#purgatory is poughkeepsie

[shallowrambles]

anon i agree with you and don’t have much to add to it except the latter paragraph is mostly what i mean sans my own hyperbole… i have a dialogue breakdown of it somewhere for andrea that gets into the nuances of how (regardless of how sympathetic i feel and how understandable i find it), that interaction for me personally comes off as: “i beat my devastating and difficult addiction and now you have two seconds to beat your own and if you don’t make the right decision and i am not enough for you to decide to try to change now (as i use somewhat antagonistic/dehumanizing/rigid language) hasta la vista bby!” 🫡❤️

i certainly agree no one was in a good place post-purgatory and everyone who battled there was prone to giving into that sense of hopelessness!

[shallowseeker]

This is the funniest thing you've ever said @ananke-xiii:

[Maybe] John wasn't a Led Zeppelin fan, he knew a few of their songs just fine and used his knowledge to court Mary (good move, king) and then went home, listened to all of their songs, learnt all their lyrics and shaped his personality so that she would like him. Here, I've said it.

And actually, that's pretty damn cute. Mary was so impressed with his passing knowledge that he rushed home to study his crush's interests so the date would go even better next time.

That's so John-coded (overpreparation).

///

But also. I love how this theme reminds me of some of the stuff I write about Harper Sayles and the ghost of "imaginary lovers that never let me down."

Perhaps even John couldn't live up to the idea of John, like Vance could never be the Vance of Harper's expectations (which is, incidentally, why Harper kills him, forever crystallizing him in a Purgatorial "black-and-white," where he could never disappoint her).

This is also tangential to Cas and The Empty: "Come on, Castiel. Wouldn't you rather be a fond memory than a festering disappointment?" In the world of SPN, to live, to be REAL, is to be a disappointment. (Also see: All of Mary's arc.)

[couldnt-think-of-a-funny-name]

any chance for more what if emma doesn't die thoughts from you? I am filled with sorrow for her and Dean once more

ooh....you know for someone who has an obscenely long ghost emma wip I've never really considered if she just survived from the beginning hmm...

well obviously when sam barges in the room dean either manages to put himself in front of emma and talk him down, or, the sexier option, he shoots the gun out of sam's hand. sam still argues but dean is invoking oldest rule here lmao. I don't know if 'poughkeepsie' would apply here but I want him to drop a code word to guilt sam into letting emma come along

between his attitude and the whole 'pulling a gun on her' thing emma reasonably does not like sam right off the bat, so she's practically glued to dean like a shadow for the first couple weeks

(personally I think emma truly wanted to escape and didn't want to hurt anyone, I think she only pulled the knife bc she couldn't read dean and thought he wasn't gonna help her. so obviously that's. less of an issue here)

idk I just really like the idea of emma knowing How to fight but having more of a pacifistic nature, not really blending well with either sides of her family. like she didn't ask dean to protect her from the amazons so she could be a hunter. dean may not be able to give her a normal life while they're busy hiding from leviathans, amazons, and the us government, but he'll be damned if he's gonna force her into a fight or give her a gun. sam tries to convince emma to work as bait for the pennywhistle case and dean goes Nuclear

so once dean's comfortable letting her out of his sight for longer than half an hour she's usually on research or like, the get away driver lol

dean's 'never had enough money to get nice things for sammy' childhood guilt is manifesting aggressively he's buying stuff for emma every time he goes anywhere. whole back seat of the car is decked out with fluffy blankets and pillows, she's got her own collection of music, clothes, stuff like that. she definitely has more stuff than she should have considering they're living on the run but that's not gonna stop dean

sorry I just love the idea of sam constantly picking fights with her and dean being like. Why Do You Have Beef With My Newborn.

like I definitely think sam would warm up to her before the end of the season, especially after cas fixes his mind, but between the amy situation and his personal trauma about feeling like a monster his family should have hunted, I think he'd just. have a rough time with her at first. plus in no world does sam know how to communicate with teenage girls lmao

HOWEVER I don't think she'd stay with him while dean is trapped in purgatory. I think lowkey sam doesn't even really. Consider being her guardian or whatever bc he sees her as grown and capable, but also he's immediately trying to find a place to settle down and emma is like. what the fuck are you talking about none of this is finished???

so she takes off. she wants to find kevin to 1) make sure he's okay and 2) see if his prophet powers can help her figure out what happened to dean and cas. I think she should meet up with charlie!!! she figures if anyone can track down a missing person it'd be her, and we all know charlie's not gonna turn away kid wanting to save her parent.

