#Jack is more like Claire

[aurorasleepsin]

Proof Imposter Syndrome is hereditary. He gets it from his dad's. (Also proves nurture over nature.) Lucifer bypassed imposter syndrome and went straight to narcissistist

15.15 - Gimme Shelter

[viviebeevie]

I took a bunch of expression requests on Twitter :)

[fist-of-vengeance]

thinking about how essentially every relationship john locke formed in the early seasons of lost has completely disintegrated by the time of his death.

of course there's his relationship with jack, which starts tense but manageable and culminates in jack pointing a gun at john's head and pulling the trigger. but even his smaller, less narratively prominent relationships either implode or drift apart. he bonds with walt in season one but then walt leaves the island, which is itself a severing of their bond since it was mainly based on being the only two people who wanted to stay. still, he goes and visits walt off the island so this is probably john's most successful relationship. I dont think i need to explain how he fucked up with boone, "the sacrifice that the island demanded." charlie viewed john as a mentor and claimed to trust him more than anyone on the island, but after the events of fire and water, that trust is destroyed and charlie despises him. at the same time we get john bonding with claire and having a pseudo-paternal dynamic with her, but their closeness basically drops off the face of the earth as he gets less and less involved with the other survivors.

his arc in the series is essentially a gradual distancing from everyone around him. it starts when he abandons hunting (providing for the others) in favor of trying to get the hatch open (it's extremely clear his primary motive isn't any survival applications but getting answers to the mystery). when they do open the hatch, he spends more and more time inside, underground, cut off from other people. he spends more and more time interacting with ben, a human mystery box that he's obsessed with cracking even if it gets him killed. he follows the proverbial white rabbit deeper down the hole and leaves his connection to humanity behind. the island and its mysteries become more important to john than anything or anyone else.

then in season three we get him claiming to go undercover with the others only to unceremoniously tell sawyer that he's actually going to join them. and it doesn't feel shocking, it feels inevitable. because john has spent the entire series becoming less and less connected with the people he arrived with. in that sense he actually makes a fascinating foil to juliet, who is introduced as one of the others and yet never really fits, she's increasingly sympathetic and kind in a way the rest of them aren't, her redemption arc feels so natural that she actually starts referring to her old people as "the others" like she's been one of the crash survivors from the beginning. her and john basically have inverse arcs, which is probably accidental but very neat.

in season five john tries to convince everyone to go back to the island, and fails spectacularly. and of course he does, because he was so consumed by obsession that he stopped maintaining his relationships, and in many cases actively alienated people (this is also basically what happened with helen) and now he can't wrap his head around why they're all so hostile to him. i am forever obsessed with the scene where he confronts kate and she brutally calls him out for wanting to return to the island because he doesn't love anyone. it actually struck me on rewatch how well the two of them got along in season one, and how badly their relationship has degraded by this point. john repeatedly casts aside interpersonal relationships in favor of his obsession with destiny, so when said destiny actually involves persuading the people he once shunned, he's at a loss. this is because john treats purpose as a supplement for connection, destiny as an alternative to love.

as an aside, this aspect of john's character kinda ties into my opinion that several lost characters can be read as allegorically neurdivergent under a certain lens. i know this was absolutely not intended, but as an adhd former gifted kid who struggles socially, there is something uncomfortably familiar about a character who allows their relationships to burn around them because of a single-minded obsession, especially as a result of being promised the fickle status of "special."

tl/dr: john locke is a doomed idiot and i love him

[kacievvbbbb]

While I love Jack and do think Alexander Calvert did a truly amazing job playing him and the fact he looks a little like Misha is adorabel.

but I do think that we were robbed from how astronomical the following seasons could have been if Jack was a girl.

[ananke-xiii]

Rowena and the thick, bloody umbilical cord between choices and faults.

In a previous post of mine I’ve explored a little bit how Mary and Kelly represent a sort of “missed opportunity” for, respectively, Sam and Jack.

At the beginning of s13 Sam resents the fact that he hasn’t been proactive in seeking to create a relationship with his mother and now that she’s (presumably) gone he doesn’t want to deal with that reality. He had wasted his second chance. Jack, on the other hand, never even had a first opportunity to begin with but, unlike Sam, has experienced a sense of unity with his mother so extreme that one of the first things that he tells Sam is that he was his mother(!!!).

