#spn themes

[supernaturalsidepiece]

SUPERNATURAL 2005 - 2020. (More)

[shallowseeker]

Dean + "Everything we've always wanted"

Hello, scripted All Along the Watchtower line:

Ah, yes. Everything Dean's we've always wanted. This comes shortly after meeting Max & Alicia Banes on 12x20, who also use "We" to cloak their individual wants and needs, like a shield. So what are the requirements for this everything-I've-always-wanted?

Mary (a flawed-but-Loving Parent-Hero; the symbolic road to accepting Our Imperfect Selves)

Cas ("Flawed Father Material" who is Brave, Dutiful, and Devoted; the One Who Carries Your Burden-Halved; the symbolic road to de-Romanticizing White Picket Fence & Apple Pie Life)

Sammy (the child who finally Grew into Leadership; circa season 12; The one who leads the American hunters against The British Men of Letters; the one who elevates the Family Legacy; the symbolic road to dealing with The Moral Gray of life)

///

We also get this aired line from 12x22:

DEAN: (dejectedly) Yeah. You know, it wasn't long ago, I thought we had it made. We saved the world. We got Cas back. We had Mom back. I mean, it wasn't perfect, but still, we had 'em.

It wasn't perfect. Like I was thinking in this season 8 post, this represents the acceptance of De-Romanticizing the Apple Pie Life.

[shallowstories]

To me, the way Anna fell, to become a human child, is meaningful in of itself.

If I were put in charge of writing Anna, in a reboot or otherwise, I would base it primarily around the concept of parents defending their children, and Anna longing for that (rather than sex, loyalty, chocolate cake, etc). It's not that those things aren't important, but that the the specter of Anna falling to become a child, wanting to be protected by her parents...it would hit SO hard.

Her deepest fear is her father killing her, after all.

Imagine fully-angelic Anna witnessing a mom rocking an innocent child and calling it "her little angel." Imagine Anna killing children, and watching parents do everything in their power to stop it. The ferocity of their defense would have such an impact, you know?

I REALLY like that approach.

[woundlingus]

“If Castiel were a woman destiel would have been canon” if Castiel was a woman she would have been killed off in season 4 because everyone would have screamed and pulled their hair out over how much they hate her for the crime of holding Dean’s attention and bashed for being a dumb bitch who never does anything right and a waste of screen time like every other woman, destiel never would have been a concept to start if Castiel had been a woman

[phrysic]

something’s got to give.

[acecroft]

Dean Winchester in SUPERNATURAL 6.06 'You Can't Handle the Truth'

[transprodigalson]

pics of sam tht make me go "yeah i want to top him"

[autisticandroids]

FAMINE: That's one deep, dark nothing you've got there, Dean.

[youtube with closed captions]

dean and his father. dean and his family. dean and how bad it is.

(via @closetoyou1970)

[quietwingsinthesky]

it’s one thing to go ‘i don’t want to engage with supernatural’s themes of incest because they make me uncomfortable and/or are triggering’ but its a whole other thing to claim ‘there’s no incest in supernatural and anyone who says there is is a freak, no one should ever talk about it and should instead talk about the wholesome parts of supernatural.’ like. my guy. Mary Winchester kissed her father’s corpse on the mouth. I think maybe this isn’t the show for you.

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

Joan of Arc + Sam Winchester: PURITY/TRANSCENDENCE

John Everett Millais, Joan of Arc, The Maid of Orleans | 2.13 (trans.), "Houses of the Holy" | Luc Besson, Joan of Arc (1999) | 5.14, "My Bloody Valentine" | 8.23 (trans.) "Sacrifice" | Pascal Laugier, Martyrs (2008) |

[fukoronoko]

Black Sheep or Sacrificial Lamb

[supernaturalsidepiece]

SUPERNATURAL 2005 - 2020. (More)

[shallowseeker]

Searchin' for a rainbow + Cas's death + forbidden love

If you want to enjoy the rainbow, be prepared to endure the storm.

In season 12, Cas dies on a doomed beach. (It's Washaway Beach, where the effects of the world are claiming an entire town.) In season 15, Cas dies in a dungeon while on the run from Death and God.

In so many ways, the story grinds to a halt when Cas leaves, and so begins the spiral of narrative death, from Dean to Sam & Jack. (Later seasons are so Dean-and-Cas-driven that it's maddening.)

///

The rainbow, the valley, and the mountain

The rainbow is the illusory happiness, visible in the distance but impossible to reach. (It never quite seems to reach the horizon, the meeting point of Heaven and Earth.)

Cas is Heaven. Dean is Earth. All the characters are struggling to live, to find that ephemeral "rainbow" of happiness and peace.

