#alt mary

[spnwin-reader]

Sam would be odd man out on snacks even had his parents survived:

JOHN: Licorice drops? Nice choice.

Woe to Sam, continually and perpetually outnumbered, even when Jack joins the family. Hell, even when he eats, Cas like pork rinds and crap food.

Who will eat terrible rabbit-food alongside Sam? No one.

(Maybe Henry?)

SPNwin 1x01, SPN 7x10

[shallowseeker]

The thing with Mary is that Mary is and always was a child soldier in a way that John isn't.

Soldiers die for the Cause, they sacrifice for the Cause, and above all else, they die for each other. That's built into Mary's bones.

This is how the Campbell story begins and perpetuates.

Mary is young. She's desperate. Mother? Dead. Father? One foot in the grave as we speak. And John? Lying dead in front of her, felled to the ground because of Mary's hunting life.

Of course she's going to be vulnerable to make that deal. Of course she makes the deal.

She's been coerced, backed into a corner, torn up by grief. She crumples under the pressure of everything leading up to this moment.

But beyond the machinations and beyond the romance lies her soldierhood.

It tells her it's worth the cost.

She's used to doing the ugly thing.

(Find her "Queens" and she'll move to protect.)

[shallowrambles]

OOF. Imaginary lovers never turn you down.

This is one of Dean's Harper-coded neuroses for sure.

I think because John was hot-and-cold caretaker, Dean is very...insecurely attached. Even as a child, we see him balking at Sam seeking college, to the point of accidentally smothering the dreams on occasion, and pressuring even when tries to be "sorta okay with it." (Like how we see him in Drag Me Away from You)

///

So anyway, it's a neurosis I love love love to see. Dean will use phrases like, "This isn't really you," and occasionally always-and-never statements whenever he's glomped on a brand new ally to fulfill the fantasy of "never letting him down / disappointing him." SUPERMAN, even. That old hero worship.

But much like with Harper Sayles, even Vance isn't Vance! And so, none of Dean's idealized figures are really them either. He struggles with balancing trust and instinct. (Note: This is how all relationships tend to work. It's what's so LOVELY about Dean growing through these imperfections. He gets older and wiser. "He can try to get better, every day.")

He eventually starts to accept the mistakes of his loved ones: Sam, Mary, Cas. HIMSELF. We see in s15 when he insists he always "knew Chuck was squirrelly" when he clearly didn't. Dean is so used to being right about people/intuition, it's REALLY had to swallow when he's dead wrong. "I didn't wanna admit I was wrong." (He got played by Crowley, by Cain, then Chuck. It sucks to get manipulated so thoroughly!)

///

Anyway. This theme of imperfection, of seeing one another is even what's driving SPNwin.

It asks the question: "What if mom and dad had been REALLY able to truly see one another?"

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ANYWAY, this stuck out to me!!! I don't know if I want it to be a meta or not, so it goes on the vent blog instead...

IN SEASON 10, Dean is spiraling and running. It doesn't matter who. He's disinhibited, used as a pawn to ensure a "rich man's" continued place as ruler, just as Michael would have used him as a sword to win a war/maintain power.

In season 9-10, Dean is vulnerable. He's reeling from rejection and being shunned for his mistakes. This makes so much sense in the terms of the scripted season 8, with Dean saying "I love you" and getting rejected by Cas, and then again for trying to save Sam's life and “trusting the wrong person" the way Cas (in parallel) trusted Metatron to try to protect others…

After spending all of season 8 coming to terms with the imperfections of his family and loosening up on some of his rigid expectations, after dealing with the complexity of both his little brother AND his would-be love interest, it all blows up in Dean’s face.

Itssooooooooo

//

-> Dean was rejected by his bro for trying to do the right thing, for trying an experimental treatment to save his life, which lead to both the unintended rejection of Cas and Kevin's death. (Sam will later "get Charlie killed" in his attempts to save Dean with ....an experimental hail-Mary.)

-> And in season 9, Cas got back into the Angel war, and Dean didn't like him being a military man again, fearing that it would be Groundhog day all over again. And so, Dean continued to spiral. He was continually paralleled with both Josie Sands-Henry relationship and Josie's shadow self, Abbadon, a knight of Hell, a shrieking wrathful pain.

Dean is become like knight of Hell Abaddon herself at first, before later reversing course to parallel another knight of Hell: Cain.

