Brennan: Tyranny. You are a demon of suffering, crafted by the Shadow of Suffering, Ksha'aravi. There is no greater suffering than losing what Kattigan has lost. And Kattigan, you see that reflected in Tyranny’s eyes. You understand, on a Nat 20 Insight, Tyranny’s perspective that she is fundamentally warped. That she’s an archetype and not a person, as she once said to you. You made the knife in her hand, this knife that has just cleaved through your bonds, as she opened your shackles. You look at her and know that she is absolutely right that she is a demon. She is the demonest demon who ever demoned. There is nothing wrong with her. And that knife you made for her … something within her understands your pain. There is something in her, older than her body, older than her name, older than this form that she has been given, that is here in this world because she knows what is rending you apart inside. And she is here to protect you. She is here to save that which can be saved, and if it cannot be saved, she is here to punish those that destroy it.
--- Episode 30: Here in the Dark
Just. Mulling over this a bit. Chewing on this.
Pulling out some pieces:
“You are a demon of suffering, crafted by the Shadow of Suffering, Ksha'aravi.”
“You look at her and know that she is absolutely right that she is a demon. She is the demonest demon who ever demoned. There is nothing wrong with her.”
“Something within her understands your pain. There is something in her, older than her body, older than her name, older than this form that she has been given, that is here in this world because she knows what is rending you apart inside.”
Tyranny was crafted as a demon of suffering by Ksha’aravi. But that doesn’t necessarily mean to cause suffering. It may mean to understand it. Something within her, older than her name, older than the form she has been given, was made to understand pain. And then …
“And she is here to protect you. She is here to save that which can be saved, and if it cannot be saved, she is here to punish those that destroy it.”
She was made to understand pain, and then … avenge it? But not only that. Save what can be saved, and then only if it cannot be saved, punish those who destroyed it. Now, some of that might be Tyranny herself, her choices, picked up by Kattigan’s insight, not necessarily her created nature. But even if that’s the case, Ksha’aravi still apparently likes her. He likes her choices. And she’s still a demon. The demonest demon who ever demoned. Her choices are not anathema to her nature.
And I’m just looking at Ksha’aravi’s epithet. The ‘Shadow of Suffering’.
There’s been a lot of talk of shadows lately. But the thing about them is, shadows of something are not the cause of that something, they are cast by it. They follow after. The shadow of suffering is not suffering’s cause, it’s its aftermath.
Ksha’aravi is a demon prince where once there was a demon queen. A demon queen who married the god of suffering. Azgra. Ksha’aravi is ‘one of those who remained’. The shadow of suffering. Suffering’s aftermath.
And the child he crafted was created knowing pain, on a level older than her name and her form, and is here to protect those who have suffered it, and punish those who cause it.
I’m not entirely sure what that says, given other evidence of those who work for/with Ksha’aravi, and their less than positive effects on the world, but …
Yeah. That was definitely an interesting Insight roll, for sure.
This is not an academic essay. But I’m trying to figure out how some people I know think the end of Supernatural was fitting and good and nothing to complain about and other people I know are so intensely upset and angry that they can’t sleep.
I’m dubbing it Feels Theory (cause it sounds like Field Theory). And it goes something like this:
For a subset of viewers, the most important thing about an ending is the feelings it evokes in them when they watch it.
The valued feelings are: Sadness, Nostalgia, and Closure.
What they ultimately want is to let go, and this is the formula of feelings that allows for letting go.
I think Sadness may not actually be right. The SPN ending had sadness. But I propose that Happiness or Bittersweetness might also suffice, because what’s really happening there is not the quality of the emotion but the intensity of it. Feeling any of those things intensely is cleansing. You can have a good cry when you’re happy or sad. The point is the catharsis.
So I’d like to amend that to: Intense Emotion, Nostalgia, Closure.
