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Day 15: Third Eye

I just wanna add another one to the "Poor Sammy" list

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"The Aeneid was a fanfiction" daughter or terrible greek myth retelling son (you are not allowed to kill yourself)

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1x01 → 15x20

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Fate and fatality are linked in complicated ways and nowhere more so than in the extent to which racism explains not just who becomes a prisoner (almost everywhere and at all times poor people of color, ethnic/religious minorities, migrants, and dissidents), but also explains what the prisoner becomes. […] [A] person is socially negated or made a human non-person […]: living, they nonetheless appear as if and are treated as if they were dead. […] In exchange for avoiding immediate death, what’s taken from the captive is hist past, his family, his culture, his honor, his future, his very being. […] A ‘nonperson’ […]. This is fatal […]. The idiom of social death speaks about the captive but is only partially addressed to him […]. The idiom of social death teaches […] ‘how ordinary people should relate to the living who are dead […]’. And it is emphatically not a singular but a relational idiom that speaks most intently, most essentially, to those ordinary people who need (or accept) instruction in how to relate to those proximate populations - slaves, prisoners, undocumented migrants, the very poor, the abandoned, the enemy, the subversive … - whose degraded status is deemed required for the rest of our well-being. […]

Here the question of the past, the present and the future - indeed time itself - looms in many complicated ways. Around the prisoner, there is an enormously complex practice and discourse of time. Perhaps the most obvious or seemingly definitive is the way in which the law renders punishment in units of life-time, giving time to be done in the present and taking away a life with a future, with the right to a future time, or futurity. There is, in fact, a whole anthropology of ‘people without future’ embedded in the culture of poverty assumptions that justify mass imprisonment as poverty management. […]

People without future are suitable, in this schema, for confinement in an institution that controls both space and time. And, of course, the daily life of the prison is organized like a sadistic […] time/motion laboratory: regular and surprise head counts […]; meal and shower times designed for maximum inconvenience (always too early) and for maximum control over fraternizing; the routine exercise of internal discipline not only by the temporally disorienting solitary lockdown but by the extra judicial extension of the prison sentence. […]

Dylan Rodriguez writes that the ‘prison’s logic of death exterminates time as we know it. Bodies fill up spaces that have been … constructed within a … time … alienated from history’ […]. Part of the ‘terror of the prison regime’ is the ‘endless sameness … that convinces the imprisoned that their very subjectivity is in question’ […]. As Ray Luc Levasseur writes, ‘It seems endless. Each morning I look at the same grey door and hear the same rumbles followed by long silences. It is endless’ […]. In the prison, state power renders the distinction between illusion (’It seems endless’) and reality (’It is endless’) into a weapon to force the prisoner to serve the time, to assume this alienation. Rodriguez continues, ‘tremendous human and technological energies pour into the apparatus for the express purpose of making time happen’ […], of giving some semblance of futurity to the endless present of prison time, that ‘painful’ time Maryland prisoner Q calls ‘the dragon’ […]. The prison regime makes time happen by organizing the routine of everyday life […] according to the overarching principle of absolute obedience and compliance to its authority, its dominion. […]

To achieve a measure of agency and possibility […] it is necessary, as Q puts it, ‘to redeem time’ […]. This redemption involves refusing the death sentence and its doom, involves refusing to be treated as if one was never born, fated to a life of abandonment and spectrality. […]

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All text above by: Avery Gordon. “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity.” borderlands 10:2. 2011. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism.]

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I've read that thread on twitter about the commenter and the poet and I actually find it a bit weird that so many people "side" with the poet. The question was undoubtedly stupid and the aggressive reply can be partially justified but the "shame on you, shame, shame" part, put there, on the internet? Awful. Feeling shame is one thing and it can be a good thing but publicly shaming people? I don't know, I feel like, as a poet and an adult, he knows the weight of words and that he crossed a line. Okay to being harsh towards entitled questions but there's a limit to that to.

