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recentanimenews · 6 years ago

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THE GREAT CRUNCHYROLL NARUTO REWATCH Unleashes Sakura With Episodes 29-35

Welcome to THE GREAT CRUNCHYROLL NARUTO REWATCH! I'm Daniel Dockery aka That Dude That Won't Shut Up About One Piece, and I'll be your host this week as we make our way through all 220 episodes of the original Naruto. Last week, we covered episodes 22-28, and we continue this week with episodes 29-35.

This week, the theme is Naruto Minus Naruto, as we lose our title character pretty early on. But despite missing someone shouting about how they're gonna be Hokage one day, this actually seemed to work out pretty well, as it gave our favorite boy Rock Lee and the consistently underrated Sakura a time to shine. Sasuke did some stuff, too, I guess. We also got some bad guy reveals and Gaara being as Gaara as possible. So let's dive right in and let the Crunchyroll Features team give you their thoughts on a batch of episodes that didn't have an ounce of quit in them.

So, not a lot of Naruto in this set of episodes, huh? I mean, we've already gotten to know Sasuke, Sakura, Rock Lee, etc. pretty well so far, so it's not like they can't carry the story, but how do you like the show when the title character spends most of it unconscious?

Paul: I'm fine with it as long as the supporting characters have plenty of interesting things to do. Naruto's personal blend of lunk-headed enthusiasm hasn't really clicked with me yet, so I'm happy to see other characters take center stage now and then, and I like that Sakura finally got a moment to prove her mettle in these episodes.

Peter: This was probably Sakura's biggest moment in Naruto... possibly including Shippuden. I forgot they combined her special haircut scene with the Ino flashback. The whole situation with the sound ninja was kind of a cluster but I felt like that sequence was particularly well-done. Episode 30 is easily the best in the series so far, I forgot how well directed the moment where Sakura realizes she's alone is.

Danni: I've joked in my livetweets that I can't tell whether the main character of this show is Naruto or Sasuke yet, but that kind of became not a joke at all this time around, didn't it? That was kind of a shame, given that his material at the very beginning of this batch where he's chiding Sasuke is great. Luckily, the rest of the cast was great all around in this batch.

Noelle: It is pretty funny to have the protagonist absent, but it's clearly not just wasting time. A lot of stuff happens while Naruto is out cold, especially the big fight where Sakura shines, and she needed to shine! A protagonist doesn't have to be there all the time, even if they are carrying the story, and these segments are proof of that.

Jared: Having Naruto out for most of the episodes really made some other characters step up and gave them a time to shine like Sakura (finally) and Ino's group. You couldn't get away with having him be gone or KO'd all the time, but especially when the show just brought forth all these new characters, it worked.

Kevin: It actually helped to up the stakes a bit and create space for more character development. Sakura hasn't needed to do much until now, since Sasuke and Naruto could fight instead. In this set of episodes, the boys were unconscious the majority of the time, so not only did she need to push herself to look after them, but she also needed to fight opponents that even seasoned Genin like Lee couldn't stand up against. Running or hiding weren't options.

Carolyn: THIS is the Sakura I remembered and have been missing this whole time. I am fine with Naruto sitting out a spell so Sakura can rise.

David: While I like that the other characters are getting the spotlight, I'm also not a huge fan of how they're getting it. Lee? He's allowed to be cool for a little bit, but still has to be undermined by his limitations that also define his character. Sakura? We have to square getting her development with her entire character revolving around Sasuke. Oh, and Sasuke? Got cool powers from the new bad guy, so the whole thing feels a little artificial by the end.

Joseph: It kind of makes it seem like they just didn't know what to do with Naruto while other people have the spotlight, because knowing his character he would have to butt in no matter what, dattebayo! If it paves the way for more episodes like 30, which features out of this world choreography and animation, I'm all for it, dattebayo.

Kara: I'm a Doctor Who fan - having the lead unconscious or straight-up missing for major portions of story is familiar territory. That said, I'm glad it was used to good effect here. I was hesitant coming into the Chunin Exam arc because there are Just So Many Characters, and a lot of them are completely new but clearly important. Giving Nart some down time while we get to know how they work (and how characters we've seen before are growing) was a good idea.

These episodes are sort of bookended by two horrific reveals:

1) IT WAS ME, OROCHIMARU, THE WHOLE TIME

2)WTF, GAARA

How do you feel about these two? I've been playing a lot of Gaara in Jump Force, but I forgot that he pretty much opens his character arc in the show through intense murder.

Paul: I mentioned this on Twitter before, but although Orochimaru is clearly coded to be this big, scary, impressive villain, he strikes me as the ninja equivalent of that bad friend whom everybody kinda knows but nobody particularly likes. Orochimaru's the kind of guy who would get a little too drunk at the holiday ninja party, and then he'd awkwardly hit on your ninja girlfriend, and then he'd puke on your ninja couch cushion and then flip it over to hide the ninja vomit rather than tell you about it. Damn it, Orochimaru!

Gaara is just a comical murder-baby so far. Again, I know he's supposed to be frightening, but I just think he's a precious little sandy cinnamon roll.

Peter: Given what Orochimaru's done so far, I'm actually curious if Kishimoto had a plan for him at this point. One of this lines in particular speaking with Anko is hilarious in retrospect. I have a new appreciation for Temari and Kankuro. The scene where they were trying to get Gaara to calm down was particularly good. You got a sense of how desperate and afraid they are of Gaara. Also I don't remember Orochimaru using so many... wind ki blasts? I think Kishimoto wasn't sure what powers he had yet.

Danni: I'm a little disappointed that my perfect snake wife was just a creepy old snake man in disguise. I'm honestly more terrified of Gaara right now. Orochimaru seems like he actually has a plan. Gaara just seems a bit...unhinged...

Noelle: I definitely agree with Peter, where Orochimaru in his introduction definitely wasn't as cohesive power-wise, as opposed to the snakes and more snakes that he becomes later. He is set up to be extremely threatening, but at this point, it's definitely more potential than it is factual. As for Gaara, Gaara is one of my faves, even if he starts out as a murder machine. The murder does not stop my appreciation for him. You go, Gaara.

Jared: Now I want a redub of those scenes with Orochimaru except with the Higher Power reveal audio. They certainly make him seem to be a big deal, although it's still relatively shrouded in mystery. Gaara's showing fell incredibly flat for me. Unlike when we first saw him where he had this mysterious aura about him, this just felt like he was made to be the ultimate edgelord. Which if the folks above me are indicating, he gets better, so hopefully that happens sooner rather than later.

Kevin: For both of them, I feel like their introductions worked well to establish them as serious threats. Orochimaru as a somewhat unknown quantity that even the adults are scared of, while Gaara is a coldblooded Genin that doesn't bat an eye at killing people, to the point that even his teammates fear for their lives when around him. For Orochimaru though, I can't remember any actual reason why he's actually in the Chunin Exam. We'll get to future events in later installments, but why bother actually joining the Genin?

Carolyn: I remember loving Orochimaru the first time I watched the show and thinking he was a major villain. They certainly set him to seem that way. I'm interested to see if my thoughts on that change as we progress. I also remember thinking Gaara was quite impressive and mysterious, though he was never a favorite character of mine. Rewatching the show, they definitely hype up his skills.

David: Gaara having a team that is scared of him is significantly more scary than Orochimaru's clear long-term threat foundation going on here. It's kind of cheating but I think this matters a lot for how impactful this ends up being very soon, whereas Orochimaru's threat is much more broad and lore-spanning in the grand scheme of things.

Joseph: Between Orochimaru, cursed Sasuke, and Gaara, there's so much DANGER in these eps. I love it!

Kara: Holy crow, things got dark. I'm not saying that as a negative, either. I'll be curious to see what happens with Orochimaru, because that's some high-stakes stuff that got thrown into the mix. I had a feeling Gaara was gonna make Sasuke look like a ray of sunshine by comparison, but I'm with Akamaru on that whole situation.

If you had to get into intense anime battles in your actual, half-anime life, and you had to copy a Naruto character's techniques, whose style would you use?

Paul: I will continue to stan for my main man, Choji Akimichi, and his ability to transform into the boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Also, they never kill the chubby comic relief characters, so my plot armor would keep me safe from harm but not from embarrassment.

