Oh gosh, so desperate to not want them be soulmates. Like, how can you claim to have watched it and not seen it??? 🤣🤣🤣
I like how she rants about people using the finale to say they're soulmates but only shows screen shots of people using DSOM....so where are these people talking about the finale as soulmates then?
Wow.
The desperate attempt to deny what is clearly and explicitly stated on screen. Sam and Dean share a heaven and are soulmates. Period.
This is canon.
No amount of denial or spin is going to change that. None.
I mean, it's a microcosm of their meta in general, really. No, no, what the show is directly saying can't be true, you have to dig deeper! Here's several thousand words of cherry-picking, rationalizations, and random prescriptive assumptions I've just made up to make it mean what I want it to mean instead of what you directly get out of what was said and shown onscreen!
Castiel asks Dean what he sees and says other people see a tunnel or a river, but for Dean it's a road, so follow the road and he'll find Sam. The transition between Sam's memories is also a road. The only place Ash later mentions as having overlap is where all the individual lands meet up at the end of their individual paths to the Garden.
They didn't appear in literally the same room, so it wasn't the same heaven! I've decided roads can only work like this specific kind of road in this specific circumstance, so actually they were moving between different heavens - Castiel didn't say they weren't! Actually it was Ash that let them move through each other's memories!
Ash didn't appear until later and needed a spelled door to move them to his heaven. He specifically says most people can't leave their own heavens and literally brings up soulmates for no other reason. He calls their heaven Winchesterland and says they were in "your heaven", not Sam's heaven or Dean's heaven. We see in later seasons private heavens have an escape hatch to go between heavens which is different from the Axis Mundi, which Sam and Dean also don't use.
Ash was only talking to the specific brother he was looking at! He doesn't know what he's talking about - he was drinking too much beer! He didn't understand Enochian as well as he thought he did! Didn't you pay attention to the themes?! They were in clearly different heavens because they had conflicting desires (in the season heaven and hell were pointedly pitting them against one another), so the whole point is that they're not soulmates! Ash was just joking, obviously!
They always do this. They take what was directly said and shown, then sit down and brainstorm reasons why it can't mean what it would obviously mean taken at face value. Then they convince themselves and each other those rationalizations, hand-waves, and hidden meanings they had to put various degrees of effort into making up are clearly the conclusion the show wanted the audience to draw instead! It's so obvious!
Which is why they were blindsided episode after episode, season finale after season finale to the show's very end. Wait, wait, wait, a straightforward horror fantasy tv show just tells the story it's telling, you don't need to ignore half of what happens and use a secret decoder ring on the rest to figure out what it really means? Inconceivable!
Yes, all of this. No matter how hard the hellers try at hand-waving, denial, etc, there is just no getting around the canon in DSOTM that you need a spelled door to go to another person’s heaven, and neither Sam nor Dean have that knowledge until later in the episode after Ash collects them both, already together, in their shared heaven. You’re also right that even if we take the later retcon of individual heavens having escape hatches into consideration, Sam and Dean still didn’t use one to find each other, Dean just drove down the road, like Castiel said, and there was Sam.
This also doesn’t get around how absurdly easy it would have been to have Ash say Samland and Deanland instead of Winchester land and how they absolutely could have worked it so that Ash collected the brothers separately in order to illustrate Sam and Dean having separate heavens. Instead everything in DSOTM illustrates Sam and Dean having a shared heaven. I mean, just because not all of their happy memories revolved around each other, doesn’t mean it wasn’t still a shared heaven, especially when you take into consideration the context that both heaven and hell were doing their damnedest to pit them against each other AND that it was illustrated in that very same episode (DSOTM) that angels could manipulate peoples heavens.
