#chuck coercing dean into the role of The Father is part of the reason why his story has never worked

[ananke-xiii]

Talking about mommy issues... I'm not a 100% fan of Jack as the destiel son BUT it's important to me that going there means acknowleding that "archetypically" speaking Dean is The Mother while Cas is The Father*. And this isn't just because, when Sam accuses Dean of acting like their father, he replies with a Freudian slip if I've ever heard one ("I'm not his mother"), it's also why Chuck's myth-retelling doesn't work (Abraham is totally Cas and he and Jack subverted that myth) 'cause first he doesn't understand Dean and second he's not an astute storyteller and doesn't realize his story was already subverting the myth he wanted to re-enact. Therefore he should've created a situation where Jack (The Son) was forced to kill Cas (The Father) if he wanted to provoke Dean, this was Jack's original sin according to Dean, come on Chuck, it's been 14 seasons, everybody already knew Dean was not gonna kill Jack. He's totally fine with caging and entrapping his putative sons but he draws a line at killing them (insert that meme from Community). (I mean, I know Chuck wants Dean to do his bidding but after 14 years he had to get a little more creative than that. Maybe he should've listened to his editor Metatron, just saying. "maybe less about detail and more about balance") ((hello Becky and Metatron parallel)).

It would have also meant that Jack's story would've gone back to its genesis + the long tail of dead parental figures (not only Kelly and Cas but Nick/Lucifer and Mary and whoever else I'm forgetting lol).

By the end of s14 there is a short-circuits of symbols so it all had to go tits up, hence the rising of the dead etc. etc.

*This doesn't mean they are the Good Mother and the Good Father as they're clearly not but these are the primordial energies that they both channel to Jack. Also, obvs patriarchy in SPN is very much alive and well as demonstrated by the fact that the Good Mother and the Good Father are only the Dead Mother and the Dead Father and unfortunately for Jack this is what he got when he was born. He's not even born and he already lives in an ideal world with ideal figures compared to whom he'll always fall short.

Also, Jack's got the power to wake up from the Empty his putative father because his Mother (Dean) is grieving his death and he wants to please him: Jack is a total mama's boy.

[katsidhe]

15.09 vs. 11.10: Chuck, Lucifer, and the Art of Persuading Sam Winchester

15.09 gave me strong 11.10 vibes, for obvious reasons. And so, because I had 11.10 in my mind while watching 15.09, I immediately started thinking about why Sam capitulated relatively easily in 15.09, while in 11.10, facing worse circumstances and a more convincing argument, Sam did not.

Here are my lengthy thoughts about that comparison . This is also a thinly veiled excuse for me to compare and contrast Lucifer and Chuck. (What a great family.)

Let’s start out with the observation that Chuck and Lucifer both care a lot about their respective images.

Lucifer’s wanted to be regarded as plenty of different things—a wronged son, a martyr, a terrifying power, a teller of harsh truths, king of all evil, a good father. He plays an active role in his own mythos; he wants to be the center of attention. He’s the hero of his own story, and no one else gets a say.  

Chuck, instead, takes a behind-the-scenes role. While he cares just as much as or more about PR than his son does, he wants to be viewed as both lofty and benevolent. He wants to be so removed from mortal affairs that moral codes don’t apply to him, and yet also, paradoxically, be seen as magnanimous and kind. He’s not the hero; he’s the Wizard of Oz offering gracious intervention, and he’s the bard recording tales with a spin of poetic untruthfulness.

Chuck is less personally cruel—he doesn’t do his own dirty work, he hangs his righteousness on small rescues and insignificant kindnesses; he shrugs and points out his creations are free to make their own choices in the death mazes he designs. He pretends to think he can take honest feedback. He’s even squeamish about hurting Sam.

Chuck, like his son, likes to think he’s not the bad guy. Lucifer will try to persuade people to do what he wants, but failing that, he won’t hesitate to coerce them. Chuck usually likes to think he doesn’t do the same thing, but his snapping point is just as perilously close to the surface. In 15.09, Chuck tries force before he tries psychology, the opposite of Lucifer in 11.10. And this isn’t so surprising. Chuck is unaccustomed to being defied—every significant time it’s happened historically, it ends with the offending party stewing in cosmic lockup rather than seeing the error of their ways—whereas Lucifer, who whipped up a full-on rebellion back in the day, is extremely accustomed to using persuasion.