they do find kevin (and linda!) and get them situated and do what they can to hide them from crowley. dean and cas eventually get out of purgatory the same way as in canon bc they couldn't really figure that out, but at least kevin wasn't abandoned all year and had a decent head start on figuring out the tablet. the four of them have a little clubhouse set up and charlie makes buffy the vampire slayer references or room of requirement jokes literally every day

this is pretty much all I've got right now, but I'm always filled with sorrow on emma's (and deans) behalf omg. someone please save her already

[kylermalloy]

I was tagged my my lovely tumblr wife @letsgobethegoodguys—thank you, darling!! 💛

dean winchester or sam winchester // colt or ruby’s knife // leviathans or hell hounds // meg or ruby // dean’s favorite gun or dean’s purgatory weapon // lucifer or au!michael // chuck or amara // season 1 or season 5 // kevin tran or charlie bradbury  // angels or demons // mary winchester or jody mills // human!cas or crazy!cas // motel rooms or bunker // pie or beef jerky // classic rock or celine dion // dean’s mixtape or dean’s family pictures // werewolf or vampire // leather jacket or flannel // jo harvelle or claire novak // silly episodes or emotional episodes // jess and sam or eileen and sam // changing channels or mystery spot // nurturing dean or badass dean // the born-again identity or heaven can’t wait // a single man tear or the road so far (the songs)

I’ll tag @flightoftheseraph, @poughkeepsies, @thelegendofwinchester, @sealionsam, @dreamsfrozenincandyland, @wendibird, and anyone else who feels like doing this!

[letsgobethegoodguys]

I was tagged by @prayedtoyou - thank you!!! 🤗

dean winchester or sam winchester // colt or ruby’s knife // leviathans or hell hounds // meg or ruby // dean’s favorite gun or dean’s purgatory weapon // lucifer or au!michael // chuck or amara // season 1 or season 5 // kevin tran or charlie bradbury  // angels or demons // mary winchester or jodi mills // human!cas or crazy!cas // motel rooms or bunker // pie or beef jerky // classic rock or celine dion // dean’s mixtape or dean’s family pictures // werewolf or vampire // leather jacket or flannel // jo harvelle or claire novak // silly episodes or emotional episodes // jess and sam or eileen and sam // changing channels or mystery spot // nurturing dean or badass dean // the born-again identity or heaven can’t wait // a single man tear or the road so far (the songs)

I'll tag @kylermalloy, @poughkeepsies, and @aihoshiduo

[philosophicalotter]

ABCs, Supernatural Style

A- Amara and Azazel and Abaddon (we forgot about Adam) B- Baby and Benny and "Bitch" and Bobby C- Cas and Crowley and Claire and Charlie and Chuck and Cain D- Dean and Demons and Demon!Dean E- Ellen Harvelle F- Frank DeVoure (or however u spell it) G- Gabriel and god!Cas and guns H- Heaven, Hell, and Hellhounds I- Impala and "I lost my shoe" and "I'm proud of us" J- Jody (John doesn't deserve it) and Jo and "Jerk" K- Ketch and Kevin and Kline (Jack and Kelly) L- Leviathan and Lebanon and Lucifer M- Mary and Metallica and Michael and Machetes and the Mark N- No Chick Flick Moments O- Orange is The New Black (For Cas' Netflix binges) P- Purgatory and Pamela Barns and Poughkeepsie Q- Queer? R- Rock Music and Rowena S- Sam and Souls and Souless!Sam T- Toni Bevell (man I hate her) and Talbot (as in Bela) U- Uriel V- Vessels and Vamps W- Winchester X- X-Files Y- Yellow Eyes Z- Zachariah

Thanks to @i-think-2-much and @chasingluminescentdreams for helping me brainstorm!

[rebustein94-blog]

Sulfur Town, USA

My first day out of Poughkeepsie was a slow cruise through an afternoon of sulfurous towns and an evening of night-blue Virginia forest. We finally rolled into the station at Manassas just as the sun really went into hiding and the clouds really began to bleed. Snow lilted down out of the sky with the kind of lazy malevolence that turns people equally giddy and terrified. The kind of bad weather everybody loves to hate, because it gives them something to talk about. 

But anyway, the thing that caught my eye the most was this one place we saw sometime in the early evening. The train punched through this town just north of Baltimore called Harrowsport. Everything in Harrowsport was steel and brick and the buildings that weren’t half-burnt shrugged self-consciously out of the dirt. There was a small graveyard of broken stones tucked into a scraggly patch of trees, just beyond the lonely, pale bones of a church-in-progress. There was a sign there that said something about raising money by a certain date, so the church could be fully rebuilt. But the date was three years ago and some of the lettering had fallen off. Somebody had spray-painted these hopeful little balloons along the side of a tenement building a little further on. They floated ever upward from the limestone and junk and broken glass. Pulsing toward the clouds. A big black fence surrounded the whole town, keeping it jammed inside one lonely patch of earth and blocking it from the promise of the world. The very trees seemed to claw their way toward the train tracks, groping against the sky for some, for any, sense of beauty and purpose. For anything other than the purgatory inside the fence. 

