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onewomancitadel · 2 years

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Current worry for Rwby: you can post this publically lol.

So, I really am worried that they pull some BS and force Jaune to stay on the island or some shit like that. Assuming that happens, They’ll either say that in order to send everyone back to the main world one person has to stay or something, and that ends up being Jaune, or they’ll do some shit like “Pyrrha is alive on the island” and Jaune chooses to stay with her or something idk.

God I REALLY hope this shit doesn’t happen, that would suck and be super lame and not fit his character at all.

Hi <3 yes, well, I recommend reading my previous posts about Jaune and V9 speculation just for reference. I think there was actually an anon who was worried something like this would happen.

So, with that being said, I don't think my opinion has changed.

Assuming that happens, They’ll either say that in order to send everyone back to the main world one person has to stay or something

why lol

That's my first question, why. That's just arbitrary. It's the sort of thing which happens to minor antagonists like the Ace-ops, it's not going to happen to a main character. (Even then there's a thematic thrust to what happens with the Ace-ops).

or they’ll do some shit like “Pyrrha is alive on the island” and Jaune chooses to stay with her or something idk.

Then the V6 audience send-off would be for nothing. I mean that's also assuming the island/Fallen Place is an underworld, and it doesn't seem like it's an underworld. It's definitely a Special World, which fulfills the monomythic structure, but it doesn't seem like an underworld. But let's say Pyrrha's in the Special World anyway because she hasn't passed on. (Pyrrha is not alive on the island, Pyrrha is a spirit. There's no way she would be alive lol).

Then Jaune lingering wouldn't be right.

But then let's say instead it is an underworld and they decide Jaune's ultimate purpose is to say behind with Pyrrha.

Then why would they do what they did with Penny? Like why change him fundamentally like that in opposition to Ruby if the answer is to keep him static and stay with Pyrrha? That's not how he rediscovers himself (and they already did the 'Pyrrha's sacrifice reinspires everybody again' in V6, so that would be tiresome) and I cannot imagine how wrong it would be to make a V8!Jaune stay behind with V3!Pyrrha after everything he's been through. People are stagnant in their death, they don't grow with you, only the parts of themselves they left behind inside you.

If he had genuinely been unchanged as a character and they wanted to write a really sad/tragic end, maybe. If it's someone's twisted idea of a happy ending: why does he get it now? That should be at the end of the show. So that doesn't make structural sense either, even if you go along with it.

Let's say instead he stays down there because they have to get him back. Who would get him back? Once you start talking about katabasis (underworld descent) especially to retrieve someone, you're touching on some of the most significant ideas mythically (like I'm not quite sure how to communicate it), anything from Inanna's descent to Orpheus and Eurydice (and I'm not ruling out this stuff being applicable to other characters, but this is about Jaune). The person retrieving Jaune (on his own, let's say it's not a group thing here) from the underworld would most certainly be his love interest. Pyrrha obviously can't do that.

The reverse can't happen, R/WBY is not approving of trying to subvert the cycle of life/death, even if the narrative is probably ultimately sympathetic to Salem. So Jaune would be unsuccessful in trying to take Pyrrha out from the underworld (if they decided to follow Orpheus and Eurydice in the original spirit here, it would work. But like, this isn't foreshadowed for their characters, I'm not getting Orpheus or Eurydice for either of them).

Yes, Achilles is met in the underworld in Odyssey by Odysseus, and he regrets his life, and says that he would rather be a living ploughman than king of all the dead. I'm not sure who fits Odysseus in the story, and I really doubt that Pyrrha would express this given how they've characterised her death - though it would be interesting if she did lol - but that's food for thought. But it certainly doesn't involve anybody lingering behind.

To be quite frank if they decided to do that to Pyrrha, I'd be upset myself, because that's a dead fucking horse and would have zero emotional resonance with me. If they do the, Pyrrha inspires Jaune to be himself AGAIN it would be very boring. Does he need her in a bottle? At that point she's just an accessory, too.

