just to be a conversation-starter for Cas and Dean.  However, if his fate can be sealed by a line of dialogue, then it only proves that confirmation of the fates of Eileen, AU Charlie and the other hunters could have been given in the same way.  Just one line could have done it - "I just spoke to Eileen, everyone's back."  Instead, at the end of 15.19 we're in the absurd position of having Sam and Dean toast the people they've lost without them even bothering to check who that may or not be.

Billie: The bizarre thing about Billie being revealed as a villain at the end of Season 15 was that she was supposed to be acting in self-interest - that she wanted to be the new God.  It made no sense.  What would make sense to me, though, would be if Chuck was controlling her (as Lucifer bound Death in Season 5).  Season 15 has strong echoes of Season 4 - and Billie took on both the role of Ruby (feeding Jack hearts rather than demon blood, but nevertheless making him into a weapon, with the price being the loss of his sense of self and ultimately his life) and Heaven (persuading Dean that it had to be this way, and telling him to go along with the plan).  We only have the Shadow's word for Billie's motivation, and we know she wasn't responsible for the deaths of the AU hunters, so in the end her status is ambiguous - she really seems to be a victim of Chuck's bad writing.  She's erased from the narrative along with Castiel, when really she should have been freed from Chuck's control and fighting on the side of nature and free will alongside the Winchesters.  Supernatural also concludes with nobody in the role of Death, which is a crazy loose thread left dangling.

Castiel: His confession was a thing of beauty, perfectly summing up the truth of both his and Dean's characters.  Both of them are made of and motivated by love.  And yet after speaking his truth, he is silenced.  He never gets to hear that he is loved in return (when the previous twelve seasons have made it abundantly clear to the audience that Dean loves Cas just as much as Cas loves Dean).  His capacity for love made him the only thing that Chuck could not control; as an agent of free will, he should have had a central role in Chuck's defeat.  

In 15x13, when Cas is in the Empty to see Ruby, the Shadow says: "funny thing about [Death's] plan, though... she didn't say anything about needing you. Baby, you can't just traipse in and out of here. It upsets the order of things."  To me, this sounded so much like 4x22's "you're not in this story" that I saw it as a pretty clear indication that Cas would play an important part in Chuck's defeat.  Because Team Free Will wouldn't follow the plan, would they?  They would find another way, wouldn't they?  Wouldn't they?

However, after the confession, he's never seen on screen again.  He's barely mentioned.  Eventually we're told he "helped" Jack, so he ends up where he started: as a servant of heaven.  He deserved to complete his fall, to become human, to live as well as speak his truth.  Making him a silent, unseen instrument of heaven undoes his entire arc.  Erasing him from the narrative requires the extraordinary warping of that narrative: nothing about his death suggests that it should be accepted as a permanent 'sacrifice', when we know that there is a spell that can return angels from the Empty (and, thanks to the handprint, we have his blood for it) and that Lucifer was brought back by Chuck in 15x19.  And the idea that Sam, Jack and Dean wouldn't try everything in their power to bring him back is utterly ludicrous.

Cas' confession scene to so closely mirrors 4x01's barn scene that the narrative is crying out for the parallel to be completed by Dean rescuing Cas from the Empty just as Cas rescued Dean from hell.  However, we're never given that narrative closure - just like we are never given the reunions demanded by the scenes of Sam losing Eileen and Charlie losing Stevie.

Chuck:  Okay, so he might not make your list of characters you could ever care about, but my point about his ending is that while it's fitting, for it to really work we also needed Cas to become human, too.  For Chuck, being human is a punishment, but for Cas it would be a reward.  We really needed this balance, otherwise all we have is humanity as the worst thing that could happen to you, which is not exactly a great parting message for the show.  (Also, how precisely is it possible to make him human?)  Not only is being human the worst fate possible, but, specifically, so is growing old and being forgotten.  Again, this is a punishment for Chuck, but it would have been a reward for Dean: growing old when the story (and his own self-loathing) constantly told him that he would die young; and being forgotten, not in a negative sense, but in terms of not being a character in a story any more: remembered fondly by his friends but no longer a legend, just a man living an insignificant little life exactly the way he chooses.  

Dean: Where do I even start.  Let's be clear: ending the story with his death (by any means and in any scenario) was always going to be the absolute worst possible ending for him and for the show.

