#why havent i asked this question already this has been plaguing me for decades

[anxiously-sidequesting]

Wait so I know technology exists in the Spiral but like does Wizard City have phones. Like do our Wizards have any type of device of communication on them at all. Like how the fuck are we able to like know when anybody from out of our location needs us how do our notifications work. Is there like a Homing Pigeon System being funded somewhere or

[mittensmorgul]

Thought: Half of why John is more accepting in 14x13 than most of us would expect based on his past behavior is because John kinda thinks it's a dream. The other half is because he is just a better person when Mary is around. See the "John would have hated John" posts re 5x13.

I’m gonna use this opportunity to point out a few things about the episode that I think a lot of people may have missed, because it goes a very long way toward understanding John’s reaction here:

2003 John, who from the way he showed up in the bunker, armed and apparently mid-fight... I can’t even imagine the shock of suddenly finding oneself supposedly sixteen years in the future, you know? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

From Donna’s cabin, where Mary was before they called her back to the bunker, it would’ve been approximately a 12 hour drive. Sam and Dean had TWELVE HOURS or so to talk with John before we rejoin them in the kitchen just before Mary shows up. Because heck, they had SIXTEEN YEARS worth of stuff to catch him up on, you know?

First off, he had to be so shaken when he arrived. He might’ve been thinking he get clobbered in the fight he’d thought he was in and was this all a hallucination or a dream? Or was he actually killed, and this was heaven or something? Who even knows what he could’ve been thinking at first, but he seemed to pretty quickly accept that it was real.

This is where one of the lessons the show has been encouraging us to learn really comes in useful. That being, STUFF HAPPENS OFFSCREEN and the show has encouraged us to accept the fact that what happens offscreen actually counts. So we have to assume that in the hours upon hours they talked with John, they laid out the vast majority of stuff that’s happened in the last decade and a half.

Some of it would probably be pretty difficult to hear, like the fact John didn’t survive to get revenge on Azazel (heck, 2003 him might not even know he was legit getting CLOSE even), but that Sam and Dean DO. How difficult would it be to tell this version of John that Dean sold his soul to save Sam, that he spent 40 years in Hell and was rescued by an angel, to tell them about how angels and demons were manipulating them all for decades to start the apocalypse?

Or that Sam let himself be possessed by Lucifer to stop the apocalypse, pulling both Lucifer and Michael into a cage in Hell to save the world? Like... this is still just the tip of the iceberg here... There’s still Raphael and the second attempt at the apocalypse, Soulless!Sam, Dean’s year in the suburbs, Purgatory, Leviathans, how they’ve befriended angels and demons and monsters oh my... oh, and God. Who also wrote a series of novels about their lives that are technically one of the gospels now... all the way up to how Dean earned a gift from God’s sister, the primordial darkness herself... that Mary has been resurrected...

Plus all that stuff about time travel and alternate universes they’ve experienced.

And for John, personally, the story of how they discovered the bunker in the first place, when the father John had always thought abandoned him as a child had actually traveled into the future, saved Sam’s life, and was killed by the demon Abaddon in the process. I mean THAT RIGHT THERE had to be a horrific shocker to learn, you know?

For JOHN, that’s possibly the most life-alteringly earth-shattering thing they could’ve told him, you know? Just to have an ANSWER to that question that had plagued him since HE was four years old and his dad disappeared off the face of the earth. Not to mention learning that he should’ve been a MoL legacy himself, and that if his father hadn’t been hunted through time by a Knight of Hell, John would’ve grown up “in the life” of monsters and magic himself... Kinda an eye opener, you know?

Oh, and learning that their family was a bloodline going all the way back to Cain and Abel (yes, that Cain and Abel, and by the way Dean killed Cain that one time), and that their family was part of a much larger cosmic plot to bring on the apocalypse in the first place, and Azazel-- John’s lifelong obsession-- was only the first step in all of that and a whole bunch of worse stuff happened after.

Oh, plus, Dean killed Hitler.

They’ve met Samuel Colt, Eliot Ness, Dean was on a sub during WW2 for a day or so, and traveled back to 1973 and 1978 and met with John both times (oh, and Dean was the dude who talked John into buying the Impala when he’d intended to buy a stupid VW van).

And this is STILL only scraping the tip of the iceberg here... They talked for TWELVE. HOURS. or so...

