#I was just bummed at the time of dotposting

[elizabethrobertajones]

Hey! First off I love your blog! Second, I say you have a problem or don’t understand why people don’t like Mary and I saw this post pop up on my dash http://justjensenanddean.tumblr.com/post/163320319227/thejabberwock-in-the-beginning-403-i-think. And I think this might explain why. There is such a disconnect between the Mary we got to meet in earlier seasons and the Mary now that goes beyond the “she feels disconnected from being dead for 30 years”.  It’s just a different person altogether.

Third. I don’t think this is the place to say this, but tumblr wouldn’t let me submit a link in the askbox so.

Heya, thanks, @snowslittlesnowflakes :)

I don’t know if it’s just an interpretation/how you were reading it all along thing so I think I’m never going to be able to explain this adequately in words without doing a comprehensive study of people who DIDN’T like Mary to see where they went a different way than me, but I found Mary to have great continuity with herself all season. As I’ve been doing my rewatch I’ve been finding even more reasons to yell about how great a character she is and how well her story works and ties together for me.

One of the things I was wondering, and I don’t follow enough Sam girls to be entirely clear on this to know what their vocal demographic is like, but I have a suspicion based on the wank I’ve seen that some Dean girls dislike her louder. I find Mary’s season 12 arc to be intrinsically linked to Sam, and I was expecting/waiting for that ALREADY before the season kicked off, as like, the no.1 bullet point on my list of urgent Mary things they NEEDED to address. To my eyes the show immediately began to set up and prepare to do exactly what it was going to do to deal with this. It was a gut feeling at the start of season 12 but on rewatching I found exactly what had made me think it:

https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/161941971596/1x09-she-cant-say-it-here-whether-its-a-ghost

I think it was because immediately in 12x01 they clarified that Mary remembered everything she was supposed to (aka not the time travel nonsense) EXCEPT this. I’m actually not 100% sure people remember being ghosts, since I don’t think Bobby has ever commented on it - or at least if he has it would be a very broad allusion to it, since I know he’s never had a sit down chat about it with anyone :P Anyway, removing it un-did her apology to Sam and that was GOOD because Sam could take that apology back in season 1 on HIS side, but it was no proper and fitting away for an ALIVE Mary who now had to deal with everything to feel like “oh i said i was sorry once when i was a ghost obviously it’s all good now” so SAM was the major cause of Mary leaving and being unable to cope with being around her sons, and this was loudly broadcast in the subtext of 12x01-3 to my eyes and so I was expecting her to leave and I was expecting it to NOT be about Dean, except as a secondary emotional arc from HIS direction towards her.

On top of that, Mary and Dean actually don’t have a point of tension except for the entire underlying trauma and her leaving after 12x03, all of which came from her deal, which was about Sam (ergo, the 12x22 conversation dealing a lot with how Sam was harmed, not Dean, and again, another strike against Mary from people who care about Dean that this conversation seemed not to be about Dean despite how it was to the core because all that Sam stuff directly impacted his life too and he said so and of course he’s rarely if ever felt unconnected from Sam to the point that Sam being hurt isn’t like hurting him too). 

So to me it felt like this was a secondary concern to the Sam n Mary stuff, which I was loudly stating at original airing times that I was ready to gobble up and give 100% of my attention to, did so, and therefore took away a completely different reason to be invested in Mary, allowing my Dean girl self to just happily soak up that Dean was having some problems with Mary and that he was going to have an arc of his own with her to make things up with her but the whole POINT was he was being left out and the narrative KNEW it, it wasn’t like the show did any of this forgetfully or maliciously against Dean to deprive him of his mother for no reason - the reason was Sam and that was not between him and Sam and not something I think he fully grasped consciously either, so it was something for ME as the audience to sit on and watch and wait to see how it resolved, and thankfully he and Sam never got into their own fight about it. So I was waiting for it to be resolved but I could see Mary’s discomfort was what she originally stated in 12x02 and not what she told them in 12x03 when leaving. The whole point was she didn’t voice what was ACTUALLY wrong, at least, the core of it, and left instead of dealing with it, having given them a reason they were all utterly helpless to, instead of a reason that Sam could chase after her to deal with with their words and just give her that vindication of her apology she thought she’d never get and - because she doesn’t remember it - never knows she made, putting Sam and an ENORMOUS emotional advantage over her since he already forgave her somewhere between 1x09 and 5x22, when his personal slate was wiped clean. In 12x22 she voices it out loud and it turns out to be fine but you know, if she just SAID it originally...? None of the drama of season 12 would have got past 12x02 :P

