#sorry this is very vague i should at some point rewatch all of s12 and pick out episodes i think could be

[heteroflexiblecastiel]

ok so. my mental s12 rewrite that will never exist bc i can't write.

11.23 when dean is saying his farewells before going and suicide bombing amara, cas straight up plants one on him. kisses him in front of (literally) god and everybody. and dean is about to die so he kisses back. doesn't go on terribly long but it happens and everyone saw it and that's that. cas still offers to go with him. dean refuses. etc. then dean leaves. same sequence as in canon, dean doesn't end up dying, amara brings mary back to life, sam gets kidnapped by toni bevell and the bmol

so now mary is back. and dean is absolutely NOT equipped to come out as like, kinda gay or whatever, to his mother who died in the 80s. it's not happening. so when they get back to the bunker and cas hugs the shit out of dean, dean makes even more of a show out of it being a Bro Hug and gives cas a significant look. cas backs off but looks... disappointed. not angry. just disappointed. this kicks off a Secret Relationship arc where literally everybody but mary knows that dean and cas are a thing now, but dean is tying himself in KNOTS trying to get and keep his mothers approval even as she is overwhelmed and drawing away from them. she leaves just like in canon and dean is devastated and angry

the presence of the bmol in america is. contentious. they've had a longstanding deal with crowley that they rule the UK, but america is off limits. that's crowleys domain. so now not only do they have to deal with distrustful and uncooperative lone-wolf type american hunters, but they've also royally pissed off the king of hell. it's a world war type situation. lots of shifting loyalties, strange bedfellows, double/triple agents, etc. the "sides" are much more blurred and the emphasis isn't on like, rugged american individualism vs smarmy superior brits. all three of the "sides" commit some pretty terrible acts. an acceptance of torture as a necessity is actually something everyone here has in common.

mary bolts just like in regular s12, but instead of unofficially joining up with the bmol, she instead runs afoul of them on a hunt where ketch sort of.... catches her scent. instead of the weird partner situation, they're bound together by ketch's determination to kill her. it's personal now, and he will hunt her down. mary is of course overwhelmed by the technological superiority and sheer numbers of the bmol, and she would surely be dead were it not for a mysterious woman showing up out of nowhere and kicking their asses, causing the survivors to flee. her face is unclear all thru the fight sequences. when the fighting is done, she turns to face mary and it is none other than... bela talbot. she's back and she is a demon

bela and mary have a meet-cute that directly parallels both the samruby and deancas first meetings. otherworldly creature busts in and saves a winchesters life, said winchester asks who the hell they are, entity replies that ummm, duh, they're the one who just saved said winchesters ass! mary has seen how the lines have begun to blur and is begrudgingly convinced to start working with her bc she really does need some backup and she's not willing to go back to the adult strangers who are her sons to get it. they start having sex. it's "casual" until it's kinda not. like there's only so many near death experiences and post-NDE frantic hookups u can go thru with one person before ur like.... at least a little attached

#sorry this is very vague i should at some point rewatch all of s12 and pick out episodes i think could be #reworked to fit this #spn #m

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

Hey, i binged the first 14 episodes of Supernatural just last week and enjoyed it so far. But have struggled to hype myself up to finish the series. I found out the last episodes are coming out in October and think it would be cool to catch up by then so i can watch the last ones as soon as they come out. Could you give a (as spoiler free as possible?) list of what about the show make it great to you overall? Things to look forward to, cool plot development, favorite characters, whichever...

hi, anon! 

i don’t know, anon, when i first heard i have these nightmares--and sometimes they come true in early s1 and as long as I’m there nothing bad’s gonna happen to you at the end of 1.14  back in the day, i was pretty hyped af to find out what happened next. but to be fair, 2006 was a different era altogether and some vaguely defined potential Special Ability that doesn’t even work unless Certain People are involved isn’t too exciting when every show these days with two pennies to scrape together for a VFX budget has its characters move things with their mind while shooting blue lightning out their ass.

sorry, i digress. i don’t really know how to sell this unwieldy chimera of a show to you--or if i even should--but let me give it the old college try:

1. for such a long-running show, spn has a tiny list of dramatis personae. on one hand, this means that it can feel intimate and its emotional beats deeply resonant, with long and complicated character arcs and interpersonal dynamics; but on the other hand, if you don’t find them interesting or they’re just, you know, actively annoying, you’re fucked, because there are only ever three or four main characters at any point on the show and two of them never. change. 