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The Holdovers (Alexander Payne, 2023)

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it doesn't really solve any of my problems with the finale and it's still tricky (and fully unintentional) because knowledge, as it's currently recognized, is very much based on physical sight and direct observation, therefore not seeing something means believing in it (or not) and so we have to take jack's word for granted and believe in it because we don't see amara BUT

that still doesn't change the fact that the new god is, techinically speaking, jack AND amara. because they're in harmony which can mean that they're simultaneous, not simply in agreement and then amara goes to sleep and jack does the god-thingy. the new god is NOT jack but "jack AND amara".

this means that's jack AND amara that rebuilt heaven and help both bobby and cas escape from jail and the empty. it's jack AND amara the new "top dog" in town. why would amara help jack with bobby and cas is a mystery but yeah, maybe it's cause she deeply understands prisons. she was there and she was in harmony with jack the whole time.

again, not that i like it but it's a consoling thought.

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day so bad i must end it by dipping cookies straight into my melatonin-enhanced chamomile. i gotta have at least one joy before these 24h end.

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*cough* miracle *cough* the dog *cough*

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MY BRILLIANT FRIEND - 1.01//4.10

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Elena Ferrante

I love, love this answer so much

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rethinking sam winchester's party city wig

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@ananke-xiii I actually don't like reblogging my own meta so I'll just post a new one to respond to your tags.

Sex and Violence was aired on a relatively closer date from now, so I get what makes you feel "meh" about from the "plot-twist" aspect, but that's because the history of vilifying women who are actively engaged with sex has been so long and that you're aware of it. For that, twisting this type of narrative has also been around quite long in the history of storytelling. I have a specific example in my mind right now.

The Naked Kiss(1964), a film written and directed by Samuel Fuller, has a female protagonist with a bold personality, Kelly, who is a former sex worker. The film literally starts with her beating the shit out of a man with a frying pan lmao. She moves into a new town and gets a new job, but some people try to force her out of the town because of "her past", or don't give her enough credit in general. And she ends up falsely accused because of that whole "untrustworthy" status of her. (Technically it's not "falsely" accused, it's more complicated than that, and that's what's important to this story, but I'll just simplify it for now. The point is that people don't trust her words about what actually happened.) This film's perspective always stays close to her, so it's natural that the audience roots for her, and sympathizes with her because that's the whole point of the film; you can not judge people like this. Imagine if this story had the POV of some random prejudiced towner or the character who was already disapproving of her. Or just any person who isn't her. That's what SPN did; it's Dean's POV. Sam and Cara were just horny for each other and that's all, but that wasn't what the show wanted people to perceive at that moment. So here came suspenseful music and voyeuristic shots. Conjuring up a dangerous vibe from a normal consensual sex scene is that easy.

I'm referencing this specific film for a reason, see this dialogue:

GRIFF Your face might fool a lot of these people… but not your body. Your body's your only passport. KELLY You're right. I can renew a passport… but I can't renew my body… or my face or my health. Oh, look, Griff. I'm trying to change. Please help me.

They're talking about her body as a former sex worker. Doesn't it remind you of how this show treated Sam's body and blood? Thematically, both of them have stigma related to their bodies. This film has its own problems, but it treats its stigmatized protagonist better than how SPN did with Sam.

Anyway, Cara wasn't a sex worker, but it just changed into a sexually confident woman with the "suspicious past", and the core is the same. If she was shy and not actively flirting with Sam, and living in a town full of people who had known her since she was a kid, then Dean (and the audience) wouldn't have the same amount of doubt because the whole premise of Siren as a creature is that it has the form of a woman to seduce and kill men. (Dean literally said it: "Well, I did a little checking up on her. She's only been in town for two months. And she has an ex-husband. A dead ex-husband, Carl Roberts.") The myth itself is misogynistic. As I said, Sam is also subjected to this "Let's just suspect this person first since they have a history" method through Dean's POV. It's not a totally irrational thing to do, in fact, that's usually how investigation starts, but the narrative using sex of all things for making/looking Sam "tainted" and "untrustworthy" happened not once but twice, is what I find interesting. Things that don't usually happen to a white male protagonist have consistently happened to Sam, and it's all closely related to how people see the Other, that was my point. Sam is the protagonist of the show but his perspective is not really involved in this show's narrative because he, in fact, is an outsider of this whole thing. Think about how S4 barely acknowledged the fact that Sam and Dean actually share the same blood because of Sam's demon blood arc. Dean is the default values and standard, and Sam is someone disturbing Dean's thorny fence that divides "people" from "things."

