#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.

///

///

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

///

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

///

"Don't struggle," she says.

///

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."

///

///

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."

///

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

///

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

[monstermoviedean]

live ball-handler reaction

[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

[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

[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!

[amaranthhiding]

Samwena in 13x19 Funeralia

Excuse me while I fall into another obsessive Funeralia spiral. (I swear, every single time I rewatch any scenes, this episode gets me!) Or even better yet, join me on my descent!

When Dean tells Rowena that Sam is the one who's going to kill her in every single one of her books, she is hurt. Ruth's acting is absolutely phenomenal, you can see the hurt in every little change on Rowena's face. It even goes far enough for her to have that little lip and chin tremble.

Jared's acting is just as stellar because Sam's guilt over the whole thing is tangible in the air between them. He is so torn by guilt, he can barely look at her reaction for two seconds before he has to swallow and avert his gaze.

Then Sam tries to handcuff her, and she falls back into her pattern of trying to mask her hurt with humor. She thinks she managed it by proving her superiority with that astral projection stunt. She's fleeing in a wild run because of course she wants to avoid getting captured. But I think she's partly also trying to run away from this hurt by physically distancing herself from the place it happened, and especially from the person who caused it.

Note how at this point it doesn't seem to be her plan at all to abduct Sam in any way. She's just trying to run.

Then Sam catches up to her, and she doesn’t even try to flee or fight or use magic. She’s just standing there, frozen on the spot, like she has to know the truth. She has to know if he’d actually do it, but she can’t even face him while he makes his decision.

Sam struggles, he does. There are actual tears in his eyes.

And he realizes he can’t do it. Everything inside himself screams at him not to. He lets the weapon sink.

Thinking Sam has made up his mind, Rowena finally dares to turn around to look at him in a moment of connection because she thinks it’s safe.

That’s when the promise Sam has given Dean takes over that he’d put a bullet in Rowena if she breaks bad.

After the car talk with Rowena in 13x12, Sam finally admitted how helpless he’s feeling to Dean. Sam has failed over and over again this season, and nothing would work out the way he’d intended. He got knocked out like 6 times during the last few weeks and Dean had to come save him multiple times. Sam thinks he’s the one who got Kaia killed, and that he’s the one to blame for Jack being stuck in Apocalypse World. And just one episode ago, he let Gabriel go after using the archangel’s grace to heal him. When Dean found out, he reacted with an extremely volatile outburst of frustration targeted at Sam specifically, for giving away their last hope of saving their mom and Jack. That outburst was loud enough to actually make Sam wince. All of Sam’s choices this season leading up to this point have turned out so terribly wrong that it cost people’s lives.

So Sam allows Dean’s choice to overrule his own because he has lost every shred of trust in himself and his own decisions. Sam can’t let Dean down again, he can’t.

He raises the weapon back up and pulls the trigger.

Sam can’t believe what he just did. He doesn’t want to see Rowena’s corpse slump to the ground. But the outcome he was dreading did, in fact, not happen because she stopped that bullet. Sam can’t bear to see the expression on her face and hear the slight tremble in her voice.

For Rowena, the hurt cuts even deeper than before, burning more fiercely than anything she has experienced in a long time.

Nobody was supposed to be able to hurt her like this ever again. She thought she had fortified herself against it ever since that trauma all the way back with Crowley's father who broke her heart by leaving her. She'd had no idea that Sam possessed the ability to hurt her like this, that they'd somehow grown close enough for this to be possible at all. And now the hurt just won't stop, so she short-circuits and tries to make it stop in the way her old self has done over all these centuries... by lashing out at whoever is hurting her, and making sure they can never do it again.

Naturally, the way she chooses to do this is by... putting him to sleep and transporting him into her room (How even? Levitation?) where she busies herself with lighting all the candles until Sam comes back to his senses. Then she cuts into her own palm, tears his shirt open, and presses her blood onto Sam's bare chest right over his heart. You know, as you do. Completely normal way of attacking someone. Absolutely nothing to see here.

(Also note that while the whole thing did seem to hurt Sam because he groaned in pain, no mark whatsoever is left on his skin. Not a burn. Not a scratch. She made herself bleed, but not him.) Death appears, and while Rowena is claiming that what she's doing here is killing Sam Winchester, her body language is telling the exact opposite. Throughout the entire exchange, she's threatening Billie, not Sam, with the knife. The whole thing hilariously looks like she's defending Sam against Billie! Her body is in a very clear defensive pose and she's positioned exactly in front of Sam.

Even when she finally turns her attention from Billie to Sam, supposedly to make true on her threat to kill him, it's only her head that moves to look back over her shoulder, but her arm with the knife stays aimed at Billie.

That damn knife never even gets anywhere near Sam. Then it's entirely gone in the next shot, so she must have dropped it as soon as she realized there was no way in hell she would cut into Sam's skin with it.

She’s talking softly with Sam about Crowley, but she is so confused. At this point, her emotions are boiling so high she can't handle them at all any longer, so they burst out into the open in exactly the same way they did earlier when she targeted Sam's heart, but this far more violent outburst is aimed at the target that won’t take any harm.

She doesn't understand what's happening, why she can't kill Sam to make sure she's the one in control, why she can't make the hurt stop in the way she has always done in self-preservation over all these long centuries.

