#thnak u for sending this i have a fuckn blast talking about s10

[louisdotmp3]

O carver era scholar, what are your thoughts on the ending of the mark of cain arc? (I just finished season 10, and know that you are the go-to person for mark of cain stuff)

my brand! love that

sooo i've gone back and reread my old spn s10 posts and stewed on it a little. i love s10 but there's a lot of messiness and a lot of that messiness comes in the last few episodes, i think. like when sam starts scheming and plotting meanwhile dean by all accounts is like, hangin in there. they could've done a better job at painting dean getting noticeably & worryingly worse in an it's-an-emergency way i think, as it is sam just Decides one episode he has to stop googling mark of cain and start scheming. in general i wish sam had been doing morally questionable stuff all season to really get into monstrosity via loss of identity vs monstrosity via scrabbling for control but that's a different post.

with the thematic stuff surrounding moc i see it as dean's worsening depression brought on from the shattering of his identity in s9 (represented by his death, following sam confronting him about ezekiel and struggling w the moc & monstrousness the first time around - losing the two pillars of his identity: brother and hunter. this is a reading v informed by the concept of ontological security).

anyway this is all setup for me saying that i absolutely think ending the season with dean killing death was the right call, thematically. he's at his lowest point thus far and the whole season the show has been saying you were always going to be a monster, you are fated to struggle this much. he asks cas to kill him. he fantasizes to benny (himself) in werther project about killing himself. death literally whispering in his ear to make this one last self-destructive move.  do the thing that you could never come back from.  kill your brother (your son) and that will break you forever.  the boy on his knees in front of you is your whole identity.  kill it and you will be free, death says.  kill it and i will end your suffering, death says. and in the end, instead he kills death.

which i guess bring us around to the curse itself, which is literally destroy others or destroy yourself. the number one most fascinating thing any character says about the moc is rowena, when she says within moments of hearing about it: "the mark? it's just a curse. the first curse. but still, it can be removed." the idea that this suffering is nothing new, that it's just a curse, something solvable. she says that in the same episode they do hijinks in heaven with bobby, and i just think that says something about the mark and what it is that the mark means. they hadn't been able to make any headway on the mark at all for a season and a half until an episode with 2 parent figures getting involved.

from this post. it's very much calling to the fact that if sam and dean weren't so isolated from community & family (something that was highlighted in carver era w henry winchester, the now defunct mol and empty bunker, charlie leaving for oz, etc) they would actually be better off and things wouldn't feel like the end of the world all the time because they'd know people who had been through it before !

so i do like that in order to break the curse rowena has to kill the boy she seems to have considered a son - directly contrasting with dean who chooses not to do this when presented with the same choice. but i think any sort of thematic resonance that could be gained from that is sort of overtaken by both the mad dog spell and the crowley drama & ofc the darkness. i haven't rewatched the finale in a while but overall it has a weird tone (starting w the whore of babylon ??) and the ending half is a little clunky. but! there is so much to pull out i think which is par for the course w carver era in my opinion. as always i am watching the little shadow puppets on the cave wall and not the puppets themselves.