I'm not rebutting your opinion btw, I'm just explaining where mine comes from :) I actually like when people slightly disagree with me because it also gives me something to think about lol. And I agree with you that the epilogue of the episode is an extension of my point. And it's always been like this, when it Should be Sam's turn to express his feelings, it is usually brushed off. Or worse, people hate him for expressing his valid feelings. Even with this episode, some people still think Sam was the one who unreasonably reacted after the "What is with you and banging monsters" phone call. But the fact is this; Sam stopped arguing with Dean at some point and just suggested meeting up and figuring things out together, but Dean refused.

Also, "Love em and leave em" is just an obvious and everyday case of SPN misogyny so I didn't mention it, but this show is always about Sam and Dean, everyone else just dies or is left behind, so I think it's kinda weak to be a particular case on female characters. If we're gonna do this, this would be about specifically Dean's way of seeing women given how much he always tries to hit on women he doesn't really have real feelings for. On the other hand, every female character who had a sexual or romantic relationship with Sam was always somewhat emotionally connected to Sam, even if it was brief. Sam wanted to settle down with Jess when he was only 22, he is a character who desires to be safe and stable but is never allowed to. For that reason, I see that line and Sam's before that("What's the point?") as more like showing the audience how much Sam changed in this season. And it's actually heartbreaking. From "I'm not gonna live this life forever(1.16)" to "It's too late to go back to our old lives, Dean. I'm not that guy anymore(4.08)" to "But there's no getting out and there's no going home(4.20)." But in the end, you're right, it's also misogyny because these women are written only for a male protagonist's character development. But as I said, it's not really a particular case for women. Not saying it's not a big deal, I'm saying that the discourse would literally never end because of that ubiquity. I always talk about how this show is inherently discriminatory, and it's not only about the visible problems like female characters keep dying and black characters being assigned as villains, it's also that the concept of this show itself is discriminatory, and it has a direct link to Sam. In the end, it separates Sam and Dean from EVERYONE ELSE, that's the most obvious factor, but what I always try to talk about is "How they also differentiate Sam from Dean."

FYI, I'm kinda tired of clarifying this, but I don't think the writers of this show have the greater mind to play with the audience either. They are NOT here to criticize the problematic values as I said before, this just happens in the writers room naturally because Sam's status in the world he's in and as a fictional character of the show is almost the same. But I still think Humphris was fully aware of what she did with Sex and Violence regarding Cara's case. She wasn't trying to be "edge" with the plot twist, she just knew the prejudices and stereotypes and utilized it. If you'd guessed the plot twist of the ep before it was revealed, then it's actually a good thing, but I was talking about where all that persuasive power came from.

[ananke-xiii]

Hey there, long time no see!

I saw a post of yours and, a few posts later, fate in the form of my dash has showed me some gifs from that ep in s13 where Sam talks with Rowena about Lucifer and their trauma.

I remembered you once wrote that you had Opinions about that scene and I was wondering if you wanted to share them? I'm curious as to how you've interpreted the scene.

If you don't want to reply that's fine, I always take my chances and send asks :D

Hi friend! Thank you for the ask! I truly love that when you had an idea you thought of me and reached out with an ask!! <3

It's worth mentioning that I'm a little bit under the weather, and my fannish hyperfixations go through periods of waxing and waning. I'm currently hyperfixated on other things at the moment. (Isn't to say I never think about spn, just that my thoughts might not be as clear/focused as they could be. But I'll do my best!)

