#actually what am i saying supernatural itself was Not interested in the nuances of soullessness

[quietwingsinthesky]

i really don’t buy any argument that goes ‘soulless sam doesn’t matter as much as souled sam’ because like. he is literally just a guy with some empathy issues. i cannot emphasize enough how much soulless sam is not an object except in how the show ends up treating him; he is literally. just a guy.

[elizabethrobertajones]

m so glad they keep mentioning the paradise so they arent going to gloss ovdr that cause I still cant reconcile s12 with s13 Jack. S12jack as a fetus with the using powers on the doctor, Cas and Kelly making them hellbend on keeping his powers the paradise vision honestly to me fetusjack seemed to use his power with at least intention and awarness and this Jack doesnt look like this at all

I think we read Jack a bit differently back in season 12, because I was always ready to assume he wasn’t strictly in control of his powers, and they started this season by announcing that he and his powers were practically separate entities, which reconciled everything I felt about what he’d “done” in season 12.

The early meta about what Jack might represent in the same way people were guessing what the Darkness would be thematically and nailing it after season 10, made sense and ended up being what they have gone with, about him representing a chance for them all to confront some feelings about stuff through him, and for him to have a chance to have free will. Since he was going to be at least conflicted and they’d spin him being sympathetic at one point or another, it made sense that he wouldn’t really have known what he was doing. I thought it might be that he did it knowingly but had no understanding whatsoever of what he had *actually* done, and that it had all been a sort of basic level of self-awareness self-defence. But him feeling like his powers are another part of him entirely from his consciousness that only react when there’s practically a mutual self-interest decided by his emotions… Yeah, that works for me :P 

It means you can “blame” everything on him but that the actual part we care about (the soft nougat-y centre) isn’t what people think he is. He’ll have a choice if he brings the planet to its knees or raises it to its feet, or doesn’t do EITHER because it’s been 2 weeks and no one’s sat him down and explained to him that destiny is a made up concept by people who want to control you, in this universe.

I mean he could kind of guess from Asmodeus but he hasn’t had anyone be like, nope, that’s how it usually is around here. Haha, remember the time archangels spent millennia engineering the universe for armageddon and we were like screw you? good times, good times.

Anyway, the grey area is enormous on this show and they want Jack to live in it, and that means being very human - more human than any other supernatural anything we’ve ever had on the show. Fresh start, no clue who he is, and only a very blurry sense of anything that happened while he was not yet born. I think the fact he DOES have a sense of some of the things that happened - but he can only really remember Dagon dying and the rift from an abstract perspective means he doesn’t even remember everything he did in the womb. 

Also I think that in 12x20 I was on team “Dean’s right but he’s overreacting” and now like the whole argument in 13x03 was “Dean’s right but he’s overreacting completely” because it’s fairly obvious Sam has more than altruistic motivations to help Jack master his powers, but Dean’s missed the entire emotional nuance, and how Sam relates to Jack and how that would make him want to help him regardless but it just so happens Jack is ALSO useful to him… So I think that’s probably a safe reading :P That Dean has some sense of what happened but that he then takes it in the worst possible direction and gets incredibly upset about it, because he’s messed up and bad things keep happening to the people he loves. And he hasn’t managed to connect all the dots on what happened in season 12 either. It doesn’t mean Jack (or his powers anyway) didn’t DO all those things, just that the more detailed readings on why seem to be holding up under the exploration of Jack’s powers this year. Especially since 13x03 where Sam just asked him outright how it felt to use them and he could barely explain it or use them.

If we accept that Jack and his powers are different - that his powers are cosmic and unreliable and translating his emotions into effects which Jack had no say on - and that that self-defence extended as far as the power preserving itself with NO input from Jack as a cherry on the top to protecting him… I think you can basically characterise the powers as a separate entity, but one so intrinsic to Jack it’s not like it’d manifest as another thing - or if we did get a self vs self thing for Jack the powers would just look like Jack again. 

In 12x10 they helpfully explained in reaaally clear exposition that a nephilim is angel grace and human soul, and if those two parts aren’t mixed into one cohesive whole of a soul absolutely powered up and comfortably combined with angel power, but seeing it as a secondary thing to where the personality and self comes from, it creates a sort of instability, because I don’t think these two parts are MEANT to mix.

(It’s also killing me that this COULD be exposition on Cas, but as much as the writers constantly show their awareness of canon and throw back to everything, they’ve been completely silent on Metatron saying Cas had a soul, and Death saying souls couldn’t be destroyed, and now this - I am dying to know if Cas’s soul is doing okay in there and what will happen to Jack and if it will relate to Cas… I mean it’s killing me because the playbook on writing Cas post-human changed, and although they never ever say it, you could literally classify him as season 4-8 “soulless” and 9 onwards as “not soulless” and the read wouldn’t be wildly wrong about his personality, even if there’s seemingly nothing to say what happened to his soul from 9x09 onwards…) 

(*grinds teeth*)

I mean don’t get me wrong I love Jack, I’ve just been yelling at the screen for ages about this and it’s been like 4 years now, which is way too long for my patience, especially creating a character which basically serves to ridicule my concern about this with his stupid soul and his stupid angel grace :D

… kinda off point by now but yeah. This is how I’ve been reading it anyways and it seems to all fit together to me.