On top of all that, the town stank up the train as we went by. Like passing through the fumes issuing from an open wound in the surface of the world.

On a hill on one side of the town, rising higher than any other structure there, was a sign. A beacon of absolutely pristine red and blue: TRUMP 2016. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN. 

The train ducked into a tunnel and Harrowsport imploded into darkness. But I just kept thinking. About the town. The sign. I just kept thinking, “Oh. There it is.”

***

The woman sitting next to me on the train was about sixty. She was nice, and we talked some during the five or so hours we were together. Mostly about places to eat in Manassas, her daughter, trains.

The damn weather.

It seemed like the polite thing to do these days to just avoid talking about politics altogether, because everyone was so divided and no matter what, it wouldn’t end well anyway. Nobody would feel better by the end of it. But we were close to Manassas and I thought I would just see. So I told her, you know, I don’t even watch the news that closely anymore, because it’s just another horrible thing every day. Who can keep up? She rolled her eyes agreeably, and gave some vague response about how tired she was of it all. 

Her eyes got very sad and far away. “It just gets worse every day.”

“Yeah,” I nodded. I looked out the window, figuring this was good enough. I didn’t need to push it.

“You know,” she said. “My nephew was on TV at one of the last rallies.”

“Really?”

“They got a shot of him chanting. Very exciting.” She chuckled. “He almost didn’t go, because he didn’t have his hat.”

“His hat.”

“You know. His hat. You have to have the hat. Everybody who goes to the rallies has the hats.”

“Of course,” I said. I turned back to the window. 

I figure felt the same way about the whole thing because she was quiet for a long while.

As we got off the train, she said, “I never actually got your name.”

I told her.

“I’m Hope,” she said. “Well, it was nice to meet you.”

And she was gone. 

Hope.

Hope...

I couldn’t tell if it was a sick joke. Or something else. So I told myself to stop thinking about it, as the snow continued to fall. Getting worse every second. 

(Manassas, VA)

[shallowseeker]

Sloshing through the muck of purgatory

They should've done this (14x19) x via @spnscripthunt

Season 16 could do this. SPNwin could've done this. Forever shaking my hands at the sky.

[shallowrambles]

I guess the truth is we’re all a little bit in purgatory, a world where work is a redundant, rote, day-to-day grind.

Black-and-white. Unthinking. Uncomplicated. Just survival. “Pure,” so we can philosophize to our heart’s content and meditate on our own emotions.

Assigned task, completed task.

We don’t emerge whole into the real world except in glimpses, seeing the damage our careers and commerce do or the horror the govt we serve has wrought.

So we retreat again—into the metaphysical purgatory of the day-to-day. “We’ve got work to do.” If we have to do it to survive, it lessens the moral wound of it.

[shallowrambles]

5x21 freeform rambling; that old "purity" complex again...

Pure = poughkeepsie

There's something jarring in Pestilence and the camera sort-of implying that Dean is driven by simple rules. Pestilence even steps on his fingers in a way similar to the image of cutting of the fingers off the Four Horsemen.

Dean is always fighting for and against becoming the "pure, good righteous soldier." (Despite the widespread applause of Dean being "a righteous man," for me RIGHTEOUS is also one of those Poughkeepsie terms, and almost never associated with good, not truly.)

Whether or not Dean succeeds in casting off the good soldier label and casting off the soothing feelings of "pure places" depends on his psychological wounds of the moment, really.

And yet...despite AIMING for the cold perfection of angels and Purgatory, he can't help but embody humanity.

Dean is fallible. He's wrong. He's weak.

He's violent and hypocritical at turns throughout the duration of the series, taking hard lines against loved ones: locking them away for their own good/detox, and hard stances against only the demons they choose to trust. Then getting mad when they later do the same to him. (Yes, even Sam in season 8-10; when you get down to it objectively, he's doing to Dean as Dean and Bobby did to him. Helping his family as he learned from his family helping him.)

As audience, we get really mad at Sam, because we just "trust Dean's judgment" more than we do Sam's. Uncomfortably though, the bones of it--that is, the structural components are indeed Sam going through the same motions of "not trusting your monster friend even though he/she saved your life and earned your trust in The War (hi Ruby)" AND "locking you up/detoxing you for your own good." That's just skeletal. IMHO, Dean made his own bed a little bit here, TBH.

In season 15, he even says: "I'm working with a demon. Again. You'd think I'd learn." (It's frustrating to watch him not learn. And yet, he's blown up over Sam and Cas repeatedly for doing the same thing. It's Different (TM) when it's Dean choosing to trust demons. It’s Different when Dean is the one running away/abandoning the Cause.

