#always being the first permadeath means that he's never had to deal with living on after someone is gone for good

[setacin]

there's a dead canary in the coal mine. - mercy down by shayfer james

[pallasperilous]

So It Goes

So, forgive me this indulgence as somebody who does not ordinarily write meta; a friend asked me why I thought that the manner of Dean’s death in 15x20 is an incredibly lovely and mature writing choice. I think it is so, for reasons that also happen to explain why so many fans of the show fucking loathe it.

There is some Vonnegut at the end. Hang in for that. 

PART ONE: 

Chuck's story direction has always made sure that the boys, if they died, did so in a mega intense or glorious fashion (minus the *Mystery Spot* meddling by Gabriel, and those weren't meant to be permadeaths). Those deaths were awesome heroic television deaths that FED the story rather than ending it. Every time, the surviving brother would do some extremely stupid and destabilizing shit to bring the other back, often feeding an entire new cycle of death and retrieval. 

If he *didn't* (cf: Sam in the Cage, Dean in Purgatory), it caused a massive rift between them, which then fed *further* wild-ass decisions. The dudes were in the dictionary under 'codependency'. People knew that killing or capturing one of them meant the other wasn't far behind. 

Chuck's endgame for Sam and Dean was literally to *die fighting God.* How much more heroically wanky can you get?

But they beat him. They’re free. Jack takes over, and makes it clear that he isn’t going to be a God who meddles or directs; he’s not going to be their in-house writer. He’s just going to set things back where they belong, reform the systems that Chuck established out of ego or cruelty, and then integrate himself with the universe so that anything that happens to it…happens to him, too. He’s won’t be a character anymore. He’s a setting.

PART TWO: 

So, minus Chuck, with Jack’s goodbye and Castiel’s sacrifice…the boys get to experience plain old…real life. Tuesday! Drinking beer, kicking the laundry machine, filling out shitty job applications, enjoying the little consolations of food and pets and free time. (I think that messy room and dog-bonding and staring into the internet bespeaks a Dean who is really doing his goddamn best to not implode with grief as he has in the past, but to try to thrive in the face of deep grieving). 

When Sam expresses grief over losing Cas, Dean's response is basically: yeah, it sucks. But our job, that our loved ones sacrificed for us to have a shot at… is to stop trying to reverse all of our losses, and to learn to live with them, like normal people have to. That’s the price of the gift they’ve been given — accepting whatever real life deals them.

They can literally do anything they want; circumstances won’t herd them into Season 16. What’s the first thing Dean really does, after this little break? 

He hears “missing kids, dead parents” and he dives right back in. He opens his Dad’s goddamn notebook for the info. He’s immediately choosing to go right back to where they started, for the sake of helping other people. He books them to fight some of the very first basic bitch monsters he and Sam dealt with. That is unforced 100% Dean’s choice. 

(Sam has demonstrated an ability to not take on the responsibility of eliminating all monster-based misfortunes in the world and pursue a life beyond just hunting, so long as Dean has been off the map…but Dean’s one attempt to take a job and settle down with Lisa ended up being so obviously hollow that Castiel felt SO BAD he took time off from RUNNING HEAVEN to rescue Sam FOR DEAN.)

PART THREE: 

Remember Chuck's little fit earlier where Dean wound up getting his teeth drilled etc? That bad luck was being magnified by Chuck being pissed at them, but the brothers truly did find themselves facing ordinary people shit they had never really had to deal with. It drove the point home -- Sam and Dean had been exempt, this whole time, from the petty little ways that failure and misfortune work in the normal world. That extended to their hunting, too — they found out that there were people they could fail to save, despite their best effort. People who, according to the rules they’d been operating under, should have been savable. 

So we see this hunt — which is really rough and tumble. They’re still doing amazingly considering how outnumbered they are, but this was some of the most intentionally graceless fight choreography I remember seeing on the show. They seriously almost lose the fight, and Sam kills that last vamp pestering Dean with the kind of “whew!” last minute heroics we’ve come to expect from the show.

