#Nym finally watched Supernatural

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Supernatural 4x20 The Rapture

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Supernatural 4x20 The Rapture

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Supernatural 4x20 The Rapture

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Supernatural 4x20 The Rapture

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Supernatural 4x20 The Rapture

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Supernatural 4x20 The Rapture

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Supernatural 10x20 Angel Heart

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Were they actually planning to write Castiel out of the story at this point?

The whole Supernatural season 6 'Cas-going-darkside via a road paved with good intentions' arc aggressively signposts a permanent swansong, like he was either meant to die and stay dead or... I dunno. Stay darkside and appear once a season from now on as guest antagonist to twist the knife in the Winchester feels?

And then he's absent for most of the following season and comes back at a really odd point in the season for a recurring character to... recur... after that exit in 7x02. And with the oddest handwave about where he's been. Then he's around for keeps 'til the end of the run. It's... odd!

I watched Supernatural knowing for sure that Misha Collins stuck around 'til the end (and little else), so I've had this cognitive dissonance thing going on ever since Cas/not-Cas exploded with black ooze in S7. Help?

Tell me a thing that you know and I don't, please, old hands of the SPN fandom? What went on there?

UPDATE: Thanks to @searchingcassiopeia I now know that this was an unforced error/own goal. And that I'm not going bonkers because this was indeed written as a swansong.

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Supernatural 5x04 The End.

Artistic choices in Supernatural that make your brain melt. I'd love to know who on set made that artistic choice.

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You think endverse Cas was really human? I mean was he a reliable narrator in that script or doing this whole performance to hide himself in plain sight while being more than human less than angel?

Good question! I didn't come away from that ep believing he was fully human, personally - his ability to both instantly spot time-travel!Dean and effortlessly identify what must've happened to him speaks to that. His senses aren't fully human, maybe - at the very least, he retains a mind free from the confabulation and confusion that humans can't avoid when perceiving the world. He sees - and trusts - exactly what's actually there in front of him when the 'wrong' Dean walks in. No hesitation or bewilderment because his brain's telling him two different things - just a few pertinent followup questions to get the context of Dean's time travelling. He still has the uncomplicated, uncomfortable clarity and directness of angel!Cas.

It says a lot that this timeline's Cas describes being human as a step down. Endverse!Cas equates his relative lack of power with becoming human, but losing his angel powers isn't enough to leave him fully human, I don't think. Mortal, maybe, and functionally diminished as a warrior, but not human. It's like he's using it as a catchall word for his fall from grace, and as a derogatory label for his own limited capacity to make a difference in their fight. I don't think he thinks less of humanity than he did before, but he thinks a lot less of himself. Not because he's human, or humanlike, but because he's failed.

I'd suggest that Endverse!Cas's ability to function as an ally who Dean can tolerate (or even allow to live) means that he's less affected by the substance abuse than a human would be. I can't see that version of Dean tolerating any liability in his ranks, let alone in the leadership tier. Maybe Cas walks a thin line with it, always a misstep away from Dean having to take decisive action about him, but he seemed ultra-competent, and trusted, for a guy mixing uppers, downers, and probably sideways-ers, with apocalyptic stress levels and the loss of his very identity.

I do think hiding in plain sight could be a really big part of what we saw from Endverse!Cas. Hiding from himself as much as anything else. Hiding what? Despair, I think. We see hints of that same bitterness and acting-out in regular Cas later in S5, when he thinks that Dean's about to surrender to Michael; that his faith has been (once again) misplaced and the fight is lost. Cas needs something to believe in and fight for because that's how he's made. He takes failure very hard and very personally. There's something defensive about Endverse!Cas, prickly and difficult, even when he's smiling and appears body-comfortable. That easy geniality vibrates with an edge of, "Just try me", like a neon warning sign. I doubt anyone but Dean ever gets the opportunity to see past it.

The End is such a brilliant script, such a well-made episode that it feels like a complete 'verse, but there are so many unanswered questions about how the characters ended up where that story found them. It's a headcanon and fanfiction goldmine because it's so sparing, and I love it. (But I'd just about kill for a Camp Chitaqua or Sam-as-Lucifer spinoff serial to tell me much, much more about it.)

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Supernatural 10x20 Angel Heart

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endverse destiel--- fucking nasty or sweet?

Both? Both is good.

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Supernatural 10x20 Angel Heart

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Which one of TFW got the best line in Spn?

Huh. If it has to be one of Team Free Will then you've got me. They all had so many great lines. Crowley, Bobby, and Lucifer all got some stonkers, too.