S13 reinforces the Mother-Son symbolism because, after Jack’s birth, a rift is opened in space (apparently not in time?): Kelly stays (dead, rip girl I love you) on one side of it while Mary crosses it and finds herself in Apocalypse World. To make things even more clear, this is no random parallel universe: this is the alternate reality where Mary didn’t deal with Azazel. So mothers and their choices/faults are a central theme in this season. Or, well, more or less.

To complete the mothers’ trimurti or, better, tridevi we’re missing the final mother, the destroyer who is, of course, Rowena. It’s therefore quite apt that Rowena reaches her highest potential this season and even confronts Death. What motivates her in an interesting blend of (missing)love and (lacking)power. Lucifer is as part of her story as Kelly’s and Mary’s. Unlike these two, though, she doesn’t have a son who resurrects her, nor a turned-benefactor cosmic being who offers her resurrection as a gift to her son. Rowena has to resurrect herself. Not once but twice. She is, perhaps, the loneliest character in the whole series.

This is actually quite ironic because, if we look back on previous seasons, her “choice” to kill Oskar, her putative son, was what triggered the whole chain of events (the freeing of Amara first and Lucifer second) that directly link Rowena with Mary and Kelly.

It’s only natural, then, that s13 Rowena keeps representing the reversal of the Mary and Sam/ Kelly and Jack relationships because there is no son who’s looking for her, rather she is the mother who’s looking for her (dead) child. Like Sam, she also needs someone who can access another dimension to bring Crowley back but, unlike him, she’s not successful. Now, ngl, this pisses me off to no end, like of course I can understand the real reasons why Crowley couldn’t be brought back, still I kinda hate how it was narratively framed.

When, in "Funeralia", Rowena says that life is unfair she is right but not in the general, pessimistic sense of the phrase: she's right because in-universe some deaths are more important than others and people get back on board depending on whether or not they're still a role to play for them. Rowena's faith in magic is actually justified because magic is the only thing that can help her. And the tragic thing is that it's also what damns her in the process because it's the only form of power she can have access to. There are no angels or cosmic entities looking out for her. She's just... alone.

So, perhaps, it's not that I necessarily hate how her failure to bring Crowley back is described, I just see it as further proof that Rowena is the best example to show how in Supernatural the game is rigged from the beginning and we didn’t even need an interfering and pervy God to realize it. That's all we've been seeing it since S1. All those infinite, booooring talks about being good/evil or doing good/bad actually mean nothing because, at the end of the day, in this show what really matters is how useful you can be, to whom and why (and this is way less booooring, you learn a lot of interesting things about these characters if you go down this road, it's grim but it's more rewarding).

S13 is also when the final connection between Rowena and the Winchesters, Sam to be more precise, is established which is indicative of the fact that she will inevitably die. Before S13 her story was her own, after “Funeralia” it cannot be extricated from Sam’s. To some degree, it’s quite similar to what happened with Crowley and Dean. What’s more, just like Crowley’s powers and shrewdness are what really carry the plot from s6 to s12, magic and spells (and therefore Rowena’s role in the story) will be the key for many plot points from s13 to s15. But there is a big difference.

Both Crowley and Rowena’s sacrifices are described as heroic but, let’s be honest, only Rowena’s was. Crowley’s demise was a clean-up after his own mess at best. It also proved to be unnecessary. Rowena and that awful MBOL’s egg thingy would have managed to confine Lucifer, like, they actually did it. It was Crowley who perverted the spell for reasons that I personally find OOC. I would’ve liked the Crowley vs Lucifer power struggle but not the way it was done in s12 because it felt very nonsensical to me. As in: I can see you need a reason to keep Lucifer around and this is what you’ve come up with but it’s still quite illogical.

At its hidden and secret core S13 is the season of the “let’s reframe the sons’ stories and blame it on the mothers”. Just like Kelly is blamed for Castiel’s ideal vision of Jack and Mary’s "choice" is established as the most important point in the whole show, Rowena-as-Mother must face the same fate: it was her fault if Crowley, Fergus!, ended the way he ended. It’s a naaaaaaaaaaaaaah for me.

