#<- that’s how we got here

[bestworstcase]

@based7100 this tag made me snicker so

#forbidden tdt lore!

forbidden tdt lore!

we are not going to get into the whole entire TDT Salem Backstory for spoiler reasons and also because my gods we’d be here all day. the salient piece with regard to her semblance is that through the vast majority of the epoch between the moonfall and humanity’s return salem was experiencing varying degrees of deep deep psychosis and still, to this day, doesn’t really know How Much of what happened during that time was real. once there were people again and she’d had a few centuries to feel mostly sure of this fact, her semblance crystallized from her determination to. uh. live in this world.

(blows a kiss to ice queendom for giving me a leg to stand on here with this being in scope of what semblances can do.)

the baseline ability lets her enter and arrange her own mind as a tangible, real physical place. she has constructs representing memories, feelings, ideas, beliefs, pathways and architecture that she’s built out over thousands of years to guide and contain her thinking within the bounds she finds comfortable. which all adds up to salem being very weird but cogent Most Of The Time and having things she can do to ground herself when it gets. bad again.

in a sense her semblance is itself a realm. not a very large one—back of napkin estimate it takes about two hours to walk across end to end and four top to bottom following the main thoroughfare. but akin to ozma’s reliquaries in that it’s a real place where, conceivably, anyone could go if she opened a door. the pool of grimm and the waters of life are both In There.

(<- i had all this sketched out pre-v9 which made the salem-wrote-it ever after theory VERY FUNNY. btw)

sustaining that requires a Tremendous Amount of aura obviously but salem has an infinite reserve and also has been at it for almost the entire history of humankind 2: electric boogaloo so She’s Fine. anyway

that’s the foundation. the fun thing about giving salem a semblance of course is her immortality. what happens if you take a semblance and give it thousands upon thousands of years to cook? (one of my reasons for devising hers this way was to impose some restriction on the answer; it projects inward, not outward, because it’s a staircase she had to build to find the outside world. it can’t go the other way.)

when it originally manifested, the one point of ingress was through her dreams. (although the dividing lines between dreaming and waking and lucid semblance dreams were… permeable.) then she figured out how to cast herself in and out while awake, and from there developed a technique for making doors, which correlated with the interior construct becoming more real and let her physically enter it from remnant.

later on she decided that, since she could open the door in her semblance from anywhere on remnant, that door should also be able to open anywhere on remnant she felt like from the inside, and i think she spent a Long Time trying to make that work before it occurred to her that she could just… make more doors. (from the inside, a door always opens to where it was last opened from without; she still has not cracked this. but she does have a set of doors that all lead to destinations she’s “saved.”)

so she can use her semblance to travel, central location style, across remnant.

the other big thing she’s figured out how to do is use her semblance on other people, projecting herself into constructs of their minds. these aren’t real in the same way, they’re very dreamlike and fade when she withdraws, and of course she won’t have absolute control in a spatial model of someone else’s mind, but as you can imagine few of the outcomes of having salem in your head are pleasant. among other things this is how she “teaches” people how to communicate with grimm.

[time-woods]

they wer having a twins race

[oh-snapperss]

they'll fund a genocide and let their poor regions be destroyed. don't fucking forgive them for that.

my hometown is completely gone from what pictures i can find of it, i have not heard from my family (including aunts, uncles, parents, one sibling, and a grandparent), and the infrastructure in the mountain communities is wiped out. i cannot stress how catastrophic this is, or how difficult it will be for these communities to build back. i am angry, and scared, and heartbroken by everything that's happened.

and our government is spending it's money to fund a genocide.

free palestine, and don't be complicit. realize that this is not something happening that doesn't affect you--although it shouldn't take this to care about the deaths of thousands of people anyway.

