I know you got thoughts on Tessa!
Oh boy, do I. Reapers in general are my jam, just because as a concept they exist outside the needs and agendas of all the other species on the show. they don't provide answers or comfort or judgement, or anything other than the certainty of passing on. they don't work for angels or demons or leviathans, and if death dies the next reaper to die becomes death, which strikes me as so random and so anti-heirarchical, and so fitting of creatures whose mission statement is 'what lives, dies.'
BUT you asked about tessa, not reapers in general, so here goes: tessa comes across as so no-nonsense, but she's also the only reaper we ever see play a role and pretend to be someone else to guide a spirit to move on. part of that is just the conceit of the episode, i think, but tessa puts so much time and effort into getting dean to cross over, and while she never comforts him, she also never gets frustrated or offers him an ultimatum. we see this again in s4 with cole--she's canonically terrifying to him, but she tells him the truth, doesn't sugarcoat things, and cole is unhappy to move on but he does it anyway because he knows it's the right thing to do. but then when dean says something about a better place, tessa directly tells him not to lie to himself. it’s so interesting that her first appearance she uses necessary trickery, but she also never really lies beyond that, and refuses to let dean comfort himself with lies. and her appearance in s6--she's just so good at her job, and so invested in the balance of the universe, and i feel like she and billie could have been good friends, or whatever value of friend reapers have.
i feel like i have to address s9 tessa, even though everything about how they changed reaper lore in s8 and 9 pisses me off, because it doesn't make sense for reapers to be able to possess people, or to die like angels die, and the 'angelification' of reapers by definition consigns them to a 'side' and turns death into this entity with an agenda as opposed to this neutral force that comes to everyone. BUT anyway, it's so interesting that tessa ferries souls to hell and purgatory and yet it's the souls in the veil that get to her, and i don't think it's their suffering (because the souls in hell are suffering) so much as it's the pain of an off-balance universe, of souls not being where they're supposed to be.