Nostalgia is actually an incredibly powerful emotion. If you look at JJ Abrams’s body of work, you might be tempted to think it’s the ONLY emotion. His movies are incredibly driven to create a sense of nostalgia in viewers as a means for deriving satisfaction, often at the cost of everything else. Nostalgia is wistful, happy, simple, yearning. It feels good.
Moreover, it lowers anxiety and loneliness. And as we become more anxious and lonely as a society, the desire for this feeling only increases. https://thriveworks.com/blog/obsessed-nostalgia-psychologists/
Closure. This seems self-explanatory, but a sense of closure is real. Resolving your feelings is as real in art as it is in other aspects of life. We want to feel like there’s nothing more to say, no more questions to ask, no further developments that we might miss if we look away. A direct quote from a fan post, “I think the thing I love so much about this finale is that it FEELS finished. I remember years ago Jared was talking about how if the boys lived he’d be like, “Well then what are they doing??” and I feel the same way.”
The 15x20 hits all these points.
Intense Emotion: Dean’s death scene, Sam’s mourning
Nostalgia: Pie, the Impala in heaven, Bobby waiting, Harvelle’s Roadhouse, just Sam and Dean, the monster of the week hunt, vampires, clowns
Closure: Dean died the way he thought he would, Sam had a family the way he thought he would, and they both die and go to heaven
What Feels Theory proposes is that it is not the content that matters. Therefore, if one could swap out different plot points but retain the same emotional beats, such an ending would also qualify as “good.” It would satisfy because the viewer would go through the same set of emotions, even though they are evoked by completely different circumstances.
Suppose the finale instead went something like this:
They are standing on the road in front of Jack, the new god. Dean asks if he’s coming back to the bunker and he says no. Dean looks pained and says there’s something he wants to ask. Jack smiles fondly at him and says that he knows and then looks over Dean’s shoulder. Cas says, “Hello, Dean” and Dean turns to see him, overcome with relief. One of several things could happen, ranging on the confirmation of Destiel desire: anything from a hug and a good to have you back to tearful kissing. Sam gets a text from Eileen and asks Jack if he could… Jack snaps his fingers and Sam appears next to Eileen for a tearful reunion of their own. Jack smiles to himself and disappears.
Time passes.
Dean and Cas build by hand Singer’s Roadhouse. On the day it opens, Sam and Eileen announce they’re going to have twins. They want the rest to be a surprise, but they’re going to name them Charlie and Jo regardless. Sam stops hunting and instead works on reviving the Men and Women of Letters. In the Roadhouse, Dean sets a slice of pie in front of Cas and looks skyward. “You know kid, you can pop by and try some. Your dad’s been practicing.” He gives Cas a fond smile. The phone rings behind him and he turns to a bank of phones labeled CIA, FBI, Animal Control, Park Ranger. He picks up the FBI phone and leans against the bar near Cas, who has set the fork down and watches him seriously. “Hello? Yeah, this is Agent Kripke.” He meets Cas’s gaze. “What can I do you for?”
Such a series of events covers, at least, nostalgia and closure. It brings back names of old characters. It gives Sam a domestic life. It recalls the episode in which Dean ran a bar and was happy. It recalls the Roadhouse itself. It mirrors Bobby being the hub of hunter back-up. It lets Sam focus on intellectual pursuits. And there’s pie.
It covers closure. They have moved on from hunting. They have set up new lives and entered a new era. Jack isn’t going to be throwing new destinies at them. And while it may not be the closure of death, it’s a turning the page on a chapter of their lives.
Intense Emotion could be achieved any number of ways, depending on whether the goal was a full-length episode as a series coda. Perhaps there’s a scene of Dean moving out of the bunker to live someplace closer to the Roadhouse until it’s done. It’s a tearful goodbye while Sam stays behind and Dean takes his few possessions. Or maybe you go the happiness route. In which case, Sam’s babies being born and Dean holding one and smiling and Cas holding one and smiling and them looking at each other a little tearful would also fill that catharsis void. They talk about how they’re going to do things differently than what their dad did.