(Mary’s revulsion and horror at what she’d done to Sam is also a major emotional subplot of this fic I wrote circa 12x14 and it’s about as subtextual as the way it was being expressed in the show which is why it mostly manifests as Sam wearing flip flops for her and her loathing herself for it) (I include this note because it occurs to me that Sam’s characterisation in that fic probably seems utterly bizarre and extremely unfair on Sam unless you already read it once AND know how I felt about Sam and Mary in season 12, aka that by 12x06 I was sitting on the rooftop yelling about them every time they so much as exchanged a worried glance, and in 12x12 actually screeched out loud in glee about Sam and Mary and the yellow eyes thing and consequently spent the episode reaction time miffed that everyone was more interested in a little matter of the Destiel “I love you” than what I wanted to talk about and so that fic is a reaction to 12x12 and 12x14 at once :P)

ANYWAY I think Mary in season 12 is a substantially different person to any version of her we knew before because the entire point is that we were going to MEET Mary Winchester for the first time outside of dreams and time travel and on the other side of her death. 

She remained unbroken up to the opening of 1x01 because as fiesty and sweet as she was as a hunter when she was younger or as housewife-y and settled into a rocky marriage but loving her kids as they eventually managed to convey without rocking the boat too much in 5x16, none of this, even the sad Mary from 5x16, the latest canon version of her we saw before season 1 or 11, is who she would be post-dying and discovering her actions had global consequences and she’d utterly fucked up her sons, SAM IN PARTICULAR, and again I can not stress hard enough how important SAM is in all this, that her horror is about SAM not Dean, and that she’s running away from SAM and that she needs to make it right with SAM. 

Dean has a whole other bucket of issues of which the show took a different route to explore and unpack, by prioritising, sensibly, that Mary got maybe 20 seconds to have the “I hecked up” thought on stumbling onto Azazel in the nursery and her death, and I feel like I should repeat this over and over and put in my blog header maybe, the only time we ever see Mary after that is the “I’m sorry” line of dialogue in 1x09. That is her entire chance the show ever gives her to have a voice or to address what she did post-death. And it makes Mary’s post-death character ABOUT this until season 12 (when it... continues to be about this because that’s who she is because that’s the most important thing she feels post-death and 1x09 already confirmed it)... I don’t think what she said in 1x09 EVEN IF SHE REMEMBERED IT, WHICH SHE DOESN’T, is good enough to have Mary back and pretend her deal is forgiven, for Sam’s sake, said out of love for Sam. So the mytharc is about Mary through and through, from the BMoL to the choice to have a nephilim (who is a Sam parallel & hence ending the season with Jack and Sam staring at each other) as the more cosmic mytharc, and yellow eyed demons back, and an AU structured around her deal having never been made that she ends up being punted into with Lucifer, the reason she made it in the first place when looking for ultimate blame (again, something we’ve known since 4x22 and there were hints through the season that she needed a final reckoning with Lucifer). 

