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#yuri made the mistake of mentioning how its weird people yell out when they have sex sometimes
one-girly-geek · 5 years
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My ultimate 14x20 thoughts post
Well, it’s finally time for me to type out my mess of feelings regarding the episode- and by extension, Dabb era as a whole.  As a whole, feelings will not be positive. You have been warned...
If anything, this finale made me more certain that it’s time for the show to end (before Dabb runs it into the ground completely).
I realized once and for all how dissatisfying later seasons have been for me just before this episode aired.  I was looking back at previous season finales and thought ‘when was the last time we had a season finale that was actually about our main characters?’ And I realized that there hadn’t really been one since, S11. An argument could be made that it hasn’t been since S10. 90% of the S12-14 finales have been about Jack...
Some small positives-
-The first half was fun.  It is nice to see that truth-spells don’t have the same effect that they used to- early seasons, the boys would have been yelling nasty, ugly things at each other, but now it’s just affectionate teasing+ the revelation that Dean reads mommy lifestyle blogs.  Everyone else was going nuts, but they’re so in sync with each other now, nothing really phased them. One thing the newer seasons have done well is to show that maturity between them.
-I was bracing myself for a big brofight, and was really grateful that that didn’t happen.  I was glad that what really pushed Sam to not be okay with killing Jack was the knowledge that Dean would have to die too.  It hurts, but he can go on without Jack. But not without Dean.
-Chuck was right, I liked the old Death better too.
-The last few seconds were an epic cliffhanger. I would have no qualms with if it wasn’t for what happened in the previous 20 minutes.
The rest- this is gonna be long. And probably incoherent. 
Disclaimer- I personally am religious, but I firmly believe I would have hated the ‘twist’ regardless.  I don’t and never have watched this show for theological accuracy.  Fiction=/reality. Now in no particular order-
-Why is everyone acting like it’s some revelation that Chuck knew what was going on and didn’t do anything?  They’ve known that since they knew Chuck existed. They had a whole conversation in S11 about it, they knew he was aware of everything that went on on Earth and usually didn’t interfere. So why is it some shocking reveal now that he...knew everything that was going on and didn’t do anything?
-Free will.  Are they trying to tell me that Chuck was, in fact, interfering all along and nobody had any free will? If so, way to just kill the biggest overarching theme in the show. We’ve already had the big storyline of the main characters saying screw destiny, and how making their own choices is the most important thing.  It’s arguably the most consistent theme over all these seasons.  And now Dabb &Co is basically spitting on it and saying it never mattered anyway? I know a lot of the current writers don’ care about previous seasons, but how do you screw that up?
-Scream at me all you like about how I’m just ‘buying into Chuck’s manipulation’ and ‘all the foreshadowing was there.’ because this was a retcon, plain and simple. Coincidence is not foreshadowing.  The Chuck originally created by Kripke was not like this, nor was he intended to be.  Carver had his issues, but the Chuck he worked with wasn’t like this either.  This a complete 180. 
The Chuck at the end of Swan Song, who said that free will and choice were the most important things in the world, wasn’t originally written to be a lying manipulator who would start an apocalypse because people...used their free will and choose family. Changing the entire original intent of that scene is a retcon.  The beautiful scene at the end of Don’t Call Me Shurly was not written to be ‘only putting on a cute guitar routine and playing us because manipulation.’ Forcing the viewer to look back at it now and assume that is a retcon. Chuck telling the angels to love and protect humanity (and he himself locking up the leviathans to protect the angels) but now saying he never really cared, is a retcon.
-This whole thing just retroactively taints so much that I loved, particularly S5 and S11. This about sums it up for me.
Not to mention, this definitely ruins the Sam/Dean/John Lucifer/Micheal/God parallels that were you know, kind of important in S4-5.  Now I am definitely not a fan of John by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s clear he was supposed to parallel Chuck/God as a largely absent father who made many mistakes, but ultimately did love and care for his children.  That’s out the window now.  
A good foreshadowing is when you look back and say ‘Oh! That made sense before, but now I have a deeper understanding then I did then’ The example I’m most fond of is the E10 reveal in Yuri!! on Ice. It’s not that everything didn’t make sense before the revelation that Viktor knew Yuri first and had been in love with him all along, but it deepened our understanding of him.  It fixed a few little things we wondered about, like why Viktor acted as forward as he did when first coming to Japan, but it didn’t fundamentally change who any of these characters were as people. You looked back at everything and were like ‘wow, that makes total sense‘ It was a well-planned, well executed bit of writing. It deepened our understanding of the characters, it didn’t change them completely and expect us to believe they were really that way all along.