1.5. spn has also demonstrated--inadvertently perhaps--that having fewer characters to divide fannish devotion means more stans per character and more friction between these large groups of character stans. somewhere along the way the terms samgirl and deangirl have come to symbolise more than just a mere preference for one character over the other; it’s become a fandom shorthand for personality much in the way of astrological signs or MBTI types: utterly meaningless, but people insist on defining their identity that way anyway. 

(i say this not just as a card-carrying samgirl, but a bitter samgirl).

2. it’s also quite claustrophobic at times. sam and dean are ostensibly driving all around small-town america, but what we usually see is One Possibly Canadian Town indistinguishable from the other. as i mentioned before, the characters are few and spn rarely attempts to relate to current events or make any kind of subtle/meaningful social or political commentary (tho others may disagree with me on this). but this also means that the stories that it deals with have a timeless quality to them: family and trauma and existential angst and the Power of Love and the ways all of them can fuck you up. spn is at its absolute best when it’s dealing with stories on a deeply personal level, sometimes literally burrowing into their characters’ heads and having the entire universe mirror the dynamics of its central relationship. 

2.5. this can be a liiiitle hard to reconcile with how the show keeps raising its stakes with every season, but again, when spn is really on its game, it keeps finding new and creative ways to explore the personal with the universal, and when it’s not, you have supposedly cosmic entities reduced to the most boring metaphor imaginable for modern-day capitalist culture.

3. there’s something that spn does that i love which is turn really absurd premises into a thin veneer over a dark abyss of existential trauma which is something it doesn’t do nearly enough in the latter seasons, which is a great pity.

4. a quick rundown of the seasons:

1 - looks pretty and ends very strongly but also suffers from a case of early 00s uninspired-genre-television-itis

2 - Now This Is Where Things Get Interesting; sets up themes that are explored repeatedly for the next 13 years; please look out for ava wilson, an actual Queen

3 - a reminder that this show has been around long enough to actually have a season that was truncated by the 08 writers’ strike; plus, it contains my favourite episode of the whole show and possibly my favourite episode of television ever

4 - A MAGNIFICENT SEASON that gets better with every rewatch. the closest to flawless this show has ever gotten

5 - contains a number of the show’s best and most iconic episodes, but also sets up a lot of the show’s more... problematic motifs

6 - a HUGELY underrated season depicting some of the most delightfully creative explorations of the aftermath of deep and unusual trauma that i’ve seen, dark and thorny and uncomfortable but so goddamned sharp

7 - kind of gave up on itself halfway through; the last time this show ever took any risks/bold choices with respect to its world-building

8 - you know how these days even the most hotshot, rebellious, high-spirited, come-out-of-nowhere-with-nothing-but-heart-and-ill-advised-amounts-of-courage hero is revealed to have actually descended from some important Hero Bloodline and whoops did you think even fiction was going to indulge in the fantasy that just anybody could change the world? yeah.

9 - should’ve been this show’s turning point, except it turned a whole 360 degrees. still has some really iconic episodes, tho.

10 - eh. skippable after the first few episodes.

11 - the point where i stopped watching regularly. still horrifying but more bleak and despairing than jump-scare-and-gore

12 - this season is a black hole for me. for the life of me i can’t remember what happened in s12 - did it exist? or did spn just skip that number like some hotels skip a floor number entirely? huh.

13 + 14 - Listen It’s A Very Competitive Market And The Only Strong Thing Going For Us Is Our Large And Devoted Fandom So Let’s Obliterate The Fourth Wall Altogether And Go Full Meta, Who Gives A Shit? it’s spn back to being absurd to cover up a pit of howling, abyssal horror, and frankly it’s delightful.

