#spnwinmeta

[dotthings]

I did have some theories at some point about angelic memory wipes to explain the differences concerning John's back story and mothership canon, although I also always realized unreliable narrators was a factor, but the more I see of The Winchesters the less I think it has to do with angelic memory wiping. More and more I think it's about unreliable narrators and how traumatic memories work and also the innate ways family history gets told selectively.

It wasn't perfect until after she died.

To some extent John may have even believed his own revisionist history he told his children. Idealizing the marriage, sainting Mary, and sainting the idealized white picket fence life they had before a demon ripped his world apart, and left out the part where John already spiraled, John already knew about monsters, John had already faced down monsters and knew they were real. John and Mary thought they could escape, but the YED's deal came due.

John told his children a fairy tale about the perfect life they had.

John went to Missouri and learned the truth. Missouri lifted the veil. Can mean something other than John not already knowing monsters exist.

And it is far more complicated than "John lied." Maybe to some extent he purposefully crafted an idealized version of the past to cope with his own trauma and process his own grief and it helped fuel his anger of what was lost. Maybe also he wanted to give Sam and Dean the good parts of his marriage to Mary. To help keep her memory alive for them. Kids don't usually learn the full truth of family history until they're older, and when they learn too young it can be traumatic. But in the end, better to know the truth.

But in part. Trauma and memory.

Like, say, Dean's brain rewiring his own memories of Purgatory I because he couldn't deal with his own trauma over Cas pushing him away and Cas being lost in Purgatory. The grief, the guilt, the loss. And the sadness of having to know that's how Cas saw himself--as not worthy of being saved. Dean would rather blame himself and believe he let Cas's hand slip from his grasp than face that, and face that Cas chose not to return with him (due to Cas's own sense of guilt and wanting to pay penance).

Which doesn't mean the angelic memory wipes we saw in mothership canon didn't happen either--but there is so much we don't know. How long did they stick? If they were memory wiped, why was Mary sneaking out to hunt after her first child was born? Did Mary get her memories back and not John? Or was the memory wipes about Anna's visit and the angels only, everything else was intact? & they both knew monsters were real.

The events of The Winchesters are real, although filtered through a certain lens or emphasis and deeply thematically connected to Dean.

But this is Dean uncovering the real story. What really happened. Dean is telling the full version, filling in the gaps, past the idealizations and ommissions or unreliable narrators.