In 15x19 we have the glorious moment when Chuck calls him the ultimate killer, and Dean (heeding Cas' words from 15x18) says "that's not who I am".  Now, I mean no disrespect to Dean here (because he is, canonically, a genius) but I don't think that he was in any way necessary to the Michael double-cross plot that eventually saw the defeat of Chuck.  Honestly, if he had died in 15x18, then 15x19 could still have played out in exactly the same way.  It's as if he wasn't saved so that he could save the world - he was saved so that he could have this moment of self-realisation.  He was saved so that he could stand up to Chuck (God, and the author, and parallelled with John) and tell him that he's not the person that he tried to force him to be.  

And yet by the next episode, this revelation is entirely forgotten.  He doesn't get to continue his self-actualisation by speaking his truth to Cas.  Instead, 15x20 presents Dean as almost a caricature of himself.  Dean loves pie.  Dean loves his brother.  Dean loves his car.  All of his complexity (present right from Season 1) is stripped away.

Finally free to write his own story, he ends up giving Chuck the ending he always wanted: one dead Winchester - killed, you could argue, by his brother (Sam fails to call for help and instead tells Dean to "go".)  Told by Cas that he's not "Daddy's blunt instrument" and accepting that he's not "the ultimate killer", Dean goes right back to killing (even threatening torture) and following his father's words (in the form of the journal).  

For Dean to die exactly as the story has always told him, and as he's always told himself in his worst moments of self loathing, is brutal and tragic.  What makes it truly appalling is the way in which both Dean and Sam accept his death and say it's "okay".  For Dean to say "always keep fighting" at the very moment when he gives up and when Sam gives up on him is bitterly ironic.  (Interestingly, when Cas said "you have to keep fighting" in his 12x12 death speech, exhorting Sam and Dean to save themselves and leave him behind, Sam replied with "we are fighting.  We're fighting for you, Cas" and Dean followed with "and like you said, you're family.  And we don't leave family behind".)   

Dean has always been the symbol of humanity in Supernatural: he stood for earth against the forces of heaven and hell.  He'd rather live with pain and guilt than exist as a "Stepford bitch in paradise", and yet that's exactly what he becomes, driving mindlessly through Jack's new heaven where everyone is "happy".  Dean previously dismissed heaven's happiness as "Memorex", and after Mary's death he was the only one not consoled by the confirmation that she was in heaven and happy.  Having Dean being content in heaven is utterly out of character.  He's always fought for free will, and in heaven - where there's no agency, where he's cut off from the world - this is the one thing that he does not have.

Eileen: An interesting, complex, kickass character, Eileen deserved so much better than being erased from the storyline.  A Men of Letters legacy, I imagine her working with Sam to share the knowledge contained within the bunker whilst also dismantling the patriarchy, elitism and colonialism of its past.  Her disappearance from the narrative makes absolutely no sense - 15x09, 15x17 and 15x18 confirm just how significant she is to Sam, and yet we never see them reunited or see Sam mourning her death.  The audience's love for Eileen is totally disregarded, too - she's ripped away from us with no further explanation.

Emma: Okay, so she wasn't actually in season 15, but that's sort of my point.  I have a lot to say about Emma, but here I'll just say that her significance has grown massively since Season 7.  The narrative has shifted from Team Free Will being sons to being fathers.  Even if she wasn't brought back, just a mention of her would have been significant.  (I can't stop thinking about the massive potential of a conversation about Emma between Dean and Jack.)  She didn't deserve to be forgotten.  

Season 15 was Supernatural's last opportunity to bring back characters from the past - such as Meg, original Charlie, Crowley, and Bela Talbot - and give them better endings.  Sadly this opportunity was wasted.

Garth: He actually seems to get his happy ending, on several levels.  He finds a family; he finds happiness; he's acknowledged as a hero by the Winchesters, who had previously mocked him.  Dean's words to him about embracing happiness are powerful.  Garth lives as his full, authentic self - monstrosity now included.  It's that monstrosity that's the issue here, though - as werewolves, Garth, Bess and little Sam and Castiel are doomed to go to purgatory when they die.  Mia Vallens said to Jack that "it doesn't matter what you are - it matters what you do", but in this case the opposite is true.  It's hideously unfair, but again the show never acknowledges this.  It would have been simple to change in a line or two - just a quick mention about how purgatory has been fixed, so that only truly monstrous beasts like the leviathan are kept trapped there - but the injustice remains.

Jack:  From his birth, his destiny was either to be the monstrous destroyer or the divine saviour of the world, which is precisely why he should have side-stepped it and found another way.  He deserved to live without the weight of the world on his shoulders.  Instead, he was forced to take on the power of God - and since when has someone suddenly taking on a huge amount of power ever ended well for Team Free Will?  Then, he repeats the exact same pattern set up by Chuck.  First, he abandons his creation by walking away and disappearing off to, in the words of Bobby, "wherever he went".  Like Chuck, he ignores earthly suffering: if he's now omniscient and omnipotent, is he in fact complicit in Dean's death?  Secondly, he's controlling: he remodels Heaven as he sees fit, making it a place where everyone's together and everyone's happy, with its inhabitants given absolutely no choice in the matter.  There's also no reason why Jack had to vanish from the story - Chuck was capable of spending time on Earth.

