#the winchester gospel

[incesthemes]

something i keep thinking about is who mary is to sam. she didn't raise him; he doesn't know her except through the stories john and dean told him. she exists in pictures and print, not in memories. she's a stranger to him, yet his entire life has revolved around her. he seeks revenge for a woman he's never met or known or loved. she's just a secondhand god to a nonbeliever, omnipresent but never actually there, never actually touched or held or shared. he's outside the church looking in on the mass but never able to partake. it must be alienating, for your family to have known god while you're left only to your own faith.

[spnyouresostupid]

Winchester gospel, the inspired word of God Chuck

Suptober 23 day 3 part 2 - Inspired

[youchangedmedestiel]

Chapters: 1/1

Fandom: Supernatural (TV 2005)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences 

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply 

Words: 5,542

Characters: Dean Winchester, Sam Winchester, Becky Rosen (mentioned), Original Characters, Original Female Character(s) 

Additional Tags: Post-Episode: s05e09 The Real Ghostbusters (Supernatural), Canon Compliant, Case Fic, The Winchester Gospels (Supernatural), Canon-Typical Violence, Dean Winchester meets a dean girl, Apparently this tag doesn't exist yet, this is my declaration of love to dean, Dean Winchester Deserves to be Happy, Dean Winchester Deserves Nice Things, Dean Winchester Deserves Better

Summary:

Becky got Dean’s phone number from Chuck and gave it to a friend of her, because she didn’t believe her that the Winchester brothers were real and that they might help her. This friend calls Dean and asks them to come and hunt a vampire that kills people in her town. The brothers can’t let people die, so they accept and this is how Dean ends up facing a dean girl.

[samdeancrimespree]

ok so. thinking of that post about how what we see on the show is the censored version of the winchester gospel, the version that makes them look “sympathetic” ….. now i just wanna write some between-episode cases that are so fucked up chuck was like oof ok let’s not talk about that

[ididit-allofit-foryou]

this is gospel

[sastielsmanuscript-draft]

oh thank god you're not into w1nc3st, bless up

im not into anything thats problematic. i ship sastiel but i have standards. cmon now i make sastiel centered memes 😭😭😭😭

bless up right to you too<3<3<3

[incesthemes]

#the military upbringing (absolute obedience to patriotism and the myth of nationhood)#= patriarchal familial dynamics (absolute obedience to the Man of the household and his authority)#= American protestant cultural christianity (absolute faith and obedience to god and his authority)#all inseparable in the American mythos...#the Bioshock Infinite of it all..........#early spn was clever! sam framed as the prodigal son escaping heroism. who chooses to embrace his doomed destiny#dean framed as the obedient son pushed to his limits and ultimately rejecting his destiny/father/god#and reading the brothers as 'rejecting' john/god. there's a lot of complexity between them#sam who initially rejects family/john because he was the one rejected first! he's been excluded/an outsider his whole life!#and he is the one more eager to jump on the sword. because therein lies the belonging he's never felt he's deserved.#his ultimate longing for full acceptance into hunting = heroism = his family is what dooms him...#(i could write a whole separate meta on why sam's desire for 'normalcy' is a veneer. too many ppl buy into it at face value??)#dean who slowly grows more and more tired of the path he's been pushed onto. by john. by god. he's shackled by heroism#he defects but there's no escape bc he's so wrapped up in nostalgia.#his longing for domesticity and home <- all the cultural symbols by which Family reasserts itself as inescapable truth#but the Family is a power structure...and his absolute nostalgia for it is what leads into him recreating its power dynamics.#they're both just lil haunted rats running circles in the maze of America..........#< or however that nico vega song goes (via @finalgirlsamwinchester)

many people, especially in a culture where religion is so omnipresent, turn to religion for community and belonging—this is also how cults recruit new members: preying on people's feelings of isolation and loneliness and inviting them into a community of people just like them. it makes sense that sam, ostracized and alienated as he is, would be the one to turn toward religion, and since "religion" in the united states almost universally means "christianity" because of cultural reinforcement and the overwhelming presence of christ, this was the option presented to sam and the one he took.

dean on the other hand already has a god in his father. not only is there no room for christ with john consuming dean body and soul, but he's actively discouraged from believing in a higher power due to his lifestyle (and probably from john himself, since all mentions of religion in the winchester family are related to mary only, dean initially rejects the possibility that angels exist which means john probably never considered it a possibility either, golden boy dean would probably never disagree with his father on such an important ideological ground, and sam is treated as odd and Other for believing in god, indicating that religion is a stranger to the family).