Sam and Dean have had some shockingly full lives, you know? It’s not even a surprise to me that after all that, after seeing the evidence of his sons’ lives laid out like that for him-- the good, the bad, the cosmic and the mundane-- (GOD! HIMSELF! MADE THEM PANCAKES! RIGHT OVER THERE!) that John’s only possible reaction would be to understand just how far his children went after his death.

In the wake of learning all of that, what they went through pre-2005 is just kinda... overshadowed, you know? Almost unreal itself.

But yeah, because of all of this ^^, and then the absolute SHOCK of seeing Mary again after all this time, after spending the majority of his adult life seeking revenge and justice for her death, and the long and painful search for the truth that kinda wrecked ALL their lives, to see her again alive and happy and whole... well, heck... everything else kinda pales to that. The literal horror show he and Sam and Dean endured (even the bits that were blatantly his fault) just... they’re suddenly worth it all, just for that moment, you know?

In a weird way, in that moment John had the burden of suffering with Mary’s death lifted off of him, and he could stand there in the perspective of that more innocent John from 1978 who’d unwittingly judged his own future actions so harshly. For one night, he got to step through to the other side of all that trauma and look back on it from a point where he and his family had finally WON. Where they’d emerged from it and built a life for themselves that he might never be able to understand, but he can appreciate it.

Even in 1.21, he told Sam that his goal was to finally be able to walk away from their mission when it was done, for Sam to be able to go back to school, for Dean to have a normal life, for him to finally be able to rest thinking he’d been able to serve Justice on Mary’s behalf. John himself didn’t even plan to continue hunting out beyond killing the demon who killed Mary, you know? I’m not sure he even had considered a future at all for himself out beyond that singular life goal. Because that’s what living for revenge does to a person.

But this also offered him the fresh perspective that of course there wasn’t really an end to hunting, and that Azazel wasn’t the Final Boss they’d needed to defeat. And he’d have some small notion of just how awful the burden he’d left Sam and Dean with all those years ago-- which THIS John is still THREE YEARS AWAY FROM DUMPING ON THEM.

Ow, time travel.

Granted, the episode didn’t try to explain or defend any of this to the audience, because it should never HAVE to... Can you even imagine how much of a mess of an episode that would’ve been if they’d even tried? Because the story of this episode was being told on multiple levels:

they didn’t try to overwhelm the GA with all of this heaviness, because the GA wouldn’t even care. The GENERAL notion of Sam and Dean’s lives to this point and their emotional states in canon during s14 would be enough of an explanation (trust me that the GA doesn’t have Strong Feelings about John the way Fandom does)

this was also the big PR push episode this season, and a lot of JDM folks likely tuned in just for him while having only a tangential knowledge of SPN canon to go on... introducing 14 seasons worth of emotional turmoil for their sake is kinda... pointless...

They assumed that people in the fandom who ARE invested in these characters emotionally would actually understand all of this already without needed to be spoon-fed all of this again

Because that’s how writing works. The writers have to trust that the audience is actually engaging with the story and possesses critical thinking skills.

I think some of the disconnect here was that we each went into this episode with our own personal baggage attached, with our own feelings about how WE might personally react if we were in Sam and Dean’s positions here. And if Sam and Dean didn’t react the way we hoped they would, whether it be via expressing anger at John over how he raised them, or just yelling about any or all of the above, then it was OUR job as the Thinking Audience to ask WHY, and to consider the past fourteen years of canon in coming to a clearer understanding of Sam and Dean themselves.

I wrote something the other day (yesterday? maybe... hang on... http://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/182723615495/rosewhipped22-so-i-havent-rewatched-lebanon-yet) about Dean’s wish that the pearl granted, because he HAS been thinking about his entire life-- including the baggage he’s been trying to lay down all season exemplified in his conversation with Sasha about her father in 14.05. And I think this episode nailed that aspect of Dean’s personal growth, by bringing John back the way they did and specifically NOT making it about anger or bitterness, but about finally being accepting of HIMSELF and of the entirety of his own life, setting down all the shit he can’t change while also acknowledging that he wouldn’t change any of it if it meant it wouldn’t bring him to this current point in his life. And that is HUGE. That is GROWTH and MATURITY.

Because this episode wasn’t really about John at all, but about Sam and Dean (and even Mary) finally getting to lay John’s memory to rest so they can move forward without dragging his ghost along in their wake.