Supernatural is about everything and nothing all at once.
EDIT:
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EDIT #2:
Alright, my adhd is getting out of control and I'm cluttering more than usual. So, here's the side blog about danmei/mxtx/yaoi. jasmine-in-the-danmei-zone.
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You know, I could be wrong but....I think the fandom doesn't have the time to talk about how John's violating experience of being possessed by Azazel and almost being made to kill his sons and so on...well, it does affect his decision uk. In the very next episode or whatever, he's selling his soul coz Dean is dying and Sam's clearly doomed etc etc.
(I'm a certified John hater ofc but there's smth about how Azazel uses like a gross incestual abuse thing as a weapon uk. Idk how to say it but it's there and it's super horrifying. Visually, it can feel like it's saying something about John, but in reality, it's saying a lot about Azazel and how dark the demons can get.
//I do think Dean's reactions says a lot about Dean and John, ofc. But that's different).
And in general, there's genuine horror elements to John's experience, esp pre-Mary's death. His reproductive autonomy, his consent even in terms of what Mary hid from him, Mary's crunchy choice to have two kids with him without telling anything etc etc. Idk I think if we can be sexy and reasonable, it's an interesting layer fr.
Ukwim?
(as usual, no pressure to answer this hehe <33)
Oh, yes very good. John has a lot of reproductive horror tied up with his character before Azazel ever rapes him gets his hands on him.
Putting a lot of this under the cut, because it probably deserves a trigger warning for once. I MIGHT edit this later, but internet is shitty and I JUST had my mojo and I'm feeling reckless.
Azazel is the literal embodiment of WAR, right down to the biblical meaning of it. Azazel taught humans to make weapons and war. That was one of his explicitly named crimes.
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SCAPEGOATS AND INCEST
Yes, there's the Gothic scapegoat reading of Azazel centered on incest anxiety, and honestly, if that's someone's thing you like, fine. But for me, it's become boring and predictable. Using incest as a shortcut to signal profundity through taboo isn't difficult or uncommon; it's one of the oldest tricks in the book.
Likewise, I'm not especially persuaded by the "secret self" reading of Azazel's possession of John... the idea that what was done to him merely reveals what he "really" was all along. That strikes me as a very US of A imperialistic logic: you are the thing that was done to you. The violation disappears, and the victim becomes identified with the invading force.
i.e.: "You ARE the thing that was done TO you."
It's an old habit. Just look at 1930s poverty tourism in the eastern and southern US of A (rich people and eugenics galore): pamphlets full of fascination, disgust, exoticization, and fantasies about degeneration, purity, and bloodlines. But OFC, the white self-made man was a capitalist fantasy, too! But communities that didn't fit that ideal like big families, dense social ties, mutual dependence... became easy targets for suspicion. Not to mention they kinda wanted to exploit these very people... espe in coal-mining regions.
the most base part tho is: "Look at those strange people out in the woods. Surely something dark is happening over there." It was less documentation than voyeurism, a chance to gawk at and, frankly, jack off to an imagined degeneracy from a safe distance. That's also how the cousin-fucking narrative merged with the older aristocratic Gothic tradition: different targets, same fantasies about bloodlines, corruption, and decline.
Which is partly why I find Samuel Campbell so interesting. He sits at a round table, distrusts hunters and recruitment models barging into his home, wants the civilian in the room to know the truth, occupies a distinctly maternal role in his family structure, and doesn't ACTUALLY force Mary into hunting.
Azazel, meanwhile, seems to thrive on casting suspicion on exactly those kinds of bonds. He wants to dominate exactly these kinds of people because they are HUGE BARRIERS to recruiting people for war, for work, for exploitation.
That's why it's fascinating to read Samuel C's season 6 self as reactive to that wound. Was Azazel his "super secret shadow self," or did Azazel simply rape him and use his body to do all the things that oppose Samuel C's values (and coincidentally, things that titillate Azazel: power, spectacular domination of the other).
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With John, it's a little different... and more personal. John doesn't remember being murdered OFC. But maybe there's a fear he can't name, a sense that something is wrong just beyond the edge of his awareness.
Then Azazel murders his wife, completely blindsiding him, and in a sense narratively frames John for the death. Not literally OFC but the story is the culprit (as tje Bloody Mary episode meta-textually plays with every whodunit in the playbook BUT THEN shines the mirror on the audience in the end).