The line that really seared itself into my brain from all of Supernatural was guest-character Hester's:

It really shook me! I mean, in and of itself it's a great line. But there's so much worldbuilding packed into the combination of the line with Emily Holmes's delivery. This idea that Castiel fetching Dean out of hell was the first domino tipped over, not only in Cas's personal fall ("You have fallen in every way imaginable,") but in the subsequent chaos and destruction in Heaven. And she's not wrong to single that event out as the turning point, but she turns the blame on Dean, who hardly got any choice in the matter:

"Why should we give you anything after everything you have taken from us? The very touch of you corrupts. When Castiel first laid a hand on you in Hell, he was lost! For that you're going to pay." Supernatural 7x21 - Reading is Fundamental

She says these lines to Dean, and it starts as the whole aloof, disdainful shtick we've seen from other angels speaking about and to humanity. But Hester reaches max gross load right there and then, so it finishes raw. She breaks down, shouts, loses all self-restraint and just hurls her grief, rage and pain at Dean. Moves to punish him. When Cas deflects Hester from physically attacking Dean - no small intervention, given his fragile state of mind - she whales on the helpless Cas instead, trying to claw back some control of her life by attacking what she sees as the source of her problems.

Hester's completely adrift in this new world of free will and personal responsibility that Team Free Will have dropped on her, and on all the other, surviving angels who didn't get a starring role in the Apocalypse or the war in Heaven. Hester's fallen too, they all have, and she only knows it when Inias begs her not to kill Castiel. Then she snaps completely, and Meg kills her before she can kill Cas.

That's some corking dialogue right there, and in some ways it's more of a reveal about the state of things in Heaven, post-non-Apocalypse, than all Castiel's season 6/7 power-grab arc with its exposition about what's going on up there. Hester's public breakdown is one of the few hints we ever get of exactly what Cas is so regretful and self-hating about in later seasons. Every time his storyline trips him over another failure or mistake, it adds to this guilt until he ends up just desperate to do something right. So desperate that it blinds him to the nuances of an evolving situation, sometimes.

I don't think Cas understands until almost the very end of the story, after becoming Jack's father and reaching rock-bottom in his relationship with Dean, that the one thing he always thought he got right in the first place - pulling Dean Winchester out of Hell, saving him, taking his side against an absent and uncaring God - was always victory enough.

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Does Dean know Cas loves him?

Oww, that question's hard on the feels! Okay... okay. Yeah, I think so. Dean's not unobservant and he doesn't lack empathy, so he must be aware on some level. I think he's hung up on not knowing what it could possibly mean for either of them - what the devotion of a creature like Cas could even mean in human terms.

It seemed like Dean stuck and held on the whole "angels don't have the equipment to care, and when they try, it breaks them apart" bit. When was that - season 7, while Cas was off in mental honeybee land? Dean couldn't possibly have held onto that once he saw Cas parenting Jack with such unconditional love, years later, but by then there was so much water under the bridge... too much they both should've done, and shouldn't have done, and did do but then never talked about...? I dunno. I think it just became too big to tackle by then. They never had the luxury of enough time without a crisis to even start.

I think Dean believes that Cas shouldn't or mustn't love him, for various reasons, so he avoids consciously dealing with it as far as possible, and mentally frames it as doing them both a huge favour. Dean's aware, but can't bear it and feels completely unworthy of it, is my take. He wants to protect the people he cares about, including - especially - from himself. The more losses they suffer, the more he doubles down on the self-blame.

In reality, even when he's in absolute torment, as he was while fully human, Cas actually does just fine with his developing emotions - he accepts them, for starters - but from where Dean's standing, from the fragmented parts of the story Dean witnesses, it looks like a long-running disaster movie in which Cas gets repeatedly broken down and diminished and punished for choosing the Winchesters.

Even for a man who started out faithless, having an angel willingly fall from grace and choose him over heaven, brethren, and actual god must be... so overwhelming. It must feel wrong to be the focus of something so big and incomprehensible, even if it wasn't his choice or his fault. Dean's not even close to deciding what to do with that big picture by the time Cas flat-out says, "I love you," and makes it so very, very simple and human.

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Was Cas evil in s6?

I don't think so...? I don't think he's evil there - just horribly, destructively and self-destructively wrong, combined with stubborn and prideful and self-righteous. He has plenty of flaws, but he's not evil while he's still Cas. He retains the brainwashed-angel-soldier mindset of, "Some harm is perfectly acceptable for the greater good", while being emotional enough by now to have a slippery grasp on the difference between his own will/needs and the greater good. He hates deceiving Dean but justifies it as 'protecting him'. He knows perfectly well that talking to Dean right back at the start would've put him on a different path, but he can't join the dots on his own and decide that what he's done and plans to do is morally wrong. I'm not sure Cas is capable of that at this point in his evolution.

After he soaks up the souls of Purgatory, it's hard to tell what's the basic messed-up Castiel, what's power-corrupted Cas, and what's Leviathan-influenced. None of Supernatural's antagonists are simple, and most of them are tragic in the "This could all have been avoided, if only—" way.