I think I can come up with 2 different aspects that bother me about that scene every time I see it:

One that revolves around the portrayal of late-season-Sam's relationship to trauma (via Lucifer as a focus).

The other, the way the show handles the idea of "Lucifer's face" and why I just... don't like it.

Sam, Lucifer, and Trauma in Supernatural

Lucifer, S5 Samifer, and Sam's Queerness

The first thing I'll say just to get out it out of the way: At best, I have a mixed relationship to the idea of Lucifer being portrayed as Sam's abuser in s6/7 and beyond.

I'm one of the last standing s5 Samifer girlies (gn). I interpret their relationship in s5 as an symbol of Sam's own repressed queerness. The ultimate climax of Sam's 5-season-long queer-coded arc, with Lucifer as narrative manifestation of Sam's internal queerness and relationship to it. With this as the reading that works best based on context. NOT as an abusive relationship.

S6/7+, probably unsurprisingly in that context, turning what I read as a symbol of Sam's queerness into a story about abuse (including the implied rape of a man by another man without any additional context!!!!)... leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.

That being said, I won't linger on that.

Lack of Internal Consistency Handling Trauma, Abuse, Character Development, Morality, and Subplots. Through the Lens of Sam & Lucifer's Later-Seasons Relationship

I think the other problems highlighted by the Rowena and Sam scene (if it's the one I think we're referencing, where he talks to Rowena in the car about Lucifer's face). Is that Sam's post-s5 storyline doesn't seem to have any intentional overt theme the way it does in the Kripke era... except for dealing with Lucifer as antagonist and abuser.

Lots of people like this storyline a lot, and connect with it on a very personal level. I don't want to take that from them (because why would I want to take that from someone processing their own trauma?? Fiction is big enough to handle a myriad of readings.) Also, I just think a lot of meta and fanfic has been extremely useful on its own, whether the subplot in the show is handled well or not, when tackling the subject of abuse and its psychological impacts. I've read a lot of really good fic based on this premise - some of my favorites! - that handle these themes exceptionally well.

And even if I wanted to contest these readings of Sam and Lucifer's relationship, I can't really in good faith. Because, my preference or not? Handled well or not? it's more or less canon.

But I think there's something very strange and weird and frustrating, for me. That the writers (potentially at Jared Padalecki's insistence) focused so hard on the Lucifer-as-abuser storyline. That it became one of the only throughlines for Sam in ~10 whole seasons.

Particularly when Sam (and Dean, and Cas, and Lucifer himself, and Jack, and Crowley, and and and...) experience aspects of violent control and manipulation and torture and murder. Pretty much all the time, as a matter of course. And propagate it! Including our heroes - like Sam himself!

Leaning so hard on the handling of abuse when it comes to Sam's character, and this one singular relationship, feels really jarring and out of place. When that's not really how violence or control or loss of autonomy is handled, with pretty much any other relationship/situation throughout the show.

(Again, I'm not arguing that abuse shouldn't be handled like abuse, either in spn, or fiction generally. More that there is a specific suspension of disbelief and emotional core to how trauma and violence are expected to manifest within this story. An unspoken rule-set for this show and universe. But for some reason, Lucifer and Sam's relationship exists entirely outside of those rules. Unless the story can't figure out what the fuck to do with Sam or one of his other relationships. Then it gives the same or similar storyline to another character for a hot second. Like Rowena. Or s13 Gabriel, etc)

The framing of Lucifer as the One True Abuser of the series also lets pretty much everyone else off the hook for often doing the exact same thing. Or having the exact same emotional response to trauma or bad parenting or whatever. All throughout the series.

Lucifer is the really reaaaallll evil bad guy. Because at some point in the later seasons they decided he was.

People (usually Sam) feel a particular level of hurt in response to Lucifer's actions because the story says they should feel that way. Because Lucifer is Very Uniquely Bad and Hurts People.

