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#which just completely neglects the moral complexity and ambiguity that is presented by characters who *need* to have apologists
acediscowlng · 3 years
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me to my friend: i am not a jgy apologist!!!
my friend: .....
me: *looks at my ao3 fics*
me: ..... i may be a jgy apologist
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ryanmeft · 5 years
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Us Movie Review
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Every year brings many horror films that provide the basics, and very few that rise above them. Get Out was widely praised as one of the latter; I disagreed, one of my more contentious opinions on movies. To my great satisfaction, the issues I saw in Jordan Peele’s first directorial effort are almost entirely absent in his second feature. If it just avoided doing things wrong, though, it wouldn’t be as good as it is. Whereas Get Out was content to insert some heavy-handed social commentary into a traditional formula and call it revolutionary, Us truly brings fresh ideas to the genre.
Much as Get Out was essentially a horror twist on Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, Us brings another outside plot to the genre, this one from superheroes: the heroic team who meets their evil doubles. We start in 1986, in a visually stunning sequence: young Adelaide (newcomer Madison Curry) is neglected by her dysfunctional parents (it is notable that we never see their faces for long) at an amusement park at Santa Cruz, so she wanders off. As a storm rolls in on the beach she makes her way to an abandoned hall of mirrors, complete with a scary pop-up owl and a fake-out for an exit. There, she encounters a well-worn horror trope: her reflection behaves differently than she does.
The movie cuts to the present day, and adult Adelaide (Lupita Nyong’o), who has returned with her family to their vacation house near the same beach (note that the family appears reasonably well-off, though not rich, a rarity for horror films; just last year, the entirety of the last Purge movie took place in a stereotypical “hood”). Her husband Gabe (Winston Duke) is a lovable oaf, brave and protective but not in a “grunt grunt, man tough” way. He’s assigned the job of doing some of the dumb things horror movie plots require to function, but because his character has already been presented as both loving and slightly dim, we mostly overlook these lapses of judgement. It helps that they do not occur with anything like the frequency they typically do. Daughter Zora (Shahadi Wright Joseph) is on the verge of true teenagedom---she doesn’t want to hang out with the vapid twin teens (Cali and Noelle Sheldon) belonging to her parents’ sniping and materialistic friends (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), but she’s also getting a bit too old for her younger brother Jason (Evan Alex).
Peele spends enough time on family dynamics---the pranks played by the siblings on each other, a hopeful lovemaking session between parents thwarted by pesky feelings, the singular joy of your kids not getting an old song that is just the greatest thing ever---that by the time we get to the scares, these people are well-established for the genre; in another twist on what is usual, it is the white characters who are bare outlines thrown in just to have someone to kill off. The Wilson family, on the other hand, are strange and complex people by the time their copycats show up on the front walk. They appear in red jumpsuits, holding hands, are unresponsive to Gabe’s commands, and quickly launch an invasion of the home. Once they have the family at their mercy, Adelaide’s double---named Red in the credits, though like most of the doppleganger names I can’t recall this ever being mentioned in the film itself---proceeds to tell a macabre tale I won’t reveal here. She then initiates a game, which is where the superhero comparison comes in. The doubles have come prepared, with a strategy to exploit the weaknesses and personalities of their prey; much of the rest of the film is a game of cat and mouse as each tries to outwit and overcome the other. The body language of these beings, which is meant to mirror and exaggerate the worst traits of their heroic doubles, is incredibly unnerving; physicality is too often overlooked in modern horror, though the template of the genre, The Exorcist, excelled in it.
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There’s no attempt on the part of Peele to disguise the fact these things are some sort of dark copies of the heroes; it is explicitly revealed in the trailers and in the film’s title. It is a rather masterful bit of slight of hand on his part. We think the duplicate angle is the point of the film, but at the very beginning there is some seemingly unrelated text about there being vast lengths of disused tunnel underneath the United States; I held this in my mind through the first act, but such is the tension of the second that by the time it becomes important to the story, I had nearly forgotten it. Those tunnels turn out to produce an apocalypse, and end up providing a thrilling third act that grants us a great, unexpected mercy: something different for horror. I don’t dare discuss it in detail, for in it Peele’s script and direction, Nyong’o’s stunning ability to act convincingly while playing dual roles that are both fighting each other, and the incredible camerawork of Mike Gioulakis come together in a way that, by itself, may cause me to go see the movie twice in theatres, a rarity. Suffice it to say the dopplegangers are flesh and blood, and that the resolution does not feel like cheating. The final twist could be seen coming a mile away, but it is at least well-earned, and notably more morally ambiguous than how it is usually used.
