#can we please stop glorifying it as twu wuv now

[mittensmorgul]

I was impressed that you were so precisely on the nose regarding chuck’s manipulation of Eileen (I’ll admit, I only latched on to this theory relatively recently >.>). Any tips on staying positive as we wait for Rowena to return to the narrative? I found it discouraging that she was so absent from chuck’s ‘memories’

It’s funny, because I find it encouraging that Rowena hasn’t been part of Chuck’s memories. Neither has Jack, nor Billie, nor the Empty. Nor Cas, really, outside of 15.09, and the fact that taking the mark would drive him mad like the MoC did to Dean, and Dean had to lock him up in a Ma’lak box...

especially since Eduardo Sanchez tweeted a selfie with one of the statues in Hell the other day... episode 15.14...

OOH, and did anyone else find it strange that Chuck’s “true visions of the future” ALL had Sam and Dean wearing the same clothes, despite being months and even years in the future? Dean leaving the bunker in that same shirt, no jacket? I loved that particular consistency, because it poked a massive hole in Chuck’s telling of the future as if it was time travel or some “true seeing.”

I mean, Eileen could still be Sam’s endgame, and she could choose to return of her own free will at the end (or even before the end). But the show has bent over backward to tell us that Sam and Eileen have never had a romantic relationship before her resurrection. It’s bent over backward showing us that they have potential there, that they have fun together, but that they have some serious communication issues (their “agreement” that Dean completely misinterpreted as something cute and couple-y, but that was actually about Eileen setting some boundaries because of Sam’s overprotectiveness, and honestly good for her). And Sam’s REPEATED insistence to Dean that “it’s not like that” every time Dean tried to nudge him toward Eileen.

BUT! If Eileen is Sam’s intended romantic partner for the end of the series, it would be the very beginning of a relationship between them. A “so the world’s not ending, do you want to go for a coffee and see if this goes anywhere” type of relationship, and not a long-standing Grand Romance. It could be cute! Them choosing to get together, but there’s no foundation for that now. She was literally Chuck’s plot device this entire time, and Sam’s kiss at the end wasn’t enough to hold her there. Sam wasn’t enough to hold her there when Chuck wasn’t controlling her into pushing the romance plot. I can’t see their relationship to this point as anything but icky because of that. A couple of cute, flirtatious scenes from years in the past are not enough to cancel out how she was directly manipulated into pursuing a romance. Can we all agree it’s more than a little skeevy, because she literally had no choice in the matter?

To me, it puts her on a direct parallel with Lilith-- both her original incarnation and how Chuck manipulated her into seducing Sam in 4.18, and how Chuck tried to use her to manipulate Dean into a seduction in 15.05-- one episode before Chuck put Eileen’s ghost into the bunker to seduce Sam. The difference here is that Eileen is real, and alive again, and free (we hope) from Chuck’s control, because... Sam didn’t buy into Chuck’s romance plot.

Heck I have so much more to say about Chuck’s “storytelling” in general, and how it’s woven throughout s15, but I’ve been thinking of all of Sam’s visions of the future in 15.09 as exactly the same as Dean’s visions of “the future” in 5.04. I mean, Chuck’s final ending for Sam and Dean didn’t even make SENSE. And you could see it on his face that he KNEW this was a dumbass story, that he was lying his way through the whole thing like the lying liar he is.

I mean, he told Sam with a repressed glee that it would be the monsters overrunning the world if they locked him away. THAT is what broke Sam’s will to go through with it. Chuck has him convinced that without him in the universe to keep the balance, then “darkness” would take over, and the monsters are darkness. Yet... we know that Chuck is the one with the monster obsession. He’s the one who created the Leviathan in the first place, he’s the one who subtly arranged everything that led to their eventual release from Purgatory, he’s the one who created the “British Men of Letters” as an adversary intent on wiping out all the monsters which only stirred up the monster population to new levels of anger against humanity. And he’s the one whose only appearance this year that I actually trust was in 15.04, when he talked to Becky trying to get his “writing mojo” back... because what he cared about... was the MONSTERS.

I can’t help but think of the AU’s of s13 as an honest glimpse into Chuck’s other failed universes... all of them having lost to the monsters. Kaia’s “Bad Place” overrun by giant trolls and Predator-looking things, the feral vampires in the Apocalypse AU, and then in s14, AU Michael planning to organize the monster population into his personal army to destroy humanity.

This... is Chuck’s plot for s15. Jack ruined his plot for s14 when he ate Michael. Chuck just couldn’t stand for that. Jack’s not part of his story. Doesn’t fit in with Chuck’s apocalyptic vision of the End.

But... Eileen did. Eileen was integral to it. Of all the people he could’ve manipulated into playing the role of Chuck’s mole, he picked her. I’m really glad she’s earned her freedom and life back now, but heck... the romance? It was never real.

I feel like I should make an entirely separate post about Rowena, but lol I already wrote a treatise on her entire character arc, and without more canon to make assumptions on, I’m gonna just point people toward the thing I wrote about her and posted way back on December 1, a few days after 15.06 aired:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/21641770

(it’s 13k words, too long for the tumbls)