If Sam (or anyone else) should feel similarly about other characters who've hurt them in similar ways, but don't feel that way; that's okay! Because those other characters are not the One True Bad Guy Abuser! Please, try to keep up!

Lucifer hurts people: Very Bad, of course. Those people will be hurt forever. Always scared of him, and never want to work with him except in the direst of circumstances.

Other People hurt people: Meh. Acceptable. Forgivable, even. They could become begrudging accomplices. Maybe later, even trusted, beloved friends! It's fine, ultimately, the wounds will not linger, the trauma is fleeting and eventually forgettable. Because it wasn't Lucifer who did it! Understand?!?!

Also if sometimes Lucifer hurts people and they're really fucked up by that, but sometimes Lucifer hurts other people and they're fine... Who cares! That's not important. If Lucifer hurts Sam or whoever, in a particular way, of course Sam will carry that pain forever. If someone else hurts Sam in the exact same way, it's a coin toss as to whether or not that will matter to him psychologically, or even be referenced again ever. There is no internal logic for who/what/how trauma impacts people, or even if trauma is a real thing that exists. Please do not ask the writers or producers or executives, or even the actors at cons, any more questions about this! You are taking the show too seriously, and that is annoying!!! Cringe, even!!!

It's really just another manifestation of the fact that the later season writers are pretty thematically directionless, and that the show became a bit of a joke and a soulless cash grab, even for the writers. Even if they didn't like working on it that way, which I really don't think they did.

What sorts of circumstances are traumatic, and carry lifelong scars? Well, whatever the narrative calls for! What sort of characters experience traumatic psychological wounds? The ones the writers want to experience it, when they want them to. What sort of relationships are permanently scarred by autonomy violations, violence, and manipulation? Depends on if the narrative wants to paint them as a good guy or bad guy.

I also think, again, that I just can't take a lot of characters' trauma as it relates to Lucifer too seriously, either. A lot of it exists literally just to be a foil for Sam, like I said. Because it's clear that the writers didn't know what to do with him. And/or, that the writers wanted to develop Sam's character in ways that the fandom and/or Jared Padalecki were disinterested in.

As such, the Lucifer Trauma plotline ended up being the only really consistent thing for Sam, that everyone had to return to constantly. Because it was one of Sam's only consistent internal, intentionally portrayed motivations, they wrote other characters into that, too. Even when it didn't end up making sense for the situation or Sam's character. Or honor past aspects of Sam's more complex characterization; Rowena, for example, having the exact same trauma Sam has had with Lucifer, imo undermines a lot of aspects of Sam's specific trauma and his past connection to him. Traumatic or otherwise.

Even the more updated version of the Sam/Lucifer dynamic, which ignores the more complex motivations of Lucifer's character in favor of "he's just a sociopathic asshole" ignore why Sam would be a favorite punching bag of Lucifer.

The show literally can't decide if the horror of the Lucifer/Sam relationship is because Sam and Lucifer's relationship is unfortunately special, and Lucifer is a complicatedly messed up person who's uniquely fixated on Sam. Or because Lucifer is just an incredibly generic version of the worst evil character you can imagine, and Sam just happens to be some rando who got caught up in the crossfire. When Lucifer would pretty much torture and abuse almost anyone as much as look at them.

I also hate this latter version, because it implies that Sam is, for some unexplained reason, unusually weak-willed when it comes to Lucifer specifically. While most of the other mains treat Lucifer the way it makes more spn-universe-rules narrative sense for him to be treated; as just another Big Bad, Monster of the Season.

"Lucifer's Face," Worldbuilding, & Horror

If we're still both thinking of the same scene, another thing I don't love is the conversation about Lucifer's face being horrifying. For several different reasons.

This first point is more about aesthetic choices, and they tie in both to personal preference based on my own past religious upbringing, and to the concept of horror as a genre and how to execute it effectively.

