In light of the video that was released yesterday, this seems like I’m too late coming in with it, but I noted in December watching 11×09 – last season Rowena’s wardrobe got progressively darker, darker, darker, along a nice witchy spectrum from red to purple to blue to black, and now she’s showing up in a dress that could be plausibly interpreted as white. (Looking at the picture she tweeted yesterday with Misha, I think it’s white with a substantial silver overlay and it looked beige/gold due to lighting. But that’s me.)
If she’s suddenly wearing white – I’m thinking “wedding dress”, and I’m also thinking “She brought Sam to her intended as a wedding present…”
Good catch.
The cage looks like a Gothic church. She’s brought to the altar by a male family member. And she has brought the dowry.
There are even the “candles” you find at the sides of churches.
And the ring is a square ring, but still a ring, in boxing/wrestling terms.
…but we can’t actually have the wedding until the groom is properly dressed. Sam is both the dowry and the tux, I suppose.
Does Lucifer really want to wear Sam, though? I mean, is his final objective wearing Sam? Or is Sam just the means to get to someone else, either as bait (Lucifer knows Dean and/or Cas would come for Sam – let’s not forget that Cas did it once already) or as temporary ride to get out of hell and then dump for someone else?
I think he does. Sam is still his true vessel – why would he trade a shiny new Mercedes in on a junker Pinto that might only get 10,000 more miles out of the engine before it blows up? Also, he’s got a score to settle with Sam, who cheated him out of his Apocalypse and then had the gall to get rescued when the eternity of torment he had coming for that was just getting started. And Lucifer isn’t one to let go of a grudge. (Cas and Crowley had also better duck and cover.) The best punishment for Sam now… take him, hold on to him, and make him watch as Lucifer remakes Creation to his own liking.
And he can start in on Sam before he even says yes, because of the threat of the Darkness – who, as far as Sam knows, has free rein to start sucking all the souls she wants. Lucifer can defeat the Darkness, he’d like Sam to believe… and I think he can, he’s Lucifer, the Lightbringer. But the cost… well, on top of Sam essentially needing to sacrifice himself, Lucifer would be out of the Cage and Michael would still be in it. What does Sam “We Need To Start Thinking About The Collateral Damage Again” Winchester do when faced with that choice?
Lucifer’s modus operandi has always been to find your greatest virtue and use it to make you do evil… I think even if Sam wasn’t his true vessel, he’d take Sam and hang onto him just for giggles.
Jensen said that at first he thought that Dean was sort of enamored of Amara – and so he played it that way.
Me: That’s how it seemed.
Jensen: [laughing] Oh, well good, I succeeded then!
Then he thought no, this doesn’t seem right, so he met with Jeremy Carver.
Jensen: And then I understood it more like she’s Kryptonite.
Me: Okay, that makes more sense.
Jensen: And Dean really doesn’t understand it, doesn’t know what’s happening. That’s why he’s been so secretive with Sam. In fact, in an upcoming episode… Have you seen the scene where…
Excitable non-spoilerphobic fan: Yes! We have!
Me: Not too convincing if you don’t wait for him to say WHAT scene!
Jensen: [laughing] Nice try!
Jensen: No real spoilers, but Dean does tell Sam that he might need to do something he doesn’t do very often – put Sam in the driver’s seat, because he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to perform. It’s like, I might have to sit this one out on the bench, though it goes against everything he wants to do. That’s why he’s been so secretive with Sam, because he doesn’t know how to talk about it. It’s a mystery for a while longer.
Jensen: No real spoilers, but Dean does tell Sam that he might need to do something he doesn’t do very often – put Sam in the driver’s seat, because he doesn’t know if he’ll be able to perform. It’s like, I might have to sit this one out on the bench, though it goes against everything he wants to do. That’s why he’s been so secretive with Sam, because he doesn’t know how to talk about it. It’s a mystery for a while longer.
Huh. Well that puts an interesting spin on Dean stealing Viagra, then.
Ok, seriously though, where does this idea that Sam was made to feel ‘important’ in his childhood come from. Please point me to one piece of canon evidence that says that Sam felt this, that Sam was made to feel that he had value or that his wants and thoughts and feelings were valued and important, please just one.
This is a child who thought he was dirty and unclean at a very, very young age – it didn’t just come from no-where, Sam didn’t make this up out of his head and I don’t buy that he ‘sensed’ the demon blood, this was a feeling that came from the environment in which he was raised.
And when this is then paired with so he still values himself (because someone who says “I’m the least of you” really sounds like someone who thinks they have value!) and “he takes care of himself” – like, does he? Because I’m fairly certain Sam really, really doesn’t….