Peter: I feel like the correct answer is Gaara since you can just stand in place writing poems while sand kills people. Practically I think it's hard to argue that Sasuke doesn't have the most "ninja-like" style incorporating the three "jutsus" and leaning heavily on misdirection and outmaneuvering. Each requires having a pretty particular thing though, so it's kind of a lottery by birth.

Danni: Probably Orochimaru. Less for his actual fighting techniques and more because his Mr. Fantastic powers could come in handy when lounging around the house.

Noelle: Gaara's, having sand do my bidding would be pretty neat, and it's not like I sleep much anyway.

Jared: Rock Lee's techniques are what basically what I imagined myself when I was younger when thinking of having anime type fights.

Kevin: I would probably go for the Sharingan, largely due to how versatile it is. It gives amazing kinetic vision, allowing the user to dodge more and land more hits, lets them copy any ninjutsu the enemy uses, can make [REDACTED], or [REDACTED] or even summon [REDACTED], and that's without even getting into the unique abilities from [REDACTED]! Basically, it allows for a lot of flexible techniques, and just with the slight drawback of [REDACTED].

Carolyn: Ooh, can I redact stuff, too? My favorite hasn't happened yet. Have I mentioned how much I love Shikamaru?

David: Is it wrong to want to be Sasuke just because he gets the most well-animated fight scenes? I want to be as cool as he is in those.

Joseph: I've always been a fan of the Shadow Imitation Technique of the Nara clan. I think this is the first time we've seen it in the anime, but throughout the manga I always found it awesome whenever, BAM, someone found themselves ensared out of nowhere.

Kara: Gonna have to say Ino and the body-hopping. I'm so clumsy, the only way I'll ever effectively beat someone up is if I project into them and beat myself up.

So, Sakura gets a few cool minutes in Episode 32. I especially like the reveal that it wasn't a substitution and that she was actually dropping on Zaku and gutting through those Kunai. However, it's kind of mired in a lot of flashback and a weird "How does my face look?" backstory. How did you feel about it? I will say, for a little bit, I got hyped. Bleeding Sakura descending like Batman on this goon is a dope visual.

Paul: I'm glad Sakura finally got a chance to shine, and I didn't feel that the drama of the scene was terribly undercut by her childhood anxieties about having such an enormous forehead. It contextualizes some of her earlier, snappish behavior, and I was impressed with her growth as a character when she expressed a genuine desire to protect Naruto and when she offered Rock Lee her heartfelt thanks.

Peter: I'm kind of two minds on this watching it for the second time. If anything I feel like her dramatic move was undercut by the fact that there were two more Leaf squads that could have stepped in acting as a sort of safety net rather than anything actually relying on her. That said, I think the balance between her efforts in the moment and Ino remembering the extremely dumb stupid kid reason they stopped being friends was great.

Danni: I adored it. A woman's body in media is often portrayed as a priceless work of art. It's an object whose fragile beauty is meant to be fawned over and protected. The slightest mark of imperfection is detrimental to the whole piece. This either leads to strong women whose bodies remain unscathed or weak women whose bodies exist to be tragically violated. Seeing Sakura use her own body as both a weapon and a shield in this fight was nothing less than refreshing. She cast aside the beauty of her long hair, took three kunai to the body in order to get closer than her target, straight up sunk her teeth into him like a wild animal, and took a beating without flinching or letting go. It was so incredibly refreshing to see a woman actually fight with her whole body rather than an objectified version of one.

Noelle: This is Sakura's big awesome moment, and she nailed it. She doesn't have signature jutsu like Naruto's clones or Sasuke's fire - all she really has are perfected versions of the basics. That she's able to use her intellect to her advantage; setting traps, tricking her opponents, it works for her character. The fact that she is unyielding is fantastic, considering that in a lot of anime fight scenes featuring women it it's rarely conveyed just how brutal they can get. Sakura's desperately fighting, and she will take kunai and even bite her opponents if it means she can help her friends. It's rough, messy, and great. Let girls have brawls too!

Jared: I'm a huge fan of the "cutting your hair to signify a big change" trope, so I was incredibly excited to see it here. This moment for Sakura was essentially what I'd been waiting for this entire time with her and it delivered. I was kind of surprised how much backstory we got here, but I think it fit well with everything that was happening around them with Sakura and Ino. Everything about how she attacks Zaku felt like she was desperately doing anything she could to survive, which included things like biting and not letting go. Plus, I'm surprised they showed her bloodied up.

Kevin: To put it this way, Sakura faking out Zaku is both my highest and lowest point of the week. I love that we finally got to see her fight and even out think her opponent, and I was even okay with seeing Ino struggle with their history when deciding how to act, seeing her friend-turned-rival in trouble. They probably could have cut one or two of the flashbacks and lost nothing from the storytelling though.

Carolyn: I actually loved the flashbacks explaining her desire for long hair to impress Sasuke and her rivalry for his heart mixed in with Sakura being an awesome fighter. We saw where she came from and we see where she's headed. Her cutting off her hair (epic) was not just a clever tactic, it was her moving past her fickle, shallow priorities and stepping up. (And incidentally, finally winning Sasuke's respect.) I liked that contrast and I thought it made her powerful moments more meaningful.

David: I don't like how being feminine was presented so constantly as a negative thing in the lead up to her 'level up', especially because it got immediately followed up by a line from Shikamaru to Choji about how they need to be the 'men' of the situation. I also don't like how it didn't end up even really helping the situation, but Sasuke's unintentional powerup did. I do like how the story clearly realized how drastically it was underutilizing its main female characters and tried to rectify that as well as it could within the characterization it had already established for them. So, basically, I like that it ended up where it was, but I wish it didn't have to do that in the first place.

Joseph: Sakura's moment makes up for a lot of her inaction in previous episodes. It made it feel like a much more significant turn, and I think it's another great argument for the power of anime adaptations in taking certain aspects of the source material to the next level. I would also be remiss not to mention how major of a role she played in stopping Sasuke after he awakened to some straight-up Final Fantasy IV midi cover music.

Kara: Sakura's characterization grew three sizes this week! Normally I have nothing against romance or a crush being a motivator (people in the real world act that way sometimes), but I was getting second-hand embarrassment whenever everyone and their mother used her emotions against her because she was that much of an open book. She was seriously dope in episode 32, and I do like that she didn't drop her feelings so much as compartmentalize them. Was it perfect? No. Was it better than what we've seen for the last few weeks? Very much. Plus we've spent so much time being told she knows her stuff, it was nice to see it in action.

If you've read the manga, how do you feel about the pacing of the anime at this point?

Peter: I appreciate they're not trying to draw things out, past a few recap episodes. The only real filler we've gotten was a few more social scenes that ultimately helped build up the individual Team 7 members more so I'm good with them. Visually the series uses the manga as a direct roadmap the majority of the time but the departures, like in Naruto's fight against Haku, were extremely good.

Noelle: It's definitely a little slower, especially since you can read the same amount content much faster than you can watch it. Different mediums lend to different speeds. At the same time, it's not significantly slower - not like One Piece - so it's pretty tolerable. I can't say I have much complaints with the pacing.

David: It's gotten slower recently, but it's still MUCH better than I expect from long-running shonen adaptations even today. I never feel like a half hour isn't used effectively, which is impressive.

Joseph: They've chopped a few minutes off the absurdly long flashbacks at the start of each episode, so it's much punchier now than when it was covering the Zabuza fight. The adaptation nails some of the big moments, so I think they do a fantastic job of making the most out of Kishimoto's story and characters.

Last but not least, what was everyone's high and low points for this week, along with anything else you want to shout out?

Paul: My high point was the fight between Sasuke and Orochimaru in Episode 30. Pierrot's animation team really pulled out all the stops for that one, and I was frankly blown away by how well-staged it was, especially since the previous episode was so janky, to the point where it gave us the "Naruto, you look kind of cool" silly face meme. My low point was the reveal that Rock Lee's ultimate technique is just a glorified Izuna Drop. I was disappointed by that, because I was expecting something really far out there.

