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Which still should I paint for 4x18?
Top left (Cas being choked with blood running down his face)
Top right (Dean pouring holy water with his arm covering half of his face)
Bottom left (Dean challenging Alastair with a fierce expression)
Bottom right (Cas using his powers with his arm extended)
Cas: It’s nice to meet you, Chuck. I admire your work.
Babygirl, you got no idea how true that really is.
so the tnt loop is looping around toward the end of s8, and it hit me again: I don’t think that Metatron sheltered HIMSELF so completely that he’d never even heard of the Winchesters. I think Chuck... bubble-ized him. I mean... this is a guy whose spent millennia collecting humanity’s stories for himself. I’m literally watching the scene where he explains it:
DEAN: So you have been holed up here, or, or, or in a wigwam, or before that in some cave, listening to stories, reading books?
METATRON: (grinning) And it was something to watch. What you brought to His Earth, all the mayhem, the murder. Just the raw, wild invention of God's naked apes... it was mind-blowing. But really... really, it was your storytelling. That is the true flower of free will. At least as you've mastered it so far. When you create stories, you become gods, of tiny, intricate dimensions unto themselves. So many worlds! I have read... as much as it's possible for an angel to read, and I haven't caught up.
Sam especially judges him HARD for this, for burying himself in narratives while “his kind” caused so much havoc on Earth. Metatron apparently hadn’t even heard of Kevin Tran, who Dean holds up as one of the Real People who have been harmed, and whose stories are what Metatron should be caring about. And that name also apparently doesn’t ping anything for Metatron. I thought all angels were supposed to have the prophets names etched into their brains or something (per Cas from 5.19, but also the fact only the current generation is there, the NEXT generation won’t be added until they are born, also per Cas from 8.07).
So... this makes me want to believe that Chuck... flipped a couple of switches in Metatron when he left Heaven. Like, oh, you’re gonna leave your post? Okay then, I’m gonna cut you out of the loop then. Or maybe Metatron even did it to himself, deliberately NOT wanting to know the Heaven situation... but I have a harder time reconciling that. I mean, he was HIDING, and on the RUN from Heaven, attempting to avoid imprisonment and torture for the information he knew about the tablets. I don’t think he’d want to be cut off from angel radio so entirely that he missed a decade of chatter about the Winchesters, the Apocalypse, and especially the fact that a supposed Prophet of the Lord was novelizing all of it. I mean... you’d think if he’d known, the same way Cas casually did in 4.18 like every angel knew all of this and it was entirely obvious information, that Metatron would’ve dropped everything else and read those books at the very least. But apparently not...
That seems like information that an angel attempting to hide himself on Earth to avoid angels for his own safety would’ve picked up on. You know. For his own safety.
Angels are all over the earth? End times? Catastrophic events left and right? Demons everywhere? And he was just... unaware of all of it? Assumed Michael and Lucifer were even still relevant playing pieces on the board and not both locked back in the cage after the apocalypse failed. Like.... HOW did he miss this even if he didn’t pick it up directly from angel radio? It really does feel like Chuck deliberately kept him shielded from all of this. Like Chuck MADE HIM into the weird lil guy he became.
Which leads me to point 2. We never knew what the results of the Hell Trials really would have been. Metatron said the Angel Fall Event wasn’t trials, but a spell. But it was built in the same way the Hell Trials were.
Sam went into the Hell Trials borderline delusionally hopeful that he could SURVIVE them. That was his goal on setting out (and why Dean worked so hard to save him when they learned Metatron had lied to them). And he KNEW what the description of the inevitable results of finishing the trials would be from the very first time Kevin ever told them about it: an eternity of being tortured, essentially. Sounds like something far worse than even the eternity in the Cage with Lucifer that Sam had signed himself up for in s5, yes? But WHY? Like, what would that eternal suffering accomplish?
And was that something Chuck wrote into the Hell tablet, or another addendum like the Angel Fall Spell added in by Metatron? We just don’t know. But I like to think Chuck knew full well that Metatron had added those unauthorized details for his own reasons, and that’s why Chuck helped him hide out, waiting for the time that he could bring Metatron out for his own narrative purposes. Just to see what would happen.
So yes, Sam and Dean decided for themselves in s8 to pull the Hell Trials. Their biggest act of hubris in all of canon, but it was like Chuck needed a plotline for s8 and started throwing tablets into their path, waiting for them to find the Scribe and drag him back into the story.
Anyway I’m about out of steam on this one. But there’s so many reasons metatron is my all time favorite spn villain. :’D
Episode 78: 4.18 The Monster at the End of This Book
Welcome to Chuck’s story. Was Chuck written deliberately to eventually grow into the Overarching Big Bad of the entire series? I really doubt it. Does it work perfectly anyway? Yes, yes it does.
And because of that, rewatching this episode with the clarity of hindsight becomes a transformative experience. Oh Chuck, I see what you did there... you cruel, capricious god
(who really should’ve been properly overcome within the narrative, but it was always His Story, and the show we watched on our screens was His Narrative... and understanding that makes it weirdly easier to cope with the lack of a decent ending in some ways, so I’ll probably never stop talking about it...)
All that said, there are copious volumes of bonus material this week for anyone interested in Chuck’s Process (which he even says directly in THIS episode, it’s not just a s15 concept, he’s really that deep in his role as the Author). Let’s start with the easy stuff first, though:
The Superwiki Page for this episode
My tag for this episode
But especially these posts:
Gabriel as Chuck Lite and their mirror narratives
Rewatch notes from June 2019
Lizbob’s essential reading on Book Canon vs Show Canon, because the show *we* watch isn’t even the story Chuck is trying to craft in canon, and most importantly Chuck’s Story is *not the Truth*
The regular 20 second CW promo video
The special extended promo video that’s essentially a book promo for the Supernatural novel series. Fun and meta!
And if you’re feeling intrepid, please enjoy exploring these tags: Chuck’s Process, Free Will in the narrative, and my standard Chuck tag... “if you say mysterious ways so help me i will kick your ass”
There’s probably more I could add to that list, but that’s well more than enough for a good start :’D
Listen now on AnchorFM, or wherever you enjoy podcasts!
I wonder when the spn writers worked out that chuck was god. If they had it planned out since the first episode where he was introduced then that’s fucking insane. Literally his first words after finding out Sam and Dean are real people were I am a god. Wtf. Then when Cas gives Dean info on how to stop Lilith from getting to Sam, something that interferes with gods plan, chuck says he didn’t see that happening? Because free will? Holy shit you guys.
the fact that u can pinpoint the exact moment chuck started losing in the monster at the end of this book
like !!!!! pack it up god, ur son is gay and is about to ruin your life !!!!!
but… but why would it be elvis *sobs*
Moriah | 4.18