Just….I’m sorry, but stuff like this makes me want to vomit…
It’s complicated and messy, I think. There’s a sense in which you could say that Sam and Dean were both made to feel important in their childhood, but in opposite and in both cases destructive ways. Dean had a job – looking after his brother – he was also a participant in the family secrets and the family mission. That is, in a warped way, a kind of importance. But not only was he given a completely inappropriate level of responsibility for a young child, he was also instrumentalized. He came to feel that he was his job, that he was “Daddy’s blunt instrument” in ways that feed into both his later self-identification as a depersonalized killer and the ways his relationship with Sam get twisted by defining Sam as his job rather than an equal and autonomous person. (ETA: and what happened with Lisa and Ben shows that this isn’t just a problem that obtains in his relationship with Sam; he extends the internalized model to familial relationships formed in adulthood.)
As for Sam, I think, again in a warped way, being the object of ‘protection’ (at this point in SPN I can’t seem to type that word without scare quotes) is a kind of importance in the family structure, but more destructive than constructive for self-worth. Sacrifice is an apt later illustration of that pattern: trying to affirm someone’s worth with “I do all these things of which you are the object” at once positions them at the center of something and denies their intrinsic value. And the sense of unclean otherness, whether it came from some perception of demon blood or from John’s suspicions about Sam’s place in the supernatural drama surrounding the family (I don’t think it makes a huge difference which it is, and it can be both; SPN is fantasy, its metaphors are literalized) also stages Sam as a central figure, but being the dangerous one or the freak (the one who in canon time becomes the one who by John’s rules might have to be put down) isn’t exactly an affirming importance.
I do think that Dean’s mediating position in the family structure was real, and that it did involve an element of being a buffer between Sam and John. The thing about that structure, though, is that Dean was also a conductor and mediator of the abusive structures of the family. THIS IS ABSOLUTELY NOT SOMETHING FOR WHICH DEAN SHOULD BE BLAMED; HE WAS A CHILD, IT WAS ABUSE OF HIM AS WELL AS OF SAM. But when he was thrust into the position of caretaker, while it did mean that Sam had someone giving him care, it also meant that the care Sam was getting was both only that which a child could provide and only that which a child whose primary model of parenting was John Winchester could provide. It’s an uncomfortable truth that child!Dean’s caretaking often echoes John’s. John abandons his kids; Dean leaves Sam alone (in the Something Wicked flashback, in the AVSC flashback, in the pattern of dropping him off at Plucky’s). Dean was a participant in gaslighting Sam about the truth of his life. (Again, not something for which Dean, a child, is ethically accountable, but it’s still a part of Sam’s formative experience.) Kid!Dean gets angry and physical with kid!Sam when Sam mentions Mary in the AVSC flashback. And there’s a lot of evidence (Bugs, for example) that Dean backed up rather than challenging John’s behavior to Sam. The ways in which Dean has become more and more John-like in many ways in his dealings with Sam in canon time are deeply rooted in their childhood patterns.
I would say that Sam developed some impulses of healthy self-care, though he also has rifts of catastrophic lack of self-worth and self-destruction. Being positioned as the outsider from whom secrets were kept within the family undermined him in a lot of ways (and it’s significant that his story both within and beyond the family often echoes the motif of having his sense of reality radically compromised), but it did also give him a kind of perspective and an impulse to question and investigate that stood him in good stead in striking out from the family pattern in healthy ways, though undertows within and without are always pulling him back. But I wouldn’t say that makes him lucky. People can get certain strengths from traumatic experience (Dean as well as Sam; Dean would never have survived purgatory without that ability to form small, cohesive us-against-the-world bondings that is very much related to the John Winchester model of family), but trauma is still a fundamentally destructive thing.
Yes! I agree, wholeheartedly. And long ago I agreed in many, many, many words. 😛
Has anyone poured in a ton of thought to the ongoing reverse Cain prophecy dealio? It’s still working backwards in chronological order for Dean’s life vs his except I think we’ve kind of run out of backwards prophecy happening with the opposite effect at this point? (it was firmly established that Cain was Half Right about it all as in the order existed but the end result of the action was “reverse” to what he did as well – since Cain killed Abel to save him from Lucifer, Dean spared Sam and he… did the thing)
Or is there a speculation for how this would work carrying on in reverse effect from the point of subversion that just happened?? Like, following on backwards from Cain’s story??? I’m just wondering if anyone’s put any energy into exploring this since I haven’t even tried thinking it through yet and that’s a lot of threads to gather together and I can hold maybe 2 potato in my thoughts right now…
I was just kind of thinking about that, because now we’ve zipped on past “I killed my brother” to “My brother was talking to Lucifer, not God” and does this end with the gates of Eden being opened back up, and if you take it back far enough the undoing of Creation? that’s a little trippy.
