#spn funeralia

[shallowseeker]

What drew them to each other is that they were both willing to do reprehensible things.

Whether it's to save their own skins, to save their families, to carry out a plan... They're naturally fucked up in the same pragmatic way.

But they can BE their full, "flawed, petty evil creatures" in full light of the other.

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DUNDUNDUN SAM WAS JUST WAITING FOR HER TO TURN AWAY WHAT A BASTARD

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She should've gotten to KILL him at least once, I think. Just to further make their bond weirder.

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"Don't struggle," she says.

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ALSO.

I like to watch the unraveling futility of their ambitions. Rowena, Crowley, and Sam were all united by wanting status and ambition to help them escape "a rigged game."

"And it took everything from me, everyone I love-- my family."

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BOOM. There it is.

See, Rowena sees the lengths Sam will go, and she actually RESPECTS it.

Their relationship is built on the comfort of understanding WHY they're willing to gut each other AND each other's loved ones. Strong feelings that they try to dissociate themselves from.

They use their smarts and ruthlessness to protect themselves and their loved ones at all costs.

And they both want to change.

"You were never gonna kill him. There was a time you would've. But not now."

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There is such an--an OPENNESS about the bad things they've done, and Sam needs that in his life.

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And in season 15, Rowena knows that Sam wouldn't have been able to kill her at the end there... not unless she guided his hand and helped him.

[winchestress]

they should've been at the club

[shirtlesssammy]

Dean Winchester every day -- 283/326

Supernatural 13x19//Funeralia

[monstermoviedean]

i want to stop and break this down because i think it's pretty emblematic of the type of conflict cas and dean have over and over, which is never actually resolved.

cas comes up with the idea to talk to heaven to find gabriel.

dean considers it and says he doesn't think it's a good idea. reasonable way to respond imo.

cas says they don't have any good ideas. while that's fair, it also feels like cas has decided this is the only viable option and therefore there can't be any other better ideas.

dean tentatively agrees, but expresses a desire to think/talk about it a little more, referencing cas going rogue and burning out donatello's brain a few episodes back.

cas calls this a disagreement and focuses on the results - the positive results only. he's not interested in talking about how donatello is brain-dead and has previously expressed a belief that the ends justify the means, especially in this instance.

dean suggests that it was not okay to do this. i think he's referring to the results as well as the methods (cas doing this on his own without consulting anyone because he feels like he has to).

cas says "i hear your concerns" but doesn't address the concerns that dean is expressing about cas behaving in a way that disregards the well-being of himself and others. and cas addresses dean's concerns about the angels killing him by suggesting they won't do it because they have a common goal. that's not really comforting for dean. and that also assumes the angels will behave rationally and for the betterment of all, which is not always a safe assumption.

"this is something i have to try." i. not we! cas is making this decision for himself, based on his sense of responsibility to everyone (especially jack and mary) and his guilt over the effects of his actions on heaven and the angels.

sam comes in and the conversation gets interrupted.

dean closes with accepting that this is what cas wants, with one request: "just don't get dead again."

all together this reads as: cas has an idea. dean asks him to not make a decision yet, out of concern for cas and for "collateral damage." cas has already decided this is the best course of action, and whether or not anyone agrees, he's going to do it. dean agrees and asks cas not to die. because that is literally all dean can do! he can't talk cas out of it, he can't go with him. so all he can do is just sit and wait and fucking hope that cas doesn't die again.

i'm not suggesting cas is doing anything wrong here. i understand his actions and his motivations. i just want to point to another instance of this "cas wants to do something, dean asks him to wait, cas does it anyway, dean is left to worry" pattern that never gets resolved. ever. and while i think dean and cas could both communicate more effectively sometimes, i don't think dean can communicate their way out of cas' decisions.

[samsrowena]

when you're so down bad that you think burning someone to death sounds like a totally reasonable thing to do

[magnificent-winged-beast]

Funeralia 13x19  ∞ SPN 13x19

[ananke-xiii]

Rowena and the thick, bloody umbilical cord between choices and faults.

In a previous post of mine I’ve explored a little bit how Mary and Kelly represent a sort of “missed opportunity” for, respectively, Sam and Jack.

At the beginning of s13 Sam resents the fact that he hasn’t been proactive in seeking to create a relationship with his mother and now that she’s (presumably) gone he doesn’t want to deal with that reality. He had wasted his second chance. Jack, on the other hand, never even had a first opportunity to begin with but, unlike Sam, has experienced a sense of unity with his mother so extreme that one of the first things that he tells Sam is that he was his mother(!!!).

