I has a meta
Nov. 10th, 2008 09:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tsukinofaeriiI also has a coffee, which hopefully will help me get through the meta. But considering how hard it is to type right now, probably not. ._. Please bear with me, I swear I've been thinking about this for days. Any incoherence isn't the result of it being way too early on a Monday. It's just me.
Possibly also some Bible spoilers.
...
JESUS DIES. I SPOILED YOU. HAHAHAHAHAHA.I'm okay. Really.
We all know about Sam, so I'm only covering him because he directly relates to Dean, and this meta is all about the Dean-kitteh. (Don't ask.) They're brothers, joined at the hip (and possibly other places, depending on your feeling regarding WinCest), and also obviously each other's foils. Sam is educated in the classic sense (overly so and possibly in the wrong fields, considering what they do), Dean went for On The Job Skills. Sam is religious, Dean was atheist and now possibly agnostic. Sam is moral, Dean is practical. And so on, and so forth.
Sam is an Antichrist. Really, he's the Antichrist, since all the others are still chewing on their binkies and working on that potty training thing. He's supposed to be leading the armies of Hell in a glorious war (and theoretically even more glorious victory) over Earth and the armies of Heaven (we have no evidence of the Armies of Heaven. Just sayin'). Sam can control demons and has a whole host of powers that he's not tapping into because They're Bad. Angels don't like him very much because he has demon blood.
Sam really sucks at this Antichrist gig.
He got his powers from Azazel, who is also known as the Yellow-Eyed Demon, YED, The Yellow-Eyed-Son-of-a-Bitch, and YESOB. I'll go with Azazel. It might surprise some people (notably the ones who don't watch SPN), but Azazel is an actual Biblical figure. He was one of the Grigori, angels who married human women and were responsible for corrupting the earth. He also apparently taught humans to make cosmetics and weapons. Wikipedia has more. In Supernatural, Azazel fed Sam some of his blood in order to turn him into a Super General for the legions of Hell.
Religion in Supernatural seems to be something of a grab-bag of mythos. We've seen pagan deities, fake pagan deities, all sorts of legendary creatures, ghosts, demons... Introducing Azazel gave us fallen angels. Now Castiel has shown up and given us the other side of that. Even more confusing, demons seem to have a Lucifer messiah belief... Well, you get the point. And then they drop an Abrahamic-religion god on our heads. Initially I was pretty much all one with the idea that Kripke had lost his marbles. We can't have battled off a passel of gods and then be told that this is a monotheistic universe. Out of cheese error, please reinstall universe and reboot.
Of course, being the geek I am, I eventually remembered that the Abrahamic religions have roots in monolatry, which nicely solves everything as far as that plot twist goes. But it leaves us facing the very real possibility that we're dealing with old-school biblical stories. Which means we're dragging history back in time two thousand years or more, to the days when Rome was still a bastion of paganism. Everything is balanced between polar opposites. We have Heaven and Hell, Angels and Demons, Good and Evil, et cetera. So everything we've been shown in-series needs to be balanced out.
The setting is a war, with Earth as the chosen battle field. Hell's chosen general is Sam. And, as I've already said, he sort of sucks at it. The natural opposition of the Antichrist figure is the Messiah figure. Would it shock anyone that they seem to be setting Dean up for that slot?
We can't have an Apocalypse without the Second Coming, now can we?
Dean is about as good a messiah figure as Sam is a bringer of the apocalypse. Sure, he saves, but not exactly in a family friendly sort of fashion. Luckily, Supernatural doesn't seem to care if they're good at it so much as that they fit the basic shape of the bill. And Dean definitely does.
Going beyond the parallels to Jesus (I'm pretty sure that the Bible didn't mean it like that when Christ spent time in the dens of the lowly and hung out with whores), Dean has been resurrected, is a defender of humanity against the darkness, and is a son of Mary.
Okay, so maybe that last one is a stretch, but the plain and simple statement of Dean's current position is that he is leading angels. Castiel said that he and Uriel were to follow Dean's orders. In case anyone missed the primer, Uriel is an archangel. That means Dean, at last note, was out-ranking one of God's generals. How's that for power? This also nicely sets him up as equal and opposite of Sam, which evens out the power imbalance we've been seeing lately.
I don't pretend to know where the series would go with this idea. Sam's obviously not on the side of Hell, which makes me wonder if Dean will end up on the side of Heaven. (Especially seeing as our local representatives aren't making Heaven look particularly attractive.) He doesn't have any powers that we've seen (being awesome is not a power), and I somehow doubt he'll ever get into the whole "holy smiting" thing. But I'm watching for the walking on water moment. Or maybe water into wine. That seems a little more Dean's style.
