#this isn't very Society If but i had benny and cain parallel thoughts

[louisdotmp3]

ok jeremy carver expert riddle me this: society if benny was around for the MOC arc ?

okay so benny does have a role in the mark of cain plot in that like, here’s this monster that wanted to live a life between the two worlds of monsters and humans and he simply couldn’t.  it was exhausting.

“i’m not a good fit, dean.  not with the vampires and for sure not with the humans.  i don’t belong.  and after a while…that starts to wear on you.“

so the benny arc is good setup for when dean, faced with losing his brother when sam finds out about ezekiel, takes the mark.  dean feels like he has nothing, because a fundamental part of his identity is being sam’s brother/parent, and so he takes the mark and has to then navigate that in-between that benny failed to, that cain fails to, and that ultimately dean himself fails to - the arc says it’s simply something that cannot be done.

cain and benny both succumb to their monstrosity in different ways.  they lose their lovers and struggle to find their place in a world where they don’t fit in - they don’t fit into the supernatural world and they don’t fit into the human world.  because there is no place for them, because they are completely alone, and because they are barred from humanity they succumb to their fates.  cain back to violence and murder, and benny back to purgatory with the rest of the monsters.  neither of them belongs and without any connections to the human world, they can’t sustain their balance living between the two worlds.

not to mention the way that dean kills both of them.  ultimately, they both want dean to kill them, or feel it’s the right choice.  they’re both tired of fighting to exist in their current forms and they want it over with.  cain tells dean he’ll have to kill him one day, and at the end of their final fight cain kneels and bows his head for him.  dean kills him in the style of a gladiator.

“The slayer was kept fighting until he could be slain.” (Seneca, Epistles (VII))

but anyway society if benny had been around - well i think it’s easy to make every monster of the week in s10 a dean parallel or mirror which was undoubtedly done on purpose, and benny would have been another one of those.  but if benny had made it to s10 that’s where he would’ve died, too, because carver era has this thing with fate where you can try to fight it for a while and be successful at it - but ultimately there is something in your blood that will determine your fate.  we see this not just with cain and the mark (”my whole poisoned issue”), but also with sam and dean’s legacy men of letters blood (@ 10.19).  cain has this whole thing about how his bloodline is poisoned - but all the show comments on is that it’s wrong to kill people, not that cain is wrong about all of his descendants being cursed because of the murder of abel.  so this is all to say that if benny was in s10 he might’ve done the deed himself instead of dean asking him a favor, which would’ve tormented dean not just because he cared about benny but because with the mark he couldn’t kill himself, he couldn't take that way out.  (which actually is tackled via a hallucination of dean’s in 10.19).