The question isn't whether Azazel is John's scapegoat or dark double. It's whether John becomes Azazel's scapegoat. The story's scapegoat. Same for Chuck re: Lucifer. Sure he did bad things, but ALL of them?
That's what makes the "secret self" reading feel backwards to me. especially with USA army... tendencies.
Azazel invades John's life, destroys it, exploits his fears, and then leaves John carrying the consequences. John gets burdened with the paranoia, the grief, the violence, the instability, and eventually the suspicion that perhaps he was the problem all along. That risks reproducing Azazel's own logic: the invader disappears, and the invaded person becomes responsible for the damage.
In that sense, Azazel doesn't just possess people. He recruits them, uses them, and leaves them holding the bag.
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There's an irony here, too with Azazel's whole army-talk and recruitment dialogue.
John is a traumatized soldier who watched his wife die in a way that made very little sense, and a lot of that trauma ends up doing Azazel's work for him. John's fear is one of Azazel's greatest tools. Hypervigilance, isolation, suspicion, survival training... all of it keeps John SUPER paranoid and on the run, which I'd argue is part of the strategy. If John's distance from his children produces parentification, trauma, grief, militarization, and isolation are more than enough, which might be the truer picture of the Plight of Western American nuclear families. If you squint, even the desolate isolation of suburbia. A family cut off from wider support networks will often place adult burdens on children, or too much specialized labor on wife / husband dynamics, for that matter!
That's tragic, but it's not the same thing Azazel is doing. In that sense, he's not so different from the poverty tourists of the 30s. He projects fantasies onto people whose real struggles are much simpler and more material. All the talk of corruption and hidden darkness distracts from what he actually wants: to break people apart, isolate them, and get their labor.
Which brings us to our next topic: imperialism, and notorious war crimes.
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WAR CRIMES
And not to bring an incredibly dark reading to my blog, but I keep thinking about a postwar confessional hotline in Japan where former soldiers were invited to speak about their experiences. There was guilt, of course, but what struck me was that some callers weren't confessing so much as reminiscing. It shocked the hotliners just how often and how much some of them missed it. They missed the power, the violence, the bonding with other men, and the sense of absolute control. The atrocities weren't merely things they had done; for some of them, they were memories they CHERISHED. "A man's paradise," one said of the raping.
I do circle back to the particularly devastating tactic across conflicts which is sexual violence aimed at families, not merely to harm individuals, but to demonstrate absolute power over an entire social unit. It was a favored war crime to force family members to rape each other, and delight if there was any whiff of arousal. (Funny! To! Them!)
One especially devastating technique was to rape the dad with weapons or otherwise, because it SHOWED the family how unsafe they were. Their protector was ineffective; Not Even Big Strong Daddy can't save you. That's true psychological terror. And sadistic soldiers thought it was funny. It was a bonding experience between them more than anything sexual.
With all this in mind, I think it maps onto Azazel's sadism quite well. The fingerprint kill veers from efficient (neck breaking) to torture (gut wound) to spectacle (bit booms and fire). He is WAR itself, and it's simply more interesting to me personally because of how shaped we are my this imperialism and exploitation. Azazel is a specific heart of imperialism, war, etc, and he's the scapegoat for the audience because he's generating the story and doing the violence to its characters who are getting "drafted" into the narrative by US, the voyeurs.
If you like possession as a secret self reading, I suppose that's fine. I like it too sometimes, I just get... less mileage out of it, that's all. Given how the USA works and how it exploits, I get more out of classism and recruitment and possession as invasion. There's just something about demonstrating that the victim's body, mind, and relationships are no longer entirely their own. And considering how we actually FIND John after Azazel possesses him, one can also read Azazel's taking of him as The Rape of John Winchester:
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What interests me is how often stories try to turn that violation into revelation. Chuck does something similar when he tells Lucifer that the Mark merely revealed what was already there. "You always cast a jaundiced eye."
The logic is familiar: the thing done to you becomes your true nature. The violation becomes evidence.
I.E. -> "You ARE the thing that was DONE to you. You secretly enjoyed it, especially if there's arousal, and it shows the shadow side of you," reads as more a reading from the oppressor/ imperialist side for me.
Pinned to the wall like a bug, not unlike the narratively echoing Campbell gut-kill that Ms. Monica Holt almost succumbed to
but instead of
EDIT: I probably should proof this before I put it in this wild, buuuuuuut. I'm not.