so sam fills the hole of belonging and community inside of him with god, but dean's is filled by john. john is just as much an absent father as god is, but dean pours his faith into john and doubles down on his belief in him as an absolute authority as a result of the shtriga attack, and then likely continually reinforced over time. because sam isn't given the responsibility dean is, he has more freedom to reject john's authority, but it doesn't change his upbringing: he needs to find authority somewhere else, and so he turns to god, hoping he will save him. this faith is strengthened by his feelings of dirtiness and sin, which is encouraged by christianity because of the concepts of original sin and penance and salvation.

but in the end they both need the same thing, because they're cut from the same cloth. the absolute obedience to a higher authority to tell them how to live. when sam's faith in religion begins to ebb, he clings more to dean as an authority; when john dies, dean clings to sam for direction. it's not an immediate shift, and they both constantly return to god/john as an authority, haunting them both long past they exited left stage. they're both seeking approval and direction from someone other than themselves because they've been raised soldiers, not leaders (and isn't it fitting, then, that christians call themselves god's warriors?).

even the marked physical absence of john in the narrative positions him as a god figure. he becomes no different from god because he's not here. all they have is the good book (dad's journal) and faith that following his path (quite literally) will save them and bring them closer together. the first season, then, can be a metaphor for a religious journey, for seeking god in america. the cross-country road trip (wild goose chase) is as literal as it is spiritual. and the ultimate critique is that god is absent; god is a deadbeat father; god is an abusive son of a bitch who demanded obedience from soldiers kept ignorant by design. the metaphor is extended when the judeo-christian god is revealed to be literally, actually an absent, deadbeat father demanding obedience from soldiers kept ignorant by design. john is the symbol of an absent god, and god is the symbol of an absent father.

kripke is jewish, not christian, so i'm sure a lot of this critique is by design. because as someone who is not christian, it's easy to see how christ-haunted america is. it's easy to understand the alienation and otherness that spawns from a lack of faith in the christian god. sam and dean are trapped in an americana nightmare they can't escape from. they can reject god, but dad is still there haunting them anyway. they can reject dad, but god is still there jerking them around on puppet strings. even rejecting everything and turning to each other doesn't allow them escape, because they're a product of their raise and they still crave obedience to authority, and they still act the way they were taught. you can't escape christinity when christianity is your culture. you can't change the way you were raised. you can't help that your father is also your god, and you can't prevent the damage of his abuse. free will is an illusion, and you will always follow the path god laid out for you because you can't escape your very nature.

guy who so desperately tries to find god. who wants to have faith in a higher authority to guide him out of the hole he's in. from the weight of guilt from simply existing, as the person he is. but every time he thinks he's answered his higher calling it turns out he's made the Morally Incorrect choice and his path to goodness and holiness was the road to the devil all along

[ricky-tiki-tah]

I know that there’s spn books that aren’t actually the episodes, but why hasn’t anyone published the Winchester Gospels? The books Chuck wrote and have them “written by Carver Edlund” ??? I wanna see those books!! I want more in-depth stuff. Kinda like how some movies have books written after the movie came out. But a book for each episode, up to season 5 cuz that’s where Chuck stopped iirc. I wanna read those books.

[mrs-jamesbbarnes]

Sometimes I forget @gospelofthechosen isn’t canon and I get sad - for instance watching 4x17 and seeing Dean getting into the Prius and getting excited and then realizing it’s not actually Kat’s Prius

(Also RIP to the best fanfiction I’ve ever read ever)

[incesthemes]

dean's sexuality is an overwhelming recurring theme throughout the show: his fetishes are prominent, he flaunts his sexuality and sexual behavior freely, he's a relentless flirt, and he has the most sexual encounters in the show. what i want to briefly consider here is how his sexuality and, more importantly, his fetishes may symbolize a freudian eroticization of a fantasized domestic life, particularly in his fetishization of femininity.

so hear me out: dean subconsciously eroticizes his mundane desires because he can't externalize them in a safe or realistic way. the desires are, namely, a longing for a domestic, "apple pie" life, which is a desire that has been explored in the show multiple times. dean routinely covets domesticity, through his desire to raise a child (ben and lisa subplot), the djinn fantasy (2.20), his "nesting" in the bunker (8.14), and his displacement of that desire onto sam (who is the primary subject of his erotic fixation in general and a subconscious extension of himself—if sam acquires a happy domestic life, dean can live vicariously through it).