S13 reinforces the Mother-Son symbolism because, after Jack’s birth, a rift is opened in space (apparently not in time?): Kelly stays (dead, rip girl I love you) on one side of it while Mary crosses it and finds herself in Apocalypse World. To make things even more clear, this is no random parallel universe: this is the alternate reality where Mary didn’t deal with Azazel. So mothers and their choices/faults are a central theme in this season. Or, well, more or less.

To complete the mothers’ trimurti or, better, tridevi we’re missing the final mother, the destroyer who is, of course, Rowena. It’s therefore quite apt that Rowena reaches her highest potential this season and even confronts Death. What motivates her in an interesting blend of (missing)love and (lacking)power. Lucifer is as part of her story as Kelly’s and Mary’s. Unlike these two, though, she doesn’t have a son who resurrects her, nor a turned-benefactor cosmic being who offers her resurrection as a gift to her son. Rowena has to resurrect herself. Not once but twice. She is, perhaps, the loneliest character in the whole series.

This is actually quite ironic because, if we look back on previous seasons, her “choice” to kill Oskar, her putative son, was what triggered the whole chain of events (the freeing of Amara first and Lucifer second) that directly link Rowena with Mary and Kelly.

It’s only natural, then, that s13 Rowena keeps representing the reversal of the Mary and Sam/ Kelly and Jack relationships because there is no son who’s looking for her, rather she is the mother who’s looking for her (dead) child. Like Sam, she also needs someone who can access another dimension to bring Crowley back but, unlike him, she’s not successful. Now, ngl, this pisses me off to no end, like of course I can understand the real reasons why Crowley couldn’t be brought back, still I kinda hate how it was narratively framed.

When, in "Funeralia", Rowena says that life is unfair she is right but not in the general, pessimistic sense of the phrase: she's right because in-universe some deaths are more important than others and people get back on board depending on whether or not they're still a role to play for them. Rowena's faith in magic is actually justified because magic is the only thing that can help her. And the tragic thing is that it's also what damns her in the process because it's the only form of power she can have access to. There are no angels or cosmic entities looking out for her. She's just... alone.

So, perhaps, it's not that I necessarily hate how her failure to bring Crowley back is described, I just see it as further proof that Rowena is the best example to show how in Supernatural the game is rigged from the beginning and we didn’t even need an interfering and pervy God to realize it. That's all we've been seeing it since S1. All those infinite, booooring talks about being good/evil or doing good/bad actually mean nothing because, at the end of the day, in this show what really matters is how useful you can be, to whom and why (and this is way less booooring, you learn a lot of interesting things about these characters if you go down this road, it's grim but it's more rewarding).

S13 is also when the final connection between Rowena and the Winchesters, Sam to be more precise, is established which is indicative of the fact that she will inevitably die. Before S13 her story was her own, after “Funeralia” it cannot be extricated from Sam’s. To some degree, it’s quite similar to what happened with Crowley and Dean. What’s more, just like Crowley’s powers and shrewdness are what really carry the plot from s6 to s12, magic and spells (and therefore Rowena’s role in the story) will be the key for many plot points from s13 to s15. But there is a big difference.

Both Crowley and Rowena’s sacrifices are described as heroic but, let’s be honest, only Rowena’s was. Crowley’s demise was a clean-up after his own mess at best. It also proved to be unnecessary. Rowena and that awful MBOL’s egg thingy would have managed to confine Lucifer, like, they actually did it. It was Crowley who perverted the spell for reasons that I personally find OOC. I would’ve liked the Crowley vs Lucifer power struggle but not the way it was done in s12 because it felt very nonsensical to me. As in: I can see you need a reason to keep Lucifer around and this is what you’ve come up with but it’s still quite illogical.

At its hidden and secret core S13 is the season of the “let’s reframe the sons’ stories and blame it on the mothers”. Just like Kelly is blamed for Castiel’s ideal vision of Jack and Mary’s "choice" is established as the most important point in the whole show, Rowena-as-Mother must face the same fate: it was her fault if Crowley, Fergus!, ended the way he ended. It’s a naaaaaaaaaaaaaah for me.