Even then, if Pyrrha is met in the underworld based on her own Achilles allusion, it won't go the way you're thinking. That's allowing that the Fallen Place is an underworld. I wouldn't be surprised if people are thinking they'll see dead loved ones but they don't. I did that in my fic. Lol.

Given the presence of a Tree of Life, it doesn't seem like a dead place. In fact the last few frames of the Fallen Place are the camera looking down at Ruby's scythe (death) to looking up at the Tree of Life (life).

Anyway, with all that aside, it sounds like you're worrying more than anything. You can't control what the story does, but it's certainly not the end, so even if he does stay behind, he's not dead. That's just bait. The problem there is that if he's behind, and they don't have the Staff, how do they save him?

Well, I've got this fanfic called The Distance Which Fools the Skimming Eye, and a certain someone with a certain Aura bond and the Staff of Creation lends an unexpected hand. How fascinating! See that earlier line about it being his endgame love interest who retrieves him. XD

More seriously, I really doubt Jaune is going to be punished by the narrative, like I say in my original ask. From my perspective, I obviously think him killing Penny does work for him cultivating empathy for Cinder; I really doubt they would write Jaune into a corner and then punish him for it.

If anything, as I've gone on record speculating before, rather than seeing Pyrrha, it would be crazy if he instead saw Cinder. Obviously, that's the dramatic irony I enjoy in my fanfic.

If we're talking about what you're supposed to get from katabasis, it's special/forbidden knowledge you can't get anywhere else. So I'm not sure that Pyrrha (allowing that it's her and not an illusion as well! Because that could be a test, like in my fic, just not with Pyrrha) would not be the point of the excursion anyway.

That's why I'm wondering about what's most challenging for the characters now, and it's why it's so suspicious to me that Jaune killed Penny and is in a Special Place. What is he going to learn with the others? Or what is he going to learn about himself or somebody else?

But yeah, if we really refer to the monomythic purpose of katabasis there will be more interesting stuff that's happening. Also I don't know if it's been at all foreshadowed he would be condemned to stay in the Special World? Or have his happy ending staying behind? (Again, doesn't make sense).

To summarise, it makes neither structural nor thematic sense, even if we go along with some of the assumptions for the sake of the argument. Jaune's end is not foreshadowed that way. He still has a lot more to do. Underworld/Special World descent involves the retrieval of forbidden knowledge - we already know everything there is to know about Pyrrha and I'm not sure R/WBY is going to waste its screentime retreading the same ground after V6's decisive closure.

I hope that assuages some of your concerns, but these things are out of our control as viewers. I just hope something interesting actually happens, that would be fun.

Thanks for your ask. <3

#seraphina's asks #user: redhoodhungergames #V9 speculation #jaune arc sadsack tag

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prairiedust · 4 years

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Purgatory Revisited Part One

We’re going to Wally World!!!! I’m laughing so hard like going after a leviathan blossom lolololkhfhfdshfkh;aharihfndwhat the ever lovin hell with this show does it come with a ramekin of Blossom Sauce TM?

So back to Purgatory. This is fine.

no it’s not fine asdfh;jkhgifgrhhg so the reason I’m keysmashing is this: I have wanted another “descent into the underworld” plotline (plot, not incidence) since Cas made his deal with the Empty, because that is just a truckload of unfinished business. And I thought that we’d gotten “all” of the underworld allusion in The Rupture and Golden Time, and that the next textual underworld journey we could expect would have something to do with the Empty! (Although it really is starting to feel like that has been dropped completely, esp in light of the Shadow and Billie both waking up Jack and appearing to be allies. Unless that is another “gotcha” waiting to hatch unexpectedly...) So circling back around to Purgatory when there’s other loose ends to tie up is a surprise.