Unlike Chuck, Lucifer doesn’t care about whether people think he’s nice, or generous. He commits all sorts of cruelties that he views as either deserved, minor, or morally irrelevant, because he thinks his higher objectives are justification for pretty much anything. He hurts people who’ve hurt him before, or he hurts people whose lives he considers insignificant, or he hurts people in service to a ~philosophical point~ that he thinks is important.

So, when it comes time to persuade Sam, Lucifer is focused on himself. He makes explicit the case that what he can bring to the table is the most important part of the deal: he can beat Amara. He’s selling himself as the hero, as a power that Sam cannot deny.

Chuck isn’t selling himself. Nor is he offering a wizard’s solution, some kind of deus ex machina that’s surely within his power. Instead, he’s just trying to demoralize Sam, and frankly he’s kinda bad at it. His torture is subpar and he knows it. His threats are all ones Sam’s heard or even lived before. But it’s still important to him that he be perceived as not just a storyteller, but the storyteller. His sale, like Lucifer’s, is still predicated on power—an ill-defined power over the narrative that Sam doesn’t understand.

Chuck doesn’t understand Sam half so well as Lucifer does. Chuck’s pitch is a threat against Sam’s future, and it’s one that might have been a lot more devastating ten years ago for Sam—the “your family will die hunting” and even the “you’ll become a MONSTER, Sam” ultimatums are much better tailored for early seasons Sam than late. It smacks of the same slavishness to traditional Winchester Tropes (tm) that had Chuck trying unsuccessfully to get Lilith in a 20-something vessel to seduce Dean: he doesn’t really get that his characters have changed and aged.

In fairness, Sam doesn’t understand Chuck terribly well either. The one bit of insight Sam manages is realizing that Chuck doesn’t like getting his own hands bloody, but he’s wrong-footed by Chuck’s insistence that, actually, the vamp!chesters ending isn’t one of his favorites. Sam’s obviously uncomfortable with being unable to assess the scope of Chuck’s knowledge and plans. He can’t tell what’s a story draft and what isn’t, or which kinds of suffering Chuck wants for him and which he doesn’t. Neither does Sam have the same personal spite for Chuck that he has for Lucifer—and this more than anything else is the reason he allows himself to capitulate to Chuck’s threat.

Lucifer’s pitch in 11.10 was based on the past. He uses a litany of Sam’s accomplishments and weaknesses to lean heavily on Sam’s guilt complex. His arguments boil down to this: You can’t trust yourself to make decisions. Your only real reason to say no is your selfish fear of me. You’d doom the planet just to spite me, you’d make a choice thinking only of your own discomfort and everyone in the world will suffer for it.

And because he knows Sam so well, these hits land immediately. It’s a good pitch, well-calculated—Sam doesn’t trust himself, Sam is afraid, and Sam knows he’s not capable of a rational decision under these extreme circumstances.  

But it doesn’t work. Because frankly, it all lands a little TOO well, well enough that Sam’s able to throw out the whole thing out of, basically, sheer spite. Instead of being swayed by these arguments that he can’t refute, Sam finds himself willing to admit that, yeah, Lucifer’s right, Sam IS willing to risk the Darkness to spite him; he hates and fears him enough that he’s willing to rely on faith in some other option, ANY other option, as long as Lucifer doesn’t get another shot at the world. Sam says, more or less, “okay, fine, you’re right, but have you considered FUCK YOU.”

No matter the logic, no matter the emotions, no matter the carrots or sticks, Sam can always rely on the core principle that “Lucifer should not be allowed to get what he wants, because screw that guy.”

But Chuck’s not Lucifer. Sam doesn’t have the same bone-deep conviction that whatever Chuck wants will inevitably make everything worse. And that’s why Chuck’s pitch, though it gets a C+ from me compared to Lucifer’s solid A, works.

It’s not even clear whether Chuck’s forecast is a threat or a prediction—is he saying without narrative interference, chaos will inevitably win out? Or is he claiming that he will cause this monster outbreak intentionally? Either way, Sam supposes, it doesn’t really matter. He believes the threat, as much as he ever believed the doom of the Darkness. And while he knows he might be able to survive it or find a way around it, he really, really doesn’t want to be forced to, not if he can avoid it. Defying Chuck is neither as necessary nor as clear-cut as defying Lucifer.