This is what we’re told in “Funeralia”:

Rowena: Oh, but it is. Death has something I want. Sam: What’s that? Rowena: My son. After you told me he was gone, how he died, I had an unexpected reaction. We had our differences, but it’s my fault he went down the path he did. I left him. Dean: We’re talking about Crowley-- demon, King of Hell? Rowena: We’re talking about Fergus-- a man abandoned and loveless, tricked by a demon, died in a gutter. He deserved better from the world. From me.

Now, just to be clear: yes, Rowena had the responsibility to do better; yes, she was the absolute worst; yes, she played no small role in her son’s story. However, I personally don’t like all these negative associations between “worlds” and “mothers” as if every fucking thing in the universe is dependent solely on them. How did we end up here? It’s almost as if absent fathers are, like, not THAT bad after all (and the show, as far as I'm concerned, ultimately approves of and absolves absent fathers). So I’m very suspicious of the way motherhood is portrayed specifically in s13 and Rowena’s attempt at redemption well demonstrates that there is reason to be so.

This dialogue in “Funeralia” confirms my gut feeling:

Sam: You know, what happened with Crowley? That wasn’t your fault. Rowena: He never had a chance. Dean: He made his choices, just like we all do. Look, every one of us has done something that we have to live with, that were trying to make up for. Every one of us. Sam: Even without all that extra juice, you’re still the deadliest witch around [Sam's flattering Rowena. He's gonna ask for her help in 3,2,1...]. Rowena: Flatterer. Sam: Yeah, well, we, um... we may need your help [Here we go!]. To save our family. To… hell, to save the world. Dean: You wanna be redeemed? This would be a pretty big step. Rowena: And do you think I still can be? Dean: Yeah, I do.

I mean, not to be rude, but who the fuck cares if Dean Winchester thinks that Rowena can be redeemed? Like, how is Rowena’s redemption (which is strictly connected to her being a bad mother and not, among other things, a zero-regret murderer, which she also happens to be, for instance) connected to saving the Winchester’s family? Don’t get me wrong, I understand that this is SPN and that Sam and Dean’s problems are Apocalypse-level problems (lol, they really did that, when I say that their story is like a cosmogony maybe I’m not that wrong) but, as I’ve said, I cannot help but notice the similarities between Rowena’s arc this season with Mary’s and Jack’s, i.e. you can be redeemed if you either do something useful for the Winchesters or... realize that it's not your "fault" that your sons suffered terribily because "choosing" to deal with Azazel was actually the right choice... for the world. How come fathers saving the world are framed as heroic while mothers actively creating worlds by making hard choices that benefit the greater good need redemption?

So to sum up: while fathers invade S13’s main storyline as solvers, restorers and fixers, mothers are the bones of the story, they carry its weight and its sins but get little if nothing in return: Kelly stays dead, Mary ends up helping out a world that absolves her of her Original Sin but that’s nevertheless a mess (you can never win lol) and Rowena can’t get her son back (but she can save Sam and Dean's family the world!). Looks good, right? Hurray mommy!

[bloodydeanwinchester]

im getting soooooo close to the widowers arc in this fic and i am DREADING it…. i feel like it’s gonna be sooooo bad for dean. it’s already bad and all that’s happened is cas played him for the colt and left him ☹️

[aprikosengamine]

Mad respect for anyone who is shipping Kincoy in this day and age, these people only interacted for 2 seasons nearly 30 years ago, yours truly wasn't even born until more than 5 years after aftershock premiered. We saw these two idiots swear they wouldn't have an affair in their first meeting, took and ran with it. Many thanks to the OGs out there who saw this going on live and pulled up to the internet thinking I have to document this when it took more time to boot it up than me writing this post.

[jackexmachina]

Sam Winchester // Jean-Paul Sartre (1946) 'Existentialism is a Humanism' (tr. Philip Mairet) @suncaptor's Birthday Event // Existential But the people we saved, they're our legacy. And they'll remember us, and then I guess we'll eventually fade away too. That's fine because we left the world better than we found it.

image description: scenes from "Bloody Mary," "Metamorphosis," "Reading is Fundamental," "Angel Heart," "The Rising Son," and "Golden Time." They are interspersed with an excerpt from 'Existentialism is a Humanism,' a lecture given by Jean-Paul Sartre.

1x05: Dean is driving in the Impala as Sam sits next to him. Sam says, "Dean, that girl back there is going to die. Unless we do something about it. You've got to let me do this."

the text reads: For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism – man is free, man is freedom.

