#spn cosmology

[mittensmorgul]

Is it weird to view Chuck and Lucifer as being really similar? They both come off as egotistical, self-centered, and the type who demand everyone to like and sympathize with them while treating everyone as minions who must obey/coddle them. It kind of reminds me when Dean said Sam was a lot like John despite being the rebellious son, and it makes me wonder if the similarity between Lucifer and Chuck was intentional. What do you think?

aw, first off, hi there :)

second... yeah, my personal prevailing theory for years, and how I look at the archangels in general, is that each of the four of them are like... quarters of Chuck. I know I wrote a post about this years ago, but i'll be danged if I could find it... >.>

but yeah, Lucifer embodies those particular facets of Chuck himself.

Similarly, Gabriel always felt to me as embodying other aspects of Chuck, as well as Michael and Raphael. Depending on what point in canon we're at, and how Chuck is interacting with the story, each of the archangels fill one of those roles, you know?

The archangels were one of Chuck's first creations, closest to him and most similar. It feels like they were sort of archetypes in creation, and since I haven't found a better way of explaining it outside of my own head, I'll use the same word I did a couple paragraphs back. They're each a different facet of Who Chuck Is in a really primordial way.

Gabriel evades Responsibility™ and enjoys playing around with creation, pretending to be something he isn't, just wanting to play with the story. That's a different facet of Chuck, as well.

Michael is all about the Rules. He's fully bought into destiny, and the inevitability of the story playing out exactly as written. That's also Chuck.

Raphael we know less about, but after Michael was locked into the cage at the end of s5, and even before that, when we first met him, he was convinced God was gone, and there was no point to letting his creation continue. He just wanted it all to end, so he wouldn't have to be In Charge anymore. Which... is kinda also Chuck.

So, yeah, I do think it's intentional.

#chuck's process #i can't even remember if i had a tag for chuck and the archangels at this point :'D #chuck and the archangels #spn cosmology #ooh that last tag... my past writings on this subject might be filed in there if you feel like delving :'D

[qvincvnx]

literally don't understand why people are anti winc*st like early season spn is a horror drama about The Family (the collapse of the family unit being the motivator for hunting; hunting as kinship network of damaged family units; hunting as a net from which you can never escape; the family as a net from which you can never escape). also: a show that hates women so much that incest seems like the less problematic option, shipping wise.

like i don't really ship it due to i haven't had spn opinions since i was probably 13 years old, but at least it's more interesting thematic and social commentary than the replacement ship, which requires me to posit christian cosmology as true, and also is boring.

#i literally don't remember that many people even writing fic that DIDNT CONDEMN IT like iirc a ~happy ending~ was often framed as a tragedy #i simply don't understand what's upsetting ITS MORE COHERENT TO THE TONE OF THE SHOW. which is supernatural (ha) horror. so....?

[autisticandroids]

another thing i willl say about season two is it's a LOT less spooky than season one. like with the exception of crossroads blues, which is really fabulously atmospheric and has incredible creature design (those hellhounds!!), i don't think i've been particularly impressed. like i don't find spn scary at the best of times, but season one has some really solid like... unsettling atmosphere building and tense moments, along with a lot of phenomenal and compelling creature design. like something wicked is a bad episode but i will remember the creature design on the shtriga until i die. and there's a lot of that in season one. season two the episodes pack less of a punch as individual incidents, they're more like just a series of pieces in a (characterizational and thematic) puzzle and you're meant to put them together so the individual pieces don't matter so much. and the ones that weren't so connected to Themes also like, weren't really atmosphere building. they were episodes of supernatural, they fit neatly into the structure of Solving A Case and they didn't really stray outside an already understood and established cosmology of evil. they were there as puzzles with definite answers, not emotional moments in the same way. which i think does make for better supernatural, but it also loses something

#spn

[spngeorg]

Episode 98: 5.16 Dark Side of the Moon

We finally get to explore the Great Gig in the Sky... Heaven, as it were. I could talk about this episode for hours. Days, even. But what is Time. (and yes, I considered just assembling this entire post out of song titles and lyrics from the album, but I figured that would give us all Brain Damage... fine, I’ll stop now)

We finally get a peek behind the curtain, but what are we actually being shown? Who’s actually doing the “showing,” and what agendas (including Chuck’s) are influencing what Sam and Dean experience there?