EDIT 2: I realized I didn't talk nearly enough about MARY. I make jokes about Mary having John barefoot and pregnant, but there are definitely overtones of that with how her specific trauma manifests. She's afraid of hunting, and she's afraid of the danger of hunting, and she's afraid of WHAT SHE LIKES ABOUT HUNTING.
I think it's interesting too that her instinct was TO TELL HIM THE TRUTH WHEN HE PROPOSED. "John, wait. There's things you don't know about me..." -> I think this speaks to her being on the cusp of revealing the truth. But then! Then! She loses her parents, she becomes, "little orphan Annie," and her supports are obliterated, making her RIPE for Azazel's recruitment, and he... makes recruitment sound not so bad, something she can handle. Which drags her truth understand and put a stake in the dirt of her lies. AND because she's so afraid to tell, she's robbing John of proper consent when it comes to starting a family with her!
DEAN: Kind of makes you wish he knew the truth, huh? I mean, all those years thinking his old man ditched when the poor son of a bitch really came here and saved our bacon. Freaking time-travel, man.
SAM: You think it would have made a difference?
DEAN: What?
SAM: Dad. If he'd had his own father around.
DEAN: What, in how he raised us? Sammy, he did the best he could.
SAM: I know that. I – I do. They all did.
Dean has absolutely been thinking the same thing Sam's saying out loud this entire episode, is the thing. Sam's played nice with Henry, but Dean wouldn't even shake his hand, because Henry was the guy who abandoned their dad.
DEAN: I'm just saying before we break out the warm and toasties, let's not forget that, uh, H.G. Wells over there left Dad high and dry when he was a kid.
SAM: But maybe he didn't run out on Dad – I mean, not on purpose. Maybe he time-traveled here and, I don't know, got stuck.
DEAN: Yeah, well, either way, Dad hated the son of a bitch.
SAM: And Dad made up for that how? By being father of the year?
Initially, I thought Sam's response was odd, because the fact that John neglected them doesn't excuse Henry abandoning John. But Sam's clocking here that Dean sees Henry's abandonment of John as a catalyst for John abandoning them, and Sam is actually saying John's behavior was all on John, and if anything, he should have known better than the average person how damaging it is to abandon your children and been more present. Dean then reacts to that by insisting, "Dad had his issues, okay, but he was always there for us." But we know that isn't true based on everything Dean himself has said in the past and everything we have seen as viewers. Dean criticizing his father is well-documented. (I also have specific tags for Sam's relationship with john and Dean's relationship with John where I expound on all of this at length/Sam and Dean's feelings about John and changes in those feelings throughout the seasons). Saying John "did the best he could"/"did his best" is actually a repeated Sam line (1.08, 2.03, 5.13, 14.13). This is the first (and if iirc only) time in the series that Dean is the one to use this phrasing (don't believe me? search here!)
All of that to say... there is no reality in which Dean's grudge against Henry throughout the episode was not at least partly driven by the belief that generational trauma has screwed their family to hell and Henry abandoning John was part of what lead John to leave his children alone in motels for days at a time when they were very very young, and ghost them for the sake of The Mission. This is also why Dean yells at Henry specifically for putting his mission over his child (the same way John put revenge over them until 2.01).
The thing is that Sam and Dean are both getting older, and they're emotionally further from their issues with their dad, and they're reevaluating what they experienced as kids as a complex web. Dean starts the episode with his anger focused on Henry as a first domino, while Sam (in an interesting twist if you know what his comments about John have largely been like since season 2) denies him the excuse. But they both soften. Dean starts out feeling more conciliatory toward John and softens on Henry, while Sam starts out feeling more conciliatory toward Henry and softens on John. At the end of the episode, they are both left contemplating Henry and John and the Winchesters and Campbells in general for generations as victims of a complex web of heavenly machinations.
DEAN: Listen, I understand that this is not your idea of a happy ending, okay, and that – that you're disappointed that me and Sam are mouth-breathing hunters. But you know what? We stopped the Apocalypse.
HENRY: If this works the way I planned, there will never be an Apocalypse to stop.
Am I the only one who is thinking about the fact that, in 5x03, Dean grabs his ringing phone and goes "Damn it, Cas. I need to sleep!" before Sam proceeds to say he's the one calling him?