Peter: I'd have to say everyone involved had a low moment against the sound ninja. Rock Lee could have actually just kicked the guys head off so I'm not sure why he pulled out his ultimate technique. The master strategist Shikamaru really handled the InoShikaCho combo poorly (why not just have Ino knock the paralyzed guy out then 3v1 the last guy?). Feels like there were too many cooks in the kitchen while Kishimoto was trying to let Sakura stand on her own. High point was Sasuke's epic fight against Orichimaru... or maybe Gaara being Goth Prime?

Danni: If you can't guess already, the high point of this batch for me is Sakura's battle. Naruto snapping Sasuke out of his daze and the whole fight between Sasuke and Orochimaru are close runner-ups. I can't say there were any real low, low points for me in this batch, but I could have done without the whole prolonged tension of them debating whether or not to open the scroll simply for them to move on without opening it. I really feel like that could have been a lot more condensed.

Noelle: It has to be Sakura's battle. She's the last member of the team who hasn't really had a moment of growth, as she's mostly been stuck fawning over Sasuke. Now she has a moment of her own, to show that she really can be one of their peers in combat, not just because she's assigned to be alongside them. Sasuke vs Orochimaru was also fantastic to watch. Low points would probably be the Sound Ninja fight when Sakura wasn't the highlight, it felt a little too long.

Jared: The true answer here is Sakura finally getting her moment as the high point. The flow of these episodes just kept moving until the end where things really slowed down, but that makes sense. Sasuke pulling out a Canadian Destroyer (front flip piledriver) was something I absolutely wasn't expecting. Maybe my low points would be Gaara's fight and then Naruto wanting to open up the scroll since it felt way too obvious that he'd do that.

Kevin: Sakura's fight somehow managed to be both the best and worst moments. The best moment was when she uses Substitution multiple times to trick her opponent into giving her an opening, even though she needed to take multiple kunai wounds in the process. It was awesome to see her thinking, and there might've even been a bit of Naruto rubbing off on her, given how brazen the plan was. Unfortunately, it led to the end of her plan... biting Zaku's arm and just holding on as he kept punching her head. Great plan, Sakura.

Carolyn: The squirrel and the hair cut were high points for me. Also, just seeing everyone have respect for each other. Sakura thanks Rock Lee, Rock Lee acknowledges Sasuke's ability. Good stuff.

David: It might not sound like it so far, but Sakura's fight is my high point for not just this bit, but the entirety of the show - it's one of the defining moments of the series to me, something that has stuck with me for decades at this point. So, criticisms aside, that matters a lot to me. Low point is how even when the show is trying to make Lee cool is still undermines him just as quickly, making it hard to believe it really appreciates his struggle.

Joseph: Episode 30 is an all-timer, so that's gotta be my high point. The low point was probably the Sound Ninja. Their powers are cool, and I understand jutsu is a term encompassing techniques in a wide swath, but to me they just had prosthetics and weapons. Hey, check out my jutsu *pulls out a gun*.

Kara: Can't decide between Sasuka vs. Orochimaru or Sakura finally Doing Things as my high point. Really liked both. Low point was probably every time I had to see Naruto squiggling around in snake guts.

COUNTERS:

"I'm gonna be Hokage!" count: 14

Bowls of ramen consumed: 2 bowls, 3 cups

Shadow Clones: 115

And that's everything for this week! Remember that you're always welcome to join us for this rewatch, especially if you haven't watched the original Naruto!

Here's our upcoming schedule!

-Next week, on FEBRUARY 22ND, we’re looking at EPISODES 36-42 as I, DANIEL DOCKERY, IN MY TRUE BEAST FORM, hosts as the Forest of Death continues to torment! THIS IS THE ONLY INSTALLMENT WE'RE ACCEPTING QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS FOR THIS WEEK!

-Then on MARCH 1ST, we’ll talk about EPISODES 43-49 as NATE MING returns as we enter into one-on-one competition including a showdown between Rock Lee and Gaara!

-On MARCH 8th, we move on to the final stage of the Chunin Exam with EPISODES 50-56, hosted by CAROLYN BURKE!

Thank you for joining us for the Great Crunchyroll Naruto Rewatch! Have a great weekend, and we'll see you all next time!

Have any comments or questions about episodes 22-28? What about our upcoming installment, featuring episodes 29-35?

-------------------------

Daniel Dockery is a writer and editor for Crunchyroll. He has a Twitter that he uses.

Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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junker-town · 5 years ago

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These are the best and worst sports in fiction, according to us

What is your favorite fictional sport and why is it Calvinball?

Inventing a sport is hard. The best fictional sports from movies/books/shows/etc. seem to fall into two categories: Either exceedingly clever games you have always wished you could play (and sometimes can!), or senseless, broken dreck that no one could possibly find fun, no matter what a story’s canon would lead you to believe.

Here are the best and worst fictional sports, as selected by SB Nation staff. There are a lot of other options out there, however, and plenty of discussion to be had about what sports even count as “fictional.” Does a sport you can “play” in a video game count? What about, uh, murder-based sports?

Let us know in the comments. Or just yell at us about our decisions. That’s fine, too.

Best: Jumanji

I wanted to consider the board game oeuvre of fictional sports, and considered Cones of Dunshire for the top spot. But Jumanji is it to me for the way it captured my imagination as a kid. Will it inflict untold damage, and potential death, upon you and everyone around for miles? Sure. It may also turn you into a cool monkey boy with a prehensile tail. Just roll the dice, dingus, it’s your turn.

Worst: Star Wars holochess (I guess it’s called Dejarik)

It’s kinda like Magic: The Gathering crossed with chess. The board looks too cramped for much strategy to take place, though. Plus you have to let the Wookiee win.

— Louis Bien

Best: Blernsball

Blernsball is the 30th-century version of baseball, which took place in Futurama (Season 3, episode 16, “A Leela of Her Own”).

The reasoning behind this being the best fictional sport, is that baseball in the future undoubtedly has to be better than baseball in its current form. It’s that simple. Baseball is good now, and assuming they were to actually evolve over nine more centuries, it could be great.

But that’s also a big if.

Worst: Poohsticks

The objective of Poohsticks (from Winnie-the-Pooh, obv) is to stand over some running water, drop a stick, and see whose stick gets down to the end first.

Go play Fortnite or Call of Duty instead.

— Harry Lyles Jr.

Best: BASEketball

A sport that combines all the fun of basketball with none of the running, jumping, or otherwise-needed athletic traits one needs to typically be good at basketball. Any game you can play with a beer in hand is a good one. Especially if all you have to do to play defense is remind opponents how their sister’s GOING OUT WITH SQUEAK.

Worst (but not really): Bouillabaseball

It’s just baseball with fish parts. I expected better from the ALF writer’s room, but I still stan the Equinox Weenies.

— Christian D’Andrea

Best/Worst: Vampire Baseball

Though I’m loathe to admit I’ve read “Twilight,” I would like to make fun of “Twilight,” so here we are. Basically, in the book, a real treat for our heroine was getting to watch Edward and his vampire family play vampire baseball. Wow, sounds fun, they have superhuman abilities I wonder what their sports will be like?!

Get your hopes down, it’s just regular baseball that’s louder. Because they hit the ball so hard. Great date idea Edward, Bella gets to watch your family game of regular baseball. She doesn’t even get to play. I can’t believe she likes Edward more than Jaco— I mean I don’t care, Twilight’s for children.

— Clara Morris

Best: The Running Man

I’m sure there are some prudes out there saying “but Jaaaames, murder isn’t a sport!” To which I would reply “it is the REALEST sport, even when fictionalized.”

The Running Man is unquestionably one of the greatest action movies of all time, which game us the best fictional sport of all time. It’s professional wrestling, with all its pomp and circumstance mixed American Gladiators with a healthy sprinkling of pure, unadulterated murder.

In case you’re not familiar with the plot, the basic concept is simple: Dangerous convicted felons are given a chance to fight for their freedom in gladiatorial battles against armed, themed enforcers on a dystopian game show. It probably says something about me that I like this so much, but here we are.

Worst: Taking the Stone

This is from the show Farscape and is the dumbest thing of all time. Rather than try to explain in my own words let me just share the entry from Wikipedia, which does a great job detailing how dumb this is.

“The game consists of jumping into a deep well, and chanting while falling. A sonic net at the bottom of the well, sustained by the participants’ voices, cushions their fall. When the youth reach the age of 22 cycles, rather than grow old and be deformed by the planet’s radiation, they stop chanting part way into the leap and die against the rocks. This death is called Taking the Stone.”