Heaven is associated to high places, like mountains. And Earth, like Dean's namesake, is the fertile low valley.

///

Cas is an angel on high

When Cas goes down into the valley, he changes. As he nears Dean/Earth/bunker/human family, he becomes weak with sentiment.

Much of Cas's storyline veers between the push-pull between modes of strength and weakness. Cas struggles to find the balance between the tyrant, the king, or the weakling.

Cas yearns to be more emotional, like a human. He is paradoxically seeking strength in a low place, within human weakness.

When goes to higher places, he grows colder. In season 6, Cas reaches towards becoming God. As he flies higher, he becomes stronger but more vindictive, authority-driven, and capricious. (This same thing happens to Dean in season 14-15, when he goes "up" to Moriah.)

CAS: "Brave little ants...you were once my favorite pets."

As God, Cas fails spectacularly and is torn down, like a false idol. From this point on, Cas tries to integrate humanity and emotionality with his angelic nature. The slow acceptance of his own angelic emotions is shown in season 12's Lily Sunder has Some Regrets. This integration becomes a source of strength.

DEAN: "What Ishim said... You're not weak, Cas. You know that, right?"

Cas is learning the meaning of humanity. "My power is made perfect in weakness." His growing emotional courage helps him face his fear. He uses the resilience of his own emotions as an antidote to terror.

(Thanks to seasons 7-11, he goes through these existential crises trials way sooner than seasons 14 & 15- Dean does, and for this, Cas is resilient as fuck. Bullets symbolically bounce off his heart in 15x06 Golden Time.)

Cas almost resolves his narrative tension of destiny versus faith in the future. Cas has come down to earth.

CAS (to Jack): “We love you, not because you fit into some grand design, but because you’re you.”

///

Dean is the low valley, where family and humanity dwell

Dean is “just a man.”

He's weak and afraid, and he thinks that if he were "perfect," and that if the rules of morality were black-and-white, then he wouldn't be so afraid or tormented all the damn time.

Dean yearns to be more unfeeling, like an angel. This yearning is clearly expressed in Heaven and Hell and all of "Purgatory-as-pure" storyline.

DEAN: “How's that possible? You guys are powerful and perfect. You don't doubt yourselves or God or anything.”

And with Purgatory, despite his rebellious nature and denial of destiny, Dean yearns for clear-cut rules and 24-hr, 360-degree total warfare. It's simpler. Suicidal, even. Post-AU Michael possession, Mary dies, and then Jack symbolically "dies." Dean crumbles. He seeks the authority and steely unfeelingness of God's work, and Dean goes up on the metaphorical mountain, "Moriah."

In doing so, he comes closer to Heaven and risks aligning with its rigid cruelty. He becomes colder, too.

Lucifer in 12x21, freed and on a mountain. It's an angelic motif.

In Moriah, doing what God says is the act of worship and loyalty that Chuck craves. Not only is Dean going to kill Jack for him, but he's going to use his own soul to do it, killing himself in the process, for Chuck's entertainment.

That's real devotion, right? Kinda like how Lucifer entices his followers to kill themselves for him in season 11's Rock Never Dies.

Dean's cowardice in the face of his fear leads to a loss of direction--a full-on existential crisis not unlike when Cas lost his way in season 6. In season 6, Cas he sought to punish Heaven, and devolved into his season 7 nihilism.

In season 15, Dean goes on a similar journey and buckles under the weight of his own powerlessness and fatalism.

////

The horizon, the happiness, the rainbow 🌈

But what of happiness?

The horizon is where Heaven and Earth meet. This horizon represents the future—the impossible goal of our main characters.

The merging of Heaven and Earth = horizon = "happiness" = "paradise" = Jack Kline

///

But in Supernatural, you're not allowed to choose your own paradise--only God's. You “should” want to be "next to God."

You shouldn’t want other Gods. You shouldn’t even want to stand next to each other. You should just want God. Chuck.

///

Jewish tradition placed paradise on Templemount (Mt. Moriah) or later along the Jordan valley, be it in Jericho or Bet Shean (in Greek Skytopolis).

These are two paradises: the valley is the garden associated to "plenty," and the mountain is associated with "worship” and doing (angelic) duties for God. Both are idealized, but kept separate from one another.

Dean's two most impactful prayers take place near a horizon and in the Wilderness (metaphysical abandonment by God). In the image above, it's no accident that the tan car and the family umbrella seating are seen touching the horizon, where the merging of Heaven + Earth (happiness) should take place.

For "humanity/the valley", in order to appreciate its capacity to nurture and nourish, there need to be important people dwelling within it.