And Dean realizes: something has gone wrong. Something that no pulp TV action genre writer would ever, ever draft for a hero’s death. There was some scary rebar sticking out and Dean got shoved into it in the scuffle and it hath Fucked Him Up. It’s the kind of shit that happens on construction sites. It’s an accident. It’s a random misfortune. It has nothing to do with his heroism or skill or the cleverness or powerfulness of his opponents. It just happens.

Under show rules, here is what would happen next: Castiel would heal him. Jack would heal him. Sam would call an ambulance and Dean would be DOA and Sam would whip out his cellphone and call Rowena or a crossroads demon or Sister Jo or research a spell and we’d be off and rolling for Season 16.

But Dean says: Don’t do that.

Because that is what Chuck would write.

Dean realizes — this is exactly the world they have fought to exist in. A world that is randomly wonderful, randomly shitty. This happened because he chose to be here. Nobody made them pursue this hunt. Is he surprised that it happened so soon, that he ended up having so little time to give unscripted life a shot? Yes, to the point that he clearly thinks it’s honestly kinda funny. Cuz who’d write it like that? Nobody! He likes the part that he gets to die on a hunt, standing up, in his boots — that’s what he’s always seen for himself. Not in a bad way, not in a “killing machine” or a “daddy’s little soldier” way, but because it means he kept fighting for other people up to the last second. He’s upset that Sam is so upset — he’s more worried about calming Sam and reassuring him than he is about how cool his death is gonna look on IMDB, or how they can cheat circumstance to buy him more time. 

Instead of buying more time, at the expense of living like real people instead of TV characters…he decides to make the most of this one moment. He tells Sam how much he loves him. He tells Sam that Sam will be okay; he’s going to go live a whole life on whatever terms he and the universe can work out together, and the fact that Dean isn’t there is gonna be a painful but acceptable part of those terms. Dean says: don’t go running off trying to change this. Just spend this last little bit of time with me, while the universe does its thing. That’s what they do.

TL;DR — this death is fucking awesome because Chuck would absolutely fucking hate it. He wanted Sam and Dean to go down in a ball of fire together, fighting their coolest foe ever, CHUCK! 

Instead: Dean dies like a normal person, from an accident bred under circumstances that he chose for himself. Chuck loses half his prize, not to some other big bad, but to a damn piece of construction material on a mundane job.  And Dean gets to die in a way that unshackles Sam’s fate from his own. Like Castiel did for him, he gets to say: I love you. This is enough for me. Go live your life.

He finally gets to drop his kid back off at Stanford.

Chuck would be so pissed.

And we, the viewers of Supernatural...well, hell, we’re ultimately fans of Chuck’s writing, aren’t we? So of course something so unprecedented, so un-heroic or badass, so mundane and intimate and random...of course it shocks. Because that’s not the show we’ve been watching!! But isn’t that the point? The author is dead. We can put aside his tastes, and we can look at Dean’s death, and say the words of Dean’s actual favorite author, Kurt Vonnegut --  So it goes.

[in-tua-deep]

consider; an au where five dies in the apocalypse (but keeps trying to get back to his siblings anyway)

oh CURSED but also that gives me a vague idea which probably isn’t what you’re getting at buT if Klaus gets to be immortal then maybe so does Five idk just let me live

The first time Five dies he doesn’t even know he did so. Time travel isn’t meant for people to do by themselves, and the Commission spent a very long time perfecting those briefcases to make sure their agents didn’t tear themselves apart and scatter their atoms across space time. Five, however, gets put back together and spat out into the apocalypse.

The second time Five dies in the apocalypse and it is probably a combo of heatstroke and dehydration and starvation. It’s hard to tell what gets him in the end, he’s trying so hard to give his siblings graves that he doesn’t stop to think about his own health. 