//

I think of this like Dean's reversal power arc. Dean is become like Rowena: I'll never be powerless again. And his whole world reverses: he gets to call out Sam for the evil Sam is doing, Sam gets to be the one who makes mistakes when trying to save him, and Cas gets the "wife" treatment instead of the war husband one.

Dean is the one to beat Cas up for once, and Cas is one of the characters who gets the brunt of Dean's brutality, because Cas is the one who hurt him the most.

Which brings me to this. Oof. Imaginary people. Imaginary lovers. Escape to the fantasy world. It doesn't matter WHO. Just keep running.

In season 9-10, Dean escapes more fully into a more extreme version of his season 8 neuroses, a world where no one lets him down, except this time he's flipping from imaginary person to person, searching for anyone that "won't let him down."

And guess what? The world still does. And Dean's tired already. Chasing freedom didn't free him or bring contentment.

With the toiling work of Hell on his tail, he runs again, this time to Anne-Marie, who despite his demonness and Crowley's ire, Dean seems to be catching feelings for. Crowley clocks it right away: "Damanged. I can see the old you falling for that."

(Because Dean already is. His humanity is a glimmer, but it's still there. We'll see it in demon Dean’s dispatchment of Lester rather than his assigned target, the wife.)

And more than that, Crowley misunderstands Dean's whole deal: that he is simply running. Running, running, running. Anyone will do.

"Somewhere else.” He says this to Anne-Marie. In a way Dean’s running is checking out of life, a bit like season 7 Cas (nihilism/existential crisis) and season 8 Sam (white picket fence as purely escapism).

But you can't run from yourself.

Dean's humanness hangs on, even in the midst of his Hell tasks, and his humanness persists even in seedy bars with random women-he-should-feel-nothing-for. It is a vexing thing.

He's supposed to feel nothing, to be a rolling stone.

And he isn't.

///

And Dean himself has been a little bit like Anne-Marie herself. It's an old wound by this point, but I see it as a nod to the whole Cas-Raphael thing.

Dean was so busy spiraling over Cas being in danger in s8-10 that he never had time to process all of what happened with Cas’s betrayal. He's still hurt.

And with s9 Cas rejoining the angels, though understandable and well-intentioned...it opened that old vein.

& things like this are in parallel too.

Cause Cas was saying he was doing it for Dean...and then he kept going, punishing Heaven. (There are real feelings for Dean in the mix, but nothing is singular…it’s always tied up in other things.)

I disagree with Metatron in saying that Cas “in love with humanity” solely explained his actions. Yes, Cas is motivated by protecting his human fam, but there have been incredible moments where he wanted to punish the other angels, where he inflicted unnecessary violence on demons (like the demon looting and fleeing Hell in 15x03 The Rupture.

Demon Dean’s “I protected your honor, didn't I?" sounds a lot to me like, Cas’s “Has any but your closest kin ever done more for you?"

Cas did all that for him, or so he said, and yet...

///

Because imho what was going one with Cas wasn't solely about protecting his human family.

There's other complicated stuff in the mix.

It was also about the feelings of betrayal BY Heaven. (Which is why he didn't even trust his own rebel angels!) Cas was utterly rejected by Heaven, MURDERED without a thought by Raphael.

Cas gave into his authoritarianism because he was angry. He was emotional and he was channeling that. They need a firm hand because he loves them. You know, like the specter of pizza man and the babysitter.

///

And yeah, it’s okay that Dean hasn't fully reckoned with that. Dean in s9 said, “Cas, I know you try to be a good guy, okay?" Anne-Marie...she almost...echoes that sentiment when she said “I thought you were a good guy playing bad.”

It's off-key, but it's...similar somehow.

I love that Cas toppled from the Superman pedestal, hitting at Dean's emotional interiority and challenges in the most extreme example possible!

I feel like Lily Sunder flirts with the shadow version of this, because when she first met Ishim, she thought he was PERFECT, too.

It's not one-to-one, but it sure as Hell is getting at Dean's "Cas makes so many mistakes" anxieties, which AU Michael will tap into, too!

But mistake-making IS humanity! AU Michael doesn't get that. (Metatron eventually will. "Sure they lie and they cheat and they steal...but they never give up. YOU do!")

///

So back to Anne-Marie. When she calls Dean on his deeper issues, he:

DEAN: *belittles her judgment and demeans her, calling her a skank* ANNE-MARIE: I'm so screwed up myself. I'm gonna walk out of here thinking I actually deserved that.