Ah! Yes! Because I’ve been wondering about Amara vs Creation. She seemed kind of… content with the actual making of the world and it was just the metaphysics of souls and Heaven and God’s interaction with it that she’s currently got umbrage with. But she also seems to be veering dangerously close to someone who could and would unravel the whole thing out of spite to God? Like, I am concerned she’d want to unravel it and she definitely has the means to.
If we’re working backwards though from Cain and Abel that does mean we’re working backwards through the book of Genesis right? It’s all in that one book? (look who never had to study the Bible for anything ever and knows it mostly by hearsay :P)
@larinah I (assume) was talking about how the darkness and light were at the start of the Bible? I can’t remember or figure out how to find those posts on my blog right now. 😛 But I am pretty sure there was something about the light being split from the darkness and if the speculation that Amara and God need to smush back together into one cosmic entity to settle this dispute is worth anything, that will literally be running through to the start??
I don’t know why you would assume it was me talking about the bible. I hardly ever talk about the bible. (*Pretends that she didn’t used to teach Sunday School and lead a Bible Study group for years before becoming an atheist*)
But, yeah, I was. 😛
I was also a couple of years ago talking about Metatron pushing a big ‘restart’ button up there along with all his cosmic levers, because I’d bet money that was his original storyline before everything got accordioned out. And then I was thinking that that was the story that perhaps got moved over to THE DARKNESS as the show keeps getting renewed. I was thinking of it as Metatron making the big wheel in the sky spin around again for a do-over with him as the creator, but it’s interesting to think of it as THE DARKNESS spinning the wheel around in reverse for an undo instead.
She did say something about God thinking he could create better than she could, so she must have had some designs way back in the beginning herself.
Hmmm, so then does that mean that Mary and John are going to have to undress as Mary spits out an apple. Mary is reduced to a rib, which leaps into John’s chest. He unnames all the animals and when done, lays down to dissolve into the mud?
(Which would be surprisingly fitting for all of this!)
And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can
see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now
moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close
as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. “What is
the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.
“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.
“Certainly,” said man.
“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God.
And He went away.
——
God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!” “See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.” And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God. Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor! Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night. I will go to heaven now. I can hardly wait… To find out for certain what my wampeter was… And who was in my karass… And all the good things our karass did for you. Amen.
“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God. “Certainly,” said man. “Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And He went away.
Excellent! I love it. I need to read more Vonnegut. I’m ashamed I haven’t so far in my life.
Hmmm. Making me think, here. Amara’s certainly all about the bliss of submission and abnegation of the self. I wonder if the fact that humans giving the world meaning and free will only being possible if God goes away is the lesson that she needs to learn. Not a new lesson in SPN.
Has anyone poured in a ton of thought to the ongoing reverse Cain prophecy dealio? It’s still working backwards in chronological order for Dean’s life vs his except I think we’ve kind of run out of backwards prophecy happening with the opposite effect at this point? (it was firmly established that Cain was Half Right about it all as in the order existed but the end result of the action was “reverse” to what he did as well – since Cain killed Abel to save him from Lucifer, Dean spared Sam and he… did the thing)
Or is there a speculation for how this would work carrying on in reverse effect from the point of subversion that just happened?? Like, following on backwards from Cain’s story??? I’m just wondering if anyone’s put any energy into exploring this since I haven’t even tried thinking it through yet and that’s a lot of threads to gather together and I can hold maybe 2 potato in my thoughts right now…
I was just kind of thinking about that, because now we’ve zipped on past “I killed my brother” to “My brother was talking to Lucifer, not God” and does this end with the gates of Eden being opened back up, and if you take it back far enough the undoing of Creation? that’s a little trippy.
Ah! Yes! Because I’ve been wondering about Amara vs Creation. She seemed kind of… content with the actual making of the world and it was just the metaphysics of souls and Heaven and God’s interaction with it that she’s currently got umbrage with. But she also seems to be veering dangerously close to someone who could and would unravel the whole thing out of spite to God? Like, I am concerned she’d want to unravel it and she definitely has the means to.
If we’re working backwards though from Cain and Abel that does mean we’re working backwards through the book of Genesis right? It’s all in that one book? (look who never had to study the Bible for anything ever and knows it mostly by hearsay :P)
@larinah I (assume) was talking about how the darkness and light were at the start of the Bible? I can’t remember or figure out how to find those posts on my blog right now. 😛 But I am pretty sure there was something about the light being split from the darkness and if the speculation that Amara and God need to smush back together into one cosmic entity to settle this dispute is worth anything, that will literally be running through to the start??