A valley without people is just a Big Empty.

///

Going lower

Fleeing to the dungeon + divine punishment

In the end, Dean and Cas try their best to protect "their people," but they are chased by Death. They flee from Death's library into the main part of the bunker.

Dean spins in a panic, "Oh, Cas, what do we do?"

///

A bunker is, symbolically, a safe place/military fortification, a fallout shelter. In Supernatural, it was the place the illegal family of Heaven-and-Earth dwelled; it was perhaps the safest place they could find (from God + from the viewers that demanded story and sacrifice).

///

Death pushes them further still, past the library and past the rooms, down into a literal dungeon.

CAS: "I've got you."

You know. Cas has him. (He doesn't even know how much of Dean he has, not really.)

Cas hauls them down into the dungeon and shuts the door, using his smarts and blood to keep Dean's heart safe. It's like a demented Passover, painting blood on a doorframe to keep Death away from a firstborn.

Unlike Chuck, Cas wants to protect Dean's heart and cherish it, not possess it.

(Note:// The soundscape of Death's booming thuds on the door call to mind the Hellhounds Sam was holding off in 15x13 Destiny's Child.)

///

Cas: dragged to "super Hell?"

Jokingly, a lot of people refer to this scene as Cas being sent to "super!Hell" for his feelings, and although there was some pushback on that being an oversimplification, it's visually and narratively true (see images below).

The viewers are fluent in the imagery of the scene, and the imagery is absolutely communicating divine trap and torture and punishment.

Dean and Cas tried to love each other here, in a Fringe state, a Hell below the blessings of public society/normal life. But even this was forbidden by God.

And so, the cosmic ocean/flood came for Cas.

The dungeon in the valley, which lies on the opposite side of the “field full of folk” from the castle on the hill, symbolizes Hell. Importantly, this Hell exists because they're being chased out of Paradise; they're driven from their home and happiness.

With respect to Jack Kline, Cas is literally suffering an Enochian fate. As Father figure to a Nephilim, Cas is being pulled into an eternal Abyss for the sake of trying to live in a (self-cultivated, Godless) Garden of Earth.

For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment 2 Peter (NASB) And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day...since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire. Jude 6-7 (NASB)

///

There's no sanitizing the fact that Cas IS being killed for loving a human. And the looming visuals work to bold and underline this.

One, they're in a literal dungeon, and two, Dean is "caught" in a Devil's snare. Dean is symbolically trapped in the black torture-chair.

He laments that he's led them into "another" trap, continuing season 15's theme of Dean's existential crisis. (Stupid, worthless, ineffective soldier.) It also echoes his lack of faith in his own judgment, his not-being-able-to-rely-on-his-gut anymore. For Dean, this is devastating.

///

Then there's this shot: Two handcuffs + The waiting Abyss:

The Abyss appears between two handcuffs. Literal torture. Cosmic enslavement.

//

Cas roughly throws Dean out of the Devil's trap, but in the final scene, we see that Dean's still imprisoned.

There's a bloody handprint on his left shoulder, the mark of humanity. It's the revelation that his heart was always on his sleeve, and it was tied to Cas this entire time.

But his feet are STILL in the trap, and there's still a handcuff looming on his right. His leftside "the symbolic emotional heart" is now saved, but he's still shackled to the narrative on his right.

Dean's alone. Cas took his place in the chair, and now it's just empty and lonely here. Dean's heart is out in the open now, just as Cas's is. That's the real Truth hidden inside the Despair.

It's right there, on his sleeve, but oh--it's bleeding.

///

In the final episode, after Dean dies, it seems to leave only Sam (and metaphorically, Jack-as-God)...in this strange, dreamlike, post-flood world.

But no amount of wallpaper or nostalgia goggles can cover up that the narrative has become about much more than Sam Winchester.

Sam is now like Noah in The Bible (sans boat). He represents a fresh start with a brand new, pure, “normal” family.

Dean and his family had to go.

[shallowstories]

I think Eileen would get weird about losing Sam

Like, she's a "tough old" gal, per the script. She's died once. She's been to Hell and back. She's been puppeted and manipulated and she's doubted her feelings. Sam's marked by Gods. He's trouble. He's in trouble.

But Sam is her lockscreen.

Sometimes, that scares her.

Maybe even makes her angry.

[smaeemo]

I hate that every man Im attracted to in TV is a middle aged white man, and that every comfort character is an awkward probably autistic queer coded freak

[angel-hole]

SUPTOBER DAY 01 - liminal in the beginning

4 And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the colour of amber, out of the midst of the fire.

5 Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance;

— Ezekiel 1:4—5