Jumping into a well. Maybe killing yourself. Bad sport.

— James Dator

Best: Cricket

Or, more specifically, the good Dr. Stephen Maturin’s take on cricket. At the beginning of Patrick O’Brian’s The Fortune of War, what can only be described as the hulk of the HMS Leopard drifts into the Indonesian bay of Pulo Batang. The crew, exhausted by their recent ordeal in the Southern Ocean, relaxes with a game of cricket against that of the HMS Cumberland. Or they try to, before Maturin, equipped with a bizarre, home-made bat, makes his appearance on the behalf of the Leopards.

A rapacious grin ran round the Cumberlands: they moved much closer in, crouching, their huge crab-like hands spread wide. The Admiral held the ball to his nose for a long moment, fixing his adversary, and then delivered a lob that hummed as it flew. Stephen watched its course, danced out to take it as it touched the ground, checked its bounce, dribbled the ball towards the astonished cover-point and running still he scooped it into the hollow of his hurley, raced on with twinkling steps to mid-off, there checked his run amidst the silent stark amazement, flicked the ball into his hand, tossed it high, and with a screech drove it straight at Jack’s wicket, shattering the near stump and sending its upper half into a long, graceful trajectory that reached the ground just as the first of La Flèche’s guns, saluting the flag, echoed across the field.

As far as rebukes towards English pretensions go, deliberate or not, it’s pretty hard to beat Dr. Maturin’s efforts. This is cricket as it really ought to be played: nonsensically and with maximum force.

NB: My favourite part of the above passage, incidentally, is the confusion it created amongst O’Brian’s significant American audience over whether Dr. Maturin was any good at cricket or not.

Worst: Quidditch

Take a perfectly good magical sport, with three goals, multiple balls, rogue and malevolent magical items designed to hurt you, and flying. The bones of quidditch are close to perfect, giving scope for brilliant tactical and individual play in three dimensions.

And then the Golden Snitch ruins it. There’s absolutely no need for the damn thing. The chasers, beaters and keepers are playing an interesting, well-constructed sport. The seekers, meanwhile, are playing a ridiculous version of hide-and-seek which almost inevitably overrides what everyone else on both teams are trying to achieve.

Not only does the hunt for the Snitch render the actually good part of the sport irrelevant, it also destroys quidditch as a spectator sport. Since the Snitch is so small as to be untrackable, the audience in the stands has no idea what’s going on at any given time, making this a sport that’s both nonsensical and impossible to follow.

Kill the Snitch, and then we’ll talk.

— Graham MacAree

Best: Crunchball 3000

Now I know what you’re all thinking. What the hell is CrunchBall 3000. Well it’s a computer game that has LORE.

The game has elements of rugby, soccer and football and is an excellent time waster at wo— I mean it’s a really underrated way to pass the time.

Worst: Quidditch ... but in real life.

*It’s not really the worst, I just wanted to talk about it.*

Don’t get me wrong, IRL quidditch is fun. I’m just mad that the one time I played, I was the seeker and the snitch could go anywhere. We were in a park and there were no boundaries. I stopped chasing them after three minutes. I have asthma, man. I was off it.

— Kofie Yeboah

Best: Calvinball

When I was a kid in my hometown, there were a few boys on my street who were around the same age as me. In the summer, we would all spend our hard earned pop-bottle deposit returns on buying used baseballs at rummage sales and then use them to play in an open field down the road from our houses. Baseball is actually a very loose term for what we played, especially once the ball was lost or the cover tore off. Then it was a free for all. Little did I know until later in my development that such games as those we played were already mastered by the titular characters in Calvin and Hobbes. Calvinball, you see, is a game with no rules, other than the rules you make up as you go along. No two games are allowed to be the same, and no rules made up on the fly are allowed to be duplicated. Throw on some masks, hit a baseball with a mop and go score some points by running seven times around the sprinkler. Wait! The sprinkler is now the loser zone, so you have to use a croquet mallet to hit a tennis ball over the driveway without it touching any dirt or concrete. If it does, you lose 10 points.

“Other kids’ games are all such a bore!

They’ve gotta have rules and they gotta keep score!

Calvinball is better by far!

It’s never the same! It’s always bizarre!

You don’t need a team or a referee!

You know that it’s great, ‘cause it’s named after me!”

As Calvin opined in the final Calvinball strip when a football game turned into one of the crazy contests, “Sooner or later, all our games turn into Calvinball.”

There really isn’t a better sport out there, real or fictional.

Worst: Star Trek’s parrises squares

Let’s keep this portion short and sweet: They never gave any rules to parrises squares on the show, but it clearly is dumb because there is no way the folks who made Star Trek: The Next Generation were able to come up with a cool sport. That’s probably why they didn’t bother showing viewers much of the game, which is played with an “ion mallet” on a padded playing field.

I know no other details. But it’s is clearly dumber than real-life quidditch, which is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever watched in my entire life.

— Sam Eggleston

Best: Rocket League

Video games are murky territory, and I’m not sure if most of them can be classified as fictional sports. Is Counter-Strike a fictional sport, or a simulation of a military operation? I’m not really sure. But Rocket League is unquestionably a game about a fake sport, and it is by far the best fake sport anyone’s ever invented.

Soccer is the most popular sport ever invented by humans. The coolest iteration of soccer ever invented is from Nike’s 3v3 Secret Tournament ad, which was played in a metal cage. Rocket League iterates on this concept further by replacing the human competitors with freaking rocket powered cars. If it was possible to create Rocket League in real life, it would be the world’s most popular spectator sport.

Worst: Professional wrestling

Oh no, I’ve exposed the business! It’s difficult to classify wrestling as a type of sports or entertainment, hence the term “sports entertainment,” but essentially it’s a TV show about a fake sports league. There’s no non-fixed sport that bears a strong resemblance to pro wrestling, so I think it’s fair to classify pro wrestling as a fictional sport.

Wrestling Twitter, don’t scream at me. I am not here to talk shit about the entertainment you love. I’ve watched thousands of hours of pro wrestling and I love it. But as an actual sport, it’s kind of a mess. There are no published rules, and the referees seem utterly incapable of enforcing the ones that broadcasters tell us about. Competitors are not punished for repeatedly assaulting referees. Any sensible sport would have introduced additional referees or an instant replay system after 100 years of consistent shenanigans, but the major pro wrestling organizations simply refuse. No fictional sport has less competitive integrity.

— Kim McCauley

0 notes

elizabethrobertajones · 8 years ago

Text

9x19 Rewatch

I had Mel threatening me with being shoved in a woodchipper if I didn’t carry on this rewatch.

I also haven’t watched Fargo in years but it’s left lasting imprints on my psyche

We get the full Jody recap and some basic vampire lore. It’s got a little reminder of the time Dean WAS a vampire, if you look closely, which is especially relevant to his arc this season and honestly I don’t know why they didn’t harp on that more :P Okay, he was made a vampire entirely involuntarily as part of that stretch of season 6 which is all rape metaphor all the time. Dean and vampires is already a huge mess because of this and that thing where John used him as bait in 1x20, and other stuff, and vampire episodes are closely connected to Dean’s issues - scroll to the bottom of this page for a great series of posts on it that sadly only goes through season 2 but is where I got this thought from like... literally the week this episode originally aired since I had in fact reached fandom at that point and this was super relevant to the new episode:

http://sleepsintheimpala.tumblr.com/mymetamess

... anyway, the pattern keeps up. I know I and a couple of others have written about Dean being slam-dunked back into the closet around season 6-ish area (tbh, really just a Gamble era thing) and 6x05 either is something you can point to as a real inciting incident especially while Dean’s still desperately clinging to his year-long relationship with Lisa, or just a good sort of one episode summary of where he’s at... However it is, Boris the vampire rape-metaphors him and introduced it via creepy hitting on Dean, so all round is a terrible incident, that fits strongly with the themes of where Dean seems to be at around that time in relation to his sexuality...