When I think about it, Sam’s underworld journey was allegorically bringing back Eileen, Cas’ would (supposedly) be settling his score with the Shadow, and so Purgatory 2: Return to Purgatory would be Dean’s. But Cas is allegedly coming with Dean… this is interesting. Hey look, kids, there’s Big Ben, and there’s Parliament, and there’s Big Ben, and there’s Parliament!

Why am I excited about a “descent into the underworld”? Why, when our heroes jump back and forth between different realms like they’re walking in a park? Why was I not yelling about this when Castiel and Jack jumped into the Hellmouth? (psst it was partly because he was going with someone else, yet here we are.) And how many times have our heroes been dead? I mean, Dean was dead just as recently as Advanced Thanatology! And all three of them just now held onto a magic bowl and were Bedknobs and Broomsticked into Hell in the midseason finale, it wasn’t even that hard??? What’s the big deal and why is Purgatory 2: Return to Purgatory any different than any other trip to one of Spn’s many otherworlds?

This is the first of at least two, and possibly three, and four is not entirely out of the question, hot-mess posts over the course of the hiatus and is just over 4k. I’ve rewritten this so many times and I still don’t know what the point of posting it would be, but here, try to enjoy some rambling about mythology and heroes’ descents into the underworld.

Many mythologies and works of literature have stories about descents into the underworld. The descent of a hero into the underworld is called “katabasis.” Actually almost any descent into the underground in myth and literature is called a katabasis/catabasis, but I’m talking about a typical “hero goes to hell” kind of story. In Greek mythology, Hercules goes to the underworld to complete one of his twelve labors-- as his final task he has to capture Cerberus, the guardian of the gates to the underworld, so down he goes, has some adventures in the netherworld-- and as half-divine, he gets back out-- and then goes back down to give Cerberus back to Hades, and gets back from his second journey okay too. Odin journeys to Hel in order to find out what happened to his son Baldur, who it turns out was in Hel. The Japanese god Izanagi journeys to Yomi, the underworld, to try to get his wife Izanami back (but similar to other legends about otherworlds and underworlds, Izanami has consumed food and can never leave.) In literature, Dante Alighieri wrote one of the alleged masterworks of Western literature about an imaginary descent into Christian Hell in The Inferno, where Dante and Virgil descend into the famous nine circles and he basically spills the tea on most of his contemporaries and passive-aggressively doles out everyone’s just desserts and then witnesses the morningstar’s icy torment, and climbs back out through the center of the Earth and out Mount Purgatory. In Michael Chricton’s Jurassic Park-- just kidding. Ha ha no, I’m not. There’s a powerful catabasis at the end of that book that leads to a revelation about the dinosaurs. Think about how many movies and books there are that feature a descent underground, a descent into a netherworld, or even just a trip to an otherworld. Tom Sawyer. Hellboy. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. The Empire Strikes Back. The Last Jedi. It’s a powerful tale type.

So @drsilverfish and I have talked a bit about one of the most famous “descent into the underworld” stories, Orpheus and Eurydice, as it features in season 15. Orpheus and Eurydice were deeply in love-- however, on their wedding day, Eurydice was bitten by a viper and died. Orpheus, the most skilled poet and musician in the world, was unable to go on without her, and played a song so sad that every creature in the cosmos wept with him and eventually he journeyed to Hades’ kingdom in order to plead to Hades for Eurydice’s return. Orpheus sang so compellingly that Persephone, Hades’ part-time wife (herself able to move between these two worlds on a technicality,) was moved to tears and convinced Hades to let Eurydice and Orpheus go. However, Hades has one requirement: Orpheus is NOT to turn around to see Eurydice’s shade until the sunlight touches her. We all know, however, that as soon as the sun touched him he turned around. It was too soon, Eurydice had not crossed into the upper world, and she disappeared back into the underworld forever.

Stories about descents or attempted descents into the underworld often ask us to reflect on the cyclical nature of time, as in the story of Persephone, loss as in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, the finality and inevitability of death, as in the Epic of Gilgamesh, or themes of vulnerability, justice, and cosmic/karmic balance as feature in both the story of Inanna and the sister-stories of Odysseus and Aeneid. Supernatural has dealt with those themes, as well.