He passes out, has a really weird dream about someone not liking him, and then he wakes up again. He dismisses it.

The third time Five dies in the apocalypse is a bit more difficult to ignore - he trips on some rubble and his head makes contact with the sharp edge of more rubble and when he wakes up he’s missing time and sitting in a pool of his own blood. When he touches his hand to his head though, he can’t find a wound.

He dies a few times in the beginning, trying to figure out how to survive in the hellscape. He thinks his least favorite death was when he ate bad food and ended up getting so sick he died slowly, unsure whether it was the sickness that killed him in the end or the fact that he was too weak to go out and get supplies.

He learns how to survive. He manages to hold off dying for a few years. He hits a growth spurt. He starts getting facial hair. It’s uncomfortable as all hell growing up in the apocalypse that’s for sure, but it’s doable

and then he dies. and when he wakes up, his clothes are just that much too big. he doesn’t have facial hair anymore. he’s thirteen again, and he looks just like he did when he arrived

after that it becomes almost a game. How long can Five survive without resetting himself back to thirteen? He wonders if it’s a side effect of his powers, the universe rebooting him back to the first moment he time traveled. Technically speaking his thirteen year old self exists across every instance of time and space due to the possibilities involved in time travel - so he assumes it has something to do with that. It’s a terrible horrible game - going through puberty once in the apocalypse is fucking terrible but going through it multiple times? Literal hell

The Commission keep an eye on him that’s true but… not close enough of an eye. They had vague ideas of his movements to make sure he didn’t do anything and admired the fact that whenever they checked in he was still alive, but they never saw him die

Five loses track of how old he is. Like, okay, it resets when he dies so does it even count? He’s been working on this equation for literal decades, but even he isn’t sure how long it’s been. He just knows that he would die and reset and go through puberty a million times in his quest to get back to his family, a quest made all the more urgent by the fact that he’s facing an infinite period of time in the apocalypse if he doesn’t figure it out

(at least he has Dolores)

When the commission finally comes for him, he gets taken for a health check up and they estimate his age to be ~50-55 yearsish and Five decides he’s 55 pretty much at random because why not. And Dolores said he’d never get to his 50s the way he worked, ha, showed her. If he got to 70 he would win a longstanding bet between them

Then he figures out his equation and jumps back in time and falls out of the portal and - he’s thirteen again. Fuck. Congrats, he fucking died again getting back to his sibling but hey! At least death doesn’t seem to stick to him. He can’t believe he’s going to have to start his bet with Dolores all over again and she was going to be insufferably smug about it he could just tell. God fucking puberty. AGAIN. His siblings better be appreciative of his efforts or he might start the apocalypse himself in a fit of teen hormones

He managed to keep his little revival trick a secret from the Commission, though they are peripherally aware of the fact that he does seem to have an aging trick and so the Handler makes a reference to that rather than congratulating him on the de-aging

Eventually Klaus makes an offhand comment about meeting God and everyone is surprised when Five snorts and is like “I fucking know right? Shes so rude all the time.”

Five is, however, kind of salty that he gets reset to 13 every time. That’s about the time he realizes that - oh, maybe time travel is not meant for squishy mortal bodies and maybe the first time he died was the first time he time traveled. Maybe the reason he keeps being 13 is because that’s the first time he died.

He wonders if Klaus will reset to 29 every time he dies in the future, in that case.