he also routinely denies himself this domesticity because he's given up on getting out of the hunter life. he was raised in a survival environment and never was given a real opportunity to escape (even sam had to fight tooth and nail to get out, and we all know where that got him). the one time he had a chance to reject john and embrace normality he returned smiling because of sam (9.07). he's the one that vehemently secludes himself (and sam, like in 1.06) from society because connections are a liability. he leaves potential long-term relationships preemptively, always choosing hunting (and sam) over them before anything "real" can happen (1.13, 6.01, 6.21, also consider 8.19, perhaps more abstractly). he's so broken inside that he lacks any real desire at all (5.14). et cetera, et cetera. he denies himself his domestic desires to the point that he lacks desire at all—he's a broken shell of a man.

so the violent repression of the id causes the secret desire to leak out through erotic fantasy, a playground of fiction that is used by, well, most if not all people to explore desire in a safe and controlled medium (see: how many women have rape fantasies, for example—the sexual fantasy is a constructed world for safe exploration of certain desires, often abstracted through erotic symbols).

dean is so repressed as an individual, likely by external pressure to conform and control himself via john, that dean could subconsciously transform his secret desire for domesticity, into an erotic fantasy. he displaces those unacceptable desires from the unattainable mundane onto the safer erotic and they eventually distort into fetishes. the fetishes themselves are then abstractions of the things he covets but can't obtain.

and i want to focus specifically on his desire for domesticity and make an argument for feminization as a fetish (thank you rhonda hurley for your contributions to society) and how that relates back to that base desire.

there are several episodes in the show which suggest that dean fetishizes femininity itself, or rather feminization as it pertains to him (4.07, 5.04, also consider 10.05 in a more abstract sense). in 4.07, dean openly fantasizes about living in a "hot cheerleader's" body (youthfully feminine). in 5.04, dean recounts the time rhonda hurley forced him into her pink, satiny panties, saying that he liked it. 10.05 is a meta episode which additionally posits a plotline where dean becomes a woman through supernatural means, suggesting that fans are invited to draw a connection between dean and feminization. (these are the episodes i can pull off the top of my head; it's probably not comprehensive but i can't remember others atm)

so let's consider this feminization kink: we have dean fantasizing about femininity, womanhood, and especially girlhood, which he notoriously eroticizes (again in 4.07 and also in 4.13 and 10.13, to name specific references, but there are so many examples of this) in relation to himself, specifically. you can layer this in the way his deeper desires are of domesticity, and the home is traditionally (importantly) the domain of the woman. if dean would come to associate domesticity with femininity, then he would subconsciously connect his desire for domesticity with a desire for femininity. therefore, this feminization kink can represent an eroticization of his own (perceived) femininity. dean craves domesticity, but the domestic can only be achieved through womanhood, and therefore his desire for the domestic manifests through femininity, and thus feminization.

this "perceived femininity" of the domestic is important because of how dean conceptualizes the world largely through his consumption of media (see also: his "wild west fetish" via 6.18), which enforces gender roles and the relegating of the woman to the domestic sphere. this additionally aligns with dean's lived experiences: he had a domestic life while mary was alive, and when mary died the domesticity died with her. his only personal experiences with a settled home life are inexorably tied to the presence of femininity (his other excursion is when he lives with lisa, strengthening this association), and the absence of it and subsequent domination of john (the masculine) also took with it that domestic life.

and then you could even go so far as to make the argument that his eroticization of girlhood and his fetish for barely legal girls is a symbol of the domestic life he didn't get to live himself. it can represent a longing for youth in an environment that was inaccessible to him, a stability and domesticity walled off by womanhood. his youth was masculine, and his desire is for the feminine. it would stand to reason that when he yearns for an idealized youth, it would be through the lens of the symbolically feminine. and so this desire manifests through a fetishization of youth (girlhood) and his subsequent creep behavior. it all comes back to the life dean didn't get to live, eroticized and represented through a sexual fantasy born of rigidly enforced gender roles and the loss of femininity in his home life.

[incesthemes]

thank you for explaining!!! this is really interesting!

by god i'm assuming you mean the christian god and not the pagan gods they interact with. i do enjoy the (kripke era) deconstruction of christianity and the ambiguity of god's presence in the narrative and how that interacts with the very real and corporeal gods they find themselves antagonizing regularly, especially with episodes like hammer of the gods. the religious conflict between sam and dean is a theme i really like and thought was done super well, especially through utilizing john as a godlike figure to substitute dean's lack of religious faith and to haunt the narrative in the same way the christian god does.