Worldbuilding & Lore: The Metaphysical vs The Three Dimensional

In earlier seasons when it comes to things like angels and demons, there's more of an emphasis on the idea that there is a physical plane and a spiritual plane. With both spoken and unspoken understanding that the spiritual plane cannot be physically seen, and does not have a "visible" three-dimensional existence. That anything pertaining to angels, demons, heaven, and hell that we "see" is a symbolic representation or manifestation of the actually unseeable. The unknowable. Things that mortals can't really comprehend.

Later seasons seem to ditch that concept of the metaphorical and incomprehensible in favor of a more literal portrayal. Heaven and hell are real 3-dimensional places you can travel to and walk around in with your physical body, if you want. Angels, demons, and manifestations of their power, like wings or glowing eyes or smoke, are much more... dumbed down, for lack of any other way I can figure out to put it atm. It's all REAL real. Heaven looks like a glowing white office building. The throne of heaven looks cheap, unimaginative, plastic, and very real. There are hallways in between individual heavens which are stuffed into a single room, instead of it being a wild, living amalgamation of other people's ideas of happiness. You can just take your physical body to purgatory or hell and start punching souls out with your fists. Souls are basically just like bodies now, anyway.

The older seasons showed heaven and hell as transitory, hazy, largely conceptional. Appearing in quick flashes or wide emptiness, or represented by things you could only see on earth that weren't meant to be literal. Meant to imply that both living human characters and the audience is getting a symbol of an experience.

The reason I liked this is that it made the universe feel much bigger, much wilder. Emphasized how outgunned the boys were, but also how alien and unknowable things like angels were. It felt like somebody had put a lot of thought into how these things would work, and what sorts of rules worked around it.

(It also worked, personally for me, as a way that connected with modern day American Christian interpretations of heaven and hell in the communities I grew up in. Which largely have responded to everything science has proven and disproven about the nature of the world we live in. By deciding these places and their Biblical descriptions are metaphors for things we could not conceptualize with our small human ideas, that exist in the 3-dimensional physical plane. I'm no longer faithful, and haven't been in a long time, but one thing I liked most about Kripke spn is that it felt like it captured a lot of the sort of tonal, worldbuilding lore aspects of the way I was raised. Manifested them into a modern workable American myth. Which again felt very tied to American Protestant Christian ideas and conservative Americana. Reinforcing the themes about how spn really is just modern Americana storytelling at its core. But that's all personal preference stuff.)

SPN: Once Horror, Now ????

There's the general horror storytelling rule that less is more.

In order to keep tensions high, and be less likely to violate your audience's suspension of disbelief? If you want something to feel truly scary or threatening, you have to be very careful about what you do and don't show.

Early spn treated angels and demons as more spiritual, non-corporeal entities, without anything we might think of as a 3-dimensional form. Just entities whose forms were not meant to be perceived by mortals. Not because they were evil, but because human eyes just... weren't made for that. (Remember our boy Castiel burning Pamela's eyes out, just by showing up and letting her catch a glimpse of him. Not even on the physical plane, but in the spiritual.)

The idea that Lucifer's face could be something that Sam and Rowena have both seen, like, physically, walks a very fine line there. The idea that Lucifer's face is uniquely awful to look at? For me, it steps over that line.

Why is Lucifer's face so physical that they can both see it? Why can they both conjure it up and remember it without their eyes burning out again? How does Rowena have her eyes back, when Cas himself couldn't even heal Pamela from seeing his face? A regular angel, and not an archangel? Also, if Sam's eyes never burned out of his head because he's a special vessel OF Lucifer's... Shouldn't he not have the same horrific experience of seeing Lucifer's face? Shouldn't he have a fundamentally different experience in some way, then Rowena or anyone else mortal could?

Don't even get me started on what we're supposed to think about Lucifer's weird skeleton terminator face. How can it manifest in the real world? How can it not burn most people's eyes out? Why is it so silly and uncreative to look at? Are we meant to think this is what horrified Sam and Rowena so much?

...And other stupid questions I wish I didn't have to ask or think about.