What we are seeing in season 12 is how that sweet and genuinely inexperienced, dreamy Mary we meet at her YOUNGEST age shown on screen, is like when you scrape together everything - the comments about her unhappy marriage with John, her legacy as a hunter, her fucked up father, her deal, EVERYTHING we know about her, and trying to turn it into a coherent character who has her own agency and inner thoughts and feelings that matter to the narrative, when the narrative previously only EVER produced her as a token to move around for other people’s thoughts and feelings. Even in the time travel episodes, she’s written as emotional manipulation for Dean, not as a character with a fighting chance, because 5x13 in the end wipes her memories clean and makes the very firm point to Mary that she’s gonna shut up, have her babies, and blissfully tell them that “angels are watching over” them when the awful, horrific truth of the Grand Plan has been wiped clean from her brain. I mean, Kelly in the cold open of 12x19 does what Mary was not allowed to do in 5x13 for the sake of the world, and yet is still dragged back to life because the baby is more important than her feelings - and since that’s that Glynn & Bobo episode, I’m assuming that’s a direct criticism on the past narrative, not the show fucking up this thing for once but directly telling us that in these narratives, the mother is meaningless (insert bitterness about Kelly having to survive like 5 Buckleming episodes before anyone wrote her with anything else to say than using her as the vessel for the baby so heavy handed and yet utterly unaware that that was all they were doing with her anyway >.>). The *only* thing that didn’t come up in the narrative except by omission, was the cupids, and they didn’t come up by omission before the title card of 12x01, so I figure they’ve been a part of the entire story all along even if no one said anything, especially with separate references to the angel fall spell to remind us cupids are a thing without pointing at Mary directly. 

But all that from her past that we DID know aside, Mary was NEVER a real character before 12x01, in the sense of being allowed motives, forward momentum, or a sense of purpose (and surprise surprise, she barely has one because she’s been so fucked around by the cosmic narrative all she can do is look at it in horror and wonder if there’s a way to make it right so Sam can pick up where he left off and go back to school and Dean doesn’t have to hunt, as John said in 1x20 - She  has regressive impression THEIR motivations looking back on her boys, just as we seem to look back on her with regressive ideas about her motivation even though she took her wedding ring off and that too was a powerful motif all season in its appearances and the silence about John and the John mirror in Ketch that she eventually purged herself of). So we can’t say we really knew who she was before (we meet her post-cupid but Toni extracted SHOCKINGLY dark murdery-ness from her and cited it as her Campbell side, and season 6 fills in an emotional blank there, that soulless!Sam happily fit in with them for a year and Samuel only got worried when Sam didn’t understand the concept that baby stew was bad). What she was made to say in the past, narratively, was to make us feel sorry for Dean and Sam because of her and her unknowing tragic request for them not to be raised as hunters. Dean gets so sad he forgets the 2x20 motivation to put saving people over family, and tries to undo history, and ultimately when he can’t, that trauma was part of the lesson Heaven wanted him to take away about his role, same as any other time they manipulated him like in 4x17 or 5x04 or Gabriel tried in 5x08. I used to think 4x03 and 5x13 gave us a chance to meet her but they’re still utterly clamped down in the wider narrative to be a fleeting apology for killing her off and making her stay dead. 

Anyway in 4x03 Mary is 19, motivated to get out in a way to parallel her with having Sam’s once innocence about thinking he can escape hunting, and when Dean talks to her, utterly untraumatised except for what you might expect being raised by Samuel. Asking her to be the same person post-death, with her guilt about her deal on her shoulders and 2 adult sons too traumatised about the exact same thing from THEIR end to just open up a fun little dialogue about it, is similarly demanding to keep her trapped in the exact same box, and demanding her to be someone who she realistically would no longer be, and would be demanding her to be a person who would be a poor portrayal of Mary and not taking into consideration every facet of her character, and not allow her to be traumatised or broken or overwhelmed with guilt without also making the demand she shoulder it completely and stoically and continue to try and be a sweet and motherly character because that is the role we may have come to expect of her even though we know Sam and Dean start out bright eyed and bushy tailed and post their death and guilt trauma, are angrier, harder men... And despite the fact the opening run of episodes of season 12 made it very clear it was completely unrealistic to expect Mary to cut the crusts off the sandwiches of her boys and drop back into their lives only to immediately fill an emotional void THEY had instead of wondering how SHE would feel. 