The visionary elements of Get Out whose visionary-ness I questioned were mostly concerned with the supposedly deep subtext of the film. Some saw endless layers of meaning concerning the place of African Americans in our society; I personally thought the “slavery is still a thing, guys” point was incredibly obvious. Us eschews direct 1-to-1 metaphors in favor of a few different possible interpretations, all of which could be true at once. To a history buff like myself, the idea of our doom coming from underground places we’ve forgotten of course recalls the old adage about those who fail to learn from the past. Masks are employed to suggest the ways we hide ourselves, while an excess of rabbits seem to represent a cycle of life, suggesting the film’s antagonists devour other life the same way they feel they themselves have been devoured. I could discuss this all for some time, but the reason the movie works is because, whereas taking Get Out’s metaphors away would leave the film toothless, this one is excellent even if you completely overlook them. It functions as a film first, and doesn’t need to sermonize on society to grip and terrify us. That it does that, and does it effectively, is evidence of Peele’s creative evolution.
Verdict: Must-See
Note: I don’t use stars, but here are my possible verdicts.
Must-See
Highly Recommended
Recommended
Average
Not Recommended
Avoid like the Plague
 You can follow Ryan's reviews on Facebook here:
https://www.facebook.com/ryanmeftmovies/
 Or his tweets here:
https://twitter.com/RyanmEft
All images are property of the people what own the movie.
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linkspooky · 7 years
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The Cult of the King
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This passage right here in Tokyo Ghoul 101: The Toys always struck me as odd. I assumed from his past interactions Take had a more complex motivation than this. Perhaps it was all the foreshadowing that Take might die by Arima’s hand with a blade to the neck, perhaps it was in the past the character had been shown standing up for the sake of Irimi after being shown that she defended an old woman that his commander had ruthlessly tried to cut down as long as it meant Irimi would fall too.
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He’s shown questioning the CCG’s attitude of always killing ghouls on the spot because apparently that is what will be safer for humans, when he’s presented with a superior officer who was literally willing to kill an innocent human as long as it meant a more quick and efficient kill for a ghoul.
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However with all the buildup of his character, apparently when all is said and done his motivation just boils down to “I want Arima to say I did a good.” The manga deliberately sets up Take as his own character, somebody who has their own personal agency and is not just a side npc, or a satellite which reolves around Arima. However, when it comes time for Take to state his own motivation this is all he can say.
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What exactly is the point of a revolution, if the only reason you’re participating is because you’re following the orders of somebody else?
Then again, this kind of self depreciating issue seems to occur in a lot of what is identified as Arima’s closest inner circle. There are two characters heavily connected to him, who seem almost completely hung up on the idea of Arima giving them praise. Not because he is continually nice to them, but there was some point in the past he acknowledged them when no one else would.
I am of course talking about both Hairu and Ui. 
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[Vice- Squad Leader] Ihei Hairu (20) First Class Investigator (Batch 74) Sunlit Garden* Birthday: September 29 Female Blood type: B Size: 160cm/58kg Quinque: Aus (Rinkaku; Rate S+),  T-human (Ukaku; Rate S+) Honors: Single White Wing Award, Golden Osmanthus Award Hobby: Combat training, doodling, taking to herself, observing Arima-san What she wants right now: Arima-san’s IXA [x]
Hairu’s main motivation seems to be just getting Arima’s simple praise. To which Fura says that Arima does not praise anyone. We learn why this motivation was so powerful later, because to the Garden Children Arima was their hope. It seems that garden children are so emotionally starved that all Arima had to do was acknowledge her in the past, to earn Hairu’s full devotion.
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Even to those who weren’t completely emotionally starved like Garden children though, are shown having a fixation with Arima. Ui Koori for isntance, most likely wanted to be praised the same way that Hairu did. When asked why he has such a grudge against Sasaki, he flashes back to Arima’s preferential treatment of him. 
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When he thinks Sasaki is trying to upstage him, he immeidately sees pictures Arima instead.
