Surreal Sunday is was made for experiencing phantasmagorical things such as this animated short entitled flow/er created by designers Alexa Sirbu and Lukas Vojir. Watch as seas of particles swirl and collide to form dark, showy flowers that then burst into lush fractal formations.
“In nature, it is often the simplest rules that lead to forming the most complex, beautiful forms. flow/er is a visual poem that observes this through a design lens, combining our fascination with organic, raw aesthetic with foreign geometric forms. We observe natural laws take shape in a strange dance of meticulous choreography clashing with violent forces of nature.”
A long, long time ago (season 2?), in a meta community far, far away (LJ), we had an explosion of speculation about flowers.
Flowers unfold. As buds, their inner parts are hidden, secret, until they come to their full bloom and reach their peak of potential. Supernatural uses many, many visual motifs to reinforce its narrative. Flowers are one of them.
I would argue that flowers are used as a visual motifs to hint at secrets, that there are things yet to be revealed.
They were first introduced subtly in Home. First on the wallpaper of Sari’s room, where it was later revealed that Mary had been residing in the closet.
In Home, we learned that Mary’s death was even more complicated than we had known before. But that just introduced more of a mystery. Why had she hung around after her death? Why did she tell Sam that she was sorry?
~*~
Once we reached What Is and What Shall Never Be, roses were found everywhere in the Winchester family home. Mary is the only family member still living there.
Everywhere Mary went, pink and red flowers followed.
~*~
Their last appearance associated with Mary was in In The Beginning.
All the pink and red flowers around Mary disappeared once it was revealed just how she came to be linked to the mytharc through the Yellow-Eyed Demon. ( After that, she started showing up in blue with white flowers or white with blue flowers. White=death, blue=sacrifice.)
When we first meet Ava here in Hunted, she seemed one thing, but then she disappeared without a trace. Where she had gone and why were a mystery. When we met her again, she was something else entirely.
Once the narrative started focusing on the mystery of Azazel’s children, yellow flowers showed up around Sam. Note the bedspread in The Kids Are All Right. It’s yellow damask. Damask is a fabric weave which is strongly associated with roses.
They appeared in front of Dean at his first visit to a crossroads in Crossroad Blues.
There they hinted that something was yet to be revealed regarding the fate that would bring Dean directly into the mytharc associated with Sam and the YED’s children.
Now, here we have Season 11 and a nice intro to Amara/The Darkness that involves, you guessed it, more flowers.
Yellow (yellow=supernatural) and purple flowers (purple = perspective/POV/The Story that became the story), no less. And yes, she’s a supernatural being that definitely has a different perspective, a different angle on the story of creation than has been told so far.
The association between The Darkness and flowers didn’t end there, either. Here she is as the infant Amara.
I thought that once we learned who The Darkness was, the association with flowers would end. And it has…. but, we’re still seeing young girls/infants associated with pink, blue and white flowers. (Zoe in Just My Imagination, baby Eileen in Into the Mystic, Kat in Safe House)
The feminine, the vulnerable, threatened by the supernatural, who survive and cope/fight/thrive in their own way.
And now we have Jim Michaels teasing lots of red (danger/demons), yellow (supernatural), orange (temptation/perhaps we stared into the abyss too long), and blue (sacrifice) flowers for the season finale. All very interesting.