The Accidental Flattening (Yet Again) of Sam & Lucifer's Relationship. & Lucifer's Characterization. & The Archangels. ...And What "Villainy" even is, in SPN.

I also just think it, once again, dilutes whatever it is they're trying to do with Lucifer and Sam's relationship thematically. Is Lucifer horrible for Sam because he abused Sam horribly? Or is he just pure evil essence, down to the way he looks? Is how he looks reeeeallllly one of the worst aspects of interacting with Lucifer? For anyone hurt by him? For Sam?

That seems a little... silly. And thematically just... irrelevant or offkey.

Not to mention again the weird accidental ableist connotation that how someone looks (evil, bad) connects inextricable to what they are (evil, bad).

That loops back around even deeper into a lot of my fundamental critiques of how late seasons handle everything from Lucifer specifically, to the archangels, to the concept of bad guys. Bad guys are bad guys because the narrative says they are bad guys. Lol, obviously! /s Lucifer is a bad guy because the early seasons established him as bad guy! Michael, also, is a bad guy because early seasons established him as a bad guy!

The characters are provided little to no nuance in later seasons, and anything understandable or complicated about their motivations is a very distant second to making sure they fulfill their roles as Bad Guys. The archangels' power is scary because archangels are powerful and other people being powerful means they are scary (sometimes. When narratively appropriate. Or convenient.) Not really because of complex motivational reasons based on their past characterization.

Things like the devil's face is scary because he is the devil and he is a bad guy and also therefore a monster. Fundamental questions about why his face would be scary or awful go unanswered.

Not even unanswereed, just like. Not even questioned. The narrative has never thought that was a question that existed, much less was worth asking. Nevermind worth answering.

Is the devil's face scary because he spent millions of years in hell and it changed him? And if that's true, shouldn't that make him actually, just... a little sympathetic? At least in this aspect? Since the way he looks is not his fault and not tied to his actions or anything he did to himself? But to something someone else did to him?

Isn't it a little victim-blamey of the narrative, then, to express horror and make us feel sympathy solely for the people who were forced, not to go through the millions of years of hell, but just to perceive the results of it? Doesn't it complicate the narrative of abused/abuser, if the abused is horrified as much if not more by aspects of the abuser that were outside the abuser's control entirely, and have nothing to do with the abuse?

Or are we meant to think that the horribleness of Lucifer's face is because evil like, somehow twists what you look like. At least as an archangel? In that case, what is evil? Is Michael not evil? Does he look evil? What about Raphael? What about Gabriel? All the archangels have done terrible things, whether the narrative decides they're a bad guy or not in a given moment. Is Lucifer really more evil? If you look at each archangel's actions, one could easily argue Lucifer is not objectively really much more evil than Gabriel. Unless evil is offset by acts of care and redemption. Could redemption fix the apparent ugliness of an archangel face? Has Gabriel's face ever been awful, now or in the past? Is Lucifer's face only ugly because he does not repent and change? Does that mean he is capable of change, or should be allowed to change?

Does Supernatural-the-narrative care?

Haha, no. No! Of course not. Never ask them this again.

In Conclusion

So, yeah. I'm generally frustrated with Lucifer's (and the archangel's!) handling in later seasons. And the way angels and heaven and demons and hell are handled. In a way that one-dimensionalizes them. Makes them more B-movie, syfy channel shlock, than representatives of complex ideas and questions.

I also think Sam and Lucifer's relationship as it's represented in later seasons has... problems. And while maybe how it's handled would make a lot of sense in a different show? Unfortunately here, it butts up against the rules spn has long established about trauma and abuse and relationship dynamics and the role of antagonists. (When it decides to have rules.)

And other characters being written as cheap foils of Sam's experience really drill home and highlight this discrepancy; in how Sam, Lucifer, and the themes of trauma and abuse are written. In ways that never get resolved, but just...

