#a viewer's guide to avoiding wtf'ery

[mittensmorgul]

Hey, due to the whole pandemic chaos, I have so far only watched thd first half of season 15. Obviously I've read all the spoilers about the awful finale. How far would you recommend should I dip my toe into the second half of s15 if I want to maintain the illusion that the finale never happened? Is up to and including e18 safe? Would really appreciate your help.

Hi there! 

And yeah, you’ll have to make your own decisions on what you want to watch, and where you feel like stopping, and what you would find an acceptable point to stop and let your imagination (or a variety assortment of fic, headcanon, etc.) decide on the ending you feel best with. All I can tell you is what *I personally*-- having watched all of it myself-- feel good with.

I know not everyone likes 15.19 (and yeah, it could do without the whole gratuitous Lucifer and Michael pointless final showdown... those guys have been irrelevant forever...), but up to the point where they do defeat Chuck, I’m pretty satisfied with how that all went down. YMMV, though, if you were expecting or hoping for something different.

It’s ~after~ that, the final few scenes of 15.19 where Jack restores the world and waves goodbye, followed by the disjointed and nonsensical montage of Sam and Dean’s road trip memorial to everyone they apparently no longer care about now that they won that starts the massive wtf for me. Never seeing the *actual people we all cared about* being restored by Jack, never learning Cas’s fate, nor Eileen’s, nor Donna’s, nor Charlie and Stevie’s, nor anyone else, and the Winchesters just going back to the drudgery of the solo hunting life they spent the entire series trying to escape... that’s where it goes all wtf for me, personally.

So yeah, if you wanna see Chuck get his comeuppance, I’d watch through that scene in 15.19 (you can ff through the Lucifer and Michael nonsense fight if you wanna avoid a gratuitous double murder of a woman on screen), but otherwise 15.19 seems to be setting up a wonderful array of possibility and free will for our characters (ALL OF THEM, not just Sam and Dean). And then the show was like... okay but what if we didn’t do any of that, and then tripped and fell on its face.

Lol, I’m currently rewatching early s15, and remembering just how much I loved it. Remembering just how much influence Chuck exerted over the narrative, and looking at the finale it’s literally giving us Chuck’s ending anyway, rendering everything else in the entire series pointless. So yeah, good on you for choosing wisely.

You can stop after 15.18, if you want, and just imagine whatever scenario for putting the world right and defeating Chuck suits your personal tastes. Or you can watch through Chuck’s defeat in 15.19. Either way, yeah as soon as Chuck goes down and Sam, Dean, and Jack drive away together, that’s a quality place to stop. The rest from that moment on is basically coda fic. And you can choose if you wanna read Dabb’s or *waves hand at ao3*

For reference, here’s a sorted-by-kudos look at the 15.20 fix it tag on AO3. Fair warning going in though, a LOT of these incorporate the canon of 15.20 and the “fix it” part is Dean and Cas reuniting in Heaven (which... I have read exactly zero of these, because no thank you). The warning bit comes in because they are NOT marked MCD, because the characters are “alive in Heaven.” Which... I found out the hard way... I just do not care for canon Heaven, and have zero desire to see fanfic interpretations of it, but that’s just me. I know some folks dig it, but it’s not for me. So if you also only want to read “everyone lives” fic, then please mind the tags and summaries. :)

(also, shameless self-promotion time... at the time I’m posting this, my fic which I only posted yesterday so is a good way down the search results, so if you want to know how I imagine a better ending, here have Revenge of the Text. it picks up after the “Jack waves goodbye” scene at the end of 15.19. Or alternately, if you do for whatever reason choose to watch the finale knowing exactly what will happen and want a way to justify and dismiss it entirely, have The Famous Final Scene. There’s a whole mess of “this happened but it wasn’t real and here’s why” fic out there, from witch curses to nightmares to djinn dreams, which I also personally find satisfying since I did unfortunately insert 15.20 into my own eyeballs and had to deal with the wtf’ery first hand.)

All that said, good luck to you with whatever you choose for yourself. And be grateful that you-- unlike Sam and Dean, and unlike all of us who watched it air-- you actually have a choice. <3