lrthreads: spn side blog

I recently re-read Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover.  I’d forgotten that it contained this sentence, but once I was reminded I knew I had to use it for Destiel angst.

This new pirate radio DJ cooks up a tasty ear palate. I approve. It’s a fitting soundtrack for the end of my life, my youth withering to decay here in the most boring act of all hunterdom: a stakeout.

Hi there! And welcome back!

There’s a lot of different brands of beer that only exist in the Supernatural Universe. And we’ve noticed over the years that these brands aren’t used at random. Nor are the specific signs/posters/bottles just randomly seeded into the background of the show the way something like Budweiser or Coors signs are in our reality. The signs and labels are deliberately used to give context and clarity to the narrative. They’re chosen on purpose.

We know this is deliberate because of the sheer number of brands they’ve created for the show. If it didn’t mean anything, they could’ve stopped with a handful and just randomly cycled through them, but they did not.

I mean, this blog has been keeping a list of every brand of alcohol ever used in the show, which gives some incredible context to just how much thought and attention was invested in this seemingly simple background feature of the visual narrative:

https://200dollargod.tumblr.com/post/55879856964/for-my-own-reference-more-beers-el-sol

If the brands didn’t have additional meaning, then why make so damn many of them? And why use specific brands in specific contexts only? Literally things like El Sol are ONLY used within the context of “reality is being manipulated, or someone is lying or being lied to.” There is no scene in the entire rest of the narrative where we see El Sol where it doesn’t function as this specific sort of red flag. You will never see it, for example, as part of a scene that is otherwise a straightforward rendering of truth. They have never had an el sol beer inside the bunker, for example. And the entire episode where the brand was introduced in canon was LITERALLY a false reality, Dean’s djinn dream within which he only drank El Sol and everyone thought he was always drunk and his girlfriend was a rendering of the model from the El Sol ad. So like… it’s fake, it’s all fake. Even the LABEL and every ad poster for the beer in canon is called “the sun” but there’s never a depiction of an actual sun associated with any of it. It’s telling you it’s the sun, but you can plainly see there is no sun. Fake stuff through and through!

Beer in the bunker almost always defaults to Margiekugel (alternately known as the “family beer” or “mom beer” because Jerry Wanek named it after his own mother). It’s about as close to “generic beer” they have in canon, because it’s sort of the family bonding beer.

Schultz is almost entirely associated with death (or debts, as in favors owed or the like). There are different colored labels for it, too (one even involving traditional “heaven duty coded” yellow and blue). If a character is framed with Schultz, it’s a warning.

There are far more, but these are the big three they’ve used the most in these specific contexts, just to give you some context on how we’ve noticed these things in canon over the years, and for demonstrating that the show itself almost never breaks these rules. Which is why so many of us are side-eyeing the El Sol in Heaven, and ESPECIALLY Dean’s declaration that it was “terrible.”

eta, because I thought of it after posting, that Dean also said this beer was his father’s brand (which adds painful context to Dean’s djinn dream back in 2.20 and what he tried to want for himself being his father’s dreams for him and not his OWN actual wants), and was told in the same conversation that his father lived just over yonder in this heaven setting, and Dean just picked this beer up, took a sip, and set it down and walked away from it. Which I appreciate, but still doesn’t justify why this specific beer was given the label of “John’s favorite” when again, literally any other canon beer could’ve served the same function without the baggage associated with False Reality attached that El Sol serves.

Why, Jerry Wanek, would you use that specific brand in that specific situation if you weren’t intending us to read it that way?

Margiekugel I could’ve understood, as Dean entering Heaven to be reunited with his family for eternity. Schultz I could’ve even understood as relevant to Heaven and death. Heck, they could’ve shown us an entirely new beer with no baggage attached, or even a generic mug of beer with no labeling at all associated with it! But they specifically chose THIS beer.

And I gotta know why…

but in lieu of someone actually giving an answer to this, it gives me permission to understand that this is Not Real, that something deeply wrong is happening here, and gives me permission to flat-out reject this finale as a real thing that happened in canon.

My meta tag where I’ve filed all the beer sightings of specific brands is right here for easy perusal and clarification. Some of the more heavily featured brands also have their own tags, which you can further explore as needed:

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