[vintrage]

can someone please get this girl her dog back

[soranker]

98 lovemail doodles >_<

[inkskinned]

okay is she being actually immature or is it just a woman over 30 expressing a human experience you find to be immature.

like yeah. at certain ages... let shit go. im not defending the real immature shit. im not defending the karen you're picturing. i worked in retail i hate those people too. (once somebody got mad at me because she didn't like how our winter window decor was a snowman smoking a pipe. i wish i was joking).

but men at 57 will write books about how 17 year old girls are soooo sexy. they will invent worlds where women have to be naked for "armor reasons." they will write songs that treat women as objects. people rush to defend them. meanwhile a woman at 35 will be like "heartbreak is hard, actually" or "i feel betrayed by a friend" or "i am struggling with something emotionally." immediately people will say stuff like this woman is 35 by the way. by the way this woman is SO OLD to be experiencing this. BY THE WAY.

im 31, almost 32. the other day a poet was blasted online because at her "big age", she had written a poem about feeling unloved. top comment was "this woman is 29 by the way." this woman is too old to still be useful, by the way. she has to behave better . maybe if she was a good wife and mother she could stop existing loudly, and the story could continue on without her. this woman has served her purpose, by the way. she's so cringe, by the way. at 29 - so old! - she still hasn't figured out that her existence should be one of shame.

[majunju]

cold

[umblrspectrum]

happy solvermas

[puppppppppy]

this place is so fruity

[rocketbirdie]

face value

[forgettable-au]

FORGETTABLE-AU (Page 61-64)

* I-I don't think we were talking about the same thing...

[BEGINNING] [PREVIOUS] [CONTINUE]

[shanastoryteller]

i know supernatural is the show of missed opportunities but man. the trials really get to me - what a perfect way to reboot and reset this show that you're artificially extending for ratings. it could have been really, really good, actually

so the trials of god is a way for someone to gain the ability to seal the gates of hell and the gates of heaven

they have the translation for hell, they know that slamming the gates of hell shut means calling all the demons back home and locking the key. it's logical, then, to for them to believe the same is true of the one for heaven - that it calls all the angels back home and locks them away where they can't do any more damage

peace, for the people of earth, outside of the influence of angels and demons. that's got to be worth it, right?

so while sam is completing the hell trials, they get the angel tablet, kevin gets translating, to figure out the angel trials. or maybe metatron helps nudge them along to figuring it out, since him being the big bad here isn't really relevant and they are in a bit of time crunch

canon doesn't tell us what the heaven trials are, except that the first one involves a ritual using the heart of a nephilim. they make it sound like they're carving it from their chest, but what i would do is

have a nephilim offer you their heart from their chest (gain their loyalty in a binding ceremony)

create grace from freshwater (there is no rain that falls anywhere on earth that is safe to drink and god said let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters)

find a human soul to guide you to heaven (babel fell but the stairway was built and those with wings have no need of stairs)

so sam is in the midst of the hell trials when dean sort of accidentally on purpose completes the first heaven trial and then the brothers are on parallel train tracks heading in the opposite direction

sam works to close the gates of hell

dean works to close the gates of heaven

demons and angels both working to stop them

sam completes the trials. he restores crowley's humanity and he dies and the gates of hell are closed

but that's not the end

metatron says they can close the gates if they're willing to pay the price. canon says the price is sam's death, but frankly that doesn't make any sense. what's the death of one human against the horrors of hell? and remember, metatron doesn't know the winchesters. maybe another angel would make this comment, knowing how the winchesters have weighed the safety of the world against their brother and left the world out to dry, would think this a price worth warning for. but metatron wouldn't bother, wouldn't even think of it, if that was the only price

the gates of hell close and malevolent spirits explode across the globe, evil spirits and angry ghosts causing death and destruction everywhere

hell serves a function and now the gates are closed and every evil human soul is forced to stay on earth, causing as much destruction as it can

that's the price for closing the gates of hell

except. except. aren't the hell trials interesting?

kill a hellhound. rescue an innocent soul and return it to heaven. purify a demon and restore their humanity.

the trials are not to prove if someone is worthy of closing the gates of hell. it's to prove they're capable of setting hell to rights

the trials are if things got too out of hand, if things were taken too far, and hell had to be put back in it's place. sam dies and ends up exactly where azazel wanted him - ruler of hell. all the demons and souls are trapped with him and what he has to do, while he has them all there, while they can't escape, is exactly what he did to get there

he kills the hellhounds, leaving only those meant to patrol hell. he releases every innocent soul bound there. he purifies the demons one by one, who he either releases as innocent souls or who to pledge to do their job as demons of hell - punishing evil, containing evil - in penance for what they did before (how do i even begin to make up for what i've done, crowley had asked, and this is the answer)

