some more season ten Amara mirrors: Charlie, & Dean “becoming a woman”

(Following on from the season ten Amara/God foreshadowing that I talked about in this post)

now coming up closer to the end of the season...

Charlie and Dean as two sides of the same character.

First of all: goddess!Charlie in 10x21 and 10x22

This time, it’s Charlie who is the Amara mirror. The Stynes--the “alpha male central” family--are the God mirrors, as we see in 10x22:

--and it’s in this same episode, the one in which God is alluded to, that Charlie is called “Chuckie,” a version of the name “Chuck.” A more feminine-sounding version of “Chuck,” perhaps. Did TPTB already have plans for God to take the form of Chuck if/when he appeared next? Even if they didn’t, Chuck—as a writer—has been associated with God since his first appearance, so the God associations stay, imo. What we have in 10x22, then, is the juxtaposition of God/“Chuck” and “Chuckie-Charlie”... Charlie representing the feminine form of God (heh, where are those “Charlie = God” gifsets when you need them?). She’s the divine feminine who is hurt by powerful and unhealthily unbalanced masculine forces in the form of the Frankensteins. They are the men whose raison d’etre is the creation of life, but who can’t create that life without destroying others. Their ancestor was Victor Frankenstein, a lone man who created life in a lab without any input from a female partner: removing femininity from the creation process altogether, as Chuck did.

The Stynes’ ability to create and maintain life is fueled by sacrifice, in the same way that Piero’s art was fueled by Isabella’s sacrifice, and in the same way that Chuck can only create and maintain the universe, as well as his own comfortable existence within it, because of his sacrifice of his sister.

[Obviously, none of this is to say that TPTB couldn’t or shouldn’t have handled the 10x21 plot differently and less lethally. There are many alternatives that would have still delivered on this theme, of course. I just want to take a quick look at what we actually did get on our screens.]

[In an odd kind of way, though, I like that Charlie’s connected to Amara like this. Looking at it from that viewpoint, it makes some thematic sense that she wouldn’t be able to come back into the story until after Amara herself had been welcomed back into the fabric of existence, for the same reasons that it didn’t make thematic sense for Mary to come back into the story before that point. Now, though, with Amara sticking around... idk, it feels like (potentially, anyway) anything goes! Can we have a season 12 that’s chock-full of resurrected women...?]

Which brings us to Dean “becoming a woman” in 10x22

These two back-to-back episodes put both Charlie and Dean together in the role of Amara.

If Charlie is the Amara who gets locked away, then Dean is the Amara who is filled with loneliness and rage, who wants to kill her sibling (“I think it should be you up there [on the funeral pyre],” says Dean), who bursts out of her restraints (Dean escaping off the Stynes’ table) and destroys the one(s) who tried to destroy her.

Told that the Stynes are local town “gods,” Dean replies, “Well, I kill gods.” It sounds like something Amara would say.

Which is interesting, because it places Dean--already, back in season ten--in the role of the injured, repressed, vengeful feminine. It feels like we spent all of s11 thinking about that, but it’s interesting to see that theme appearing so early. Then again, I guess it appears at least as far back as 10x05’s “And then Dean becomes a woman,” doesn’t it?10x05 foreshadows everything.

So now it’s 10x22 and he has become a woman. He’s become Amara, at the exact moment that he falls under the spell of the Mark of Cain. It paves the way for the following season’s reveal of Amara as “the original Mark” and also for the exploration of her “connection” with Dean.

Hmm. And in the next episode, Dean will come face to face with Death, a member of the masculine old guard of godlike beings... someone who wants to lock Dean up, all alone, without his family, in a place where he can’t hurt anyone--sound familiar? And Dean kills him... 

In more metaphorical terms, he’s starting to turn against the destructive, unhealthy masculine forces that are keeping him down like they kept Amara down...