i do think a lot of the lore is lacking and shallow in the show. early kripke era made efforts to pull from real folklore or at least make it look that way, and they were fairly creative with it i think, comparatively speaking, but especially as the show went on it got very trigger-happy and boring. like why does this spell require chicken feet? what are the magical properties of that? why does it work and how does it influence the results? many such examples. it would have been nice imo for the show to depict sam and dean as being much more knowledgeable about spellcraft and pagan folklore... especially when it came to defensive magic. i mean—it's all well and good to say sam and dean are against using magic in their hunting, but the anti-possession tattoo is a form of magic. the summoning spells they use are magic. devils traps and angel banishing sigils are magic. there's a dissonance between what's said and what's acted upon, and that gap leaves a lot of room for what other magic they can utilize to protect and defend themselves. lots of wasted potential, frankly speaking, and in the ideal version of supernatural that only exists in my mind i think they would both wear a lot more accessories with defensive properties (concept: jessica asking why sam never takes off his bracelet and sam stumbling through a lie to avoid telling her it prevents tracking spells from working on him, or something along those lines), or have more tattoos and warding etched into their bodies—maybe even some more dubious magic they use offensively, like fortification spells or even like those little resurrection sachets rowena has in her body, stuff like that. there's soooooooo much they could do and the shallowness of the text rings loudly in my ears at all times 💔

i do also like the very existential questions you're posing here with regards to what god is and what it means to be divine. imo a lot of these questions are answered by the text (seasons 1-5), but a lot of things are glossed over quite a bit. sam and dean both take opposite sides on the theme of doubt: sam has faith, while dean does not. i think both of their arguments are rather compelling, and the developments they go through between seasons 2 and 5 especially have a lot to say about the relationship between doubt and faith, and of course gnostic disdain. the uncertainty of the christian god's absolute existence creates the tone and gothic atmosphere of the (kripke era) show which i really enjoy. therefore when god's existence in chuck is revealed, i find it heavily undermines the original themes of the show. it's through god's precarious existence as a neglectful, absent father and the potentiality of complete nonexistence that the gothic anxieties can arise in the first place and position sam and dean as opposing forces on the topic of religious doubt.

at the same time, there's a lot of magical elements within the show that stem from christianity: demons are harmed by the "name of god" (which is actually referring to jesus christ) and are exorcized through latin (christian) chants, angels speak of (the judeo-christian) god intimately and of his work, heaven is real, hell is also real, so on and so forth. so judeo-christian constructions and concepts shape the world of supernatural, but the origins of their magic are never fully explained or explored until chuck pops out and reveals himself to be god. and you're right, i think they could have stood to explore this origin more. if god doesn't exist, then explain heaven and hell. did christians rip off the concept from another religion (hello zoroastrianism)? what makes latin so effective against demons? who invented the magic that made these mechanics work in the first place? if god isn't real, then where did angels come from? and to top it off, who or what made the world? which religion got it "right" if any did at all (this is actually something i was disappointed with in season 11 because they had the perfect opportunity to bring in proto-indo-european mythology via "god's sister" but instead they did, well, that)?

they take a lot of things for granted, both from a doylian and watsonian perspective. they never really stop to question these things, and the show itself doesn't either, and this slowly devolves into a strange christianity-reinforcing narrative over time after kripke leaves so the questions are never really given the opportunity to present themselves and generate more anxiety and doubt. real shame!!!

anyway thanks for your explanation. sorry my response is so long haha, i really like themes and motifs and most of all worldbuilding so you really snagged me with this one.

i wish the winchesters had had way more strange folksy rituals rooted in the lore. they SHOULD have been grappling with their own faiths way more explicitly and deeply. they should have been covered in tattoos of protective sigils, protective oils rubbed into their hands, charms woven into leather bracelets and necklaces.

[reyolfx]

so season 11 being SOLVED through the power of familial love preached from the mouth of dean winchester is 1) so hilarious but 2) probably so huge for dean lol, one of his big "family is everything" speeches finally worked exactly how it was supposed to and it was the one he gave to THE DAMN DARKNESS. he got her to make up with god and hold hands. he must be so stoked.

you go heart-power boy you really did it <3

[transsexualgriffith]

actually it's crazy to me how in the monster at the end of this book the very first act unforseen by chuck is cas helping dean. that he didn’t write, that he didn’t dream of. even when everything else complied. it literally changes course of the episode. the free will untangling the script.

[catnipster69]

Hey, all my wincest writer friends out there! Come join the wincest writing Discord server, The Winchester Gospels! It's a place to brainstorm story ideas, talk about wincest fic, and participate in weekly writing exercises like the Monday Drabble Prompt or the Thursday Writing Relay. It's a really comforting, welcoming space, and a great way to stay motivated. Send me a direct message with your AO3 username, and I'll give you an invite.

[shadypoliticianfromplanetvulcan]

i feel like the whole jack storyline was just god killing off an old character (chuck) and creating a new one (jack)

[cardi-c]

Sam you had one job