Some interesting, malformed, shapeless thoughts:
DEAN (About Jess): Now, I don't know what it feels like to lose someone like that.
KAREN (about Bobby): Oh…I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say, you’ve never been in love.
Paired with Amara:
In O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Amara looks slightly confused before she kisses Dean
In Hell's Angel, Amara seems intensely perplexed as Dean shouts for Cas
In All in the Family, the same look of confusion comes over her as she hovers over Cas's chest and uses it for symbolic wayfinding: straight to Dean
THE HEART OF THE MATTER
Earlier in the season, in The Devil in the Details, she carved a message into Cas's chest...for Dean to read
AMARA: Blue eyes, you’re not even worth the effort... and no offence, but you look a bit used up. Plus, I have a job for you.
Amara puts her hand on Castiel’s chest and Castiel screams as he is sent away in a blinding flash of light.
It's played as a joke, because for one, it's genuinely funny, but for two, the fact remains that she carved a threat to Dean on Cas's chest: I am coming
Twice, she uses Cas's heart to deliver threats directly to Dean
But the fact remains: Amara's never been in romantic love before.
She can't recognize it for what it is between Dean and Cas. She knows it well enough to use it, but mostly it fills her with writhing confusion.
But she does notice it and wonderingly ponder over it. Like season 10's Dean, she's dealing with the wounds of her nursery in order to become able to engage in that kind of self-actualization.
She's also a little like all those girls craving attention in season 10, from Claire to the girl who is murdered trying to capture the attention of an older, unsavory man just to plug the familial lack of support at home. It's about throwing yourself into any distraction just to ease that absence of familial self-worth and security:
MR. McKINLEY: By suggesting my daughter was a slut?
DEAN: I'll admit that thought crossed my mind. Then I came here, and I smelled the deceit and the beatings and the shame that pervade this home.
MR. McKINLEY: You shut your face right now.
DEAN: And you know what? I don't blame Rose anymore. No wonder she put on that skank outfit and went out there looking for validation, right into the arms of the monster that killed her. (Dean looks at Mr. McKinley and in a very calm voice says) Joe, who did this?
It's about the core wounds of the nursery, her brother leaving her. It's like Claire needed a loving parent, not Randy or Salinger. It's like Rose needed loving parents, not Reggie, who would murder her.
Amara's a little like Hannah, too, as Caroline cries out for her husband Joe:
HANNAH: Being on earth, working with you, I've felt things. Human things -- passions, hungers. To shower, feel water on my skin... to get closer to you. But all of that was nothing compared to what I felt when I saw him.
Her husband -- his anger and his grief. And Caroline was inside of me, screaming out for him, for her life back. These f-feelings, they aren't for me, for us. They belong to her. I know it's time to step aside.
Amara isn't very good at parsing emotions. Retroactively, we know she brought back Mary to extinguish Dean's volatile "fire" and to quell his inner turmoil. She's trying to assuage the core wound of his nursery, too.
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Shal, I hope you are feeling better! I wanted to add something to your Silvia-Amara meta if you don't mind me putting something into the mix as a long shot. Carmen from the djinn dream in What is and Should Never Be looks a lot like both of them. That seems like something!
Thank you. I'm feeling some better, but veeery sore and sleepless for the pain. (On the flipside, I can breathe better and already have more energy.)
This is so iiiiiiiinteresting, thank you!
I'll be honest...I had to go back to remind myself what Carmen even looked like. But yes! Carmen from the El Sol ad! Carmen the nurse! (I always thought she was a nod to one of Dean's psychosexual fixations, too; that is, films with hot men who dance like Swayze (Carmen 1983). I mean, hello Antonio Gades.
Plus, you know his thing for Spanish soap operas... ("Mi amor! Mi amor! Por favor despierta!" Poor Ricardo.)
And Dean's love for soaps from 7x03 The Girl Next-door. (Yes, the "My love, my love, please wake up!" one.)
//
Ahem. Anyway. Back to our Carmen. *points* Oh, my God. Yeah, it's El Sol, but it's also the specter of the beach. I am choking on my own spit here.
There's definitely something analogous in Sylvia (from season 15's Gimme Shelter) being an idealized something that Connor maybe thought he wanted, felt comfort going after, or tried to make himself want.
For that matter, I think there's something parallel here in how Amara views her love for Dean, too. Amara's view of Dean is idealized, draped in always-or-never statements, and impersonal. Meanwhile, the Dean of season 11 has grown immensely since the djinn dream in season 2. His conceptualization of love has become less romanticized:
DEAN: I can’t explain it, but to call it desire or love…it’s not that.
Carmen was an ideal, and Amara was perhaps the network's ideal, but Sylvia is actually not quite as one-to-one to either of them here. Sylvia was a real relationship with Connor, even if was perhaps a tragic childhood misstep for Connor while he was trying to figure himself out.
Of course, Carmen Porter's own words come back to haunt the Dean & Amara and Dean & Carmen relationships. Even our idealized romantic relationships falter, and they too become as baggage-ridden as our family, and our family is imperfect.
CARMEN: Well, you don't really spend a lot of time together. I mean, I just think you don't know each other all that well.
In early days, Dean's conceptualization of Carmen is adorably immature, like a teenager's dream: someone who accepts my eating habits n' idiosyncrasies, listens to me, and loves me. Someone who is "respectable" and stable. (In season 2, Dean is still, like Amara, dealing with the core wound of his nursery.)
Sylvia and Connor seemed to know each other quite well and were "a couple." He genuinely loved her, in his own way. Their connection just wasn't exactly what Sylvia thought it was, or wanted it to be. She became angry with Connor and called him a LIAR, and then she murdered him.
Dean has carried healthy relationships with dark-eyed beauties as well, like Lisa Braeden and "I-thought-we-had-a-connection" Risa from season 5's The End.
Hmmm. Okay, yes. I think your point is a good point. And it has branching points, too. There's a lot tangled up in here! Season 15's Sylvia Jones has some uncomfortable similarities to season 5's Risa, especially.
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(REF: Here's the recent stuff about Sylvia and Amara-Silvia stuff and more Amara failing to recognize romantic love and Chuck setting Amara up for disappointment.)
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my birthday celebration – day three: elysian / crack / AU / quotes from other media
“I talk to God but the sky is empty.”
―Sylvia Plath.
[Caption: three gifs of Amara from Supernatural. The first one has her look up at the sky almost in wonder, after a bolt of lightning and thunder falls; the second one has her getting on her knees and joining her hands in a church, hesitantly trying to communicate with her brother through prayer; the third one has her surrounded by corpses in a park, impatiently looking at the sky and demanding attention. The gifs, accompanied by Sylvia Plath’s quote, blend with an effect that makes them look as the sky during a lightning storm.]
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