Allowing Mary to be selfish and leave and to show her brokenness on screen was utterly fantastic and whatever else you could complain about season 12, I’m 110% here for Mary and the arc they chose to give her because it was POWERFUL and EMPOWERING and they let her messy cry and kill things and do like 8 of Sam and Dean (and Cas)’s own personal selfish, misguided or murdery arcs for herself and at the end she was forgiven, got a group hug, and rewarded with being allowed to ask if she could punch Lucifer in the face and having that wish immediately granted, since she had some catharsis left to get which her boys couldn’t give her, namely going back to the root of her problems and knocking some teeth out :P

I mean, feeling like Mary wasn’t sweet enough is a mysterious complaint to me because I have been rooting for her every step of the way DEMANDING she be ugly and horrible and cold if she needs to be because I WANTED to see the image of Mother Mary utterly torn down and for it to be stomped out, and for her to do the stomping, on Sam and Dean’s faces if necessary, because for ALL of them it would be better in the end not to think she was supposed to be sweet and caring and motherly if she comes back as a REAL character and NOT as an idol.

Like, I get that you could think in 4x03 that was supposed to be telling us that was a character trait of hers and when you’re scraping for crumbs of a character who we get nothing about except these scant little episodes, you might try and stake the entire reading of her on these details, but in the same episode she also was snarky, Dean-like, a more than competent fighter, and tbh before you know about the cupids, just in 4x03′s context, I wondered if she was only latching onto John because he’d get her out of hunting, and it was a manipulative move in a way where of course she liked him and picked a guy she had some feelings for but at the end of the day it was about her rebellion against Samuel and her desire to be free - Azazel offers her peace in the suburbs when he brings John back and his words are not so much about their love but how Mary’s quality of life increases. And once you know about the cupids it just means she’s irrationally in love and staking her idea of that future all on one guy like no one else can do it for her, but she still has ulterior motives, that she wasn’t going to marry John and teach him to be a hunter and JUST want to propagate her bloodline like a good little meaningless walking womb in the grander scheme of things and it didn’t matter in what circumstances she did that.

And since 1x09 and that “I’m sorry” they’ve been trying to TELL us that Mary is messed up and complicated and did bad things and WON’T be so sweet as they think. Again in 2x22. And in 4x03 they reveal that it was this deal, but they still chose to make her a hunter and give her that legacy, and not be led into the deal blind, like some people we see who have no idea what a demon deal meant for them. And that DOES make her deal more fucked up and people who are critical of Mary and have been for a long time, much longer than season 12, have been critical because of the fact she should have known better or should have taken better precautions (thanks again to 12x12 for confirming said precautions were useless and allowing us to headcanon she absolutely did but Azazel strolled right over them anyway, since until that point all we knew was that holy water didn’t work on him).

So... anyway, idk. I wanted to meet the fucked up Mary the show had been promising us since the start, and they introduced the fucked up Mary I wanted to see. And I was delighted. And that’s the backstory behind that dotpost >.>

Re: what I actually said before, though... 

Idk if you just saw the post of mine that went outside this blog and lost all the context because of my actual complaint being dotposted (the previous day as well) to avoid drama and because I was mostly grumbling to myself in the tags - idk if you saw that or just some snarky replies where I gave 1 line answers before diving back into the tags for cover, because that got reblogged without any of the context of what I was saying. :P 

There’s some perfectly valid complaints about Mary and why people didn’t like her with some self reflection that I’m never going to disagree with even if I personally enjoyed Mary’s arc and had already mentally boxed away a large allowance for the show to suck at telling its own story in a narrative structure way, within its rigid formula, probably because I’ve had to forgive that complaint to enjoy Cas’s part in the story all this time as well and I am a season 10 bitter fan in that respect for Cas, so nothing can suck as hard as “I brought snacks” as his grand total contribution to an episode :P 