This is what we’re told in “Funeralia”:

Rowena: Oh, but it is. Death has something I want. Sam: What’s that? Rowena: My son. After you told me he was gone, how he died, I had an unexpected reaction. We had our differences, but it’s my fault he went down the path he did. I left him. Dean: We’re talking about Crowley-- demon, King of Hell? Rowena: We’re talking about Fergus-- a man abandoned and loveless, tricked by a demon, died in a gutter. He deserved better from the world. From me.

Now, just to be clear: yes, Rowena had the responsibility to do better; yes, she was the absolute worst; yes, she played no small role in her son’s story. However, I personally don’t like all these negative associations between “worlds” and “mothers” as if every fucking thing in the universe is dependent solely on them. How did we end up here? It’s almost as if absent fathers are, like, not THAT bad after all (and the show, as far as I'm concerned, ultimately approves of and absolves absent fathers). So I’m very suspicious of the way motherhood is portrayed specifically in s13 and Rowena’s attempt at redemption well demonstrates that there is reason to be so.

This dialogue in “Funeralia” confirms my gut feeling:

Sam: You know, what happened with Crowley? That wasn’t your fault. Rowena: He never had a chance. Dean: He made his choices, just like we all do. Look, every one of us has done something that we have to live with, that were trying to make up for. Every one of us. Sam: Even without all that extra juice, you’re still the deadliest witch around [Sam's flattering Rowena. He's gonna ask for her help in 3,2,1...]. Rowena: Flatterer. Sam: Yeah, well, we, um... we may need your help [Here we go!]. To save our family. To… hell, to save the world. Dean: You wanna be redeemed? This would be a pretty big step. Rowena: And do you think I still can be? Dean: Yeah, I do.

I mean, not to be rude, but who the fuck cares if Dean Winchester thinks that Rowena can be redeemed? Like, how is Rowena’s redemption (which is strictly connected to her being a bad mother and not, among other things, a zero-regret murderer, which she also happens to be, for instance) connected to saving the Winchester’s family? Don’t get me wrong, I understand that this is SPN and that Sam and Dean’s problems are Apocalypse-level problems (lol, they really did that, when I say that their story is like a cosmogony maybe I’m not that wrong) but, as I’ve said, I cannot help but notice the similarities between Rowena’s arc this season with Mary’s and Jack’s, i.e. you can be redeemed if you either do something useful for the Winchesters or... realize that it's not your "fault" that your sons suffered terribily because "choosing" to deal with Azazel was actually the right choice... for the world. How come fathers saving the world are framed as heroic while mothers actively creating worlds by making hard choices that benefit the greater good need redemption?

So to sum up: while fathers invade S13’s main storyline as solvers, restorers and fixers, mothers are the bones of the story, they carry its weight and its sins but get little if nothing in return: Kelly stays dead, Mary ends up helping out a world that absolves her of her Original Sin but that’s nevertheless a mess (you can never win lol) and Rowena can’t get her son back (but she can save Sam and Dean's family the world!). Looks good, right? Hurray mommy!

[marril96]

Supernatural 13.19 | Funeralia | bloopers

[littlebluejaydraws]

All A Girl Needs (1942)- Haddon Sundblom (Study)

ID: Three images showing a digital drawing of Billie and Rowena from episode 13x19 of Supernatural. They are sitting on the ground and embracing with Billie kneeling, and Rowena tipped over into their arms. Rowena's face is turned away from the viewer and buried in Billie's shoulder. Billie's face is visible, with their head resting against Rowena's. They are in the room from the final scene of 13x19, with an empty fireplace behind them and the red candles from Rowena's ritual scattered about. The first image shows the full drawing and beneath are two close ups of Billie and Rowena. End ID.

ID: The painting 'All A Girl Needs' by Haddon Sundblom. The pose is the same as the top image, however in this case the figures are not Billie and Rowena, and they are on a bed in a bedroom, rather than on the floor. There is a shelf with books behind them and a side table with a lamp to the right. End ID.

[bloodydeanwinchester]

🩸Bloody Dean Every Episode🩸- 13x19 Funeralia

[samepisodebracket]

Round 1; Group 4

[shallowseeker]

Rowena and Sam would kill each other and/or the things each other loves for the sake of their respective families, and they like that about each other.

[winchestress]

[shirtlesssammy]

Dean and Cas every day not often enough -- 78/?

Supernatural 13x19//Funeralia

[monstermoviedean]

live ball-handler reaction

[lavenderleahy]

wow i'm so sorry samwena shippers, I was WRONG. they're in love.