The mechanics of the bomb plot also irks me no end.  We're told by Death that the bomb will kill Jack.  However, their plan fails, and Jack survives the blast.  In 15x19, Dean tells Chuck that all the work done to turn Jack into a "cosmic bomb" has turned him instead into a "power vacuum."  It makes it seem like a side-effect, and also that "sucking up bits of power" has been charging him up to the point where he's "unstoppable".  He's able to both absorb and appropriate Chuck's power.  However, in 15x17 Adam and Serafina explain that the bomb will create a "metaphysical supernova" that will make Jack into "a living black hole for divine energy" - which suggests that, actually, the bomb worked as intended.  

But if the plan worked, why is Jack still alive?  Billie made it clear that Jack wouldn't survive.  And "nothing can escape" a black hole - so how is Jack able to use Chuck's powers to bring back Earth's population? Besides which, didn't 15x17 reveal that Chuck himself had "orchestrated" the entire thing?  Which makes the theory that Chuck possessed Jack really the only outcome that makes sense.  (Particularly as Serafina talks about Jack making his "vessel" strong.  Jack is a nephil, not an angel - he has a body, not a vessel.  Also, the bomb is made by fusing his soul with his grace - so, the two things that make up Jack, his humanity and his divinity, are annihilated.)  Deliberately making Chuck win, however (with no tease at the end that this might be the case), makes no sense either.  My head hurts.

Kevin: As if he hadn't been treated badly enough by the story already, we find that Kevin hasn't been in Heaven since we last saw him, but rather hell.  He ends up as an untethered ghost, presumably just wandering about for all eternity.  His fate comes courtesy of a bizarre new rule that souls from hell can't go to heaven - when previously both Bobby and John have done exactly that.  Again, just one line telling us that he's now in heaven could have changed his ending.

Michael: Bringing back Adam and Michael was a brilliant move, and this version of Michael was utterly compelling - struggling with his faith in his father after being abandoned, torn between his loyalty to Heaven and his relationship with Adam.  I thought that his handing over of the spell was very similar to Cas' "just so you understand … why I can't help" moment, and it seemed the precursor to Michael becoming an advocate for humanity, even a member of Team Free Will.  However, instead Michael was doomed to play out his father's narrative: killing his brother and repeating the cycle of sibling conflict and trauma that Chuck began when he betrayed Amara.  (And we'll credit Chuck's bad writing with the fact that the battle between Michael and Lucifer that was once predicted to wipe out millions and scorch the globe can now happen in the bunker without so much as a chair being knocked over - and without wires as well.)

Rowena: She seems to be relishing her reign as Queen of Hell, but the way she's so casually condemned is jarring.  Surely her previous good deeds and her final act of self sacrifice would be enough to tip the scales in a heavenly direction?  (It worked for Lily Sunder - another woman who vowed never to be powerless again.)  They could easily have said it was Chuck's fault that she had to remain in hell - but instead it just seems like a foregone conclusion.  She deserved better.

Sam: If we're supposed to believe that having a "normal" life is Sam's idea of writing his own story, why doesn't he do it as soon as Chuck is defeated?   Instead, his suburban "apple pie" life only happens after Dean dies, which makes it seem more of a grief arc than a happy ending.  (Just as he escaped into a self-professed "fantasy" life with Amelia after Dean's death, or when he succumbed to the comfort of a fake married life in Charming Acres after the trauma of losing all the AU hunters).  

The idea that he'd keep hunting for Dean doesn't ring true - Dean had been the one openly craving retirement and domesticity for several seasons.  After all, the idea of Dean as a hunter and Sam as the brother who wants to be normal is Chuck's story.  Dean wasn't the "ultimate killer" that Chuck wanted him to be, and Sam too had been forging his own identity as a leader, a Man of Letters, and a powerful witch.  He'd also found love - and with Eileen, he could be his full, authentic self.  The idea that he would leave her is absurd, as is the idea that he would abandon his entire extended found family, who seem to have no part in his new life.  When Dean returned from purgatory, he was furious that Sam had failed to help Kevin.  Would Sam really do the exact same thing again - walk away from Jody and the girls when they are mourning both Cas and Dean and need his support?  Would he just abandon Rowena's entire witchy collection and leave the huge store of knowledge in the Bunker locked up in the dark?