Of course, Benny, a vampire, is used to show Dean opening up to monsters as friends later in season 8 to go along with a much more positive, happy depiction of Dean, as, even with all the angst that inevitably comes, he seems a little better off emotionally, and his strong bond with Benny is used as one of the indicators of at that at the start of the season. (Along with plenty of paralleling in the vampire-related incidents around that - Edlund precludes the entire Carver era conclusion with the “god” vampire in 8x05 >.>) Dean, later with the Mark at a more advanced stage, blows off steam with killing vampires, and all the nuance in these cases disappears, and to me that feels like completing what is now almost a prophecy Gordon made back in 2x03 about becoming a killer (echoed by Cain in 9x11). I’ve been over this territory a lot, if you read everything I write meta on, but anyway, this is why it feels obvious to me to use the last MotW slot of the season for a vampire episode. Dean’s now spiralling down in his descent, and his personal-arc related monster is back...

I suppose this time, the lesson is not being able to let go of a child, with Dean as the Mom Vampire, and Sam as Alex (she acts as the neatest parallel to him in 11x12 as well, at least in the sense of reflecting his established character/history - he and Claire are really interesting for where Sam feels he might be going... I suppose if I ever scrape myself together long enough to get to the end of this, I’ll have to try and collect up and make sense of all of Sam’s random honesty hour moments to Claire, Charlie, Eileen and others about how he feels about hunting...) - anyway, this is the easiest surface level parallel of this episode as a whole: that Dean couldn’t let go, he struggled with turning Sam (into an angel, not a vampire) to preserve him, and it was his ultimate downfall. And as the title of the episode shows, the names are really important, as they have been all season since the Gadreel/Zeke thing.

Anyway I suppose I should actually watch this :P

We start with a whole lot of red exit signs, because this episode is super doomy, given where Dean is going:

DEPUTY FRANK Yeah, copy that, but the bullpen's empty, and I got someone in holding.

RADIO Sheriff's heading to the station now. They won't be alone long.

Oh, I love lines that are just meaningless chatter on a first watch. (This is also part 3 of just fawning all over Berens this season, bee tee dubs.) Of course the vamp has no idea that the Sheriff will be heading to the station, or that the Sheriff will be BE-heading him in the station before the title card. :P He’s accidentally completely right in a throwaway comment while he thinks he’s clearing the police station so he can get uninterrupted time to threaten Alex.

There’s also many times I wish the recap wasn’t there, because the first indication this is Jody territory in the episode is an external of the police station with Sioux Falls on it, and that establishing shot is also a warning that this is her jurisdiction... Just a quick blink and you miss it hint that Alex is not as unprotected as she seems...

A lot of the vamp episodes mess with typical cold open expectations; 2x03 especially uses the vampire as the victim and the hunter as the monster. Here, Alex seems like she’d be vulnerable and dead with vampires after her, but this totally isn’t the case with Jody around to save her, again making the vampire the one who bites the dust for the obligatory end of cold open blood splatter. Jody’s protection/right as a police officer-hunter is explored beautifully in this episode, such as her insistence she goes with Sam and Dean to save Alex later, as well as using her cabin for a safe house and so on.

GIRL A-are the others with you?

CODY Everyone was off on a hunt when I'd realized you'd run away. Figured I'd do you and them a favor and come take care of this before they even know we're gone.

Also with the inversions - the vampire talking about being “on a hunt” is a vague term that both hunters and the things they hunt can use about their activities. Alex has the whole vulnerable girl in a cold open thing going for her to have us on her side, but Cody’s language certainly COULD be blurred with being a hunter, especially as he’s clearly treating her as something that needed to be, well, hunted.

Anyway yay Jody, the real hero of this episode :D

Dean is much better at parking than in 9x08. Cue meta about his heterosexual parking to compare to how he “couldn’t even park straight” back then while in his sexuality crisis of the season. (Great parallel because Jody episode. No parallel parking though. The Impala can not be parallel parked. 9x06 proved this)

JODY Eh, only aches when it rains. How you boys been?

DEAN Peachy.

SAM Touch and go.

JODY I know the feeling.

Did they wait for it to rain for this scene or was that just luck? :P

Making use of the rain around that line, anyway, is pretty neat for expressing Jody suffering with an unseen injury or... mark... that flares up circumstantially - and the fact that it’s clearly currently bothering her is also an omen for Dean.

This whole episode is an omen for Dean.

Anyway she asks how they are as one unit, but Sam and Dean have conflicting replies and emotional needs at this point and are working out of sync. Their fight is buried, but: Dean expresses he’s fine as Winchesters do (and of course being the one with something to hide, especially that he’s currently spiralling... Jody in 10x08 tells him he can talk to her about shit because it’s all on the other side of this, and again in 12x06... Dean does not seem to be good at making use of the resource of Jody’s shoulder, freely offered. Her shoulder is hurt though :P Maybe he doesn’t want to hurt her further by telling her the horror show of his life - the casual, fun fling of a friendship they have with her, in a way, of keeping the Big Plot Nonsense away from her, though she had directly got involved and helped them with it in season 7...) And Sam, the currently hurt one whose season is all coping and recovering and holding a justified stance in the argument (that is, when the argument is on track) gets to express dissent to Dean talking for them, assert himself as an individual AND be open about being currently hurt in a way Dean can’t be.

Interesting little exchange.

I love Jody keeping things she beheaded in the boot of her car.

Though.. she had to have a really good instinct to know that it was vampires since she jumped in on that conversation late. Does she habitually behead people?

Anyway Sam and Dean joke about her being all grown up - there’s a lot of instances of them JOKING together which I think has been taken as them being back in a good place, but is really just a thin layer of humour slapped on top of all the awful for the sake of working together.

JODY Total Jane Doe. She won't even give me her name. Girl's basically feral.

names are important - in this case, without one she is basically less than human in Jody’s language choices... Or dead, as “jane doe” is also used notoriously for unidentified corpses. Which ALSO foreshadows that she’s replacing a dead girl (the Vamp Mom’s baby girl)

Sam notices the marks on her neck, while Dean is just enjoying threatening her. He sees her as vamp adjacent (and the fact she’s marked by them though he hasn’t even seen it yet, is already symbolic of her connection to them, especially because it’s causing Dean to treat her as basically a monster or not on the side of hunters anyway. This is all ignoring that she ran away and was clearly trying to get AWAY from the vampires and NOT be like them. She is “marked” and because she snarks at them for being hunters, it draws the “us” or “them” lines immediately, so Dean moves into interrogation mode.

(And yeah the “mark” is in quotations because the parallel is obvious there - Dean thinks she’s become a monster or is less than human even before he turns into a demon, that mark is making him into something he doesn’t want to be. He KNOWS it. He’s known it since he got it. Probably BEFORE he did. But now the consequences are hitting him and it’s terrifying and so he’s not giving her any benefit of the doubt because he wouldn’t give himself)

They learn what’s on the record about Annie and Dean’s response is just,

DEAN Eight years is a long time for a human to live with vampires without getting killed or turned.

His suspicion about her I think also comes from a feeling that if she IS still human she has to have been indoctrinated somehow just because how is she still alive - I don’t know if he suspected exactly that she was a lure, but I seem to remember he isn’t very surprised at this information either. This is before Sam points out she was being used to feed on, and of course back in 7x22 they had a girl who looked a LOT like Alex turn on them (hi Jenna from season 11 :P) - I said back in my 7x22 rewatch that this episode was doing right by this story of the girl, not least because it gives her much more time, but also it’s a much more nuanced exploration of her and why she’d act and feel how she does, and her choices are so important to the story, rather than the girl in 7x22 being a plot token.

Anyway then Sam says that thing that’s relevant for, like, everything:

SAM Jody's right. And she had scars on her neck, feeding scars. Uh...They're layered, as if they'd been built on for years.

Which is a super dark metaphor for basically any sort of trauma you want to apply here. Especially as here I feel like there’s a lot of projecting going on - this was how Dean broke in hell, essentially, but with torture instead of feeding, and of course now he’s picking up where that left off and finally turning into a demon. We could say Dean’s trauma has been built on year after year...

And then the chilling imagery of:

DEAN We've seen it before -- vampires keeping people as pets, human feedbags. Sometimes these slaves...

SAM Stay loyal to their captors.

DEAN Yeah.

SAM Right.

which might have them in sync again but for really chilling commentary on their loyalties. I don’t think OVERALL their relationship is THIS bad but it’s definitely a comparison they make as a worst case scenario, and honestly, the chill bliss of season 11 and 12 so far with no Giant Bro Drama has really taken the edge off my feelings of HOW bad it got in Carver era, when we had to suffer it week by week.