This conversation is a a little like this one, where Cas belittles Dean's human status. It's not *skank* but he does call him *just a man.*

CAS: You're just a man.

Anyway, when Dean starts becoming enamored with Anne-Marie, he's not only clinging to humanity, not only starting to love even when he isn’t supposed to be able to (another Cas parallel), he’s doing his own version of soul-searching, seeing himself in someone else.

But because this is his reversal arc, where HE has the power, he gets to be in Cas's more powerful position here and he gets to lecture Sam.

(Until Amara, ofc, where he will abruptly flip to a powerless default.)

ALSO!!!! There’s this swirling painful question of being nothing more than an EXCUSE to do violence…or used as THE MUSE to give another false person’s work “more importance.”

Dean is afraid he is both for Cas.

I mean. Cas left after season 5, after a weird convo where Dean tries to figure out if Cas plans to stay and/or cares about him by “fishing” for info.

Cas also left in season 8 to go and lock up Heaven behind him forever, etc etc.

Dean worries that he’s more muse than loved one. A banner to wave in the war. An excuse. Inspirational, at best.

///

And Dean is working through his defense mechanisms. And like I said, idealization is a normal part of most relationships.

It usually occurs in the early phases and signals immaturity. But choosing to move past these phases, choosing to stay with people and keep striving can be a wonderful theme of resilience, even if in SPN does it in extreme strokes.

///

And then we get MARY, the motherload of Dean's idealization.

In season 15, when Dean says, "My mom is my hero," he means it in a different way to his early idealizations. He means warts and all! It’s so great!

///

Which is why I love Optimism SOOOOOooooo much. You get Harper, who struggles with similar things...and we get that dynamic scene of her crowing about perfection is contrasted with Dean's wisdom he's giving to Jack!

BONUS thoughts:

Cas, Raphael, and Dean, and the triangle with Dean, Hell, and Anne-Marie reminds me of this SPNwin scene:

Ah, yes, another fave motif. The John-Cas-Jack boxing motif.

Anyhoo, we have John saying he wants to PROTECT Mary...to KEEP HER FROM DYING. He's doing this to protect her.

And...

Yeah, sometimes I will kiss Robbie on the mouth.

BONUS BONUS thought: in SPNprime, Mary does the same thing for her kids....resonating with John's journal and his fear. Mary dives head-first into trying to eradicate ALL the danger...to win the ENTIRE war so her sons can be safe.

(Aside///Samuel C does this in SPNwin too...with the box that would eat up all the evil in the world.)

I love the theme. Mary nearly destroys the thing she was wanting to protect in the first place. (Like Henry. Like John and his boys. Like so many others.)

BONUS:

It's not either/or! For the matter, why is it peace OR freedom, never both!

[candyje11yfish]

zombie witch shiver🧪🧠

[hiraspit]

[restingcorpse]

[mqolearts]

her dad made benches... he liked to sit... can i make it any more obvious

[idonthaveanyurlideas]

is this the adventure you were looking for

[pineappleciders]

happy birthday aubs

[teabagtoaster]

trg as pokemon trainers for this year's D20 zine jam!

this was part of I Choose You! - A D20 x Pokemon Zine, which you can find as part of this bundle (featuring every zine made from this year's jam!) all proceeds go to the oPt Humanitarian Fund :-)

[geryone]

Incarnadine, Mary Szybist

[spnwin-reader]

Loss in common:

Enter Millie, The Prickly-but-Hopeful Fixer

[We note that, even after all this time, Millie's building carries the MoL Aquarian star of protection, and it's still Winchester Garage, not...whatever-her-maiden-name is.]

When we first meet Millie, she's bitter. As the one who "kept the lantern on," "the one who stayed," she's hurt and defensive, a lot like how Dean grows to be in latter seasons of SPN.

(Even post-demonicity, Dean is still expected to be the soft place to fall for everyone. Even after Jack kills Mary, Cas has this expectation of Dean's soft-heartedness: "it's possible he could work through this. One day, he may explode and let it all out and breathe deeply and move on.")

Anyway, Millie!

Her reunion with John is part passive-aggressive but loving. We see that Millie, like Dean, has intense abandonment trauma. She speaks abrasively-but-affectionately. She calls John "Kid, Kiddo, etc." which was a go-to with Dean for both Claire Novak and Jack Kline.