Everyone is REAL FUCKING CONCERNED about this line of conversation like what the fuck

and Five is just like “do you guys really think that a thirteen year old could survive as long as i did in the apocalypse?? with no medical care? and foraging for food? My dumb little ass didn’t know how to deal with food poisoning and infection was always a fucking nightmare to deal with. like. i’m good but i’m not THAT good”

Five 100% died from that shrapnel wound and just asked Grace not to tell the others because it would make them worry. They figure it out anyway whoops

Five, squinting at Klaus: hey fucker why didn’t you revive after the apocalypse you could have gotten your ass up and i wouldn’t have been alone

idk maybe it’s a thing that the only thing that can kill them permanently is each other?? i could make that a rule. Vanya killed the whole ass family and then her own powers tore herself apart which results in permadeath i’m making that a thing right now for this au

which says very very bad things about what happened to Ben tbh

though i mean if vanya’s own powers could tear her apart then i’m gonna say maybe the same applies to ben and that’s why he’s a ghost instead of being revived - their own powers also count among being able to permakill them

everyone is VERY FUCKING CONCERNED about five’s general lack of care for his own wellbeing (”well i’m thirteen right now so it’s not like i have far to fall. i’ll start caring about not dying again once i’m like, 20 i promise” “FIVE I SWEAR TO GOD - ” “Ugh, don’t, she’s a bitch”)

i don’t know where i was going with this but

IMMORTAL UMBRELLA ACADEMY

sort of

this probably isn’t what you had in mind but i’m not sorry

[todisturbtheuniverse]

scrambled thoughts about the finale/epilogue below:

as probably could have been expected, there were things i liked and things i didn’t.

happy, so happy, to hear that tary found lawrence again. <3 <3 <3 someone write me a fic.

grog pulling a card and getting such a bad thing, which necessitated a romp through pandemonium when the group should have been quietly grieving: well, that’s the most vox machina thing ever. they don’t process things, the have near-death experiences and then go have another.

pike’s memorial bench, what a sweet and heartfelt gesture. (my theory presently is that she was in love with vax--probably not at the time of his death, but a while ago, when it first came up.)

i feel kind of lukewarm about pike/scanlan, but i think that’s only because we didn’t really get to see it play out, the way other relationships in the game have. i do like that, way back like 50-60 episodes ago, he asked her to marry him for all the wrong reasons with very little understanding between them, and after that, they grew apart and then together, came to understand one another much better and scanlan in particular behaved much better. i like that after all that, they went on something as simple as a date after pandemonium.

grog stays with his gnomes and goes on adventures. of course. <3 a little weird family of their own.

i wish we’d heard more about some beloved NPCs, but maybe matt wants that to be a surprise for the next game, in which case, i don’t hold it against him.

so, the big thing, i guess: vax.

on the one hand...i can’t picture an ending that feels more right for vax. he has hurtled headlong into danger many, many times. he made a deal with the raven queen, not once, but twice. and from a wider perspective, VM has had quite a few brushes with death that never ended in permadeath. they have always dodged that particular horrible thing, and at least it waited until the end of the campaign to finally close in. in comparison to what could have happened, this was a pretty kind goodbye, in that there was the chance for goodbye, while still exacting a cost.

but on the other hand...i sort of knew in my gut from the moment i watched matt’s interview with d&d beyond that this was coming, and i fucking hated it. all this stuff about how there’s loss and sacrifice in real life, so that’s a lesson that should translate to fiction, too. i get that. that stakes are necessary. that narrative cost makes the game/story better. but the real world hurts so much right now that i don’t really like having that translated to fiction right now, you know? i don’t know that i would have thought the everyone-lives-nobody-dies ending was better, storytelling wise. i probably wouldn’t have. i just know that it would have made me feel happier. maybe less snot on my couch at 11:15 last night.

in this particular case, though, i kind of think that what i feel about the whole thing doesn’t matter. this is their game. consumed widely by others, yes, but still theirs. we’ll never really know whether or not it’s what each of them wanted, i guess, because they can of course say one thing to the camera and feel or mean something entirely different, but i hope it was. that it’s been talked about, prepared for, etc.

and there was still happiness, anyway. pieces of it. for all the risks that VM has taken over the years, they came out of the whole thing pretty well.

if there’s one thing that i’m actually upset about, i think it’s that ashley’s internet was being so goddamn uncooperative. i wish she could’ve been there in person, and i bet she does, too. :(