Anyway. Using winsync to deliver this info is just... brr. This is the point in the story when they’re most tied to each other in this horrible way where the resurrection codependency problem has flared up the most and Sam’s next on the block with demon!Dean lurking. The threat that Sam would go dark was huge over the hiatus, because of how his season ends, with him sitting LITERALLY in the dark...

Actually, lemme just remind you of how we find him at the end of 9x06 -

since, well, I have the gif, it’s another Berens ep, and the foreshadowing in season 9 is just a thing of beauty.

Also, the “captors” thing reminds me that Berens’ other episode this season was Captives, which through every branch of the story stressed this theme, and of course included Sam and Dean’s own sense of being captive in the Bunker with each other. Sam is in a precarious position where he’s fallen out with Dean and honestly has a pretty fair grievance about the Gadreel thing, but is working with Dean anyway, living with him, making jokes with him, and completing his sentences. About loyalty to their captors.

Now of course I’m a total Dean!girl so I see this all as fairly metaphoric of where they’re at in the argument, that though Dean is in the wrong I still find him sympathetic and empathise with his actions (as much as I want to slap him upside the head and tell him to get himself together :P)...

The other side of this is what is buried so deep it’s barely whispered in the subtext a lot of the time, and you have to catch it by implication or in very rare special episodes like 9x07, is only suddenly thrown out into the main text in 10x03 where demon!Dean really lets Sam have it about feeling like HE has been shackled to HIM with the whole looking out for Sammy thing. He tells him that he quits on that job, and equates his sense of freedom to not having to worry about Sam. Obviously that’s all garbled through demon!Dean filters for what Dean may actually feel in a non-evil way, but it makes the point of how over the years it’s been so forced on Dean to save Sam that this metaphor works there too, of the scars building up and loyalty to what he feels has been a captive situation with having to look after Sam...

I mean the real tragedy is how this is all such a mess that they BOTH have this horrible metaphor apply to them and they need to be freed from it - on both sides. Season 12 seems to be shaping up to a group effort, larger core family feeling (keeping Jody around in this discussion, great metaphor to that in 12x06 with the group exorcism), and I’m enjoying the dynamics so much more...

Oh wait and I haven’t even commented on the obligatory prison imagery - yes this is in a police station and all, but the interview room is given bars by the blinds -

it was in the earlier round of questioning too... I like how this episode is shot a lot. :D

Also this shot of Jody listening in at the door:

I love that it gives us this indication she is the POV (as much as there is one - the looking in through the windows makes it SO impersonal and I would write an essay on that, but it’s all gut feeling and I do not have a media studies degree despite the apparent dire need of one I have in my day to day life since fandom :P)... Jody is listening in and watching over this conversation, and this look shows her obviously ready to arbitrate or step in by putting the camera’s focus on her, like this fade from Winchesters to Jody, indicates that she is in control here.

DEAN And they didn't love you. They loved your blood. They fed on you.

ALEX I fed them. My choice. My brothers -- they brought me food when I was hungry. So when they struck out on a hunt, I fed them. They're my family.

Family don’t end in blood? Doesn’t start there either - especially not when they’re drinking your blood :P Idk, it feels like a subversion of this saying because it’s about family and blood. Sam and Dean keep using the wrong name for her, which makes her angry and even more uncooperative. If her name is like... a passcode to talk too her, they’re failing to gain entry by sticking to the name they THINK she should react to, trying to reason with the stolen child instead of the person Alex has become.

Alex stresses choice here, about choosing family, and again the parallels are all sorts of awful here because of the chosen family theme of the show, and how Sam and Dean choose each other, but from an outside POV that they have that Alex has been raised by vampires, they see the damage and toxic nature of this in a different way from her. She may have been running away but she needs, well, the rest of the events of the episode to see clearly and to choose a family that is good for her. It’s making the point it’s not EASY to break these bad family bonds, especially when they seem to be chosen (Dean is made to pick Sam many times over others - e.g. Death making him pick between Sam and Adam in 6x11, which I have recently rewatched so it’s on my mind :P But at the same time these choices are forced, and made out of a desperation where Dean is unable to lose Sam and fail him, so the choice is dubious and it plays into a much more complicated dynamic that needs change and repair...)

Sam carries on being a BIT more sympathetic. They’re SORT of playing good cop bad cop but both with being hunters and Alex isn’t going to get on with that however they approach it.

They also talk about her decision to run away:

DEAN And how do you think that decision is gonna sit with the rest of the nest? One of them already pursued you. You think when the rest of them find out that you left that they're just gonna shrug and cut their losses?

SAM You lived with them for years. They've tasted your blood. They have your scent down cold. I mean, how far can you run and for how long?

DEAN You didn't think this out, did you? What would happen, who might get hurt -- your, uh, "brother," for one.

which is REALLY accusatory there that she got Cody killed and putting all the blame on her actions...

(Honestly the fact this episode doesn’t start (after the cold open) with cutesy Winchesters in the Bunker getting the call from Jody while living a slice of life, really isolates us from them. This episode is already really making them look bad, Jody look good, and definitely our POV player)

DEAN Because of a choice you made. These are the consequences.

Dean, currently wandering around with the Mark, having made a choice that will get a lot of people hurt and killed, including, nearly his brother too...

Anyway this escalation of her teenage rebellious escape attempt into her family being killed, her being blamed, and Vamp Momma as a threat who might kill her for it, as Alex thinks, is what convinces Alex to put herself in their care. As far as I remember in this episode she never reaches out to the vampires and in a LOT of stories like this I know the victim often has a lapse and calls the monsters down on them. As far as I recall, a few clues about where she might have gone and her scent are enough to get Alex in trouble, and she genuinely does put her trust in the authorities - both hunters and cop - from this point. Though she’s not happy about it, she’s not punished more than this emotional blame for her attachment to the vampires? I might be wrong about that but I remember a lasting fondness for this episode’s treatment of Alex as a victim. Sam and especially Dean are blame-y and judge-y but Jody (our sympathetic character here) wants to reach out and save Alex for her own sake. And is rewarded for that.

(Thinking of blame, though... Don’t get me into her being turned into a vampire as a rite of, like, puberty or womanhood or whatever because it’s super weird but this is sort of what’s going on with Alex’s comment that it was “time” she left as her normal growth was about to be interrupted - Vamp Mom’s plan is to FREEZE Alex in this seemingly virginial-but-enticing adolescence in this fucked up backwards rite of passage, out of twisted love for her/her dead daughter but also it conveniently keeps her as the perfect honeytrap forever... Saving her allows Alex to mature normally and have control of her body, but all the stuff relating to her time as a lure is laden with the potential for blame about how her body was used - which 11x12 was about... There’s a whole mess of stuff there >.>)

DEAN Mills, you okay?

JODY No wonder she didn't thank me. That creep was her brother.

Again with the really impersonal - “Mills”... Dean knows Jody better than that but RIGHT NOW this is the story that is being told, and the feel of the episode that’s coming across.

After Jody says the thing about “brother” we get the obligatory reaction shot from a Winchester to the word - in this case Dean’s gruff angry facade momentarily cracking and sparing a moment to think about dead brothers. He’s not ALL gone yet, although we’re now very very few episodes from Dean losing that core sense of self that is his care for Sam...

(This isolated feeling from Dean is also good with us getting closer to that - keeping him at arm’s length to emphasise the coming loss of self, because we’re being cut off from him, and stuff like this shows DEAN is being cut off from his true self to, already.)

(Throwing in a reminder we’re 3 episodes from Dean yelling at Sam that their relationship is a dictatorship)

7 minutes in and Jody is already getting close to the name thing by picking at what’s so weird about it. I know for storytelling purposes it’s important to ask that question early, but I like that it’s ALL Jody getting invested in this and trying to work out how to understand Alex

Sam and Dean take the clue of where to go next and leave Jody with “babysitting” duty, though it’s already apparent Jody is invested.

I have so many questions:

The barbershop next door and this thing wedged on the other side of the bus terminal - I guess maybe the terminal is a tunnel between shops to a place out back where the buses come in if I had to make up a reason for this. But yeah, the OPEN sign, the chairs, the wedding dress? The poster that the only word I can make out is the middle one - “suede”... What IS that shop? There’s no other camera angle on it and I guess it was made up by the set department...

