#spn adjacent-ly

[scottstiles]

trying to put off watching 15x19 for the stack has unintentionally left me thinking about the episode so to take my mind off i decided to gif a movie so my eyes flittered over my movie folder and landed on dogma and my brain was like oh ya didnt you wanna gif that alanis handstand scene so im sitting here watching from ben affleck's exploding head and it hits me- this movie and that episode end the exact same (and opposite) way. alanis god takes a look around the street, takes a breath, and no more dead bodies everywhere. jack stands in the middle of an empty street, looks around, and brings everyone back to life. both stand there with the same inscrutable smile meant to convey benevolent omnipotent mystery. both characters just bursting with new soul energy. which spn writer is the kevin smith fan tell me now i need to know (and why didn't jack get to do a handstand up against a tree in a flowery garden huh?)

[lol-jackles]

The Jared doesn’t want a spinoff Anon is at it again:

https://www.tumblr.com/walkergirlsposts/760924297799860224/meet-and-greet-anon-here-and-what-i-said-was-jared

I don’t want to say that M&G anon is lying, but saying Jared said he full on doesn’t want a spinoff … or to do surfing scenes … seems like a weird thing for Jared to say when several articles like this are still/again coming out:

https://x.com/deadline/status/1832109025779183877?s=61&t=kVyYZFyDcANVMAVTMNa5xw

Surly not EVERYONE from Kripke to CBS is just pressuring Jared and he doesn’t want to actually do anything. CBS seems to be pushing the spinoff pretty hard, and I doubt they’d do that if Jared has refused to do it.

You were right about him having a new/renewed deal with CBS, though. 👏

Link. The M&G Anon never got back to me after my last question to if they have a tumblr account or not. It's sus that this anon is going to a Jared blog and a Jared-adjacent blog sharing their alleged M&G experience. It's more likely that they saw our screenshots in Natasha's tweets and wanted to ....I dunno, kill hopes and dreams even though I don't care, and others actually know Jared's M.O?

While Jared has said before in his M&Gs that he plans to retire after SPN ends, fans noticed he stopped saying that around 2017 or 2018 ish and that's because he signed a holding deal with CBS studios. No way that Jared would say he doesn't want a spin off in his M&G unless the Anon misunderstood his tone. He might be still in negotiation on the eventual permanent filming location. Pilots are often filmed in California and then move to a new location for the remainder of the series i.e. Supernatural and Ghosts pilots were filmed in L.A and Pasadena respectively before moving to Canada.

"You were right about him having a new/renewed deal with CBS, though."

Yup, the article literally said he re-upped his talent deal with CBS studios.

[keviintrans]

some pins that are up over at my etsy! check it out if you fancy 💖

[girl4pay]

i think it was you a while ago that said something about not liking the use of like Magic And Adjacent Forces to circumvent the need for like… communication or emotional honesty or like the work of developing mutual understanding etc and rewatching SPN i keep thinking about like the inverse of that? where like the very real presence of all this supernatural fuckery in their lives keeps operating as this like scapegoat for so much very human emotional shit that they just. do not deal with at all ever and like… idk idk what i’m trying to say like it never or very rarely feels done in a way that feels like it’s meant to be like symbolic or representative really which like i don’t think i’d like either but like… idk i was just watching an ep where dean’s freaking out to bobby that maybe sam came back from the dead Wrong and Bobby’s like ‘no demon’s lie so sam’s probably just fine’ and no-one’s like ‘hey but like he did DIE under very upsetting circumstances and now his brother’s going to hell and bad shit keeps happening like… maybe he’s just having a good old fashioned Bad Fucking Time of it maybe?’ idk idk what point i’m really trying to make here tbh i’m just really trying to resist the urge to message my best mate bugging her about this bc i’ve definitely sent her enough semi coherent rewatch messages already in the past few days