JOHN: Love what you've done with the place. MILLIE (passive-aggressive): Well, my husband and son walked out on me, so. It's the best I could do. (growing emotional) Dammit. Welcome home, Kiddo.

Gruff, abrasive, imperfect? Maybe. But full of love.

Alt John and Millie are united by the common loss of Henry, just as Prime John, Sam, and Dean were united by the common loss of Mary.

John thinks Henry walked out on them, but I think Millie is likely more complex. With her tacit knowledge of the Men of Letters, I think it's reasonable that she at least suspects that he might be dead.

What does that tell us about her? It tells us that the loss of Henry was unbelievably painful--it's probably easier for her to consider he left than the very likely truth: his demise.

She's a fixer. That's what she does.

She holds out hopeless hope.

JOHN: I'm fine, Mom. MILLIE: The Hell you are. You've been chasing your dad since he walked out that door. I know that's why you enlisted. But it is time to let the past go, kiddo.

But Millie isn't healed either. She hasn't let the past go, even as she pursues her dream of being a mechanic and owning a garage (like her father). Letting the past go hasn't helped her heal.

In fact, carrying on hunting and the MoL business is what seems to soothe her loss, giving her new meaning and purpose. Millie and John's push-pull dynamic with hunting is much like how it was with Ellen and Jo Harvelle.

///

But overall, we see what Henry's absence wrought. It's just as Henry feared in SPN Prime (9x17 Mother's Little Helper):

HENRY: Therein lies the problem. As our initiation grows closer, I... I worry that this might be a selfish endeavor on my part. JOSIE: Selfish. How? HENRY: If anything were to happen to me, what of John? Millie? JOSIE: They'd be proud to know that you answered the call. HENRY: No. My wife would be a widow, and my son fatherless. I don't expect you to understand. You don't have a fam--[he pauses] I'm sorry, Josie. I didn't mean it that way. JOSIE: I know, Henry. You're a good man. Millie is lucky to have you.

This directly parallels Cas and his allegiance to his work, Heaven, (Heaven is a truck, and Cas is a truck-driver; Dean thinks he's Josie when he's actually Millie).

It also beings to mind the visual of ("little John") Jack's entrance as he wanders around muttering, "Father. Fa-ther. Father. I need to find him. Castiel. He was supposed to be here," while looking for his long-expected, lost father in 13x01 Lost and Found.

But it's also an off-key parallel to prime John, who would become as Millie was, a bereft widower in the cold, floundering and ill-equipped to handle the dangers of the supernatural world.

///

Enter Mary, Action Hero

(Note: Mary's got a short range, so I love how she uses speed to her advantage to get larger targets off-balance.)

///

And importantly, John...is NOT allowed to look cool. It's a RULE. He's a dorky...little...guy.

Mary knocks the demon into a blessed holy water vat, a call-forward to something prime John will do in SPNprime 01x21 Salvation.

//

When Alt John and Alt Mary meet:

Mary's father has been absent (missing) from her life for a short time, and John's father Henry has been absent for most of his life, just as when Dean and Cas meet, theirs too is a tale of missing fathers. Cas's father was absent for all of his life, and Dean's flaky dad has been gone for a (relatively) short time. It also very obviously parallels Sam and Dean searching for their missing father.

When they break inside the Men of Letters clubhouse, Mary keys into John's emotions about his father. This reminds me of of the first time Dean keyed in really hard to Cas's emotions in 5x16.

///

JOHN: How do you cope with it all? MARY (wryly, jokingly): I'll let you know when I find out. (SPNwin 1x01)

//

DEAN: Yeah, I get it. I know how you feel. CASTIEL: How do you manage it? DEAN (wryly, jokingly): On a good day, you get to kill [The Whore of Babylon]. (SPN 5x17)

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Recent losses of friends & family:

Additionally, Mary and John have both suffered recent losses. Mary lost her narrative twin Maggie, and John lost his comrade Murph to war.

[Mary's cousin went to Hell, just as Sam's brother went to Hell in season in vintage and mid-SPN.] Mary's hunting family was torn asunder, parents separating.

And John? WIth war, John signed up to fill a void left by his father, to find meaning in life.