WHY a wedding dress though? THAT sticks out. Alex isn’t being forced into any marriage-equivalent situation, nor are any of the other characters... It’s a very odd thing but they captured it in this shot >.> I need back up.

@mittensmorgul seemed totally chill with the concept and assured me that this is a Thing that cleaners do to show off their competence... I guess the thing is now just that they chose to display this so obviously in the scene.

I’m going to go for retro DeanCas subtext and suggest the cleaner and launderette from 9x01 are linked except dry cleaners are an upgrade from launderettes in terms of self service vs someone doing it for you and them doing fancy stuff like wedding dresses... Like Cas had an upgrade from human (clearly linked to the launderette scene as that was where he accepted a lot of human limitations finally) but anyway, look, a wedding dress! Cas is gonna get married!

[disclaimer: I vaguely remember how this season ends]

For some reason all I take away from the rest of this scene is trying to make vampire hissing noises and realising it’s harder than it looks to do with your mouth open, bearing your teeth, without making phlemgy noises.

Jody’s cabin in the woods objectively looks creepy because cabins in woods are creepy as fuck, and the fact that it’s Jody’s doesn’t really do anything to smooth that over...

She does not do much to reassure Alex by giving her the old horror movie rundown on the setting:

JODY F.Y.I. -- The woods around here -- really easy to get lost in if you don't know your way around. Me -- I know them like the back of my hand.

ALEX I got it. "Don't try running. You won't get far".

ALEX Oh. Dead.

JODY [taking the picture back] You know, there are about a thousand more polite ways you could say that. I'll give you a pass on account of the whole raised-by-monsters thing.

Alex is obviously trying to get a rise out of Jody – maybe just testing the limits of this semi-captivity she’s in with her and seeing what sort of prison guard she’s ended up with. Jody gets in this barb despite trying to be high-minded (because Alex dragged her family into it) and the “raised-by-monsters thing” emphasises again the line between human and monster that Alex is wavering in between… By the definitions OTHER people put on her, not so much what she’s doing aside from being sarcastic.

I’m half sure the exterior shot for the vamp house was Cain’s AGAIN but from a different side. The interior is probably any old set. I’ve talked a lot about how the state of Sam’s soul and how in peril it is is almost a direct correlation to run down shacks with boarded up windows. This is a rare case where “Blackout windows” and the whole state of the decrepit house refers to Dean. Because windows are the eyes to the soul or something, and they’re all blacked out. Wonder what that means.

(I have a post on that in my queue, another relic of season 9 meta that I stumbled on and was awed about at the time)

DEAN Hey! Hey, you need a hand with that?

This is objectively one of the worst things Dean’s ever said :P

I remember meta about his flippancy about it being a sign of his decaying soul (everything is) but honestly I think he’d say it whatever was going on :P

Anyway I love the dedication to Fargo references in this show.

Remember that time Sam knocked a vampire out with a shovel?

(Teamwork!)

SAM Ralph Hedges. Stacy Kepler. Any reason you targeted them?

DALE Yeah. Hunger.

With the threat of the hunger of the Mark as the big bad in season 10, this is pretty ominous. Vampires being used as mirrors to Dean as well… Ironically he blows off steam killing them in order to feed that hunger and stop it being dangerous to random humans. (The main example of this I can think of… is from 10x19. Hi Berens :P)

Anyway Dean gets back to torturing, no hesitation. I’ve now left this rewatch too long to remember if this is the first time he gets into it since getting the Mark or what, but this is another neon sign that he’s not okay.

I’ve seen a lot of meta about the bit about siblings here –

DALE Well, all of us but little sis. She was, uh, "too good to turn". Mama couldn't bring herself to, no matter what we said, no matter how bad Alexis got.

DEAN Bad?

DALE Let me guess. You never had a teenage sister. Dragging her heels, whining, near constant, about everything, but more and more about the blood, like she's somehow above it, like she's better than us 'cause she don't feed on people.

Again the suggestion that a little sibling is a burden. Ironically Dean had it the other way around that Sam had a problem WITH drinking blood. Monsters tend to work in reverse to the Winchesters so that’s no surprise… It also suggests favouritism between siblings and the parent; I think Sam and Dean both relate to that, thinking John may have liked the other better for different reasons, even if it involved a lot of projecting. I’m getting pretty sleepy to remember what the meta I’ve read about it suggested though >.>

The “Bad” thing is also interesting too – Dean seems to be thinking it means she’s evil because he’s determinedly looking for signs of that still because they don’t trust her (and so he falls completely for the READING of the story that Alex as a lure was evil. This is about INTERPRETATION though – Dale tells the truth of events but the bias on the reading determines if she’s evil or a victim.)

Anyway Dale just found her annoying. :P

DALE Her moping? That teenage crisis-of-conscience crap? It's annoying as hell, but it's just an act. When the chips are down, she'll always choose us over humans.

That confidence that she’ll choose family – taking and corrupting the iconic line about it

Also talk about a Cas mirror for picking humans - which Alex does - and remembering 9x22 and the whole “humanity” thing is waiting in the wings for Cas...

MAN Come on, sweetie. Aren't you gonna give me a name?

ALEX It's...Ann.

That’s the 3rd name she uses so far (And Dale used “Alexis” for us, so Bingo! I guess) – a corruption on her original name – of the innocent little Annie who genuinely WAS, turned into the vampire lure. Like, no wonder she doesn’t want to use Annie again after reconnecting with her past. It’s not like LotR with Frodo calling Gollum “Smeagol” and luring out the old identity that could be reasoned with to a degree until things went really south… Alex has every right to keep the name she had been given by the vampires that still carries less baggage than this, especially as it seems to be more connected to her identity as herself (the “crisis of conscience” self that rebels) while she’s constructed a persona under “Ann” who is exactly what she wants to leave behind…

Then, the obvious demonstration of the story being wrong:

DALE Best a vamp could ask for. And you better believe you don't get that good at it unless you enjoy it. In her own sweet way...Girl's as bloodthirsty as any vampire.

SAM [suddenly realizing] Jody.

(Cut to Jody returning with firewood, finding Alex missing, a whole little horror movie tension building moment… aaaaand Alex is passed out on the bed, one sleepy, harmless teenager)

She also shows a sign of humanity:

ALEX Sheriff. My grandma?

JODY I'm so sorry.

ALEX No, it's -- it's fine. I figured -- it's been years, and she was old.

She tries to shrug it off, but the fact she asked at all is a great sign that she’s not a lost cause, because she’s got concern about another human being…

Dean kills Dale just because they’re done with him – it’s framed as a quick decision where Sam leaves, and though Dale is subdued and tied up, Dean goes back to kill him. It might not seem like much when they’re in a rush and Jody is in danger and these vampires are blatantly evil and by the Winchesters’ standards the type of monster they have a right to kill without hesitation, unlike some of the sympathetic vamps they’re encountered who should give them pause. BUT the way this all goes down, it leaves Dean making a snap decision that’s bloodthirsty and involves killing, right at the point of the story when every single kill he makes, from the moment he gets the Mark, is weighted with a huge amount to say about his current arc and how he’s doing. The kill at the end is a much bigger sign of him being Not Okay, but, yeah, this isn’t a good thing either, despite how it may seem like part of their regular job. Later in the episode his bloodthirsty choice turns the vampires against them even more than they’d normally react to hunters, although I guess it takes the heat off Alex for getting so many of the family killed. :P

I always hate to think about poor Jody spending a night sleeping on the cold forest floor. I like to think the vamps came at like, 4am, and the Impala gets there maybe like 6 or something.

Dean comes rushing in to save Jody – Sam too but we see the shot of Dean rushing towards her and his dialogue full of concern, so it sort of makes him more in the focus there.

It seems sort of normal until –

DEAN You think they went back to the nest?

SAM Of course they did. Why wouldn't they? Question is -- what are they gonna do when they find their brother dead?

Oops.

They try to tell Jody not to come out of honest concern that she’s hurt, but Jody has her own priorities that she’d had Alex in her care. When Dean tries to convince her Alex is evil, Jody has the alternative reading:

JODY I don't care. Whatever she did, she did because they made her.