-The amount of Lucifer/Micheal/Amara were right! posts I’m seeing around are frankly sickening.  Lucifer made his own decisions. Even if Chuck was bad all along- Lucifer loved him. He hated humanity, not Chuck.  He wanted to destroy humanity out of spite and jealousy.  Are we now saying he was right to do that?? That torturing human souls to turn them into demons, killing entire towns of people to raise Death, everything he did to Sam, everything he did to Kelly, how much he admitted he enjoys crushing teenagers skulls (and that’s just the tip of the iceberg)- all of that is okay because Chuck was bad?  Lucifer loved Chuck. He hated humanity. Whether or not he was right about Chuck’s motivations (and honestly, did he really care? so long as Chuck apologized to HIM, nothing else really mattered) doesn’t mean he was right about anything else. Ditto for Micheal.
Amara- she is a bit more complicated.  It could be argued that due to her nature, and how she’s been locked up for eons, she doesn’t have much of a sense of right and wrong the way other beings do. But just because you don’t know something is wrong, doesn’t mean it isn’t wrong. I’ve seriously seen people saying that ‘Amara did nothing wrong and Chuck only locked her up because SEXISM’ *headdesk*  Amara destroyed entire worlds before the current one.She wasn’t a totally innocent being, just locked up for the hell of it.  She herself admits that she did what she did out of jealousy, and that in the end she was wrong, because creation needed to exist. She didn’t actually hate Chuck, and they reconciled. (Now, I suppose they expect us to believe that the whole beautiful end of Alpha and Omega was a lie/manipulation as well? Retcon.
- Basically, this is lazy. And that’s a mark of Dabb era as a whole.  (He’s okay as a writer, but not as a showrunner).  Anything that was weird in previous seasons? We can just handwave it say ‘Chuck did it because manipulation.’  SPN has had a problem with constantly trying to escalate its villains-from demons to Lucifer to Metatron to Amara-and now to God? It’s just the laziest thing to do. Dabb was just like ‘we need the BIGGEST, WORSE villain of all for the last season! Who’s the most powerful being around? GOD!’ It’s utter LAZINESS.
-It didn’t have to be this way.  You could have done a final season as a love letter to the early show that started it all, not started another apocalypse. A lower stakes, character focused final season would have been great.  A tribute to what came before, while showing how far the characters have come since.  But no, Dabb had to be lazy and escalate everything once again, because the subtly and character driven plots seem to be beyond him. 
-I don’t know how they’re going to write themselves out of this one without massive retcons. You can’t kill Chuck or Amara and not have all of creation perish. But Dabb retcons everything whenever he wants to (see: every inconsistency regarding Jack’s soul magic/powers/morality this season), so I’m sure he’ll find some way to do that. (Which reminds me, does everyone going like ‘oh, Sam is such a badass for shooting Chuck!!’ remember the whole ‘Sun will go out and creation will die’ thing? It was tremendously stupid).
-I am so, so, so sick of Jack. I’m tired of everything and everyone revolving around him, anyone who goes against him being wrong, and everything he does being so easily forgiven. I’ve realized that most of my issues with the later seasons go right back to him. I didn’t want him dead (because of how it would affect others I do care about, not really because of him), but I wanted him gone.  Now, he is dead, but not gone at all. He’s hanging out with the Empty and Billie, which means a huge part of the plot of S15 is gonna revolve around him again. I stg if we end with Jack basically becoming God, Dabb is gonna catch these hands. Talk about being the ultimate Sue, who took over the whole show from the main characters...
-All I wanted was a lower-stakes season focused on the actual main characters and no one else...I guess that was too much to ask for.
-There’s some interesting theories going around that might make some sense of all of this, but I don’t know if I trust the currents showrunners to be smart enough to use them.
https://missjackil.tumblr.com/post/184463865432/theory-chuck-isnt-throwing-a-tantrum-at-all-he
-So that’s it. I’ll still be watching S15 because I’ve invested too much time into this show not too, and because I still care about the boys and J2,and of course I’m going to cons for the same reasons. It’s not their fault the writing is shit...
P.S You’ll not convince me that part of J2′s choice to end the show wasn’t due to the writing.  They’ve said before that they would keep going as long as the writing was good- then S13-14 happened and they’ve decided to stop. They’re far too nice/professional to ever come right out and see it, but it makes sense. I also think they realized that they couldn’t get the time off they wanted and still make a show they were happy with. We’ll see what the upcoming con circuit says, since they’ve got less reason than ever to hold back their opinions. 
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