What makes descents into the underworld different from other journey-into-otherworld stories is that usually there is no way out of the land of the dead, and the ability of our hero or heroine to cross that boundary both ways sets them apart as truly exceptional. So there is also an element of liminality to descent stories-- while not necessarily liminal places in and of themselves, there is usually a border, gate, doorway, wall, or membrane of some sort that has to be navigated, and these gates are supposed to only work one way-- into the netherworld. Yet our heroes cross and sometimes re-cross. But we already know that about Sam and Dean and Cas, they’ve died multiple times, came right back, visited Hell, came right back, went to Purgatory, made it back, so what’s my deal?...

Well, getting into this allusion, tne thing that makes the story of Orpheus so unsatisfying is because the contract of the story is not fulfilled, the thing we’re rooting for does not happen-- in many descent into the underworld stories, the hero takes on the journey voluntarily, has an objective, and ascends successfully with that objective or having fulfilled it (this is a tentative thesis afaik, because other stories are considered to be katabasis stories that don’t necessarily fit these requirements. But for Spn, this seems to be what is coming up based on the template from The Rupture, Last Call, and especially Golden Time. And I really wanted to find something to back this up but goddamn is the internet (and even databases like JSTOR) a freaking mess nowadays.)

Golden Hour was a clear allusion-- almost a retelling-- of the Orpheus and Eurydice story. There was the “descent” into the land of the dead-- Rowena’s hexed apartment-- and then the only living person who could enter it without dying was Sam, marking him as exceptional. Therein he found a spell, authored by someone who has become the queen of the dead, to bring Eileen back to life. While doing the spell, he kept his back to her during her journey back to life-- on the surface level reading, it was (maybe!) because he knew her ghost-clothes wouldn’t come back with her, but on the allegorical level it was because Sam, as Orpheus, passed the test and didn’t look back until he knew that the sun shone on her. When an underworld quest fails, it is often because there is some lesson that the hero has to learn about death and life and grief; the lesson for Orpheus is that of the peril of thresholds, the permanence of loss, and patience-- those are not lessons that Sam necessarily needs to learn.

In the allusion we got to the Orpheus and Eurydice story, we also got a terrible wrong righted-- as it was unjust that Eurydice died on her wedding day and it wasn’t fair that Orpheus didn’t follow the rules, Eileen had been dragged off to Hell when the Hellhound killed her, and by Chuck’s rules could not get into Heaven, and so bringing her back into the “sunlit lands” was a rectification of that injustice. In the myth, when Orpheus loses Eurydice at the end, it’s just so goddamn sad, and is an unfulfilled expectation. Glynn fixed that.

Golden Time was a beautiful subversion of a famously tragic ending. There are some ways in which subversion of stories are fulfilling-- when Glynn altered and subverted the Orpheus and Eurydice trope, it satisfied a lot of viewers and gave the myth a happier ending. But sometimes, subversion of a story just leaves us wanting…

I thought fleetingly that the Orpheus trope might apply to Cas in the Empty in season 13, but again it didn’t fit well, and ultimately he wasn’t rescued from the Empty like Eurydice from the underworld. Man did I want that, though, I really wanted someone to fight for Cas to get back. What we got was terrific, for a variety of reasons. Cas’ “perma-death” and The Empty plotline was a partial Gilgamesh and Enkidu reference from The Epic of Gilgamesh for Dean’s side of the story, if you squint-- Gilgamesh’s best most perfect companion Enkidu (a wild man who was literally made by the gods specifically to be his partner in adventure, which has interesting connotations for deancas subtext in light of how heavy a hand Chuck has had in the Winchesters’ lives) dies, and Gilgamesh prays to the gods to allow him to join Enkidu in the afterlife. In season 13 we get Dean praying for Castiel’s return, as opposed to an underworld reunion, but God does not grant his prayer; Dean then actually kills himself in Advanced Thanatology but is sent back by Billie. This is a bit like the Gilgamesh and Enkidu story, but ultimately the allusion was subverted in that Castiel gets to fight his own way back to the sunlit world-- he becomes a partial underworld hero in his own right, which was a fantastic arc for him (this trip to the Empty doesn’t completely “fit the bill” because Castiel was killed, he didn’t mean to go there, and he did not necessarily have an objective, although he discovered his will to return to the sunlit lands.) There was further obfuscation because Mary was missing in the AU at the same time, so it wasn’t “pure.”