Plus Dean and Cas both take major blows to their confidence in having any hope of defeating Lucifer and stopping the apocalypse. God has always been a dick, honestly. Sam... is still desperately clinging to hope, for now. Things are looking pretty grim all around, though.

I talked long enough in the episode, so here have some links:

The Superwiki page

My Tag for the episode

My cosmology of the spn universe tag

my tag for Heaven (and hell, purgatory, and the empty)

my tag for soulmates (mercifully briefer than the previous two lol)

filming locations map

the Network Draft script

an interview with Thunderbird Dinwiddie (Pamela)

Listen now on AnchorFM, or wherever you enjoy podcasts!

#spn 5.16 #spn podcasts #spiders georg of the tnt loop

[incarnateirony]

So for all of it. All the smugposting. This comes down to TWO things

2po imagining what my blog is, imagining I thought it was purgatory, despite me literally spamming garden and heaven meta to the point people asked me to start tagging it better bc it was A Lot.

2po doesn't understand spn cosmology for ass.

You guys want the spoiler? The big spoiler on why wry and playful jensen, "no, it's heaven" to correct it when someone mentioned the purgatory outfit.

Cuz yeah, we know technically that was the purgatory outfit, but it was Jensen's means of asserting several tiers of plot

that chart is basically canon. cope.

dean's outfit WILL change to the previous one once reaching the garden/roadhouse/family, from heaven, for continuity; the point being that in his suspended state of mind, he's in The Trap. Not. Literally in Purgatory. But in the proverbial, mental trap that's keeping him from crossing over. He's in the general non3dspace that could be called heaven plane, but he isn't in the mental state to access completion.

It's literally "I can't move on until I face my new profound realization just like with mary, to find myself and my own peace; and my heaven needs one other." He's in the Trap, and he's calling out.

That's it. It's heaven because everything is heaven, he's already dead, he's on the road to the Garden, but he isn't able to integrate yet, so it's not classical heaven. He's still alone. And even with all the family waiting for him on the other side, there's something he has to say, first. Because it's in just saying it, in just Being. That's how you GET peace.

Again, Castiel never went to the empty. The tag line in the script was "at peace". he accepted his shadow and that of humanity and basically unbirthed it like rowena did hell. Hence. The Castiel's Uterus joke. I have been tagging everything with again. Because issa heaven joke. Which for all 2po's screaming about it he sure didn't understand SHIT about, I guess.

I guess then we shouldn't try to have him comprehend the 3-tier 3-language (Sanskrit, Greek, English) pun the Akrida are orbiting around that.

Cas let himself be filled with light and love and learned what that soul was, the moon became full with both the good and bad in humanity, and loved it all. This time with Death, the infinite vessel, so he wouldn't explode, tied to the afterlife like Rowena and not able to hop to earth. And now the light is trying to call Dean home.

That's it. That's the plot.

Cas.

A wise woman once told a story about a fight she had with her husband. And the regret she had. Letting him walk out. Because they would never let each other leave without saying it.

Cas.

There's something I have to say.

And here, at the end of the road, though I followed my father my whole life, I've learned his best, and worst--I've fought those shadows, even if the toughest is within, and it's time to make my own way. [continues turning over arcana proverbs tiredly] Mm. I think you all get the point now. Yes. It was all worth it. And with one last regret, whether he knows it's heard or not, Dean Winchester finds peace. And he is good. With who he is. And wouldn't turn it back for the world. Even if he could have What Is And Should Never Be. Who would that make him. Who would that make Mary. Not who they are now.

It's time to come home, hometown hero.

....genuinely can't believe this dipthong posted Who We Are fullchested and didn't even spot the--my god.

Dude.

In the light you will find the road.

catch a FUCKIN clue.

