#meta-adjacent

[charie-caphine]

SPN Finale Weirdness Central

from postmodernmulticoloredcloak’s summary/analysis of the end montage from SPN 15x19:

So: some of these moments seem like genuine moments you’ll want to put in a montage, but there’s a weird predominance of characters smiling and looking happy or goofy. It’s kind of... not exactly representative of the show as a whole, you know? There are moments that fit as, you know, iconic steps in the story, but surprisingly few, and many moments you’d expect to be in a “final” montage are blatantly not there. Several moments with, let’s put it like this, suspicious meta connotations. Moments that, well, we don’t know what happens in the finale yet, but smell like they might be relevant to future developments. (Metatron’s speech to newly human Cas anyone?)

What really strikes me is the amount of moments connected to reality being manipulated or distorted in some way. Lots of Changing Channels, fantasy elements of various kinds (the Djinn dream, Scoobynatural, Oz, the imaginary friend Becky’s wedding to Sam, the fairy, ...), them acquiring luck (s3) or losing it (s15), and so on. It’s almost like the sequence is telling us something...

Yet another thing to add to the growing SPN finale weirdness collection which so far goes like this for me:

1) 15x19 ending on a montage of funny/alternate reality moments

2) not starting 15x20 with a Carry On montage

3) but featuring three other full-song-length montages

4) Miracle the dog (which used to have actual owners in 15x19)

5) Dabb’s Pies (that Dean got smacked in the face with)

6) vampires with a cheap Halloween mask fetish

7) agents Kripke and Singer

8) El Sol beer (note that it tastes like crap)

9) gratuitous half-nude Sam

10) a phonecall from Austin, Texas

11) Sam’s kid, loudly named Dean, turning from a blond to a brunet

12) Sam’s embarrassingly unconvincing “old person” look

13) Sam’s kid seeming just peachy with Sam’s death

14) no new family or old friends' pictures in Sam's house

15) lugubrious Carry On indie female-led pop ballad cover

16) the show literally smashing though the fourth wall in the final shot

This list keeps growing.

I didn't hate watching the finale. It was typically pretty and well-acted (I mainly mean Dean's tragic death scene, but again — that was practically a poor man's rehash of that time he died getting stabbed by Metatron), and its events made sense within the context of the episode. But it also made less than zero sense within the context of show overall. What is going on? What should our takeaway from all this be? The ending played out exactly as the season's/show's Big Bad final boss threatened at the outset, yet this doesn't even seem framed as unhappy. It's just... weird, abrupt, and doesn't follow from point A.

[azfellandco]

please explain about have to explode and a/c i wish to be enlightened and also to have feels

I’m big tired rn so this isn’t gonna be like... fully coherent but I will do my best.

The tl;dr is that in “something here will eventually have to explode” the “something” is both “the world” and “whatever feelings Aziraphale and Crowley have for each other that they don’t and won’t talk about”.

Here is Have To Explode by The Mountain Goats, for anyone who doesn’t know it.

When the Under Pressure trailer came out at the beginning of March I wrote up a meta about what specifically it was in the existing material for the show so far that made me think that as far as show canon is concerned, Aziraphale and Crowley used to be much closer and had broken up or drifted apart prior to the eleven years before the apocalypse. This tag is full of other stuff about this topic because when these excerpts from the upcoming script book came out everyone in my tumblr circle lost their minds about the fact “there isn’t an ‘our side’, not anymore, it’s over” reads like a breakup or the echo of a breakup. 

Anyway. 

Consider Aziraphale and Crowley trying to save the world, both knowing it’s only a matter of time before they have to acknowledge that they don’t have to be doing this, they don’t need the world to stay the same. Technically they have sides and allegiances and technically they don’t owe anything to each other. Maybe they did once, but they had their chance and they fucked it up and now they know they have a very limited timeframe in which to fix it. 

“the stage is setsomeone’s gonna do something someone else will regret”

that’s the world ending and the knowledge that the people who are ending the world (heaven and hell) are an entirely different group of people than those who are going to bear the consequences of that decision (all of earth but also the two of them)

“i speak in smoke signals and you answer in code” 

that’s the pair of them talking past each other even as they try to work together, because they can acknowledge that they like the world but they can’t acknowledge why it’s so important that they be able to keep liking it. 

“the fuse will have to run out sometimesomething here will eventually have to explode, have to explode” 

they both know its coming (the apocalypse or the inevitable moment where they have to confront each other, the moment where they both have to acknowledge they still care)

“name one thing about us two anyone could love” 

I can’t even get into this line because it makes me fully emo but it centers the whole tone of the song and the whole context that goes with it for the purpose of this meta as highly self-depreciating. They are both big time regretful they spent so long at odds with each other now there’s so little time left. 

“five, four, three, two, one, watch for the flash”

Again, very limited timeframe they have in which to fix things, where “things” are both the upcoming apocalypse and also their relationship. You can count down the moments, even, near the end. 

So yeah there you have it, that’s why Have To Explode is making me cry on this here evening.

Tallahassee is my favorite Mountain Goats album and i’m way too excited that I’ve finally found a loophole that lets me apply this very angsty collection of songs about a failing marriage to this relatively angst-free pair of immortals. 

[charie-caphine]

The finale may have finally broken the famous brother codependency and brought Sam and Dean back to where they were always meant to be without celestial interference, but the fifteen years’ journey was neither wasted not in vain, for they never would have loved the people they loved or accomplished as much as they did otherwise.