meanwhile, dean, heartbroken, completes the heaven trials and dies

and the gates of heaven slam shut and all the angels are stripped of their grace and expelled from heaven and dean finds himself in charge of an empty heaven

the trials are for when things have gone too far and heaven must be rebuilt, after all

good souls pile up, no one who dies able to truly leave earth, and given enough time they become twisted things that must be hunted along with the spirits of evil men and women who cause chaos from their last breath

dean has work to do. he has one angel - the nephilim whose loyalty he earned in the first trial - and this is what he has to do. he recruits more, to replace the ranks, he creates grace and hands it out judiciously. he sends them to guide the good souls home, using the stairway that the former angels wouldn't be able to use even if they wanted to, and each good act and deed earns them a little more grace. former angels throw themselves into the fight for humans, because they know it's the only way that dean will return their grace to them and lift them back into heaven

and in fighting for them, in living like them, they learn to love these creations of their father that they'd despised. they see what he saw and the thought of destroying this place in a civil war becomes unthinkable to them. they are once more the angels god intended them to be

in this, dean and sam fulfill their destiny as lucifer and michael's vessels. not in letting them in, but in pushing them out, in doing the work each was intended for but refused

only when there is only evil human souls being punished and caged, only once the demons are once more working to run hell and earn their release to heaven, does sam reopen the gates of hell

only when there's a full choir of angels once more, committed to their cause, only once there are souls working with reapers as it once always was, does dean reopen the gates of heaven

they're called the god trials for a reason. above and below, sam and dean act as god, putting things back in their intended places

they could stay. they should stay. keeping house, making sure it all goes smoothly, eternally keeping earth safe from angels and demons both

they're called the god trials for a reason. not even god could resist the paradise inbetween that he'd created

dean doesn't know if sam is going to return to earth. he might stay in hell, and if dean becomes human once more, then what's the point? he'll live and die a human, get stuck in heaven, and be forever separated from the brother he loves

sam doesn't know if dean is going to return to earth. he migh not be able to, might be stuck doing his work - sam assumes if the hell trials did this to him, then the heaven trials did the same to dean, and the idea that dean could have failed the heaven trials after he dies doesn't even cross mind. if he returns and dean's not there then he loses it all, he never again gets to see the brother he loves

but when, exactly, haven't they been willing to risk everything for each other?

dean falls as lucifer fell, throwing himself towards earth

sam rises as michael did after the fall, pulling himself towards earth the same way michael once pulled himself to the top of heaven

what's the use of being a god without his brother, after all?

dean and sam are reunited on earth, human once more

no more angels, no more demons, heaven and hell functioning once more as they should. we're back to basics, a clean slate, all of the rest remade and set aside by their own hands (it's literal and a metaphor, the way the show could have remade itself with the trials, after setting aside kripke's plan while at the same time recognizing that the design of it - two brothers who love each other going across america and fighting evil - is the thing that made it worth watching to begin with) and now it's them again, brothers forged in blood and sacrifice and love, and a new appreciation for the humanity they gave up and returned to

and then we get my beloved monster of the week with no stupid too high stakes, convoluted bullshit involved, beyond the occasional angel who dean refused to reinstate and demon tracking down miscreant souls and, every once in a while, a person or creature or something in between squinting at them and going - weren't you two gods?

nah, they say, all corn fed grins and the dimples their momma gave them, we're brothers

[t4t4t]

Hi !

I got bottom surgery on July 25th :3

I'm recovering well but I'll be on bedrest for a while. Collie and I will need rent help for September/food/gas/utilities/etc. Two disabled trans women. Anything helps ! Thank yall so much for all you've helped so far, it's saved my life ❤️

https://venmo.com/u/nora-esther-rose

https://www.paypal.me/NoraEstherRose

https://venmo.com/u/Leah-Esther-Rose

https://www.paypal.me/androgynophore

[bacchuschucklefuck]

class swap design masterpost for convenience (from top to bottom: bard!riz, cleric!gorgug, sorcerer!kristen, barbarian!fig, artificer!adaine, and rogue!fabian)

[lucabyte]

On autonomy, and what it means to be Obliged to Help.

Bonus:

[verflares]

who's afraid of the big bad wolf?