How often Cas called him in the middle of the night, about trivial matters (right in the middle of the Apocalypse no less), for Dean to react like that?
Something about how the Alpha Shapeshifter transformed into Samuel C's body to do the BIG SCARY FIGHTING, into Sam W. to break down a door, but into Dean to cradle the baby and do some rescue-caretaking.
Perhaps even to soothe who the baby had already bonded with?
And he didn't kill Dean. He could've like he snapped Mark.
Which has always been interesting to me.
EDIT: Why DID it spare Dean? Even Sam? Anyone got ideas?
Do you have anything about Mary taking Lucifer into Apocalypse world mirroring Sam taking Lucifer and Micheal into the cage?
(also i love love love your metas)
No, I don't, but now that you mention in, that's an excellent parallel. I think I've gotten stuck comparing it more to Mary's Purgatory where she gains (a bit like Cas) some mental clarity about her choices.
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But very nice, 5x22 Swan Song; it rhymes a bit with 12x23 All Along the Watchtower. Sam drives Lucifer and then pulls Adam, and Michael in. And Mary drives Lucifer too, but Lucifer pulls Mary in.
Sam drives Lucifer into Hell and prepares the takes the dive
Michael desperately tries to stop him (in the script explicitly stated as such also that he didn't want Lucifer to die, after all)
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Compared to 12x23: Mary drives Lucifer into the rift, and Lucifer pulls her in.
So she's also a bit of a Michael-Adam figure here! Getting pulled into something during the big face-off!
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re: Purgatory. I'm sure I've prattled on about Apocalypse World as 24-7/360-degree Unthinking War. It's both good and bad for Mary, because although she heals (she sees that the world is a terrible place, and her deal/choices sit alongside exploitation and violence that is not unique to her)... she also is tragically comfortable in a world where "the enemy is obvious," her skills are valuable, and she doesn't have to do a lot of gray thinking about the regular world.
(((Or living for herself, or striving for her own happiness, or putting her own family in danger etc etc etc. It's a "happy place" only somuch as she can't make the wrong call so easily out here. Monsters are monsters, and they're generally obvious, transformed and rendered with horns and teeth and shadows... or in enemy fatigues. That's why, like Purgatory, the colors of Apocalypse World are washed out. It's a more black-and-white world. A simpler world.)))
She winds up wanting to stay because she is a hero OFC and cares about the people desperately, but it's also... easier than wanting to go home. 24-7 survival and good-vs-evil is something of a relief to her because she's screwed up so much. It's "pure," in the Poughkeepsie sense.
Lucifer ALSO feels at home here, actually. We saw that he felt useful in the Amara fight, and we see that having a bigger and badder enemy heals him here, too.
War machines feel better when they're rendered more explicit underdogs, perhaps?
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As for other meta!
I do have this one about the twinning of Mary and Dean being assaulted! And the twinning of Lucifer and Sam with the back stabbings:
(CW: Vague allusions to sexual assault)
Mary is thrust into a new word without protection with only a rogue archangel at her side. Jack emer
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And how Apocalypse World Mary cage is explicitly mirrored to Dean's entrapment in Hell, when he sacrificed himself for his family's behalf (like Mary did):
At the beginning of the ep, after the events of Tombstone + Jody's police sketch and worrying evidence that Jack killed someone again...
...
Apocalypse World is a bit weird, because Mary comes back calmer. Jack, at least, has terrible nightmares and lasting damage.
Likewise, when Sam returns from Hell, it's soulless and hurt. Dean out of Hell OFC is in an agony that leaves him vulnerable to angelic propaganda and sexual trauma that has him wanting to retreat into safe family bonds of old (that crucially, no longer exist). And ofc, Purgatory is exceptionally rough on Dean and Cas, damaging them both. Dean in an overcorrecting, rigid code "at least he's more loyal to the cause than ever" kind of way, and Cas, beaten down and feeling like he can't even control his own suicide without Heaven dragging him back for work.
Something about how the Alpha Shapeshifter transformed into Samuel C's body to do the BIG SCARY FIGHTING, into Sam W. to break down a door, but into Dean to cradle the baby and do some rescue-caretaking.
Perhaps even to soothe who the baby had already bonded with?
And he didn't kill Dean. He could've like he snapped Mark.
Which has always been interesting to me.
EDIT: Why DID it spare Dean? Even Sam? Anyone got ideas?
