Dean Winchester was devastated in SPN 5x15, when the Cupid insinuated his parents’ love wasn’t real.
And if love isn’t real, why buy in?
The Cupid revelation was meant to demoralize Dean, specifically. It was meant as a shot at him. After all, the deep dark nothingness that can't be filled inside him is, narratively, the absence of the specific type of love he craves.
DEATH: “That’s one deep dark…nothing you’ve got there Dean. Can’t fill it, not with food, or drink, not even with sex.”
DEAN: “Oh, you are so full of crap.”
DEATH: “Oh you can smirk and joke and lie to your brother, lie to yourself, but not to me! I can see inside you Dean. I can see how broken you are. How defeated--you can’t win! But you just keep fighting, just keep going through the motions. You’re not hungry Dean, because inside you’re already dead.”
5x14: My Bloody Valentine
On the one hand, this is the apathy and anhedonia that accompanies critical Depression. On the other, it's the effects of Heaven taking care to demoralize Dean's hope for the future, because:
(Love is empty; it isn't real. You're empty, too. Can't be filled. You're nothingness personified. The Big Empty. Pure nihilism.)
But despite the psychological warfare of the Cupid, he held on to their love story. He still tried to have faith in love and The Future. (Dean clings to Baby and Led Zeppelin and the mixtape, because of what it Represents.)
He knew their marriage wasn’t perfect and maybe that’s why he could believe it was real.
I think my main takeaway I'd like to keep is this:
There's a lot of merit in being anti-destiny, anti-soulmate, anti-chosen-one, anti-Cupid, anti-mirrors/anti-parallels.
To me, that doesn't necessarily mean we poo-poo on characters labeled "soulmates," like Mary and John. To me, it means, we must be hesitant to believe such a claim in the first place. Because Heaven isn't reliable.
And perhaps, it is us swallowing the "soulmates" line robs Mary and John of choice.
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Beware the mirrors:
Before we swallow literal snake oil directly sold from The Architects of a Heavenly Matrix (Gabriel, Zachariah, Chuck, etc.), we must first consider that these "mirrors" may be deeply, deeply suspect or even untrue objects of ridicule or manipulation directly imposed by the author.
Not mirrors of truth, then, but funhouse mirrors. We err when we view our precious side plots as black-and-white revelations of truth. Most importantly, mirrors aren't one-to-one recipes for figuring out what characters mean to each other.
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The very concept of soulmates is Thee Antithesis of Free Will.
As a fandom, we are so willing to believe Mary and John weren’t "in a real relationship" and had no agency.
Why?
Because a Cupid told us so, and we don't think the Cupid had reason to lie, so we believe him.
Yes, they had rocky moments and John for sure had post-death idealization of Mary. John heavily decayed as a character so did Dean, but that doesn’t mean there was no goodness or love to begin with. You can become a bad person.
I think it's a little unfair to assume that they didn’t fight like Hell to choose each other and dodge the machinations. It's also a little unfair to assume that they didn’t choose each other, just because they, like all marriages, weren't perfect or honest with one another. If they had been perfect, don't you think that's actually more suspect?
Oh, but Heaven told you so? Right. Heaven, which feeds you a regular diet of cupids and soulmates and other bullshit. Hmm.
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Are you Team Free Will?
By the time we finish watching SPN, words that imply destiny should send us running for our goddamn lives. So, how did TFW lose?
SPN feels forever unresolved because:
Dean will dies after placing too much focus on Revenge, the corrupted, unfair past
Cas dies after placing too much stock in Jack’s Destiny, the idealized, inevitable future
Sam’s mistake was probably falling prey to Chuck’s illusion, the corrupt future, and losing Hope
Perhaps, they jointly screwed up when they lost their hero-ness and didn’t trust they they were Enough on their own, without Fortuna's luck.
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An alternative to mirrors?
Anyway, I sort of see all the mirror stuff as Chuck making fun of his characters or trying to misdirect them, or at worst, trying to tell them who they are instead of letting them discover it for themselves.
I know fandom loves its mirrors, but I like to remind myself that these mirrors can contain false, toxic messages to mold you to take on a role and to perceive things a certain way.
But importantly:
You are not one-dimensional.
You are not one archetype.
You do not have a sole purpose. You do not serve a sole cause.
You are multi-faceted and beautiful.
You can care about many things and people in your life.
You are worthy, even in the throes of the storm, even in the midst of turmoil, and even tangled up in the ugliness of war.
You can make the worst mistake of your life.
You can be an abuser and victim, and that doesn't make you a caricature; it makes you messy and human.
You can doubt who you are and go full-blown existential crisis and lose your way.
But you can start trying to be good anytime and you should always keep trying to fix it. That's hope. That's the whole point.