It's like a car stuck in mud. It keeps spinning its wheels, and getting mired deeper and deeper. But it never really goes anywhere. It never catches up to where every other theme in the show is headed. Maybe it's generous to expect it to even have a direction at all.

Anyway, thanks for the ask!! I do like talking (complaining) about Lucifer & Sam's late season relationship and how it's handled. A lot.

And I really hope that has some semblance of coherency! :D

[ananke-xiii]

Since I've started writing about resurrection in spn (around the time of the autumn equinox) I've also begun to notice the underlying aspect of the exchange/gift/deal and I thought it was cool but, you know, it was just something about that story and that was it.

But the more I scratched the surface, the more the word "balance" kept appearing and I started having Thoughts. Then, the movie "The Substance" was released to the public and it also appears to be about "balance" (or, at least, the commandment of respecting the balance, I haven't watched the movie yet and I want to write these thoughts before watching it to then compare and check if I got it or not).

So, of course, I started thinking about the so-called "work-life balance" and how it's imperative that we respect this balance or else. But what the fuck does "balance" mean? It seems like it's used as a synonym for "equilibrium" or "harmony" but is it really true?

It turns out that "balance" just means "two plates". Interesting. So this is, as expected, about opposition. Between what? 'Cause a scale, aka balance in its object-form, is used to measure things against a weight. A weight that has a specific value that you have to meet to reach the equilibrium aka the "same libra", the same weight. Okay, but who decides what constitutes a weight and what value each weight has?

So I did a little research on the history of the scale and it soon turned into an interesting study into the power to control/dictate the value of things. What's more surprising, however, is that one of the symbols for "balance" is Justice/Dike, holding a scale and a sword (there are sooo many other symbols because this stuff is ancient but I have to limit myself here). What is surprising is that, more often than not, the scale in these symbols is NOT in equilibrium. Therefore, there's an imbalance.

So I remembered the image of Justice, the Arcana VIII of the Camoin-Jodorosky tarot deck where that card shows a woman holding a sword and a scale. But she's tipping the scale. The images in the cards are asymmetrical but the card is number 8, the perfect number. What does this mean? That Justice doesn't exist, or that it's fundamentally unfair? I can't answer that but I can say that "balance" as we like (or are conditioned) to imagine it, has the potential to be biased at best, fraudulent at worst. It's a construct of our conditioned mind. Because total balance means that either both scales are empty or they weigh exactly the same. Which means there's absolute control over them, with no possibility for movement and only eventual death (metaphorically). Which means that you must NOT respect the balance, in the sense that you have to completely question and/or rebel against the balance, reject the balance if necessary, because it might be rigged or it's just pointless to reach the equilibrium because then you have no more possibility for movement and no movement doesn't make sense in Life. Because Life's about transformation. The opposing weight and its arranged value are already and always set by someone else who wants you to enter a losing game where you can only, maybe, meet the standards to reach stasis and then stop moving aka stop living. Momentarily reaching balance, same hours of day and same hours of night, makes sense in Nature because after winter there's always spring, Nature dies and resurrects again and again. Movement doesn't really ever stop (btw, I suspect "The Substance" is about Ceres and Persephone so it all actually tracks, I'm very curious about this movie now). But in human society? You gotta be careful. After all, Hermes is both the god of merchants and thieves. After all, the scale is man-made, it's just an object that someone else is holding.

Interestingly, both my musings about resurrection and the start of the release in theatres of the movie happened around the same time, the autumn equinox, as I've said (the same period of time related to the Eleusinian Mysteries that are about Ceres and her daughter). The symbol of that specific equinox literally being the astrological sign of Libra, THEE symbol of everything I've just talked about. And it's not lost on me that Libra is ruled by Venus and the movie is, I'm sure among many other tings, about beauty standards for women. Isn't it cool? I don't know if this was a fluke but it has happened.

Basically what I want to say is this: "balance" seems like a nice, harmless word but it holds much, much power. Beware of people talking about "balance" because it's very likely that they're putting their finger on the scale. In their favor, of course.