Another reason why Gilgamesh and Enkidu only worked to a certain extent was because on Castiel’s side, his “journey to the underworld” can be likened more to that of Inanna, the widely worshipped Mesopotamian goddess. Inanna desired to visit her sister Erishkegal, who was queen of the dead, but her sister was not happy to see her, and made Inanna remove an article of clothing at each of the seven gates of the underworld until she was naked (and symbolically humbled,) but nonetheless Inanna dared to sit on her sister’s throne; the seven judges of the afterlife saw this and killed her for it. Her devoted servant Ninshubur in the upper realm prayed to Enki, Inanna’s father, who created two beings who could rescue her from the underworld and bring her back to life-- however, Inanna is hounded after this by the demons of the underworld because the cosmos is unbalanced by her rescue, and someone must take her place in the underworld. Themes from this, if not a well-fitting allusion, at least crop up in both Cas’ meeting with the Empty Shadow, who humbles him over the course of their interlocution and then bizarrely gives him new clothes, hello subverted motif, while they are in a necropolis of sorts where Castiel’s brothers and sisters lay sleeping, and in the way in which Inanna can be conceptualized as a “sleeping beauty” while a corpse in the underworld, much like Cas had to be awakened from an eternal slumber, and then later on we see the theme of cosmic imbalance needing to be restored in the deal he makes with the Shadow to trade his life for Jack’s in Byzantium, which is still a swinging pendulum of doom.

I side-eyed Cas’ and Belphegor’s free-fall into Hell, but they were journeying together, and there are not a lot of mythological katabases (that I could find) that feature two or more journeyers. When you get into the realm of literature-- and we are dealing with the concept of the “written word” there are too many to deal with-- it’s almost everyone’s favorite trope, you can even argue that there is an underworld episode in Sean of the Dead-- so I’m keeping the focus narrow.

I’m also basing all of this on the pattern we’ve seen in-universe. We can see that Sam and Eileen have been heavily paralleled to Dean and Castiel in Our Father-- where Sam and Eileen have long and soulful conversations with just their eyes, Dean and Cas can hardly look at each other, and where Sam and Eileen have held hands, there was a big glowy gap between Dean’s hand and Cas’ when Cas healed Dean. So taking Sam’s underworld adventure (that he made with Eileen) as a template for Dean’s (who is going with Castiel) is fair. But, then again, the next episode is called The Trap....

Going back to what I’ve said about each “hero” in TFW getting a katabasis, setting Purgatory 2 aside as “Dean’s” descent story satisfies most of the criteria for a full-blown Descent into the Underworld:

On Dean’s part, finding out that Chuck has been yanking them around their whole lives has robbed him of his worldview as an epic hero-- if nothing he’s ever done is real, the only thing that set him apart as exceptional was Chuck’s obsession with him, which has been called “pervy.” Pervy has a sexual connotation, true, but in the purest sense means turned away from the natural course. Dean’s descents into the underworld have not been “natural,” they have not always followed the outline of “voluntary descent, attainment of objective, and ascent out of the underworld.” They’ve been engineered. His first encounter with the underworld almost-but-not-quite fits the catabasis requirements-- it was done only reluctantly (yes, he made the crossroads deal but in the end he very much did not want to go;) he digs his way out of the grave, which is a very powerful “ascent” image, but he also had no goal in the underworld; he was not going to receive enlightenment, visit an old pal, or retrieve an item or person or whatever. In fact, he experienced possibly his most catastrophic failure there by breaking, torturing damned souls, and starting the first Apocalypse. His second descent, into Purgatory, was also involuntary, as he was yanked into it by the vacuum created when he and Castiel ganked Dick, recognized an objective only once he was in Purgatory; in contrast to his rescue from Hell he does fight his way out of this underworld and achieves “anabasis,” or heroic ascent into the upper world, but the other two criteria were not met. After Metatron killed him, he became a demon, an underworld being, and so was not a “hero” if and when he visited Hell (and all signs indicate he spent his demon days topside iirc.) In Advanced Thanatology, he undertakes a voluntary journey into death order to stop the evil ghost in the haunted house, but ends up in Death’s Library, which is an otherworld or at least only underworld-adjacent, and he is sent back up by Billie possibly against his wishes, hence no heroic ascent, even though this does deal with the themes of cosmic balance and righting injustices (sending the trapped souls to their true afterlife, for instance, and stopping the implosion of the universe, for another.)

Finding out that some or all of the “big” events of his life were actually orchestrated by Chuck has stolen Dean’s identity. Last Call went a good way to restoring his faith in himself, but he definitely has reconceptualized Dean Winchester as someone who “looks after the little guys,” not a hero involved in epic stories of good and evil and right and wrong where the fate of the world is on the line. Which is fine, but we need our epic hero back in order to defeat Chuck. Purgatory 2, should it prove to not be another one of Chuck’s plots, will go far as an underworld descent that Dean undertakes more-or-less voluntarily, which has an objective (retrieve the Leviathan Blossom,) and it is presumed he will return under his own steam back through Michael’s Gate. (We know it will not be that easy, but that’s the template.)

We assume he’s not going alone. Catabasis usually involves a separation/individuation of some sort. In the story of Inanna, she leaves behind her companion Ninshubur, who waits in the upper realm for three days before mounting a rescue. In the stories of Odysseus and Aeneas, they leave their crew and their new city respectively, and after going to the underworld they each meet different shades who also have differing values to bring to the theme of separation. Gilgamesh and Enkidu are separated by death and deliberately kept apart by the gods. Izanagi seeks a reunion with his wife. In Orpheus and Eurydice, well, separation is the overarching theme of the story. So, other underworld stories that we might see referenced this time are the twin journeys of Odysseus and Aeneas, since we have two characters going to Purgatory. Odysseus goes to Hades’ realm, and encounters three shades, (one of whom is a fallen comrade, echoes of Benny LaFitte) and receives prophecy about what he would be in for during the rest of his travels. In the Roman sister-story (fanfic rewrite) to the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Aeneas also visits the underworld with the sybil, meets some ghosts, and receives prophecy about the future of Rome. (And BY THE WAY who in this show just appeared in an underworld and believes in prophecy and just told Dean and Cas to fix their “tiff” right before they were sent to Purgatory...)

In Purgatory 1, separation was also a big deal, as Cas wanders off to have adventures in the woods while Dean and his underworld companion search for him, and then Cas ultimately decides to stay, making his separation from Dean almost permanent. In each of the Winchester’s deaths, we have separation of brothers. In a tiny little in-universe reference, the Winchesters found the Seal of Solomon, or the key to the AU, in an episode that featured lovers/mates separated by a rift, that had a tiny little “descent into the underworld” shot of Dean going into the RI Chapterhouse.

But interestingly, we *just* got a subverted Orpheus and Eurydice story, where all three bells were rung, and wherein in the “lovers” were allowed to remain together. Additionally, in Our Father Who Aren’t in Heaven we see two entities-- Adam and Michael-- remain together after ascending from the underworld, although both are now free to go about their separate ways, which is very different from what we were expecting. BUT in the main arc, Dean and Sam have just been separated by Chuck’s trap. It’s all very... interesting.