I was mostly grumbling about the people who specifically disliked season 12 as the MAJOR part of their complaint and that it made no sense, or that everyone was OOC, but then also as an aside, noting that they hadn’t made any attempt to sympathise with Mary and had immediately dismissed her as poorly written. In that case I understand perfectly why they dislike season 12, because sympathy towards Mary and pretty much swapping loyalties from your normal character stanning to Mary as your fave this year (as the show itself did by prioritising her and Cas’s arcs (and even Crowley’s or even Rowena’s to an extent for the sake of killing them off with a bit of fanfare, although, see also grumbling about 12x13 as the worst send off episode ever))... I think it’s important to go for that change in perspective and not judge how it looks on the surface but ask what feelings they’re trying to express by showing these things, in both the similarities AND differences, and ASSUMING the show is competent and did its research when the evidence is clearly there they did and are referencing every event in her life as much as possible, and therefore changes are made with intent to tell us more about her and to reveal new things rather than fuck up old canon. This would go a long way to explaining her arc, and therefore towards making a chunk more of season 12 make sense. And it was a semi-personal comment, aimed at a rather small, loud group of bloggers hence keeping it in the dotposts to myself with no major tags >.> 

So, apologies, I’m only making this so lengthy and clear because of the inevitable way misunderstandings happen on Tumblr and I’ve been bothered for days about that post being reblogged without my tags or at least, I reblogged it w/o tags to be sarcastic but since it was all out of context, once it got reblogged, no one would know my tags were there any more vs seeing it all on my blog in the correct place.

Also, like I said, I have no clue if the hating Mary contingent is more weighed towards Dean girls and the fact I related to her pain through Sam while watching Dean take the brunt of her ~rejection~ was something I was chill to weather because I figured it would work out because no way would they under-value Dean’s literal most important relationship on the show, more important than Cas and Sam TOGETHER, and lo and behold 12x22 delivered in spades the mother & son bonding episode I knew I’d get if I held my horses and let them utterly destroy that bond to build it back up. I don’t know if Sam girls have similar issues with Mary but from their own perception of how she hurt Sam, or if they interpret her leaving because Dean was too clingy (surface text of 12x02 & 3) or what. Or if they’re as content as I was to see how the “I hurt you i fucked up i fucked up” arc from Mary to Sam would take them so far as I was happy to go to let the Dean and Mary thing unfold because again, it’s the most important thing in the entire show’s backstory, and 12x23′s AU showed that again, by going to ridiculous lengths to validate what Mary’s deal brought about in the main world, but only AFTER she could look Sam in the eye.

I mean I don’t wanna say I have some magical understanding of season 12 that others lack in general, I just think there are a (few) loud angry bloggers who spent a lot of time yelling at Mary for not being what they wanted, and consequently took everything she did as a personal offence towards their interpretation and had an enormous chip on their shoulder towards the season, whereas @awed-frog‘s self-exploration on the point comes to a completely different conclusion of why Mary’s arc didn’t work for them and it’s a structural fault with the show that made it so frustrating and hard to get to grips with when the emotional telling should have been more upfront to work for them. (I also don’t wanna say their reason is the only good reason to have not got along with Mary in season 12 because there’s surely others, but it makes a lot of sense to me as a reason with little to do with relative amounts of offered sympathy and therefore nothing to do with what I was complaining about so a good example untainted by my specific wank :P) 

(and this is why this was all snarky short dotposting >.>)

Anyway standard disclaimer that I’m obviously a Dean girl and I love him dearly, but in this particular case I got in hot water with anons etc all season because I didn’t feel like Mary needed to be punished for hurting Dean (I went past a past like that while looking for some of the things I linked), nor that Dean’s hurt was more important than her pain, and consequentially watched the non-Destiel Dean girls I followed wander down a path I couldn’t go with them because their very own selfsame enthusiasm about Dean and Mary in PREVIOUS seasons had made me so utterly hyped to see her again, given me the appropriate emotional groundwork to prepare for what was about to happen, and... I mean the only thing I’m baffled about is why I had to unfollow so many people with tears streaming down my face because I admired them so much once, but their protectiveness of Dean won the coin toss and they loathed Mary and season 12 so much it just became a well of bitterness. I’m still sad that it was this issue that made me unfollow some bloggers I’ve followed since I got to tumblr, because they just hated Mary and season 12 so MUCH. And I remember reading posts valuing Mary so highly from them, back when she was an idol of Dean’s and nothing more. (Again: general impression, naming no names.)