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Arima and getting praised by Arima, is a really strong motivator for Ui as well and besides being rich and possibly lonely from what we know of him he comes from a pretty standard household. 
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He’s even referred to as the “Arima Devotees”. 
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It seems like an effect that Arima brings out in others, either their jealousy, or their devoting their entire beings to themselves.
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Of course, it’s up to Ui, Hairu and Take to evaluate their own actions and their own hangups and projected expectations they push onto other people, but it seems part of the situation was worsened by Arima’s own insistence on his passivitiy. His self loathing that led to him seeing himself unable to contribute anything good while he lived and continued to live as a killer. While I understand the motive behind it, I feel like Arima’s choosing not to put out. (That is not to say something as simple as “Good Job” to Ui and Hairu when it would have meant the absolute world to them) is a choice. One deliberated by him, and one where the result is people around him continually working, devoting themselves wholeheartedly, even worshipping him to give him praise that he is just never going to give.
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Arima is empty, so it’s easy for others to just project whatever they wanted onto him. While it’s true that to an extent people projecting onto him made Arima lonelier, even more of an outcast, I believe it was Arima himself who chose not to try to fill himself with anything substantive, to do anything with himself besides sit on the throne of king.
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In chapter 73: Flower we’re shown a transition between Torso mirroring Mutsuki’s abusive father, and a pan down to Arima and Kaneki. Kaneki’s issue the entire chapter with Arima has been exactly this, no matter what he tries he cannot get Arima in any way to explain himself, or even emote. He’s left confused and unable to communicate in Arima whatsoever.
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Is this perhaps a foil? Something to suggest that there is something wrong on Arima’s part? That perhaps his total passivity isn’t just damaging to him, but to the others around him?
Just think about it for a moment, if Arima had been a little bit more honest with Ui, where would Ui be right now? Perhaps on Kaneki’s side fighting for the true justice he valued, instead of believing that everybody who had ever loved him would betray him or die.
If Arima had told the garden children it was okay to live their own lives outside of fighting and he would still be proud for them, would Hairu have walked so easily into her own death believing Arima would praise her if she just simply managed to exterminate the Tsukiyama ghouls even better than she had done previously.
Where exactly does the line of fault fall, is it Hairu and Ui’s for putting so much expectations onto Arima, or Arima for cultivating them and making use of them and never being physically capable of giving out praise the thing they needed the most, but still associating with them anyway. Arima was after all the previous one eyed king, even if all he did was sit on the throne as a symbol for Eto to use, he still used the zero squad at his disposal to purposefully slaughter ghouls and create a terrifying image of himself to be a villain to slaughter in the end. He needed their strength and loyalty, Hairu, Ui’s, to complete his own objective and also kept them in the dark about what they were fighting for. Doesn’t that strike of manipulation at least a little bit? 
Notice that the people behind Eto in this art all at least have masks on (she’s an author, she likes to know about the characters in her story), while all those behind Arima are completely faceless. 
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Of course the point that Arima is morally ambiguous is probably not a new shock to anybody. The reason I bring this up now, is because I see a similiar kind of trait seeming to arise in people who are now surrounding themselves and devoting themselves to Kaneki.
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Arima is not just a father figure to Kaneki, or a foil, he’s somebody who lived a tragic and sad life because of flaws he has in similiar in Kaneki, he’s a bad future, somebody who Kaneki should be scared of growing up into. Arima besides being able to pass on the torch to Kaneki, besides sparing a few Garden Children wasn’t able to accomplish much with his life, he succumbed to his own despair and died far away from the people who cared about him. Ui, Fura, Take and the rest of the garden children weren’t able to reach him to mourn him in time. He only had Sasaki in the end, because to Arima Sasaki was the only person he gave anything to at all. 
The point is that Kaneki should tread lightly about the way people have been treating him in the comic lately. Regardless of him bieng a leader to an organization, even before the formation of Goat he had people dedicate a weird amount of time and effort to him.
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Re: was created especially for him. Touka says as long as he comes back home, it’ll be alright.
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I’m not saying that Touka is devoting the entirety of her existence to Kaneki, but the question is what exactly does Kaneki have to contribute here? If all he has to do is show up and not push Touka away.