5. the fandom, man. i’ve been spoiled rotten. there is nothing that can’t be found in spn fandom, no matter how brilliant or terrible or eye-searingly horrifying, and this is something i’ve chased in other fandoms with no success. 

In conclusion:  watch it if you like, it can be a cool show. But That’s Just My Opinion, Bro.

#supernatural #anon ask #if this was not supposed to be spoiler-free i could've gone on forever

[mittensmorgul]

I had a wee Cas-related headcanon. And I thought @mittensmorgul​ etc will have done this to death so I searched #castiel #pb&j. Right? Not a sausage, much less a symbolically charged jelly and nut based bread snack. #cas + #pb & j, #pb n j. You get the picture. But seriously, someone has done the as-pie-is-to-Dean-so-pb&j-is-to-Cas meta/fic, right? He really liked it when he was human, but it just doesn’t do anything for him any more? #look, #I ship hard, #but #you've done this, right?

Hi there! And yeah, we’ve done this…

I got this message last night and conferred with lizbob about it, because I’m going to sneakily use her tags to find some relevant musings on the subject. From her 9.03 weird rewatching notes:

Aaah, I forgot that the real April gave Cas PB&J sandwiches. She’s presumably still normal real April, anyway. I choose to believe that >.>

Since I normally go around willingly forgetting this episode, it does put 9x11 in context with Cas wanting to make himself a PB&J sandwich, and feeling sad that it doesn’t taste the same. It was offered to him out of genuine kindness and to him must represent the goodness of humanity, way more than his horrible experience with April later which Buckleming kept going back to, Robbie picks out the one nice thing about this encounter for him to reflect on, since, as I was saying, they get the monopoly on defining Cas’s human experience. He has a 3 second encounter with the real, kind April, and so that’s what Robbie leaps on, rather than choosing a path to remind us over and over of what else to do with her.

That’s quite an interesting thing as well because this season of course, stretched and fraying at the seams surface level is that Cas just loves humanity that much (like, ignoring 9x23 and Metatron actually telling us straight up that it isn’t just this :P) but the Cas x humanity thread does have a lot to commend itself just because that’s not exactly a false lead that Cas doesn’t love humanity. I think it’s lovely that he’s profoundly affected by this moment. As well as, in 9x11, it then has Cas describing a disconnect between himself and this symbol, that it doesn’t taste as he remembered and he’s sort of feeling too huge to comprehend it just as a sandwich any more. Because I think there’s a real yearning in Cas for the “human things” (and 10x01-3 when he’s sick and where that line comes from, he slips closer to humanity as his grace fails, and again we see him experiencing “human things” in a small measure, again, against his will). That yearning to me says more than anything else that I think Cas should end up human or that he would want to be, if only he could allow himself to really contemplate it. For the love of a PB&J sandwich :P

And to go right back to being a grubby Destiel shipper, this is not the only 2 times peanut butter is mentioned in this stretch of episodes. In 9x07 Dean’s arrested as a kid for stealing peanut butter to make sandwiches for Sam, which aligns him with the side of humanity Cas fell in love with: the selfless peanut butter-giving side of humanity :P So a way to link Dean to Humanity appears in the first 11 episodes…

And then there’s this, which was probably the beginning of my real personal obsession with food on this show:

http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/138730581600/soo-the-elvis-already-had-me-worried-for-dean

And this from lizbob’s 9.11 rewatch notes:

Cas and his PB&J!

Which I have already talked about repeatedly and especially in 9x03 where I already talked about it thematically to Cas’s humanity arc. So I guess, let’s just write down Cas expressing nostalgia for humanity which he had to give up and is now reflecting on the less shitty parts of it and realising he has given up the experience now in favour of achieving other goals, so again in a concise moment expressing his entire character conflict over the humanity arc, especially where he is on the other side of being human.