Billie is the one who has to put into words what has been so glaringly obvious through the whole scene to anyone other than Rowena herself. "You were never going to kill him. There was a time you would've, but not now."

That's when Rowena caves and finally admits to everyone including herself that she has no idea what to do with all these feelings, because the only way she knows how to handle them is no longer working. She doesn't even get back to her feet to defend herself when Dean bursts into the room, instead just cowering there with quiet sobs.

Sam is the one who stops Dean with a panicked-sounding warning call. Dean was in no danger whatsoever, not from Rowena and not from Billie who clearly just stated that the Winchesters were needed. So the only possible meaning I can read into Sam's call is that he's begging Dean not to shoot Rowena.

After a scene cut, Rowena is still sitting on the floor in a position very similar to the one she's been in ever since her breakdown, with Sam and Dean sitting opposite her. She has something to drink in front of her now, though. And hilariously, we see Sam reach into the fridge like he lives there to take a bottle for himself and Dean each, so I assume he's the one who handed out the drink to Rowena as well, trying to make everyone feel better.

He goes even further than that, asking both Dean and Rowena how they are feeling and getting them to talk openly. In addition to genuinely wanting to know how these people he cares about are feeling, I think what he's doing here is ensuring the waves are smoothed over enough that this will not be a repeat of the Amy Pond situation where Dean went back to kill the "monster".

Rowena asks, "Sam, what've I done?", sounding stifled and horrified like she thinks she has ruined their relationship forever, and she still hasn’t even fully stopped crying.

This is her way of both saying sorry and carefully testing out the waters of where they're standing after all of this. He gives her a look that I can seriously only describe as soft, telling her "You had a chance to kill me and you didn't. I'd call that progress."

The wording makes even more sense considering that Dean is sitting right next to them, so Sam is making a point of putting emphasis on the fact that she isn't a lost cause, that she isn’t something they have to hunt.

Then Sam goes so far as to tell her that it wasn't her fault what happened with Crowley, even though he must realize that's blatantly false and that her way of (not) parenting clearly had a strong influence on Crowley's fate. The way Sam says it with that frowny headshake and soft voice almost gives me the impression they're talking in code, and this is his veiled "I forgive you" in reply to her veiled apology from before.

This whole exchange is insanely gentle given the fact that they both just tried to kill each other. Yes, clearly neither of them wanted to kill the other, what with those tormented expressions on their faces when it happened and Sam firing only a single bullet (which was probably his loophole way of justifying to himself that he kept his word to Dean without actually getting Rowena killed.) But still, it's remarkable how soft this conversation is after the insanity of this episode.

When Dean begins one of his motivational speeches for Rowena, Sam listens quietly, knowing he has won. He has accomplished his goal of making sure Rowena is no longer on Dean's kill list. And only after that, Sam proceeds to say the most outrageous thing possible in this situation, complimenting Rowena on her deadliness and luring the first real smile out of her still tear-streaked face. And with that one seemingly crazy comment, he cements towards her that things between them are fine and that he accepts her despite her past.

(I'm in awe of Sam's emotional intelligence.)

When Rowena asks if they think she can still be redeemed, Sam waits and lets Dean go first, even though one can basically see Sam itch to get his own reassurance out. His mouth even opens! But he has to know for sure first that Dean really has no ill will towards Rowena any longer.

And because he actually trusts her and wants to show both her and Dean that he does, he nips a potential future conflict in the bud by openly telling her the truth that Lucifer is back instead of somehow hiding that fact from her. Dean comments in a way that shows clearly he thought she was going to freak out at this piece of information, but Sam just sits there with a calm face because he trusted that she would not.

Even with everything that's at stake for Sam (they need Rowena to find Gabriel to save Mary and Jack), even after the way Gabriel let him down just one episode prior and Sam's willingness to trust in the good in people has buried them in a whole pile of problems, Sam still wants the relationship between Rowena and him to be based on open trust from here on out. So he gives her the truth about Lucifer, knowing fully well how traumatic it is for both of them.

And Rowena in turn takes that offered trust and returns it to Sam in the most outrageous way possible, finding solace in the fact that he, not Lucifer, is the one prophesied to kill her. Because Rowena is the living proof that his blind faith in the good in people was never wrong, Sam is suddenly shown to have hope and self-esteem again “You changed other people’s fates, maybe we can change yours,” after he had all but abandoned any kind of it following his interactions with Gabriel and Dean in the episode before this one. (He couldn’t even get out anything but stutters when they called Rowena at the beginning of this episode and Dean had to steal the call from him, that’s how low Sam was!)

And Rowena is so touched by still being trusted and accepted despite everything that of course she agrees to help them save their family, when at the start of the episode she had still refused because she was busy trying to save hers.

I... am not okay? Help?

[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]

[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.

[lavenderleahy]

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

[missjackil]

Supernatural Battle of the Episodes!!

Hey folks! Seems like Funeralia took down Most Holy Man in a very close battle! I don't think this next one will be any problem!

Who is it Chuck?!

Chuck: Next in line we have Unfinished Business - Sam and Dean run into Gabriel against who needs help killing Loki! Not a big fan of this myself!