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Even the way they hold each other after sex looks pretty explicitly like Kaneki being comforted by Touka. This is after she cheekily implied that she considered having sex with him as a way of stopping him from dying. 
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This isn’t to imply that I find Touka and Kaneki’s relationship abusive whatsoever, just as it exists right now it seems a bit too much “give” on Touka’s side. The same thing I see happening with Hinami, who as we remember Kaneki neglected and emotionally starved in a jail cell for more than six months.
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Even after all that loyalty she showed him which was met with complete neglect on Kaneki’s end, when she finally stands up for herself she only does so out of concern for Kaneki.
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Kaneki never so much as offers an apology to her, but the time we see her caught up again she’s gone back to as always, simply repressing her own emotions and trying to make Kaneki happy.
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There’s also the example of Tsukiyama, I’ll keep this brief because I’ve been harping on it a lot, but this is a character who fell into a three year coma because of Kaneki, who Kaneki led an entire extermination against his household. Yet the first time they meet again afterwards, he says Kaneki is already forgiven without having to apologize, and then goes back to being his most loyal servant. Even when he disagrees with the way Kaneki is running his strategy, his complaints are rejected with a reminder of his loyalty.
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This is not to mention the way Mutsuki, and Saiko basically worship Kaneki and are willing to forgive him for every transgression and cutting him out of their lives without word or warning if he simply just comes back to the CCG.
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We know that these urges exist in Kaneki. To be loved by everyone. That he only really is invested in fighting for the people he personally cares about, the ones who are five feet in front of him.
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That what he cares about, what he fights for, what his ultimate bottom line is, is receiving love from the people that he too happens to care about. It just seems that just like Arima, Kaneki has cultivated a sort of emotional dependency of all these people on him, to the point where they’re willing to do almost anything just to keep him around. 
it’s important to remember that Kaneki despite having an abandonment complex is a serial abandonner, Hide, Touka, Hinami (twice), Banjou, Tsukiyama, The Q’s, and never once is he called out for abandoning others without a word, or warning. All of these people just want so desperately to have him back. For Arima it was praise, for Kaneki it was merely to stick around. We find people working themselves in circles to earn something from him. Forgetting that relationships aren’t about what’s earned, what’s deserved, and are give and take rather than all give. 
What Kaneki needs to learn is that other people have motivations and feelings outside of his own. It’s so strange to see a character whose basiaclly pure empathy unwilling to grasp this, but that’s what makes for a unique character conflict. 
Of course now literally being worshipped as king by starving people who have no choice but to depend upon him is meant to aggravate this problem rather than help it. 
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Furuta is an active king, who bids people to worship him and promises that in return for their worship he will literally grant the impossible to them, for Ui as long as he worships Furuta he can revive the dead. This is an active manipulation on his part.
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Kaneki, the black repaer is pictured on the same page that talks about worshipping the reaper because he is the only god available to them. Is Kaneki too, the foil to Furuta, manipulative in a way? Passively demanding and thriving off of the worship of others?
Either way I think to truly motivate people to fight, Kaneki will eventually have to fight for one on one connection. Rather than be worshipped, he has to be able to process and form attachments to people that are both take and give. That are fighting alongside, rather than protecting. 
Perhaps the most important decision Ken Kaneki makes for his arc is not one where he accepts and sits on the throne of King, but rather one where he destroys it. 
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drinkthehalo · 7 years
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Supernatural Season 12 - the Mary Winchester storyline
Of all the ridiculous things… I’ve fallen down the Supernatural rabbit hole.
Supernatural is the last fandom I’d have expected to sneak up on me. I stopped watching years ago and had been wishing that someone would put it out of its misery.
But then a few weeks ago, my friend mentioned that Sam and Dean’s mother was on the show as a regular character.  It piqued my curiosity.  A story that’s actually about the Winchester family, not the internal politics of Heaven or whatever random boring nonsense that caused me to stop watching?
So long story short - I was just in Shanghai (for the third time!) and when I wasn’t running around a dark hotel or drinking at a bar, I was waking up at 5am, jetlagged and half drunk, mainlining SPN. (Watching it in bed on my phone! Ha.)
To my complete shock, seasons 11 and 12 are GREAT. It's like the show took stock of everything it was doing wrong, remembered what had once made it awesome, and set about methodically fixing it.
