#the title of the next episode is killgingg me

[prairiedust]

Red or Green? The literary and folk themes of Oroborous

Red or green is the official state question of New Mexico as ratified by the legislature in 1996. Order anything at any restaurant, even a burger in some places, and you’ll likely be asked “Red or green?” Do you want red chile sauce on your entree, or do you prefer green chile? The “state question” can sometimes reveal geographical origins-- red sauce is supposedly favored in the northern half of the state, while green is more popular in the south (I lived in the south, and you could easily get either one anywhere so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ .) The best green chiles are grown in the south, so maybe that has something to do with it-- like wine grapes, chiles from different parts of the state have different flavor profiles. Green chiles from the Hatch area are world famous.

But it’s important to remember that the sauces are made from the exact same fruit. The difference is all in the timing. Green chiles are harvested early, unripe, then roasted and chopped up and canned or put in the freezer, whereas red sauce is made from chiles that have been allowed to ripen fully and are then (typically) dried.

It’s all about timing. Let your chiles stay on the plant too long, and you miss your chance at the magical elixir that is green chile sauce.

Timing.

The sister stories of Snow White and Sleeping Beauty are, to a great extent, about timing. They are about waiting, about vigils, and about being at the right place at the right time-- or the exact wrong time.

(If you have not already read this rundown of Snow White in season 14, I suggest at least reading a few of the translations of the original folktales here or here. And cw the Sleeping Beauty story called Sun Moon and Talia is dark. I’ll be discussing the difference between the original material and the Disneyfied stories somewhat. Usual disclaimer that this is lit crit and not spec, why you ask, because I am a hundred years old is why.)

I want to say first that Steve Yockey in Ouroboros did a truly wonderful job allegorizing the story of Snow White, which has been teased for a while now. In the Grimms’ Snow White, as in other tales of that type, Snow White has been 1. run into the wilderness by her stepmother, B. taken in by a group of dwarfs, Three: then poisoned by that stepmother and fourthly laid to rest in a glass coffin. While the story has been poked at over the course of several episodes, Yockey sums it all up again in this one.

Dean-- along with the rest of TFW 2.0-- has been traipsing around New Mexico looking for a peculiar monster. Trope one. From the screen shot it looks like they’ve possibly been through Clovis, Roswell, Albuquerque, and finally made it up to Raton. As far as wildernesses and in-between places go, New Mexico is the most liminal state in the union-- many people in the country think it’s part of Mexico and if you think that’s a joke when I was a senior looking at colleges I had two well respected schools send me their foreign student applications. Roswell. AAAAaaaaahhhh Roswell. Roswell is the city that straddles reality and science fiction. They fry ice cream in New Mexico, they eat both ripe and unripe chiles there, and they have old mountain forests and arid white sand deserts within fifty miles of one another.

Another nod to the Snow White story is the Ma’lek Box that Dean mentions again-- B-- it can be seen as an allusion to Snow White’s glass coffin (in other versions, it is merely ornate or sometimes bedecked in rare gems but it is definitely something that she alone can not get out of… being dead and all...)

Finally, when the Gorgon knocks him out and Michael escapes, Sam tends Dean’s wounds while he is unconscious, which fulfills the traditional Snow White requirement for someone other than the king/prince to affect a physical change in the heroine’s state-- cutting off an enchanted dress or jostling the coffin so that the bite of poisoned apple can be coughed out-- in order to bring her back to life. Walt Disney and his studio added the “first love’s kiss” into the Snow White matrix in 1938, not even a century ago, but it quickly took over the narrative-- Disney also brings the story into a more accessible reality for modern viewers, he introduces the prince into the actual storyline earlier than in the folk tale, and then has him awaken her with The Kiss. Which do we, as an audience, prefer? The rabbit-hole of darker, more psychological Snow White tale types, or Disney’s recent and overwhelmingly iconic romantic reimagining?

Red or green?

Yockey gave us green, the version that has not ripened into what most people know as Snow White through the Disney cinematic behemoth.

The other duality in this episode is that we have Sleeping Beauty being referenced simultaneously with Snow White’s allegory.

Sleeping Beauty is Cas’ story and elements from that tale type can be seen in how the Gorgon stalks and overcomes his prey. The Gorgon uses sex to snare a human for consumption-- he says he’s an opportunist but that women have begun to be more cautious now that they are “waking up” from a long period of oppression. Sleeping Beauty’s deep sleep comes as the result of a symbolic sexual awakening-- in the more recent stories that awakening comes from the machinations of an enemy, so it is more a violation than a sudden innocent awareness. Where am I going with this? I don’t even know, this seems like it belongs in a different essay. What I’m trying to say is that the Gorgon uses sex to put people into a state of paralysis, and the evil fairy (known in the Disney movie as Maleficent) used a sexual metaphor to lure Briar Rose to her doom before she was ready for that kind of encounter. We are asked to contemplate the symbolic aspect of the Gorgon’s predation because he also uses a symbolic act-- eating eyeballs-- to see into the future and thus subvert the natural order of time.

