@grey2510 made the mistake of tagging me with a vague request for thoughts on Eldritch Monstrosities right after the episode aired. I have too many thoughts. My friends have been putting up with me begging, whining, and pleading for some form of Eldritch monster for months — and not just the Eldritch Bunker, as much as I enjoy that headcanon.
One of the problems that SPN has is reduction of scope. Everyone likes to comment on this in the form of “demons used to be so scary and now…” One of the basic tenants of the show is that humans are the real monsters; therefore all monsters are human, on some level or another. This is great for themes, but there’s a certain point where clinging to that tenant starts to mess with the sense of scope/scale to the universe and the overall tone of the show.
We’ve gotten to the point where even God and his Sister are people, and that’s a problem for a show that relies upon escalation in its Big Bad mytharcs. You can’t go bigger than the being that created everything and the being that was there before even him.
Unless you go back further.
One of the basic formula for creation myths is “in the beginning there was Chaos; and then there was a division between opposites.” Light and dark, fire and ice, earth and sky, yin and yang. Sometimes the gods create the division, and sometimes it’s just there before the gods are.
The Empty is our Chaos. It’s the answer to the riddle of “what came before eternity?”
Back up, what the heck do you mean when you say Eldritch Monstrosity?
The definition of eldritch is something eerie, weird, spooky, otherworldly; (also “oblong” in certain dictionaries). There are theories that tie the origin of the word back to the Fae Folk and Faerieland. Where most people know it from is H.P. Lovecraft, though I am not going to delve into him.
When it’s used in a fictional setting, it’s shorthand for something otherworldly, but more than that it’s something that we can’t properly understand. It’s beyond the scope of human reality, something so big and so powerful and so far above the world that we can’t even begin to get a hold on it.
I also need to expand my definition a little bit here; because of the genre we’re operating in, creature and being does not just mean humanoid, or tentacle god-thing, or morphic smoke or goo. It’s also buildings and locations (see The House of Leaves, The Haunting of Hill House, and Demonreach in The Dresden Files for good examples of location and building entities).
For characters, look at beings like Discworld’s Death; Dream and the other Endless from Sandman; Tom Bombadil from The Lord of the Rings; any of Lovecraft’s Elder Gods; or creatures like the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth. In Supernatural, Death has been our key example for years, and he’s really the best example for scope.
Death: “You have an inflated sense of your own importance. To a thing like me, a thing like you, well. Think how you’d feel if a bacterium sat at your table and started to get snarky. This is one little planet, in one tiny solar system, in a galaxy that’s barely out of its diapers. I’m old, Dean, very old. So I invite you to contemplate how insignificant I find you.”
Death: “As old as God. Maybe even older, neither of us can remember any more. Life, death, chicken, egg; regardless, at the end I’ll reap Him too.”
Amara is a similar creature, though we get to see less of her Otherness because of how season 11 is constructed and out of sheer necessity. It’s fairly easy to anthropomorphize Death (we’ve been doing it for centuries), but a being that’s essence is Nothingness has to be seriously scaled down for human characters to interact with it. Amara was also trying to understand Creation, which isn’t something Death wanted to do. Still, there are scenes like human!Amara talking to mirror!Amara that make me jump up and down and point frantically at Sandman and Dream’s gem analogy: that this massive Being’s existence in our realm, what we perceive as Dream (or Amara) in physical form, is basically the light reflecting off of one facet of a jewel. It’s only part of the whole; only a partial perspective and view of the deeper reality.
And now we have the creature from the Empty, something older than God, or the Darkness. A location with a personality who really wants to sleep.
Okay but why should I care?
Outside of the fact that the Empty being a creature reintroduces scope to the universe? There are older things out there than God, Monster, or Man and they’re awake. This is why I also frequently clamor for the show to re-do the Fae Folk; again, Supernatural has sacrificed scope for theme over the years. The monsters are all people, so the only way to get real monsters back is to go full on Eldritch.
But that’s not why they’re important. Eldritch Beings, as far as SPN is concerned, are mirrors.
When we’re talking in terms of writing and storytelling, eldritch creatures reflect the characters and world around them. If it’s a location, the set is designed, lit, and decorated so that it reflects someone or something; if it’s a character, they mirror themes or arcs.
This is why @floralmotif and I lovingly call two of the recurring sets Eldritch Monstrosities (the Bunker and one particular Diner). The Bunker has internal illogical inconsistencies, and the diner has showed up at least from s4 to s12; most of the time the sets are identical, but the ways that they are altered/redecorated/relit act as emotional mirrors for the characters present, to an even greater extent than normal sets. (This kind of mirroring does not happen in the ‘Hell’ set, ever, or Bobby’s house, or any of the other handful of recurring sets we visit). It’s an extension of how the show naturally uses set design (like the ever-popular beer signs), they just spill over into this category because at some point their use/reuse passed the realm of logic and went full “okay how the hell does this even work in-universe.”
Amara was a mirror for Dean; a being consumed by rage because of loss, fighting to reconcile disparate parts of themself into one cohesive whole, who was searching for emotional completion (in all the wrong places).
Jack fully qualifies as an Eldritch Monstrosity, both in power scope and in how he functions in the story. He’s the ultimate mirror right now; whenever he’s with a character he ends up reflecting their emotions, and he’s also mirroring a bunch of individual arcs all at once. His powers and true nature are outside of everyone’s understanding right now; only the fact that he’s limited (and adorable) keeps him from appearing ridiculously terrifying.
And now, again, we have the Empty. We have a being/location that automatically qualifies as an Eldritch Monstrosity by its nature (the anthropomorphic personification of the Void wants to have a nap), that is reflecting and mirroring the emotions of a character. Only this time it’s explicit: the Empty is an actual dark pit of despair, beating Cas over the head with his failures and fears and all the reasons he blames himself; telling him to give in to the darkness, to sleep, to stop fighting. It’s the physical manifestation of his depression.
I don’t know if the Empty will return: I hope it will, in some form or fashion. I hope there are other things out there in the dark. I really really hope my other crazy theory is right, and that Amara, Death, Billie, and the Empty are all aspects of the same Dark Being. But for now, it’s served its purpose. We’ve gained another layer of scope, which is crucial for a soft reboot like s13 is, and the Anthropomorphic Personification of Cas’ depression tried to beat him into submission and failed.