YES i was just thinking about this omg. like how their whole childhood john’s fucked up obsession and holding onto his grief is justified by the existence of demons so when ppl are like maybe you need to let go or process or move on he can be like no they just don’t understand and it’s true they DON’T understand that demons exist. or like the episode i just watched where sam is influenced by a ghost and all his resentment of dean gets preyed on and he tries to kill him and after he’s like i didn’t mean any of it and dean is like didn’t you? and sam is like ofc not but like. the point of the ghost was he turned small anger into homocidal rage but because it’s supernatural they can just ignore it and move on repressed…it really is like if Evil as a Force exists you don’t have to every check yourself or examine your feelings or actions ever because you’re either fine or evil and if you’re evil you can’t do anything about it. and in this show someone will shoot you eventually or you will pay in hell so its fine. ah the americana of it all. but then the whole thing w sam and dean specifically dean is he WON’T let that ‘natural’ order take care of sam because he’s been taught he can change things by lying/trying hard enough/being good enough and sam is like ? an object or a reward to him and then w sam he’s always trying to be his own person but it’s always in reaction to dean or john so he can’t ignore the guilt and the feeling of indebtedness and then he sees his own anger as this all or nothing thing like either he’s Normal or he’s Like His Family. so you just end up with these two ppl who by show rules should be put down for experiencing the human condition loving and hating each other so much for it it’s CRAZY! which in the end is just like what having a sibling is like but. also watching 1x11 thinking about how sammy is religious and john is dean’s god let’s not even touch that rn though

[incarnateirony]

First of all I love your meta. Second I still can't believe Dabb really said "pathways". My question is different though. I know it's old and we should focus more on the new as time goes on but I still don't understand what gives it away that what Zachariah showed to Sam and Dean is how future would be and not him toying with them. Is it 'cause he's not powerful enough for that?

Well, for 1, Zachariah outright says it, but of course there’s always room for unreliable narrarator.

For 2, there’s other elements that actually betray this like Zach actually not touching anything IN the alternate future he doesn’t belong in, but point 3 and its very long answer will actually cover some of those, as the creatives themselves explained that. (Episode written by Ben Edlund)

For 3, Ben Edlund himself says it. Now, as I know recently I’m being followed around by a bunch of goblins that want to challenge everything I say I will disclaimer, I just spent like 15 minutes searching for the quote, but seeing as it’s ten years old now, I’m struggling doing so -- I did find some very close adjacent ones below that fulfill the same purpose. I do know I reblogged it at one point in the past, because this has been enough of a point of contention it put me on the “out”s with some meta authors, as it was a discussion that some people just “can’t deal” with it being an alternate timeline/reality and choose to see it another way (ie Zach’s just fucking with them), and then along comes someone with the Edlund quote that literally says, no, this is not just some made up world by Zachariah, it’s an actual alternate timeline.

So while I can’t find that EXACT quote, in particular, I did find this one:

Kripke: –Future Dean was lying and manipulating him and we showed it to Bob—and this is, by the way, a perfect uh, model, or—

Edlund: We had crawled up our own asses, we had lit a campfire, and we were having s’mores.

Kripke: –a perfect picture of why Bob Singer is so invaluable to Supernatural. Which is, like, we show him the draft and he reads it and goes, like, “What the hell is this?!” And we’re like, “It’s cyclical! Time is cyclical!” And he’s just like, “What? What’s wrong with you? I don’t even understand what the hell any of this is! Just shut up!”

Edlund: And remember, we would come into his office and draw pictures of it—

Kripke: Yeah, yeah, we literally—

Edlund: “No, no, Bob, look! It’s a circle with a line through it and these two dashes!”

Kripke: We were drawing him a diagram of the nature of time travel in Bob’s office and he looks—he just gives us this wonderful dry look like “You’ll be drawing that for the audience?”

Edlund: Yeah, I know, right. (laughs)

Kripke: That look is called the Quiet Stop It. And then we like, “All right”, and we just knew. And it was very late, we were, like, already in prep.

Edlund: Yeah.

Kripke: We pulled that whole notion. And that was like a big through-line. That was probably like six or seven pages of the script, which when you’re that late in the game is a lot.

Edlund: Yes. But though–

Kripke: –to pull and rethink. And by the way, so mu—glad we did it.

Edlund: Much better, yeah. And it really just moved to an alternate universe model, much better. And also, there were like two pages of dialogue of Dean just going—

Kripke: Explaining it.