#the end #spnwin #cannot believe he fucked even this up #that's a skill at this point #he got lost in me discussing the nuance of mental state on the dreamer #bro that's been meta of mine for years even #it's weird actually it's almost like #wait for it #this show was predicated on ideas suspiciously close to my meta #about heaven #and the mundi #and is about to light your pals soulmate ideas on fucking fire #one might even imagine by the end #it was designed to do that #quite specifically #by someone very annoyed by you idiots #someone that knows real well #what points over there need a doubletap to die

[nikadd]

the thing abt spn as a text is that it’s so full of retcons and inconsistencies bc of the handwavy level of control over each writer’s pov or whatever else that happened that considering literally everything to have happened/been said on the show as canon is simply inconsiderate of the rest of the canon so it’s like not that hard to imagine that many people may have their own due interpretations of the text with certain reductions done to it. but also some interpretations simply lack substance and i’m not here to sit and talk abt polysemy when somebody is clearly reaching too far or not reading what’s clearly in front of them. anyways all that is to say is that if you follow one of the main themes of the show (free will is good, predestination is bad) then you have to agree that the idea of soulmates within the cosmology of the series is not a positive one

#it's valeriia talking #spn

[catsconflictscopicsandchamomile]

cramming like anything for my finals tomorrow, currently copying notes for my archeology exam to help me remember them. going through the section on the archeology of religion, and my absolute JOY at realizing that "beliefs around cosmology and the supernatural" can be shortened to "spn"... thank you, tumblr, for saving me a LOT of writing

#finalsposting #nightposting #finals hell #aghhhhh #tumblrcore #tumblr culture

[ladyknightskye]

Ask game ask game ask game!

Do you plan each chapter ahead or write as you go?

What do you do when writing becomes difficult? (maybe a lack of inspiration or writers block)

What do you think makes your writing stand out from other works?

Putting it under a cut because I got really rambly there. >.>

Do you plan each chapter ahead or write as you go?

Little bit of column A, little of column B. In general I have a rough idea of what happens in a chapter, but I don't usually have like, a bullet point list of what all has to happen. Since getting into SPN and doing a lot of fandom Bangs, I have gotten to the point where I will plan more than a chapter ahead, but I don't have to stick to any of those plans.

2. What do you do when writing becomes difficult?

Honestly? I take a step back or work on something else for a little while. Or, if it's just a part of the work that's not vibing with me, I'll go back to either the beginning of the scene or the chapter and simply redo the entire thing. Usually when I do that, the cut goes into my draft file somewhere else so I can keep it just in case. If it's the whole work that's not working? I tend to abandon it. (I am so sorry to everyone who ever follows me and starts reading WIPs. Someday. Or honestly you can ask and I'd at least give you bullet points of what'll happen next)

3. What do you think makes your writing stand out from other works?

Mmm, I think it's my ideas more than anything really. Not necessarily the tropes and stuff, but the combinations of them. I had a fairly atypical upbringing (combination of where I live, who I was raised by, the environment of my home) for a woman of my demographics, and a pretty meandering list of interests. I think that kinda combines into a willingness to play with the source material and tropes in such a way that you end up getting interpretations and combinations that aren't that common in many of the fandom spaces I've been in.

I say that not in, like, an "I'm so special~" way, because I absolutely had all the normal "girl" stuff as a kid. Like, I was a horse girl, had an astrology phase, all of that - but I was raised by an extended family (three to four generations at once on two contiguous acres of land, my mother was a military brat that has actually visited other countries and my father was a hippie that graduated from Notre Dame; my paternal grandmother and grandfather met while working on components of the Manhattan Project and said paternal grandmother was a well known pillar of the community; this entire motley crew all lived on the same land as a camper/trailer park that had some permanent residents but renters who came from all over the state as well as families from all over the east coast since to this day I remember the girls I hung out with from West Virginia; I am a character from a family of them), was introduced to the romance genre by Jean Auel's The Valley of Horses at the precocious age of eleven, and by thirteen had my sister handing me her Bertrice Small books on the regular. I read The Kadin at like, twelve or thirteen, so I was introduced to the idea of a healthy polyamorous relationship (let's be real y'all, our mom and grandmama's harem books were basically poly even if the ladies weren't having sex amongst themselves) at a time when most teens around me were discovering their sexuality for the first time. My special interests run the gamut of angelology/Abrahamic folklore, dinosaurs, cosmology (the science of space), epidemiology (heh heh, I was smacked in the face by that fuckin' red dodgeball of Apollo the first time I heard about a mysterious respiratory illness in China in January of 2020), cryptozoology, and music. Like, you throw all that into a blender, some weird shit is going to come out.

#ladyknightrambles #ask game

[drsilverfish]

Jung’s Answer to Job, or The Transformative Power of Anger with God

The Winchesters learn Chuck is God in 11x20 Don’t Call Me Shurley

In 15x03 The Rupture, the Winchesters solidify their shared anger at Chuck.