If you are someone who also gave up on the show - watch 11x04 “Baby.” It made me laugh, made me cry, made me literally want to hug my television. It was such a gift to the audience, and a promise to do better. Proof that the show can still be absolutely wonderful when it puts in the effort.
Also, Dean Winchester. He’s one of the best fictional characters I’ve ever seen; he's so fucked up and he's also the most lovable thing ever. His combination of strength, fragility, competence, darkness, sweetness, silliness… His heroism and idealism and fatalism and self-abnegation… His joie de vivre, suicidal impulses, bitterness, weariness, ridiculousness and awkwardness… His badassery and heroism and codependence and tragedy.
Such a complex beautiful mess. Narratively, he is the gift that keeps on giving, the reason the show has lasted twelve years - you can just keep throwing stories at him and you get the most fascinating results.
I will be writing more about SPN. Sorry if you’re just here for the immersive theatre posts!
Here are my thoughts on the Mary Winchester storyline, which I LOVED -
It’s a complex, messy, fascinating story, where nobody is completely right and nobody is completely wrong, and you can sympathize with every character. It brings the show right back to the core of what made it good and interesting.
The three key things I loved about it:
I was pleasantly surprised at how it subverted my expectations
Mary herself was relatable, interesting, complex, and her choices raised intriguing ethical questions
Mary’s presence provided an opportunity to dive into the psychology and issues of Dean (especially) and Sam in a way we haven’t seen before
As soon as I heard that Mary was back, I was simultaneously afraid of the ways it could go wrong, and deeply intrigued by the possibilities it raised.
The most interesting thing the show had going on in its early days was the complexity of the boys’ relationship with their father. The success of Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s career was a tragedy for Supernatural - once he was gone it just never had the same emotional intensity, though they did interesting things with flashbacks and time travel and pseudo-father figures.
But Mary - Mary has that same intense emotional resonance. She was the first character we saw in the Pilot, Dean’s deepest wish (in arguably the best episode of the show, 2x20) and Dean’s Heaven (5x16), the key to Dean’s character.
"I know [my mother] wanted me to be brave. I think about that every day. And I do my best to be brave." - Dean from 1x03 - what an amazing through-line to a story still unfolding twelve years later!
But… Supernatural doesn’t have a great track record with female characters. The original sin of the show - the reason I’ve always been a bit ambivalent about loving it so much - is how it portrays women as symbols that matter only in relation to men. The Pilot is egregious. Mary and Jess, in their ridiculous frilly white nightgowns, dying as motivation for the men to embark on their quests. In Supernatural, men have journeys. Men are subjects, with destinies, and “work to do.”  Men are multi-dimensional characters. Women are objects (in the early seasons - it’s gotten way better recently). We barely know Mary and Jess as characters, and don’t need to. Their deaths are not even about them; they’re about what they do to Sam and Dean.
Usually when Mary reappears in the show, it’s as a symbol, the embodiment of the ideal of motherhood. The love, safety, and care that Dean longs for. (Sam, interestingly, does not long for Mary the same way, both because he doesn’t remember her and because he had Dean as his mother figure. I have always adored that parallel, that Dean is like Mary and Sam is like John, which so subverts our expectations of how they present their gender roles, tough guy Dean and sensitive Sam.)
So my fear of season twelve was that we’d still see Mary a symbol. And THANK GOD they were smart enough to completely subvert that expectation, and make the story ABOUT the fact that Mary is an individual human being, not an ideal personification of motherhood.
When we meet this version of Mary, her whole world has been taken from her. Her husband is dead, her small children are lost to her. Her friends are thirty years older, or dead. I love how the show handles Mary’s reaction to the ubiquity of smartphones. It’s not a joke about moms being bad at technology. It’s profoundly disconcerting. It’s sad and strange, especially for a person so smart and competent to suddenly be in a world where she lacks foundational knowledge - it’s almost like everyone else speaks another language.  She doesn’t fit.
So she tries to find her way. She’s a fully-realized person, just as conflicted and complex as Sam and Dean, with her own goals, flaws, fears, vulnerabilities. (And THANK GOD she’s tough, not in need of her childrens’ protection.) 