Edlund: “Let me again try and” –not explaining, reiterating with different metaphors to try and create a picture.

Kripke: “Time is a bus. I got off the bus. Then I got back on.”

Edlund: (laughs)

Kripke: So, yeah, that’s the process.

This actually comes from the DVD commentary, and they go on starting that the episode was originally called “Clone Wars” and had no intention of future/alternate anything, before they basically went bananas with the idea and started coming unglued about time travel.

They literally went so far as to try to draft several minutes of script explaining time travel and, instead of making it a single linear circle of time while Robert Singer looked at them like lunatics for spewing cosmic theories (boy howdy mood), they went with an alternate universe model, which still in some essence does involve time travel, but it’s basically more quantum theory of branches making infinite universes/possibilities, so at X point you chose different and thus Z event happened instead down the line, but in another universe at X point you chose a different thing so Y happened instead.

*jazz hands*

There IS also this article/interview quote with Edlund:

Another big picture aspect that comes into question with Edlund’s episode The End is whether angels can really travel into the future, or whether Zachariah was just messing with Dean’s head, Gabriel-style. “Yes, they can, but that’s a four-hour answer,” Edlund declares. “I don’t have the math to support it, either. But in my mind—and that’s all we’re dealing with right now—I think that the future is not predetermined, it’s non-constant, and the angels can travel to any number of possible futures. Predetermining something is a state of mind; it is not the law of the universe, so if you believe anything about the future, it will most likely become a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is true in human nature. If I think I’m going to lose the game, I’ll lose the game. If I think I’m going to win, there’s a good chance that I’ll win.

“Free will is like a viral experiment that God left on the desk and then he left, and the angels are like, ‘What the hell is this?’ It’s messing stuff up. Satan got too close to it and he’s got a free will issue. It’s a weird thing, so when Zach took Dean into the future, I believe they just went into one possible future. The future will roughly happen this way if Dean self-prophesizes this future, because it’s hinged on his choice. Zach had no impact when he went into that future, which is a pretty important detail about the underlying physics of it—he can witness a potential future, but he can’t change it or live there. It’s not a home for the people from the past; it’s a projection of what might happen. You can take a human like Dean, put him there, have him experience all this crap, get a punch in the face and get rolled down a hill, and then get brought back to the present, but that future will never be because Dean has been changed by the trip. We’re just talking about possible futures.”

(“Inside the Mind of Ben Edlund”, Supernatural Magazine #19, Sept 2010, pp 56-57.)

Edlund, who wrote the episode, pretty resoundingly calls it a future that Zachariah had no impact on. Kripke has no particular statement to *directly verify* the same but spends the entire commentary talking about how they were gridding out time travel like lunatics getting side eyed by everyone in the office and pretty resoundingly calls it “the future” not “the other world” or “the fake world” or whatever.

Also side but like 4. This fulfills 15.09's similar intent narratively with Chuck, just different delivery as the current was building that future instead of future events undecided. Sam changed it then and there.

Honestly I wish I had the two minute scene of Dean deliriously trying to explain time and all kinds of shit drawing a crazy circle with lines and dashes because that would just be my avatar/banner/whatever forevermore what a MOOD.

Time travel actually requires greater power in SPN than just making up illusions, far as I’ve gathered. Almost anyone can Create A Space. Castiel eventually lost his time travel ability but held a same mood: when he sent Dean back in time, Cas couldn’t change anything. He could be witness to it, but he just drilled in that “Destiny Can’t Be Changed.” The end moral is that we can in fact change our current to change our future, which is basically the point of S5 (and... most of Supernatural) as a whole, but the angels retain the same mechanics pretty well-throughout on this.

That is to say though, that according to this model, there IS still a future out there written somewhere that Dean had to bury Cas in a Malak Box, got overwhelmed by depression, literally gave up, turned into a monster and killed everyone he loved with Sam until he too died. But Not This Sam, Not This Dean.