Dean: “I’m not freaked, I’m angry OK? I’m pissed.”

Sam: “At God?”

Dean: “Yes!”

Sam: “Me too.”

What does it mean to be angry with God?

The psychoanalyst Jung’s ideas about the psyche (as those of you who have been following my S14 Jungian meta series will know) have been drawn on by the SPN writers’ room, particularly in the Dabb era of Supernatural. Jung wrote a book called Answer to Job.

Job’s story is very relevant to Sam and Dean right now, because Job was a “righteous man” whom God tormented. In The Book of Job, Satan came to Yahweh, and suggested that Job was only righteous because his life was easy, as he had God’s protection. He bet God that Job would repudiate Yahweh if the going got tough. God took Satan’s bet, and withdrew his protection from Job, allowing Satan to visit all manner of torment on him. 

Satan covered Job in boils, caused the deaths of his ten children and all his livestock of goats and cattle and camels, and generally f-ed him up.

Satan Smiting Job With Boils (1826) by William Blake

Note that God, at the end of S14, kills Team Free Will’s son, Jack, and now Sam is sick (thanks to the God-wound from the revenge/ equaliser Hammurabi gun) and Cas is losing his powers. So TFW are suffering in a similar manner to Job. 

Job’s friends thought Job must have done something wrong, and suggested he was being justly punished by God for sins committed. 

Job himself opened up a conversation with God in prayer, hoping his appeals would be answered, and lamenting the (unjust) suffering being inflicted on him:

“Does it please you [God] to oppress me, to spurn the work of your hands, while you smile on the schemes of the wicked?” Job 10:3

“Surely, O God, you have worn me out; you have devastated my entire household.” Job 16:7

“He [God] throws me into the mud, and I am reduced to dust and ashes. I cry out to you, O God, but you do not answer; I stand up, but you merely look at me.” Job 30:19-20

“Oh, that I had someone to hear me! I sign now my defence – let the Almighty answer me; let my accuser put his indictment in writing.” Job 31:35

“As surely as God lives, who has denied me justice, the Almighty, who has made me taste bitterness of soul…” Job 27:1

Job expected and called on God to be just. But (in Jung’s interpretation) God wasn’t behaving justly. He’d made a bet with Satan, after all. 

Eventually Yahweh does enter the chatroom. He appears to Job. gives a big, bombastic and terrifying speech about how mighty he is, and Job realises he had better bow before Yahweh and retract his criticism:

““I know that You can do all things and that no plan of Yours can be thwarted.... Therefore I retract my words, and I repent in dust and ashes...”

However, the criticism, Jung argues, stands. Jung says, of this encounter:  “The victory of the vanquished and oppressed is obvious: Job stands morally higher than Yahweh. In this respect the creature has surpassed the creator.”  (p351)

https://www.jungiananalysts.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/C.-G.-Jung-Collected-Works-Volume-11_-Psychology-and-Religion_-West-and-East.pdf 

 Jung argues that Yahweh is in an imperfect state because he is separated from the feminine God-principle, Sophia, and that Job’s reproach does hold up a mirror to Yahweh, eventually leading him to re-incarnate the lost feminine godhood in the form of Mary, mother of Jesus, and thus mutate from a wrathful God to a mercy-driven one. 

Certainly, God tells off Job’s friends for suggesting Job had deserved his suffering, and even (in some interpretations) implies Job was right to call him, Yahweh, out:

“After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite: ‘My anger burns against you and against your two friends, for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.’ Job 42:7

Jung argues that God needs man in order that God may achieve higher consciousness - the createes teaching the creator. He suggests that Job sees the split in God, and that God is in need of the feminine God-principle, Sophia, in order to be truly just (aka merciful, not wrathful). 

Jung believes God, and religions in general, are human allegorical stories about the human psyche. So the union of God with Sophia is about the union of the unconscious with the conscious mind.

This need for a conjoining of the light and the dark sides of God (for Jung, elements in the human psyche) tracks with SPN. Chuck has painted himself as The Light and Amara as The Darkness, but the God side of the equation, aka Chuck himself, is presently wrathful and the Sophia side of the equation, aka Amara, is presently wise. And Amara learned her wisdom (the power of love) from Dean-humanity-Winchester, just as, according to Jung, the wrathful Yahweh learned from Job. 