The fact Cas was sitting alone in the Bunker waiting for Sam, and decided to just go wander around digging in their shelves in the kitchen and make himself a sandwich though. I mean, compared to my comments about what Dean did off-screen between episodes that’s pretty boring, but I like it :P In 11x18 he’s strongly aligned with the kitchen, and while we don’t see the kitchen here, he had to have been in there to get the PB&J materials, even if he moved to the war room to eat it. (Which has its own significance that Cas is ready for war not domesticity, see also: all the stuff I was saying about his new uniform, grace, etc, and the reason WHY he’s changed himself so he can’t enjoy PB&J any more)

Yeah, I’m snipping stuff out here, but these are themes they’ve applied in a lot of other ways that tie in to other things as well. Pie. Coffee. Hamburgers. Cake. Pie vs Cake. Pizza. And even beer. And if you click on any of those links, you’ll note a lot of crossover between the posts.

As for s12, I’ve been keeping a Big List of Food by episode. No mention of the pb&j again yet, but I’m keeping a close eye out. It’s called The Pies of s12, but it covers pretty much all the food-as-symbolism stuff so far.

But there’s been at least one other mention of a peanut butter sandwich as a major plot device. It was, after all, the reason Dean had been arrested in 9.07, setting up the entire story and laying down some heavy Dean Feelings.

Getting back to Cas (and really Dean, too), these references used to come in the form of cheeseburgers, going all the way back to 5.14.

And yeah, we know Jimmy enjoyed a cheeseburger from 4.20, but we also know that Jimmy wasn’t there anymore by 5.14. This was all Cas, finding enjoyment from something very human. Sure, he’d been getting closer to humanity during s5, but I think this is the first time he really enjoyed something human.

I recall there being some distress in the fandom around the time 9.11 came out that Cas would’ve been reminiscing about a pb&j instead of a cheeseburger. But we just kept waving vaguely at 9.07 and the pb&j that Dean got arrested and tossed into Sonny’s Home for Boys over.

Dean had been trying his best to feed and care for Sam despite not having enough money for groceries. John was gone on a hunt and out of touch, and 16-year-old Dean got caught trying to provide for the family in the most basic way possible. Like peanut butter was the glue that could hold their whole world together.

But at the same time, that month Dean spent at Sonny’s was unprecedented for him. For the first time in his life, he didn’t have to follow John’s orders. He didn’t have to sacrifice himself to be Sam’s primary caregiver. He got to spend a bit of time doing what HE wanted to do. He joined the wrestling team and won competitions. He learned to play guitar and met his first girlfriend. He had an adult who was interested in HIM, who wanted to help HIM and make sure HE was doing well, you know? Not just whether or not he was successfully following his orders. For Dean, stealing that peanut butter was unknowingly a stepping stone to his first (and one of his only) tastes of that sort of pure freedom in his entire life.

Then (only 4 episodes later!) in 9.11 Cas reminisces about being able to taste and enjoy a pb&j for what it was, the way a human tastes it and not as an amalgamation of molecules the way an angel tastes it.

(which raises some questions about 5.14 and if Cas was appreciating the molecular arrangement of a good cheeseburger, or if Famine’s influence literally gave him an appreciation for the taste, but none of that’s relevant here atm)

Back to 9.11… Cas goes one step further and uses the pbj to make a point, the entire scene preceded by a fade-in on that pbj:

CASTIEL: Sam, I want Gadreel to pay as much as you do. But nothing is worth losing you. You know, being human, it didn’t just change my view of food. It changed my view of you. I mean, I can relate now to how you feel.SAM: What are you talking about?CASTIEL: The only person who has screwed things up more consistently than you…is me. And now I know what that guilt feels like. And I know what it… I know what it means to feel sorry, Sam. I am sorry.SAM: I know.CASTIEL: You know, old me – I would’ve have just kept going. I would’ve jammed that needle in deeper until you died because the ends always justified the means. But what I went though – Well, that PB and J taught me that angels can change, so…who knows? Maybe Winchesters can, too.

Bonus:

He misses a simple pleasure of humanity. Same as Dean. Okay imma go cry over a sandwich now.

bonus-bonus:

okay now i’m going off to cry

#spn 9.03 #spn 9.07 #spn 9.11 #spn 5.14 #spn 4.20 #castiel winchester #oh DEAN #kallipygian #s12 pie masterpost #the abominable cheeseburger #you learned it from the goats #which is technically my cas and coffee tag because that's his usual connection to humanity lately but it covers the pbj too :D