We can even recall Dean's words to Gordon in 2x03 Bloodlust, how Dean struggled with the idea of "The Invincible Dad" and how his death made the word more terrifying, how it left a wound of depression inside of him that he sought to fill with meaning through work:

DEAN: Yeah. Yeah, you know. He was just one of those guys. Took some terrible beatings, just kept coming. So you're always thinking to yourself, he's indestructible. He'll always be around, nothing can kill my dad. Then just like that (snaps) he's gone. I can't talk about this to Sammy. You know, I gotta keep my game face on. (clears throat) But, uh, the truth is I'm not handling it very well. Feel like I have this - GORDON: Hole inside you? And it just gets bigger and bigger and darker and darker? Good. You can use it. Keeps you hungry. Trust me. There's plenty out there needs killing, and this'll help you do it. Dean, it's not a crime to need your job.

Dean lost his dad, and Gordon lost his sister. This emptiness is depression. John lost his dad and suffered that loss all his life. He signed up to the war for the GLORY OF PURPOSE. He didn't sign up to the war for more pain and grief, but that's exactly what he got.

What's the thing Dean can't fill up, not with booze or love or even sex? It's grief and pain. It can only be filled with love, which is what Cas's confession narratively does in 15x18.

It's also what Mary's love and the love of the Core 4 will eventually do for John.

///

SPN Prime season 8 side-parallel: Connections of recent grief ALSO calls to mind season 8, how Sam connected with Amelia when they had both suffered a loss, Sam lost his narrative twin to Purgatory and Amelia lost her husband to war.

Theirs was a fast-paced reactionary relationship born of grief, something that pinged and annoyed Amelia's father, leading him to be very passive-aggressive with Sam. (Her father was a dick, but he's both a soldier himself and does know her best and probably has her best interests in mind. He recognized that was Amelia mid-freakout, OOC. He pings that her out-of-characterness is a weird reaction to grief).

He was right to be concerned about the shallowness and stability of it. These types of reactionary relationships are well-known: they can be very shaky, melodramatic, idealized, and weak when stress-tested.

Sam (and vintage Dean) both have this tendency to be all-in or all-out when it comes to The Cause. Neither strike a balance very easily. They tend to either be ALL IN for the Perfect War with Perfect War Companions at Your Side...or rushing into something tenuous that represents a weak idea that winds up unsatisfying because it's not genuine: Perfect White Picket Fence or Howling-at-the-Moon Dishibitory Party Life.

In SPNwin, John is doing a lot of running, too. He rushes into the thing with Betty (weak and tenuous), then he rushes into war, he rushes into hunting, and he runs into the relationship with Mary.

This theme of Running into Danger / Running From Danger persists. John certainly struggles with it, BUT in a departure from his past behavior, this new thing with Mary gets a lot of stress-testing, eventually moving from limerence into turbulence, power struggle, and de-idealization. (SPNwin 1x12, The Tears of a Clown)

///

SO.

Mary and her ragtag gang of friends embark on a journey to look for the missing Samuel Campbell the way Sam and Dean look for the errant John Winchester, the way the Banes twins look for their mother Tasha Banes in Twigs, Twine, & Tasha Bane.

Certainly the core 4 are all "running scared" and clinging to one another, having all lost loved ones in a variety of ways. They are united in empathy over their respective losses:

John (dad, comrades)

Mary (narrative sibling, missing dad, splintered family and parental separation)

Carlos (whole family killed by a monster)

Lata (no-contact with her family because they allowed her beloved nanny to die; nonsensical/cruel hierarchy of human society)

Ada (husband lost to madness, son potentially a puppy-destined-to-be-wolf)

And finally we get Henry's letter:

If you're reading this, then I'm gone. I'm sorry I kept the truth from you, John. There's a dangerous world out there, and our family has fought that danger for centuries. The answers to all your questions are at the address below. I love you and your mother. Always.

I think this idea of Henry Winchester as a secret-keeper, and as Mary-prime as a secret-keeper fed into what we know about John-prime turned into: a neuroses of paranoia and over-preparedness.

But thanks to Dean, Alt John has some new tools to work through this: knowledge. Even his anger is useful, openly telling his mother how disappointed and betrayed he feels over being kept in the dark. For her part, she gives him her emotional truth: that she only wanted to protect him.

It's the first healing step for both of them.

[shallowseeker]

Man, do I ever miss Alt!John and his fucked up little feelings.

[yeehawpim]

I just assumed "High-Five Heroes" came from some hope for positivity, but Brennan talked about Kipperlilly pushing it on her group in this really cool interview and that gave it a p interesting extra dimension for me

[ghostcashewart]

drawing mary ann while we watch the new episode

[ursaspecter]

Week 2 of X-Men Inktober!