4x04: Sam is locked in the closet and tells Jack (a rougarou), "It doesn't matter what you are. It only matters what you do." From the other room, Jack turns toward the door, his face is white and veiny, and his mouth is covered in blood. Sam keeps trying to pick the door lock and says, "It's your choice."

the text reads: Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour.

7x21: Sam sits a short distance away from Castiel in the main room of a cabin. Sam looks up at him, saying, "I know you never did anything but try and help. I realize that, Cas, and I'm grateful. We're all grateful." Cas shifts in his seat and Sam finishes, "And we're gonna help you get better, okay? No matter what it takes."

the text reads: Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse.

10x20: Sam sits at the table of a motel, typing into his computer. Claire asks him about hunting, saying, "Then why do you do it?" He shrugs and replies, "To help people. Make a difference." She hesitates and says, "That's it?" He looks up at her and asks, "That's not enough?"

the text reads: We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.

13x02: Sam and Jack sit on milk crates in an alley outside the motel. Jack looks worriedly at Sam, saying, "Maybe I'm not worth all this." Sam nods, considering, and tells him, "Your mom thought you were. So did Cas. So do I."

the text reads: Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.

15x16: Sam stands facing Dean in a hallway of the bunker, and tells him, "You know what, Dean? Ever since god got back, you've been acting like there's nothing we can do. Like nothing matters. But we can do this. Man, this matters."

[milleroptimism]

Relationship tags!

[quietwingsinthesky]

no wait sorry okay expanding on my post about jack being infantilized. like one, we have to acknowledge that 90% of the time it’s just that people want there to be a baby in their story. and they don’t want to make an OC baby when they could use a character people will recognize and who they can tag. And look at that, Jack is conveniently there existing and technically like 3 years old in canon, so they zap him with the baby laser and the result is. not jack, but a baby with jack’s name doing baby things. but also, as far as I know, people don’t really do this to the two other characters in a similar situation to Jack: Amara (was actually a baby on-screen before she grew up fast) and Claire (proximity to cas means people use her as a destiel child.) so if people aren’t infantilizing Amara when she ages the same way Jack does and people aren’t infantilizing Claire when she’s also considered a “destiel kid” then. like. why jack. and the only thing i can cynically come up with is that its really, really easy for people to see an autistic-coded character purely as a child. and like I said in my original post, I don’t think this is malicious, I think it’s more a combination of unfortunate factors: people want a baby in their fanworks -> they can make jack into a baby without thinking too hard about the implications there.

[vesperscas]

dean calls claire "claire bear" as a joke because it annoys the shit out of claire but then jack hears it and thinks its so cool that she gets a nickname and calls her claire bear too. and claire hates it obviously in a big sister/kid brother way.

[soullessjack]

okay last claire/jack post for tonight probably but like.

jack is very much violent and angry and defensive by nature and instinct and he actively hates those facets of himself bc they’re the ones that are most like Lucifer and also that make jack an active threat to everyone including his loved ones. So he really wants to be nice and happy and sweet and silly and lovable and to belong with the only other family he’s ever known since his mom is fucking dead forever twice. He is like literally burdened by what he is and what his natural tendencies for violence and anger make of him and he would be so confused that claire actively wants to be like that

claire is only violent and angry and defensive because of what happened to her father and mother and family and her entire known life when she was like. Nine fucking years old. so of course she never wants to be scared or weak or sensitive or vulnerable because she never wants to be that nine year old girl with a broken life again. so she puts on her own hardshell exterior and picks fights and acts like a threat so nobody realizes she is vulnerable and scared and also she tries to be as unlovable as possible so she can’t have a family unit to fall apart on her again. Claire doesn’t understand why Jack wants to be weak like she was.

[simptasia]

couples in LOST be like:

[seagullcharmer]

once again struck by the urge to reread the original trollhunters book. i miss my kids

[bitchfitch]

Are any of your characters single or do you come up with them as couples for story sake?

most of them are made as couples/throuples/etc bc romance is my bread and butter but I've got a handful who are single yeah.

Tbh i started listing them in the tags and I've had to realize Most of my OCs are single, because for every main Pairing you need a bunch of other people to fill out the world around them. Very few of my stories take place in isolation so the secondary and tertiary casts add up quick.