[38across]

i lack the braincells and sobriety and heart to let op of the buckwild spn anecdote know that when i said their paragraph was peak autofiction i did not mean i thought they were lying bc i wholeheartedly believe it to be tru...like... my sanity depends on something like that to be tru

what i actually meant abt the autofiction comment was that the anecdote is so blunt and detached that it was almost surreal imagining it adjacent to a fandom that is typically rabid and it is such a rare chord to strike and ive largely only seen it in autofiction published by weird presses operating out of the scullery of a home in the midwest

[incarnateirony]

I saw a ways down in your posts that you definitely think the text supports Saileen (totally agree with you btw) but I was wondering what are your opinions on the ship? Beyond just that the text supports it, do you think they're a good match? Does it have a possible future or is it doomed because "Sam isn't allowed to have relationships." as seems to be a trend on the show? - just a Saileen shipper feeling a bit down by all the antis coming out of the woodwork since she returned.

Okay so hello Nonnie, I’m going to actually preface this by linking a post of creative-level gestures some people are conveniently ignoring/burying in the interest of chasing their own personal interpretation and then bagging on what the show is giving (x)

Like it’s a LITTLE to the left of your ask but really important to keep in mind while considering the direction SPN is going with this and to belay a bunch of fears.

In regards to a good match: Just… yes. I mean, she was literally created to *be* an endgame and then trashed by buckleming FOR that reason (eg “nothing gold can stay”, creatives edition aka the cursed relationships that maintain the angst that facilitates this show’s motion). She was immediately directed to play it romantic, she was made as also another MOL legacy, and generally, like

Not throwing anything out here as a *certainty* but let’s imagine they defeat god, like, plug the universe into Jack as a battery, get to the end of the road.

All that stuff Sam’s built? All the bunkers him and Dean have found, or at least chapter house adjacent strongholds, or even just modern hunter hubs? Those networks, all that scanned infinite knowledge now available at a click, body cams, organization, the leadership seen – so if humanity is freed, for example, from Chuck but there’s not a magic click on/off button for the problems he’s left, it’s time for humans to make a new world! A better one! For them to stop lying, and hiding the truth. For them to take what they have built – and Sam, with Eileen, his fellow legacy at his side reflecting the same hope and liberation the ghost of Jess left a void in, that hope he had at Samford walking away from the Father, now rebelling and subverting the Allfather–

Makes a whole fuckton of sense for his ending, doesn’t it? Or, like Dean to Mary – now, perhaps, Sam to Dean who had to be his brother, father, and mother, “Go, Dean. Be happy.” Find yourself. Learn what that is, without machinations, or dad’s shadow, or soldier’s orders. What are the things that you want, what are the things that you dream? Your favorite leather jacket, that’s dads. Your music? Dads. Your car? Dads. Do you even have an original thought? Maybe this bar (that Swayze’s echoed even in design). This is it, this is the dream. No, Dean, it’s not, it’s just A dream, Dean, that’s all it is.

Perhaps it’s time to make something more than a dream.

But whether Cas too gets to join on what it really means to be free, human, and sovereign over the self – If Dean doesn’t want to impose on Saileen, well, perhaps Destiel can go find what that means together, even if at times they’ll need their own paths.

It resonates well with Jensen’s confusion, who for years seemed to be like NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS IF THEY LIVE OR DIE IT’LL BE TOGETHERRRRRRRR of several years past into now, summarily “Wait what, that’s not right, Kripke what do you think. You like it? I don’t get it. Ohhhh I get it.”

That is a LONG RANGE speculation based on structural elements and is subject to change at any time this early in the season, but just a general example of *how well Eileen makes a designated ending*, whereas for example, were Samwitch to move forward, it would lean towards Sam *not* subverting his destiny by dragging him back towards the King of Hell storyline and all that good shit which, while some people like it, does not seem to be the story this show is telling.

I do highly suggest people watch the below video from my midseason S14 speculation/meta/patterns project to see how this ties into Sam’s overall arc (and if you want, check #lateralus project to see the entire project, because this is just one piece of a 13 part progression. And don’t just cruise the playlists it suggests, there’s two ways to watch about how these lessons are learned and the different paths between self destruction and freedom, and two parts got copyright struck and uploaded elsewhere, so you’ll have to at least check this post [x] for the replacement links)