The Shadow: again, dubious on a list of characters you care about, but hey - all they ever really wanted was to go back to sleep, and can't we all relate to that?  Anyway, they made the list for being one of the most frustrating open endings of the show.  What did it mean for the Empty to be "loud"?  Who is the Shadow, anyway?  Just how did this cosmic entity fit in with the mythology of Chuck and Amara?  It's maddening that the Shadow and the Empty were made central to several seasons only to be suddenly dropped.

The Wayward Sisters: my beloveds. Such a brilliant cast of characters and such wasted potential.  They're an important part of the Winchesters' family and Team Free Will, but, in the end, they're forgotten.  Claire may have gotten her happy ending with the return of Kaia, but this happens off screen.  We never see her reaction to the deaths of Castiel or Dean.

The final few episodes seem to be about stripping away all of the characters except Sam and Dean, so they are completely alone by 15x20. Phrases such as "just us" and "just you and me" and "it's always been you and me" seem to suggest that this is a good thing, but previously the idea of them being isolated and alone has seemed like the worst case scenario (for example in Season 8, when Sam and Dean are forced to give up Amelia and Benny, respectively, or in Chuck's vision of a future in which the brothers lose Eileen and Cas along with Jody and the girls, give up hope, and end up as vampires, killed by their remaining friends). 

Anyway, the whole idea of just Sam and Dean going wherever the road takes them is Chuck's story.  It's on the cover of his books.  By making Chuck the villain, Season 15 itself makes it impossible for a return to this idea to be a satisfying conclusion to the story.

In fact, Supernatural was never about just Sam and Dean.  It was always about family.  Season 1 was about Sam, Dean and John.  Bobby introduced the phrase "family don't end with blood" in Season 3 and Dean coined the phrase "Team Free Will" in Season 4.  It's an ethos that has spread into the fandom, too.  Didn't the SPN Family deserve a finale that celebrated that idea, of banding together, of caring about the whole world, of love being the ultimate expression of free will?

You can't help but pick up on a theme: characters that were forgotten are forgotten again.  Characters who were locked away are locked away again.  The same narratives and the same traumas play out again and again.  No-one escapes their miserable, predestined fate.  It's Chuck's ending.  And it's Chuck's spiteful ending.

It's the ending that kills off its beloved characters, and also destroys their whole world.  The bunker is left in darkness.  Time has moved forward by so much in order to accommodate Sam's natural death that we can't even imagine the ongoing stories of other characters like Garth or the Sioux Falls family (ironic, given the episode's title).

It's the kind of ending you get when a show is cancelled and the writer decides to kill off their characters and wreck their world so that there's no possibility of another network or another writer taking over their story.  (And yet outside of the show, there's no evidence to suggest this - you would think that the ending had been designed to make a reboot impossible, but it has already been talked about.)

If we were not going to get a sense of the world continuing, then we could have been given a more radical and satisfying ending.  We could have had Death collect on their promise to one day reap God.  We could have had a world freed from the supernatural entirely: heaven, hell and purgatory obliterated, and Team Free Will finding peace in life on earth.

Because Chuck has been the author and the narrator the entire time, it makes no sense for the story to continue past the point of his defeat.  (It makes even less sense for that story to revert back to Chuck's ideal narrative.)  So, really we should have been given a more open ending: Team Free Will triumphant over Chuck and their future left open, the author dead and the characters' stories entrusted to the audience.

Instead, in the end, it's a bizarre mix of needlessly closed-down endings (killing off Cas, Sam and Dean, and vanishing Jack) and frustrating open ones (the loud Empty, there being no Death, Kevin wandering, the ambiguous fate of Eileen, Adam, Donna and the AU hunters).  

And the final two episodes are also objectively bad.  The double-cross plot in 15x19 is lame when the resolution of the Chuck storyline should have been profound. (It invites comparisons with the Season 11 finale, which was excellent.) 15x20 feels weirdly empty and flat.  Dean's death is unrealistic; it echoes Sam's death in Season 2 and Dean's in Season 9 (which, if you think about it, would only be possible if Chuck was still writing it), but lacks the emotional punch of either.  Dean's "I'm proud of us," in his Season 9 death scene is so much more powerful than his "I'm proud of you" in the finale.  And let's not even mention that wig.

In conclusion: every single character deserved better.  The actors deserved better.  The audience deserved better.  Because the ending we were given was not the ending that the season, or the entire series, had been building towards.