Sharon Martin (a Jungian analyst) argues in “The Alchemy of Anger” that anger is transformational. 

http://www.jungatlanta.com/articles/spring12-alchemy-of-anger.pdf

Sam and Dean’s anger with God is their anger with The FatherTM; the impact of their own father, John Winchester, on their psyches, and, on a meta level, the anger of characters striving to achieve free will against the constraints of their writers/ creators. 

For now, the feminine and masculine God-principles may have broken up:

On the earthly plane, too, the feminine has been re-sacrificed, ouroboros style (circular narrative style). Because it was the sacrifice of the familial feminine (Mary Winchester and Jess) which initiated the SPN story in the first place. Now we have the re-sacrifice of Mary Winchester, and, most recently, to emphasise the point, Rowena’s sacrifice.  

The sacrifice of the symbolic feminine (wisdom, Sophia) is also going on in Sam and Dean’s psyches. They have lost their mother all over again and Dean, we can see, has presently chosen anger over other emotions (grief, love). Some kind of splitting is also clearly going down with Sam, given that we saw a Lucifer-Sam mind-vision, when Cas tried to heal his God-wound in 15x02.  

Insofar as Cas and Amara are paralleled (Amara leaves Chuck in 15x02, Cas leaves Dean in 15x03) Cas also stands in the place of the feminine in the narrative, at this point. And he too has been “sacrificed” and banished from the Winchester family (pushed away by Dean’s anger).  

So, the WInchesters are presently mirroring Chuck’s own wrathfulness and splitting.

But, according to Jungian analysis, their anger/ eventual consciousness of splitting, is a necessary stage of the alchemical transformation of the psyche towards wholeness. 

Eventually, the feminine principle will return: Chuck will reunite with Amara, Dean will reunite with Cas, and (I’m betting) Mary will reunite with her sons.

Jack who has been symbolised as a Hermes/ Mercury figure, and as the union of light and dark, given that he is the child of Satan and humanity - will also have a significant role to play. 

Job got his happy ending. God eventually blessed him with ten more children, a long full life and a new bunch of goats, cattle and camels.

Hopefully Team Free Will will get theirs.   

#Supernatural #15x03 #The Rupture #SPN meta #Meta #Jung in S15 #Jungian meta #Chuck Shurley #Amara #Team Free Will #Winchester Family Dynamics #The Book of Job #SPN cosmology #SPN theology

[deanmarywinchester]

the spn writers were so afraid to let angel battles get a little metaphysical and for what? so we could watch a Michael-Lucifer battle for the end of the world thats two white men throwing punches in midair, instead of the sky flickering from day to night and back while two balls of flame battle it out in the distance and the world vanishes into white light and angel static every time they get too close? come on. if it’s perceivable instead of being a cosmological sign that the ancient Greeks would’ve seen and gone “oh the gods are angry” about, I don’t want it

#just finished s13 and. michael!dean conceptually sexy; Michael-lucifer battle conceptually unsexy #also concept: Michael!dean and casifer arcs overlapping #spnposting #my posts #spn lb

[mittensmorgul]

Hello! I remember reading some meta a while back about how John wasn't actually tortured in Hell, and that Dean was the only one tortured. And also, Dean was the only one who got the 1 month = 10 years time manipulation, and that's not how time in Hell typically works. I can't remember if that was you or not?? But if it was, do you know what you would have tagged it? I'm looking for it cuz I really like it and want to reference it 😬

Hi there! I have written about this quite a bit, yes. I thought maybe some of it was in the 2.22 tag, or else in the "heaven hell purgatory and the empty" tag, since it was semi-confirmed that Hell Time (and even Cage Time) does run parallel to Earth Time in 15.08. Dean mentions the "10 years" in a cage thing as possibly a reason Adam/Michael would not want to help them, and then Adam himself tells Michael that it's been 10 years since he'd seen a burger before taking a bite of it. So to them, who were in the cage for a decade, it actually felt like a decade.

So... it feels like it's been confirmed in canon that everyone else experiences time flowing at a normal Earth rate in Hell now. I went through my tags and found a series of posts you may find interesting, but obviously these are just my personal thoughts about it. It's never been stated in dialogue, for example, that Dean specifically experienced a time dilation in order to rush him through the process of breaking him from torture in time to bring about the destined apocalypse. Other demons have confirmed it can take CENTURIES to break down a human soul and rebuild them into demons in Hell. Like Ruby in 3.09:

Ruby: Yes, the same thing will happen to you. It might take centuries, but sooner or later Hell will burn away your humanity. Every Hell-bound soul, every one, turns into something else. Turns you into us. So yeah. Yeah, you can count on it.