Possibly also some Bible spoilers.
...
We all know about Sam, so I'm only covering him because he directly relates to Dean, and this meta is all about the Dean-kitteh. (Don't ask.) They're brothers, joined at the hip (and possibly other places, depending on your feeling regarding WinCest), and also obviously each other's foils. Sam is educated in the classic sense (overly so and possibly in the wrong fields, considering what they do), Dean went for On The Job Skills. Sam is religious, Dean was atheist and now possibly agnostic. Sam is moral, Dean is practical. And so on, and so forth.
Sam is an Antichrist. Really, he's the Antichrist, since all the others are still chewing on their binkies and working on that potty training thing. He's supposed to be leading the armies of Hell in a glorious war (and theoretically even more glorious victory) over Earth and the armies of Heaven (we have no evidence of the Armies of Heaven. Just sayin'). Sam can control demons and has a whole host of powers that he's not tapping into because They're Bad. Angels don't like him very much because he has demon blood.
Sam really sucks at this Antichrist gig.
He got his powers from Azazel, who is also known as the Yellow-Eyed Demon, YED, The Yellow-Eyed-Son-of-a-Bitch, and YESOB. I'll go with Azazel. It might surprise some people (notably the ones who don't watch SPN), but Azazel is an actual Biblical figure. He was one of the Grigori, angels who married human women and were responsible for corrupting the earth. He also apparently taught humans to make cosmetics and weapons. Wikipedia has more. In Supernatural, Azazel fed Sam some of his blood in order to turn him into a Super General for the legions of Hell.
Religion in Supernatural seems to be something of a grab-bag of mythos. We've seen pagan deities, fake pagan deities, all sorts of legendary creatures, ghosts, demons... Introducing Azazel gave us fallen angels. Now Castiel has shown up and given us the other side of that. Even more confusing, demons seem to have a Lucifer messiah belief... Well, you get the point. And then they drop an Abrahamic-religion god on our heads. Initially I was pretty much all one with the idea that Kripke had lost his marbles. We can't have battled off a passel of gods and then be told that this is a monotheistic universe. Out of cheese error, please reinstall universe and reboot.
Of course, being the geek I am, I eventually remembered that the Abrahamic religions have roots in monolatry, which nicely solves everything as far as that plot twist goes. But it leaves us facing the very real possibility that we're dealing with old-school biblical stories. Which means we're dragging history back in time two thousand years or more, to the days when Rome was still a bastion of paganism. Everything is balanced between polar opposites. We have Heaven and Hell, Angels and Demons, Good and Evil, et cetera. So everything we've been shown in-series needs to be balanced out.
The setting is a war, with Earth as the chosen battle field. Hell's chosen general is Sam. And, as I've already said, he sort of sucks at it. The natural opposition of the Antichrist figure is the Messiah figure. Would it shock anyone that they seem to be setting Dean up for that slot?
We can't have an Apocalypse without the Second Coming, now can we?
Dean is about as good a messiah figure as Sam is a bringer of the apocalypse. Sure, he saves, but not exactly in a family friendly sort of fashion. Luckily, Supernatural doesn't seem to care if they're good at it so much as that they fit the basic shape of the bill. And Dean definitely does.
Going beyond the parallels to Jesus (I'm pretty sure that the Bible didn't mean it like that when Christ spent time in the dens of the lowly and hung out with whores), Dean has been resurrected, is a defender of humanity against the darkness, and is a son of Mary.
Okay, so maybe that last one is a stretch, but the plain and simple statement of Dean's current position is that he is leading angels. Castiel said that he and Uriel were to follow Dean's orders. In case anyone missed the primer, Uriel is an archangel. That means Dean, at last note, was out-ranking one of God's generals. How's that for power? This also nicely sets him up as equal and opposite of Sam, which evens out the power imbalance we've been seeing lately.
I don't pretend to know where the series would go with this idea. Sam's obviously not on the side of Hell, which makes me wonder if Dean will end up on the side of Heaven. (Especially seeing as our local representatives aren't making Heaven look particularly attractive.) He doesn't have any powers that we've seen (being awesome is not a power), and I somehow doubt he'll ever get into the whole "holy smiting" thing. But I'm watching for the walking on water moment. Or maybe water into wine. That seems a little more Dean's style.