The ending tries to destroy every good thing that Supernatural has ever given us - vibrant characters, the fight for free will, the value of found family, the power of love - but it fails. Ultimately the characters and themes are too powerful to be contained by that terrible, flimsy ending. So now I've gotten all of that off my chest, I'm going right back to finale denialism.

#so I've been compiling this list for quite a while and now seems as good a time as any to get it off my chest #it's also the checklist for the fix-it I'm writing so really I should go and work on that #supernatural #spn #spn 15x20 #spn 15.20 #tw dean's death

[according-to-the-laura]

StackedNatural Day 129: 14x14

StackedNatural Masterpost: [x]

March 7, 2022

14x14: Ouroboros

Written by: Steve Yockey

Directed by: Amyn Kaderali

Original air date: March 7, 2019

Plot Synopsis:

Sam and Dean enlist the help of Rowena to track down a demi-god who feasts on human flesh; the challenge of keeping Michael at bay is proving to be more difficult than originally anticipated.

Features:

Michelin star cannibalism, a Destiel date, Noah the gay (bi?) gorgon, a brief Samwena fake dating AU, Michael escaping Dean’s cage, Jack killing Michael.

My Thoughts:

This episode is a delight to watch. It has a great balance between season plot and episode plot, the monster is something new with new challenges, and we get little Destiel and Samwena scenes to top it all off. Stan Steve Yockey.

I like how much in later seasons we see Dean and Cas asking for, and telling each other, their true feelings. It feels so rare that Dean would be vulnerable about what’s going on in his head with Michael, but he barely needs any prodding from Cas to open up. This is also the episode where Cas, Jack, and Dean all sit in a line and their jackets make a gradient. You couldn’t make Jack their son more visual if you tried.

I love Rowena as a character, especially once she joins the team and just tags along on cases. Ruth really gets a chance to shine in this episode, running that gamut from flirty to quippy to sincere to Archangel. I really like her portrayal of Michael, and also her velvet blazer kicks ass. She has big “Auntie Rowena” energy towards Jack in this episode. She also has literally no reason to pick a fake fight with Sam at the vet and just does it to be chaotic.

Noah the Gorgon is a fun monster. Iconic one-episode character. My notes say, “wait- bisexual gorgon. #representation”. Ghostfacers effect says he kissed Cas on the lips.

Cas is literally outside the narrative in this episode, unable to be seen by this outside power. It made me think of the season 4 finale - Chuck saying, “you aren’t in this story”. I wish I wish that they had continued to make this concept concrete within the world. I love him being the spanner in the works, the thing that God can’t control. Unfortunately half the writers don’t like him so he gets sidelined a bunch.

My favourite thing about this episode, though is everything going on with Jack. His plotline in season 14 is SUPER interesting and this is such a big plot point in it. I was thinking about how the last 2 seasons of Supernatural are a quadruple whammy of sacrifices that, for once, do not include the Winchester brothers (although they do try - see Dean with the Ma’lak Box). Cas sacrifices himself for Jack in 14x08 Byzantium and for Dean in 15x18 Despair, and Jack completes the set by sacrificing his soul to heal Cas of the Gorgon’s poison and to destroy Michael (implicitly protecting Dean from both the further violation of his body as vessel and the consequences of not following through on the Ma’lak Box plan). It’s not surprising that Jack has a bit of a martyr complex, given who raised him. Jack in my mind, is both the chicken and the snake and the egg (call that a holy trinity). He’s the chicken sacrificing something precious (his soul) to kill the dangerous creature (Michael). He’s the snake swallowing something (Michael’s grace), an action that will eventually lead to Dean threatening his death. He’s the egg, a vessel holding a greater potential, that is used to kill the ultimate enemy (God). Am I reading too much into this? Maybe, but that’s my god-given right as a tumblrina in the year 2022.

Notable Lines:

“Darling boy, everything means something.”

“That's what I'm supposed to say, right? "I'm fine," keep on moving? That's what we all say.”

“Fine. Don't tell me. But using dangerous, mysterious magic, regardless of the cost, that's a very on-brand me thing to do. Of course Samuel, until very recently, I was the villain.”

“Humans burn bright, but for a very brief time compared to, you know, things like us. And eventually, they're gone, even the very best ones, and we have to carry on.”

“When they're gone, it will hurt, but that hurt will remind you of how much you loved them.”

Laura’s (completely subjective) Episode Rating: 10

IMdB Rating: 8.6

In Conclusion: This is a fun day because I’m filling in for a dress rehearsal for a role that I originally auditioned for and was not cast in. I am writing this lil book report from the theatre seats while the SM spikes chairs.

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#Stackednatural #supernatural #spn #14x14 #Ouroboros