They were on a timetable. They didn't have centuries (for one thing, Sam wouldn't live that long to fulfill his end of the fated apocalypse deal...). They needed to speed run him through breaking in the very specific way Chuck's narrative needed him to. They did NOT need John to break in this specific way. He wasn't the fated vessel of Michael, you know? DEAN was. And they needed him-- The Righteous Man-- to shed blood in Hell. I.e., to pick up the implements of torture and fall, essentially. And it still took him 30 years of brutal, directed torture to give in to that destiny. Can you imagine him being saved after 40 earth years before being returned to battle it out with 65-year-old Sam? LOLOL no.

anyway, here's some things I've written on the subject over the years. I hope some of this clarifies my personal thinking on the matter. And okay, now that I've pasted all those here, I think I'd recommend starting at the bottom of this list and working your way up, since I pulled them in reverse chronological order from my blog, and the last linked post is actually the origin of this convo on my blog >.>

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/618379181478248448/hi-im-the-wiki-anon-i-was-just-reading-a

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/189903073925/michael-and-adam-talk-about-only-spending-10-years

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/189647525560/if-deans-hell-time-isnt-indicative-of-overall

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/188516632740/re-demons-so-im-thinking-its-invite-only-most

https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/186982506615/this-talk-of-the-early-seasons-gives-me-another

I hope that at least clarifies how I think about this!

#heaven hell purgatory and the empty #spn cosmology #spn 2.22

[astermacguffin]

Love how much this summarizes my entire spn mpreg rewrite that I feverishly wrote in one sitting the other day. There are three important motivations behind that entire Poast™:

1. I asked myself "How can I make spn as awful as I can and still be better than canon?" Hence, the "mpreg saves the day" au.

2. I want to live up with my title as an @autisticandroids scholar. When I say "I wanna study you" to someone, I commit to it. Like. I definitely did the reading. Godstiel scholars of some renown only work in mysterious ways to you. I get it tho. If you browse my published works, you'll see how most of them are expansions from other people's posts. I do make original posts, but I often function more as a secondary scholar who reacts to fandom literature.

Think of how academics/philosophers build on the works of their predecessors and contemporaries (like how Lacan went beyond Freud, or how Deleuze expanded on Nietzsche and Spinoza).

Notable examples:

- The eucharist meta

- The spn mpreg rewrite (linked above)

- The "angels as psychoanalytic subjects" meta

- The amv intertextuality post

- spn tumblr linking habits and the quasi-transformative nature of referencing

- The consumenatural quartet post

- The metaphysics of Down to Agincourt

- The evil deancas categorization post

3. My ultimate Cas thesis is this: "Cas is a mouth, he is a stomach, but ultimately, he is a womb." I think it makes sense that a being of infinite hunger is also a being of infinite fertility. He is empty (and therefore simultaneously hungry/fertile) by virtue of being the Abstracted Gaze, the stand-in for the viewer.

I also think of the Empty as the Original Womb that "gave birth" to Light/Darkness (a cosmology that I think has both Manichean and gnostic undertones). Cas being touched by the Empty and defeating it through his own womb honestly sounds very metal to me.

Anyway. I forgot the point of this post lol. Mpreg saves the day i guess

#spn #aster writes #i have an upcoming post about the semantic logic of amvs so. stay tuned i guess

[septembersghost]

also on the topic from anon earlier, genre shows are so important and enjoyable, and they're a big part of pop culture for a reason. we humans love stories, imagination, lore. we love the dichotomy of light vs. dark. we love complex, brave, damaged, passionate characters. supernatural gets an unusual amount of scrutiny and vitriol, some of which is deserved, some of which i think has certain reasons, some of which may stem from negative things from the fandom, but in its category of genre fiction, it served a purpose and there's a reason it's beloved by many. critical metrics of what defines "quality" have a different application when we're talking about horror or fantasy fiction imo. is spn deeply flawed and messy? yes. its two perhaps most influential forebears - the x-files and buffy the vampire slayer - are as well. txf's mythology gets so convoluted you can't make sense of it (not unlike spn's cosmology). btvs has a lot of issues, some of which are of its era, also like spn. (angel as well, which has its own value and significance. all that matters is what we do.) i adore those shows. they're all fundamentally different, but they share some aspects that made them iconic.