But the theory is that it’s not the content that ultimately matters if you’re a feels viewer. Anything that evokes nostalgia, closure, and strong cleansing emotion is sufficient for a “good” ending. And you are likely to accept any permutation of events without imagining a different permutation of events as better or correct or proper, because the feels themselves were correct and proper.
Non-feels viewers, on the other hand, focus on narrative plot points. Their satisfaction is derived from what they feel is a logical progression of plot points and character beats. Whether any of those things evoke nostalgia or closure is less important than whether they see them as congruous. A good ending is one that is congruent. Where do their feels come into this?
I don’t know. I’m still thinking about it. These viewers have loads of feels for sure, but the issues they raise as the reasons for their unhappiness are all congruency based. The cries are mostly that it “doesn’t make sense” or “ignores the last 10 years” or “leaves out all the character development” and not so much that it lacked intense emotion or a sense of closure.
Their ability to engage with the emotional content seems contingent upon the congruency requirement. If congruence is broken, that dissonance becomes paramount and takes a place of primacy over whatever the emotional content is trying to evoke.
Whether this is just a way to weasel around shipping lines, I’m not sure. Maybe? I do know that I’ve seen people I would not call casual viewers fall on the feels side. I’m trying to make sense of how long time fans who have watched every episode can seemingly have not watched the same show at all, as their response to the finale are diametrically opposed.
Unfortunately, it’s not something one can really test, either. No show gets to end twice. So you can’t have a feels viewer watch two endings to see if both are good.
With our social media and incredibly heterogenous global culture, anyone can just take anything that happens and twist the context of it in order to fit the narrative they’re trying to push. After all, people in power have been doing that since the beginning of history.
So the question is no longer whether or not it’s happening, but whether we can trust data to show us whether it’s happening more frequently or less frequently. The question is no longer about the existence of truth, but who is telling the truth?
But most of the time we never ask that. We just take in what people are saying and assume they’re correct. We see them air clips, retell events without knowing the true context of it because the way they present it is meant to push forth certain narratives in order to elicit emotional responses and garner support or trigger echo chambers.
I’m not saying this to condemn anyone. I say this as someone who is guilty of falling into the same pattern as well. We no longer live in an age where ignorance is an excuse. However, because of the Internet, because of social media, because of this principle that everyone gets to have a say, we no longer know anymore who is telling the truth and nothing but the truth. Because the truth is constantly twisted even in the smallest of ways whether because of the effects of our own perceptions or out of an unconscious desire to manipulate narratives in the favor of the one telling it.
How do we know we’re not falling for these manipulations and machinations by these narratives? Who can we trust anymore to just tell us truth, to tell us the facts about what’s happening around the world and give us freedom to judge?
We may no longer be ignorant or have the excuse to be ignorant, but we’ve lost the ability to distinguish full-truths from lies and half-truths because human nature predisposes us towards a self-serving endgame in the end, whether it’s out of personal gain or the desire to feel like we’re righteous or fighting for the right side.
Or perhaps... we never had the ability to distinguish the real truth in our own power... 🤔
There’s a story I’ve had in mind for ~one year or so that I have bits and pieces of but that I’m not 100% sure is long enough to turn into a book... so, if it isn’t, and if it’s easier for me to just write whatever it needs to be in whatever format and post it here... I may do that. x
Remember during my New Year’s Resolutions when I mentioned experimenting with Fresh Meat: Confinement’s update schedule?
Basically, I’m not sure I’ll have consistently long scenes with it. Since it’s Handplates inspired, it might be more conducive to update more often with one or two scenes. I COULD keep my update length as is, but I worry it’ll make the chapter extremely fragmented and just feel weird. I do have the occasional long chapter in mind, but like I said, it would be the exception rather than the norm.
What do you all think? Keep as is? Or try doing shorter bursts quicker?
thinking of changing this blog’s url name to something more in line with my store name. But, i’m still iffy about it atm, so i might just leave it as is [insert shrug & sigh emojis]
