SAM: Well, you know, sometimes families do better after a little time apart. DEAN: Yeah, who? The Mansons?

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a meditation on cas and cults. the starting point and the ending point. angels and winchesters. love and affection and family and the twisting of it. the invitation to destroy yourself, and the appeal of being absolutely subsumed.

Also the thing is like, Chuck as the authorgodvillain was such a late addition that pretty much nothing is designed around him being the most satisfactory explanation – and it’s incredibly nebulous what viewing earlier events in that light of his intervention is even supposed to entail. If the writers had the courage of their convictions a little more, we could have been invited to recontextualise various really out of left field events in this light, eg @autisticandroids has talked about this re godstiel and the way the leviathans came out of nowhere, and me and them have also discussed it re gadreel being set up to be the “perfect deantransgression” (as @themauvesoul has pointed out) – it would make sense for a villainous author trying to create drama (and undermine Cas) to have contrivedly brought those things about specifically to that end. It is absolutely the case that there are places where it can be fun to say “it would make sense for Chuck to have made this happen for x/y/z reasons”, and it would have been very brave and sexy for the writers to be like “oh yeah lol this thing we wrote would have made more sense of it was Chuck”, but it would be very silly to say “oh the leviathans coming out of nowhere wasn’t actually bad writing because that was Chuck” y’know? Chuck as the authorgodvillain is a concept you can play with if you like, but he’s not a tool of analysis. In the show’s protagonist-powers-deconstruction episode the writers aren’t even brave enough to attack the most egregious writing conveniences facilitating the story, so extending the Chuck lens anywhere else in a way that lets them off the hook is extremely generous, as well as just pretty meaningless.