In Sleeping Beauty, the evil crone/Maleficent also subverts the timeline by jumping place in line. She was not invited to the party in honor of the infant princess, but after nearly all of the other wise women have given Briar Rose their blessings, she breaks in to curse the baby. There is always one fairy left who, while not powerful enough to nullify the curse, can modify it to a deep sleep instead of death. In Ouroboros, TFW2 exploits the fact that Cas and Jack exist outside of the workings of Fate to defeat the Gorgon, but not without great cost.

Which brings us to The Wrong Kiss. I didn’t even want to meta the Sleeping Beauty stuff because of the kiss, seriously. So. What happens to Briar Rose is tragic, but in the three most famous versions of the story she comes out of her enchantment because a prince falls in love with her. Jack, here, as a result of Cas’ deal with the Empty, is no longer in the Sleeping Beauty story, he is not a Prince but a Giant-Killer once more, and the antidote he administers to counteract the Gorgon’s venom will not work. Once he activates his giant-killing powers, he can heal Castiel. (In the reciprocal, Cas is an agent of the SB story and the antidote works on the dude the Gorgon was about to eat because Cas administers it. It’s a very meta way of treating the folklore theme by both subverting it and keeping certain characters strictly within the parameters.)

Jack finally lives up to his name as a Giant-Killer when he takes out Michael. In Appalachian and English Jack Tales, Jack is always clever, sometimes to the point of unscrupulousness, but in the story Jack and the Beanstalk he is a naive picaro who betters his circumstances through reliance on his simple nature as much as his wits. Often “Jack” does not change as a result of his adventures, as most fairytale heroes do, but like many other mythological tricksters he operates outside the bounds of normal morality. Jack Kline has managed to hold onto his innocence despite initiation into the Winchester clan. Now that Jack has, presumably, burned off some large portion of his soul, it will be interesting to see how his picaresque nature might actually change. Because the story of Jack the Giant-Killer? Not the same story as Jack and the Beanstalk. The Giant-Killer is the story of a deadly clever young man who defeats several giants as well as Lucifer using mainly his wits and is afterward given a place on King Arthur’s Round Table. The story in its entirety borrows from Cornish, Welsh, and Briton mythology, echoing other simple folktales as well as hearkening to high heroes of the Mabinogi. Jack has become larger than life. (AN I started this before Peace of Mind, I’ll get to that one by the end of the season maybe :P )

In a less meta sense of course, this episode is one huge mythological allusion-- Cas refers to Dean’s imprisonment of Michael as a “herculean” feat, the MOTW is a Gorgon (and traditionally gorgons were a trio of cursed sisters in Greek legends,) and Dean enthusiastically references the 1981 Clash of the Titans film twice. In a /more/ meta vein, Andrew Dabb quotes the more recent Titans movie in a tweet on this ep’s airdate. I find that exciting because the story of Perseus in CotT features a descent into the underworld, and again while I flirt with speculation here I would REALLY like to see these nerds freaking raid the Empty.

As for Snow White and Sleeping Beauty now? Red or green?

It feels as though the Snow White story has possibly been tied up and tucked away now, solving the riddle of the “red or green” sister stories. Michael, Dean’s evil rival, is dead. Pretty sure. Whether his grace is contaminated and will have an adverse effect on Jack remains to be seen. See drsilverfish’s lovely analysis of the oroborous symbolism in the last two episodes for more discussion about what it means for Jack to have consumed Michael’s grace. But. Unless there is a Ghost of AU!Michael coming up, he’s gone.

We are left, however, with Cas’ deal with the Empty-- he gets to operate under normal parameters as long as he does not exceed the minimum threshold of happiness (and I want it to be an accidental or unexpected moment, unlike a lot of meta writers, but then that isn’t spec it’s just what I hope for.) And what does that mean for destiel subtext? I don’t know. Honestly, this is a little too intense for me, I am not “canon positive” or “endgame positive” and this episode freaked me out. Analytically, though, it places the subtext at a really interesting place. It means the princess who gets rescued from an enchanted doom is still on the loose, still avoiding Fate, and the prince is still out there having Adventures in the Woods. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