Dean's demons are lovable and trustworthy (even when they ofc they aren't; we see Crowley kill a crowd of innocent queer lovers as late as season 11, just to make a phone call; we see him let Lucifer out for the sole purpose of having a personal WMD).

Anyway, Dean is messy. He's human. He makes the wrong choices as often as any of the other characters. And he can be righteously self-destructive about it.

The "testing" characters like Pestilence, Lucifer want to tempt our mains to fall into despair and hopelessness.

But some of us keep the hope burning, even when the character has messed up really, really bad and made a bunch of wrong choices. And that's what I like the best!

I feel like Cas embodies this resilience so well!

Dean does keep trying. So does the rest of TFW.

[shallowrambles]

I still see purgatory framed as “pure” like that’s a good thing.

Purgatory is not a good thing. It’s Poughkeepsie.

Dean realized this during Sam’s suicidal trials and obsessions with “becoming pure”…this was at the end of that very season and underlined and bolded that whole concept as a Bad Thing.

[shallowseeker]

Purgatory isn't pure in the good sense; it's a suicide trap and a black-and-white, unthinking world

(where difficult decisions don't have to be made and relationships don't have to be worked at because they exist only as soldiers-in-arms)

Purgatory is total war.

==Simpler morality==

Because the enemies aren’t human, Purgatory is like a zombie game, and you don’t have to think about your enemy as an actual entity. You defend yourself against the enemy, and that's it. It’s an easy morality. Black-and-white. It’s a place where your killing has no consequences. Purity and happiness and queer allegory? That’s mostly a red herring.

It’s not a happy place. That it is ever referred to as such is a taunt. It's always almost, at the core of its theme, a coded reference to dying and suicide, or checking out of life. That's why it is so present in season 8, where all three mains are heavy with suicidal ideation. It also appears in season 10, when Dean wants to kill himself because of the Mark of Cain. It reappears in season 15's The Trap when Cas is effectively "killing himself" via a complementary Mark of Cain.

Purgatory is a place of holy, god-sanctioned killing and self-annihilation. It’s self-flagellation.

They feel purified. It's an "angelic mission" carried to its extreme.

///

==The concept of penance==

[I]f they die truly repentant in charity before they have made satisfaction by worthy fruits of penance for (sins) committed and omitted, their souls are cleansed after death by purgatorical or purifying punishments, as Brother John has explained to us.

And to relieve punishments of this kind, the offerings of the living faithful are of advantage to these, namely, the sacrifices of Masses, prayers, alms, and other duties of piety, which have customarily been performed by the faithful for the other faithful according to the regulations of the Church.

Second Council of Lyon (1274, Catholic)

///

==Purity is a "poughkeepsie word"==

Purity is a reference to this tragic notion of purification by suffering (a theme which Sam also reckons with during the Hell trials).

Cas reinforces the morif, as the Seraph with the burning hands. He turns bodies to ashes. He attracts all the desperate abominations who, deep down, long to be killed. It is a purification rite of burning. A rite of holy absolution.

What Purgatory is about is Cas giving himself whole-heartedly to angelic, unthinking war as penance. To be nothing more than a weapon. Because it’s all he thinks he deserves. That's why Naomi and her angels swoop in and brainwash him so easily.

///

==Dean and Cas==

But that's not what Dean initially wants. When it comes to Cas, he wants to rip Cas away from that life. Because, "Cas, we're going home." Because, "Cas, you're more than a weapon--"

(13x14 Good Intentions draft)

No one could be more trapped by god than the 400+ million year old soldier. But even thought Dean struggles with the same thing, Dean wants to save him, oh how he wants to SAVE him. Through caring about Cas, a doomed soldier, Dean has to care about himself.

///

==Why Sam "should've" looked for them in Purgatory==

From a religious reading of the communion of saints:

Because of the communion of saints, the faithful who are still pilgrims on earth are able to help the souls in purgatory by offering prayers in suffrage for them, especially the Eucharistic sacrifice. They also help them by almsgiving, indulgences, and works of penance.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church

///

==The burden of war==

Dean prayed to Cas. Every night. Not because of romance per se, but to relieve the holy psychiatric burden of war.

He wants to help him heal, too. In healing Cas, a corrupted soldier, Dean heals himself.

“I’m at war. Certain regrettable things are now required of me.” -Castiel

///

==Married to your work==

Season 8 is also about being Sam and Dean being "married" to Hunting. And Cas is married to Heaven. They can't seem to escape their political marriages to duty, sanctioned by God. They are prisoners.

In purgatory you are nothing more than a god-blessed weapon. It’s just more holy war propaganda.

//////

(Text Attributions// Supernatural scripts here via @spnscripthunt. Transcripts are located here via SPNWiki. Visit their Tumblr to donate.)