i've written at length several times before about spn's uniqueness in dealing with folklore tropes and leaning into classic gothic ideals, including the familial trauma and the concepts of faith, love as a consuming and transcendent force, and the difficulty of heroism - and that's what i believe a lot of audiences, certainly in the early seasons, latched onto. that doesn't mean it's anywhere near perfect, but it's interesting. the winchesters themselves are ineffable and multifaceted. it is very unique in its approach to its central relationships and in the way the horror tropes inform it.

but then, i love genre shows unabashedly. i watched the vampire diaries and the originals with fascination and warmth for those characters, and would happily say that the latter particularly is one of the best examples of vampire fiction in an almost grand guignol style. (they can try to adapt iwtv, but will it have the grandiose new orleans ricean flair that somehow the originals often achieved?) penny dreadful is lush and terrible and profound. spn may be infuriating and inconsistent and full of holes and have bad writing and be barely held together by red string stitching at times, but there's a reason it imprinted on people, and that CAN be more special than objective "quality." something doesn't have to be "good" to matter to you. something doesn't even have to be acclaimed to occasionally be sublime.

#spn for ts #i'm just saying #the consolation of imaginary things #bubble wrap around my heart

[incarnateirony]

Your codex/arcana posts are fascinating, even though most of it goes way over my head. Here's hoping these questions don't sound too stupid, lol

A lot of the SPN characters were represented in this mythology but Emperor Dean (and Empress Cas) seem to have been/still are the major focus. Do you think it's because the writers just chose to focus on their self-discovery journeys instead of, say, Sam's? Or are there bigger cosmological implications because of who these characters are?

And I'm also wondering about the complexity of the mythos in TW. There's so much symbolism everywhere. I know that TW is about Dean's arc. But in real life, does everyone theoretically have their own unique but still complex mythic journey?

Sam's you will find under tags like Aeon, along with Jack. That generational trauma of the akrida monster in your brain if you will also was just. a family. people. they were real. Both team free will, dean's family, and his parents, and their truth. And his Own. He speaks it. Fish through the tags and episode names and whatnot, people find sometimes it takes a few watches through by different paths.

We're actually rebuilding a. thing. That will answer Jojo's spiral post in the most comedic way. Because 1x6, 1x9, 1x13 is just 6 is 9 (+4=13) WE'RE FINE. Reflection is another one hang tight. lmfao. We gettin there.

Once I drop the Lateralus project it'll click, but give the promo post video a spin. Any part you don't get yet after that should be answered by the tags Fool, World (aka Universe in some decks) and the related personal resolution posts, and others through. Always skim tags to connect adjacent ideas.

Basically brb a few hours I'm like a squirrel digging up nuts i forgot where my backups are at to remaster it should help. I swear. I'm rebuilding the codex as fast as I can.

#winchesters codex #lateralus project #we're turning over all the cards #one card today

[autisticandroids]

like!! in the spn cosmology fallen angels are human and fallen humans are demons! like!? what does it MEAN? ghosts are disembodied souls that act evil but people without souls act basically like demons? what is a soul, then? do demons still have SOULS?!! (also the writers were cowards for not bringing bela back as a demon)

questions i ask myself every day.

#spn #asks #Anonymous

[heteroflexiblecastiel]

1.03 makes me cry regularly bc like. the cosmology of the spn universe at this point is like. there is hell (revealed in the next episode) and there is whatever ghosts do. the veil or whatever. like nobody knows what non-vengeful spirits do when they die. so like..... what happens to Child vengeful spirits. who legitimately didn't know any better. they were stuck in a stage of life in which everything is black and white.. ppl who hurt them deserve to be punished.

except the sheriff was ALSO in that stage of life where bullying seems like the right thing to do, to fit in with friends, to assure ur spot on the social pecking order, etc. like he didn't (couldn't) fully comprehend that his actions would lead to the actual DEATH of another human being. like his brain was literally not fully developed enough to make those connections. he just went along with whatever his friends did. and then as an adult he carried that guilt with him every day.

#spn