And like... the ENTIRE SHOW since 1x01, we’ve seen that Dean did not have a healthy emotional distance about Mary, when Sam says she’s not coming back, and ironic as it is that it’s this context, Dean slams Sam against the bridge and is like DON’T YOU EVER TALK ABOUT MOM LIKE THAT and it’s not that that’s ruined that she came back - that line is betraying that Dean can’t even think about her being DEAD and the LOSS he took because she’s so utterly tragically romanticised in his head that *pointing out that she’s dead* is an *insult to her memory* and yeah he’s traumatised and Sam doesn’t remember or whatever, but bringing her back is literally proving Dean wrong not that there was a reason to hope she’d come back because I think at that point he could have NO reasonable expectation to argue with Sam like, WELL SHE MIGHT SOME DAY because that’s not the point. The point was he couldn’t think clearly about who she was or what she meant because it HURT and even before he found out about her deal in 4x03 and swallowed THAT down like a champ, he couldn’t allow himself a SINGLE mixed feeling about her. She HAD to be perfect and venerated. 

Well that all went out of control for him, but “I hate you” is the single most important thing Dean has ever said on the show, followed by realising he can hate AND love Mary because she is a complex, fucked up human being who hurt him and THAT was laid down in the first 15 minutes of the show as something he couldn’t overcome. Because Mary wasn’t ever coming back. And then she did. And now he’s overcome it. And I cry about 12x22 just about every day. But anyway. I see Mary hurting Dean as the most essential thing that’s happened to him and as a Dean girl it utterly delighted me to watch his heart shatter in real time on screen over and over.

And yet others saw it as long over due rejection from Dean to Mary in 12x22 like within a season they’d grown to hate her so much they just wanted Dean to say “I hate you” and leave and go take a self-care weekend in the woods and maybe grow a beard and never come home and leave his entire family to fuck themselves about how they treated him, but that was all taken away from them so then they got on with loathing that he made it all about Sam and then forgave her and wanted to reconcile with these assholes instead. :P

And meanwhile the more I rewatch the older seasons the more I move 12x22 from “one of the best episodes of the show” to “actually the best thing to ever happen to this show” and “wtf everyone got character development for the first time since the apocalypse” and I’m over the moon.

And also love Mary a lot. >.> 

#Asks #wank for ts #Mary F Winchester #I KNOW this is an emotional disconnect that starts waaaay back and all #I was just bummed at the time of dotposting #because I saw Mary come back in 11x23 and was like #WELP BETTER DO MY BEST TO LOVE AND UNDERSTAND HER SO I DON'T FALL INTO THAT TRAP #and then had one of the most fascinating and engaging media experiences ever as a result #12x22 #I wanted to link basically every post about mary I've made since season 12 but I stopped myself :P #my rewatch this hiatus has involved a LOT of lengthy posts exploring her and why I feel she and her arc are totally integrated #and that she makes perfect sense as a character and season 12 shines an ever brighter light on that in the past #and draws seamlessly for its continuation and ongoing exploration of her #but short of making a Mary Meta Masterpost I decided to chill with linking my entire blog :P #ugh anyway this rant is not aimed at you snowflakes #I appreciate you trying to explain but in the context of the original post I knew exactly what I was annoyed about :P #and was just trying NOT to make a long rambly post about it for the sake of being a wank light blog #aaaah well maybe it's better to just say it and move on >.> #submission