I don’t know why you would assume it was me talking about the bible. I hardly ever talk about the bible. (*Pretends that she didn’t used to teach Sunday School and lead a Bible Study group for years before becoming an atheist*)
But, yeah, I was. 😛
I was also a couple of years ago talking about Metatron pushing a big ‘restart’ button up there along with all his cosmic levers, because I’d bet money that was his original storyline before everything got accordioned out. And then I was thinking that that was the story that perhaps got moved over to THE DARKNESS as the show keeps getting renewed. I was thinking of it as Metatron making the big wheel in the sky spin around again for a do-over with him as the creator, but it’s interesting to think of it as THE DARKNESS spinning the wheel around in reverse for an undo instead.
She did say something about God thinking he could create better than she could, so she must have had some designs way back in the beginning herself.
Hmmm, so then does that mean that Mary and John are going to have to undress as Mary spits out an apple. Mary is reduced to a rib, which leaps into John’s chest. He unnames all the animals and when done, lays down to dissolve into the mud?
I’ve seen lots of speculation about the state of Dean’s soul. What does the bond with The Darkness mean who’s in the driver seat of his destiny. Like Castiel and the Attack Dog curse, he is a “puppet” under someone else’s control? I have to wonder if no soul among the members of Team Free Will is untouched.
We saw this:
and then this:
Souls escaping from a cage, huh? We’re definitely being teased with something. There’s the definitely the threat of Lucifer and Michael escaping from the imprisonment.
But I had to ask myself, when was the last time we saw snarky Sam, without a filter?
Was it here?
When was the last time we saw Sam indulge in a one-night stand?
Numbers were exchanged, or at least the attempt was made.
So, whose chain is being yanked, and who is doing the yanking?
Like, he’s considered a sin-eater while she’s a soul-eater. He took on the burden of sin for those who believe it, and she seems to be taking on some of the burden of having a soul (even though some people like Len consider that to be a bad thing while others like Sydney thought it was good). Part of the burden of having a soul is the burden of sin…so maybe in a very twisted way these cousins are doing the same thing through opposite actions?
I guess it depends on what’s happening to the souls Amara eats. Do they disappear upon ‘digestion’ or is there still something of them left? Are they going somewhere like when reapers usher the souls of the dead on to Heaven/Hell/The Veil, or are they completely broken down and gone forever?
Idk if anybody’s read my meta on Metatron as a symbol of Jeremy Carver/the changing authorship of Supernatural but I have new thoughts tied to that.
Ever notice how whenever Metatron is alone with someone, he tends to deliver this epic Breaking Speeches to the characters, almost like he’s trying to break them apart just to watch what will happen? He’s actually really cruel in that respect, pushing boundaries and pissing everyone off; Hannah and Dean, as some lesser examples, but especially Cas.
The strangest part is, there’s always an element of truth in what he says. You get more dialogue-based insight into a character when Metatron is telling them why they suck than at any other point in the narrative. He’s rude and abrasive and infuriating, but he not only gives us the best view into the protagonists’ minds, but he also asks some of the Driving Questions of the story (are you an angel or a human? comes to mind) and is such an obvious source of exposition that he can spill on pretty much anything the main characters need him to, from the Mark of Cain to the Darkness. He’s functionally the author of the text interacting with the characters to push the plot in the directions necessary to get the story where it’s going.
Metatron is symbolically the writers of the show, pulling the strings (see all other meta analysis on references to puppeteering/puppetry in the show, especially as representing soullessness/demonness because now it’s a meta reference to the inanimate nature of the characters and how flimsy that inanimateness is) to get what he wants out of the other characters. He’s the ultimate Magnificent Bastard because he is unscrupulous and willing to use anyone in any possible way to get what he wants. However, in Our Little World, the manipulator is unable to manipulate Cas anymore. He’s degraded, devalued, and has little to no control over the events. At best, he’s still the Knowledge Broker, but his skills aren’t very valuable to the protags anymore and his only value is to spill the dirt on the backstory (i.e., decide things like “Amara is God’s Sister” and “The river ends at the source”).
This is a surprising metaphor to encounter at this point in the game, but maybe not; the whole Charlie fiasco was seen by the fans as the writers shoehorning senseless death into the narrative for contrived reasons as opposed to developing the plot organically, despite the writers claiming that “we go where the story takes us.” Maybe Metatron’s newfound destitution and background role is supposed to be indicative of a new approach in the writers’ room; one where they look at the characters and what they would do first, and demand the events of the plot second.
Hearseeno 