I imagine myself in her position - with these two well-meaning, overwhelming adult children tracking her every move - and I completely understand her need to break away and carve a space for herself. The pressure and weight of their expectation, on top of everything else she’s going through, would be overwhelming.
As with the best writing in Supernatural, Mary makes choices that are not entirely wrong and not entirely right. Her embrace of the British Men of Letters is driven by guilt that her deal with Azazel destroyed her childrens’ lives, and her own need create a purpose for her life in this strange new world, and a sincere belief that it really will make the world a better place. It’s the same kind of complex psychological motivations that would drive Sam or Dean. (I have a whole other post brewing about that storyline, and about the unique and brilliant way that Supernatural’s handles moral ambiguity.)
Mary’s reaction to her adult children was so unexpected, but so right. One of those character-deepening twists that make perfect sense in retrospect.
Mary struggles with Dean, and connects more with Sam. This is what I mean about Supernatural being great at subverting expectations - because we’ve spent the entire series knowing that Dean is the one most shaped by Mary - the one who remembers her, who dreams of her, who longs for her, who can’t even say her name without flinching. And Sam is the one who doesn’t remember her - who tells Dean in the Pilot “If it weren't for pictures I wouldn't even know what Mom looks like.”
But it makes perfect sense. Sam, without the weight of a lifetime of expectations, treats Mary as an individual and tries to understand her needs. Dean struggles to see beyond what Mary means to him, and what he needs from her. Dean’s love is overwhelming, and suffocating.
There’s this great line in season twelve - I can’t remember where, but it’s when Sam and Dean are talking about the British Men of Letters, not quite agreeing or disagreeing, and Sam says something like “I know you think [whatever]” and Dean interrupts and says “WE think.” (Sorry, I need to rewatch and dig up the quote.) It’s borderline abusive, and it must be exhausting for Sam, to live with someone so overbearing that you’re not even allowed to have a different opinion.
The whole season deals with Dean’s abandonment complex - going right back to the heart of the Pilot, “I can’t do this alone.” Dean is so afraid of being abandoned that he clutches his loved ones way too closely.  We understand and sympathize because we know where it came from -  the death of his mother at four, the neglect from his father, twelve seasons of everyone he loves dying - but that doesn’t mean he would be easy to live with.
The line that kept running through my head when watching Dean this season is from Marilyn Manson - “When all of your wishes are granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed.”
Mary’s return is an incredible opportunity for character exploration and character growth for Dean. In many ways Dean is emotionally stuck at the age of four, unable to move on from the loss of his mother. He’s finally forced to recognize that his perceptions from that time were a tiny sliver of the truth, a four year old’s limited view.  Maybe these dreams need to be destroyed. You can’t live your entire adult life longing for the cocoon you were in when you were four. (Or, I mean you can, you’d be Dean Winchester, but it’s not healthy.)
Dean needed his mother’s love AS A FOUR YEAR OLD, and it’s devastating that it was ripped away from him, but for his own sanity he needs to move on. I love that Mary flat out tells him that he’s not a child anymore. He needs to hear it.
The other side of the story is Dean’s perspective, which is incredibly sympathetic. Supernatural does a brilliant job telling a complex story where no one is entirely right or wrong. Dean tries so hard. He knows he’s weird and socially awkward. He doesn’t want to scare Mary away. He wants so desperately for their relationship to work. The scenes of him angsting over what to text her are some of my favorite moments ever in the show. It’s so surreal and yet so truthful.
And I have to admit - as much as I loved Mary NOT functioning as stereotypical mother figure - I also LOVED when she finally found out how tragic the boys’ childhood was. It was completely cathartic for me as an audience member. Those boys went through more than any child should have to bear. Dean is so scarred by it, and he’s this amazing person so full of love and compassion and this beautiful vibrant light that has been twisted by these awful experiences he’s been through, and the audience has been watching him suffer for twelve years, longing for the equivalent of his mom to give him a hug.  (Just look at the bazillions of hurt/comfort fanfics.) The emotional payoff of that validation finally happening from his actual mother is enormous. Intense, and it would be indulgent if it wasn’t so EARNED.
I love that in their big conversation at the end of the season, Dean phrases it as all about what SAM went through.  Of course the entire audience is watching that scene going BUT DEAN. It’s Dean that Mary saves. It’s actually all about him, but he’d never say it.  Brilliant writing.
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