So now I have to decide. Do I see Dean and Cas’ journey to Purgatory as a descent into the underworld, or as the retelling of an in-universe myth? Or as both? Or will it be something completely novel? That partly depends on how Purgatory works in the upcoming half of the season, and I’ll be talking about Purgatory as a possible liminal setting in another post. Right now it’s not necessarily shaping up to be one, but there are hints...

Since there is a strong possibility that this will be a retelling of old Supernatural story, much like Last Call can be seen as a retelling of Nihilism, the idea of retelling and revising stories is an even larger theme this season than last-- an “anabasis,” or rising emphasis, so much so that it has in part become text. We can say, maybe, that Purgatory 1 and all of it’s baggage is now myth, and hope that what we’re getting is “new story.” If we get Purgatory 2 as a retelling of that myth, though, we might hope for new character development or a different outcome, the way Last Call retold the story of Nihilism with different themes and devices.

My last thought about descent stories is that, well, there are more than a few that feature romantic partners. These stories almost always involve those three criteria and the theme of separation that I set up as expectations: the lovers are separated by death or abduction, the mission is undertaken voluntarily-- the hero is going to find their lover in the afterlife-- there is an objective-- find the dead person!-- and there is a successful ascent-- at least by the hero-- to the upper world. I already mentioned the stories of Izanagi and Orpheus, both of which feature lovers separated by death, a journey to the underworld in hopes of reuniting with them, and a “successful” return to the sunlit lands (in that our heroes themselves return, at least.) The Shasta people of the Pacific Northwest have a story of a pair of woodpeckers; the wife falls into their fire and dies, so her husband chases her spirit into the afterlife (where she is incarnated as a human being) and to join her he has to go back to his abode and die himself in order to be reborn also as a human. Ninshubur may have been described at times as one of Inanna’s lovers, and to a modern reader the subtext is definitely there, as it is between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. That’s not to say there are a majority of underworld stories that are romantic, because I can’t possibly read them all, but it is a notable trend, and one almost explicitly evoked in-show. I’ve tried to stay away from deancas subtext lately because I personally am not an endgame-positive viewer, but is there something romantic about Dean and Castiel going to the underworld together? There certainly seemed to be in Purgatory 1: Journey Through Purgatory. P2 following so quickly after what Sam and Eileen undertook together, it’s almost like it was foreshadowed. The deancas subtext at this point in the season isn’t “oh there was a beer sign in the background” (although that’s some of my favorite kind of subtext ngl) it’s now “Sam and Eileen have been giving each other soulful looks and holding hands while Dean and Cas won’t even look at each other and see how they almost held hands but didn’t” and so it isn’t hard to reach. It has been accessible for a while now. But are we still in a place where textually Sam is getting the “romantic” plotline and Dean is getting the “platonic” one, a la season 8? The mirroring is too perfect, and the writing room was even playing on the word “mirror” by adding the connotation of “opposite.”. I will say that If subtext is all that can be written about a deancas narrative in season 15, well, to paraphrase Dean Winchester they sure are putting as much sub into that text as they can.

So going through the midseason hiatus, I will be thinking a lot about “old” Purgatory, underworlds, borderlands, and otherlands, liminal settings and liminal experiences, the peril of the threshold (besides the infamous “letting go” scene from Purgatory 1, the gateway will only exist for twelve hours!) and who knows what else. This has gotten long enough. On to liminality! I think. No, maybe I’ll do old Purgatory first. Anyway I’m cutting this off here.

Hallelujah, holy shit, where’s the tylenol?

(I’m linking to the Shasta myth because it’s a little hard to find and I want to be able to come back to it, as it has given me some ideas about resurrection/reincarnation and becoming human….

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shasta_traditional_narratives got me to:

Voegelin, E. (1947). Three Shasta Myths, including "Orpheus". The Journal of American Folklore, 60(235), 52-58.)

#the folklore of supernatural #the mythology of supernatural #descent into the underworld #orpheus and eurydice

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