DEAN Oh, and that's a reason?

JODY She's a kid!

She has a much better idea of consent and coercion, and the most tragic part is this –

DEAN Yeah, a kid who's been playing vampire murder since before she was in braces.

SAM Jody, he's right. A-at best her loyalties are...Screwed.

DEAN And how do you even know she wants to be saved?

DEAN YOU DESERVE TO BE SAVED

But yeah, Dean’s sense of self was ripped from him when he was 4 years old and he was set on the path of violence and revenge and hunting things. (Also saving people but that’s all shelved this year >.>) He has no point of reference for it NOT being weird to be screwed up by this sort of life since before you were in braces and for it to affect your adult self. He thinks he’s a killer right now – that he’s been shaped into one and that’s all he’ll be and he’s embracing it… So learning “Annie” was lost years ago just makes him all the more convinced she’s evil and unredeemable and NOT innocent of who she is.

Jody, despite missing the huge metaphor of Dean’s life or Sam’s issues with loyalties being screwed (see also: slaves and captors discussion earlier) emphatically declares that childhood is innocence no matter what happens in it and that Alex has a chance to be good because she was used and turned into what she was by the vampires…

SAM What is this even really about? You barely know the girl.

JODY [glares at the boys and moves to the car] I'm coming. And if either one of you lays so much as a hand on Alex...You'll have to go through me.

And Sam thinks Jody is being WEIRD about it – he’s following along with Dean a bit too much, and I can imagine Sam fans may have been wanky about this because Sam is normally more sympathetic. In this case he’s trying to understand Jody, but he’s essentially still in the same boat as Dean, not able to understand someone’s violent past from their redeemable present, and I quite like the way this story has him swept in Dean’s wake, following along (to a point) because the darkness affects both of them, just Dean more and this is a point of the story pushing BOTH of them deeper… I don’t think the wake up call REALLY comes until 11x01 when Sam starts making alarmed noises about how far they go and starts trying a few solutions for better ways…

Alex wakes up on what is clearly her bed

It has flowery covers and yet it very obviously in a gross vampire basement in all other respects. She’s probably slept her basically all her life that she remembers clearly. This is her idea of home. It also, not uncoincidentally, looks a LOT like a messed up version of Dean’s room in the Bunker. No actual private space – a sort of curtain around it. The same concrete décor, and a little shelf behind the bed, with books and candles on it… Garbage everywhere… Vampires upstairs… Nice.

MOMA Baby, why did you do it? Why did you run from us?

ALEX I love you, mama. I do. I just -- I couldn't take it anymore. The blood and the death, the sounds of their screams. I just... I can't do it anymore. And the way I feel afterwards, the guilt...I'd rather die than feel that way again.

“This is better… it’s making me into something I don’t want to be”

(I actually haven’t seen 9x23 in years but I think that’s the line >.> fairly traumatising episode tbh :P)

MOMA It's my fault.

ALEX What?

MOMA All of it. This is my fault. I should've turned you years ago.

This also feels pretty ominous but I can’t put my finger on why. Honestly my best bet is Crowley to Dean – all the grief he’s ever got from him, and making him into demon!Dean seems at first to suggest he finally has a Winchester who’s compliant to him…

The vamp nest in daylight has a sheep carrying truck and an old school bus outside it. Humans as livestock and Alex’s lost childhood? Who even knows :P Anyway they give Jody the briefing like she’s a soldier, but with a lack of trust about dealing with Alex.

MOMA It was so selfish. I wanted to watch you grow up. I kept putting it off. Don't you see? These things you've been feeling -- all the guilt and suffering -- those are human feelings. It ain't too late. I can take the pain away. And then we can stay together, as a family. Like none of this ever happened. Wouldn't you like that?

“human feelings” immediately hits me with Cas in 10x01 talking about “human things” – I guess this describes a crossroads they all come to. Cas, struggling between being an angel and human, ends this season on “I just want to be an angel” which suggests he doesn’t want to feel, or care, as much as he does. Though it sounded like that was a declaration of intent over the hiatus, when we catch up to him he’s actually moping in bed wallowing in the pain – maybe unable to escape it because of being sick.

Likewise, I have a post waiting in my drafts to reblog for 9x23 comparing Dean telling soulless!Sam that being human is suffering and if he died Sam was supposed to sit in a dark room and suffer about it… With guess what screencap placed under it? :P (Hint: it’s Sam sitting in a dark room suffering because Dean is dead)

I think they all have their humanity in question at this point – Sam doesn’t lose it in any magical way, but his actions as a result of all this are called into question as season 10 starts and ends with Sam taking really extreme actions with consequences in order to save Dean.

Anyway “Moma” is of course meant to be completely wrong (see also: Dean talking about suffering and being human in 6x09) and of course feeling human things is the most important thing. It’s the core of the entire show – humanity. This season is all about humanity and how important it is and of course showing Dean in a state of losing it to emphasise just how important it really is. Alex as a mirror character to him is threatened with losing it – shutting off all those emotions that mommy vamp thinks are too horrible to deal with… But what would be left behind is monstrous by this show’s definitions, and that’s exactly what’s about to happen to Dean.

And of course, Alex is saved by someone who wants to be her family and to care for her…

The blood cure for vampires is VERY similar for demons, and I suspect probably influenced the original idea – 8x18 featured the blood cure, shortly before 8x22 showed the demon one.

Oh there’s a really weird room here in the vampire’s garbage-filled house. Most of the rooms fit the trash everywhere, blackout windows aesthetic but one room Dean looks in has all these fancy and useless lace curtains over the gaps between the boards that the light is shining through. Not so obvious in the still but it seems like real beams of light effects.

I’m reminded of Cas’s phone background (established in 9x18 using images from 9x03, and confirmed he still uses it several phone models later in 12x09)… At the very least it’s a sign of hope – that Dean can be saved, that there’s still some light in his soul even when it seems at its darkest… or tbh we’ve had white lace already this episode with that wedding dress. Now Dean’s associated with a RIDICULOUS surplus of white lace which can only be here because Wanek or someone wanted to show this because it’s A: not practical, B: not very vampire-y and C: really weird even for a trashy house like this. Also they look clean and white and nice! So yeah Dean’s gonna get maaarried.

Might be because Crowley’s got an eye to have a consort though

JODY We got to go! What did they do to you?

ALEX I'm sorry, Jody. I made my choice.

BAD CHOICE IS NO CHOICE *wanders through the show banging a saucepan with a spoon*

I mean that’s the moral of this story when it comes to saving Alex, but I mean, there are sOME wider applications here.

CONNOR Hell of a sight to come home to... Brother lying dead on the floor.

No idea it was a Winchester that had done it.

Berens really starts off his first season on the show interested in the sort of legacy/mythical power of a name with a story to it – mostly through Cas, and how the angels relate to him, but it turns out these vampires know who the Winchesters are, and somehow or other worked it out after they captured them too (I doubt Sam and Dean go around saying, hey, I’m Dean Winchester, this is my brother Sam…) – maybe it’s their scent. Maybe vampires have a rumour mill of their own (demon bathroom walls too this season) and warn each other what to look out for if they have Winchesters on their case… Whatever it is, their names are known and they’re legendary enough figures the vampires know exactly how to taunt them.

Names are important.

Also that “hell of a sight to come home to – brother lying dead on the floor” thing – well that’s what Sam does in 9x23 when he comes rushing in to save Dean from Metatron…

CONNOR Which one of you took off my brother's head?! Was it you? Was it him? Pretty fitting -- brother for a brother.

The “brother for a brother” thing sounds an awful lot like passing on a brother-killing curse between people…

I have the TV instead of my second monitor to watch this so I’m less good at looking than normal, but I think this scene just has some ominous shots of Dean lying still on the floor. I can’t remember if it was confirmed he woke up and was listening to all this or not, and he just gets up at some point but the way he’s put in the front of the frame at several points, even blurry, makes it very ominous because he’s just lying there “unconscious” – I feel like he hasn’t actually slept since he got the Mark and knocking him out doesn’t do much good, really, but we don’t know that yet, so it’s harder to guess how he was doing at the time this aired… However now I’m convinced he listened in on this whole thing, and was being pretty cold and tactical about when he should jump in – even if it meant leaving Sam to get roughed up and even bled out a bit first. (In 4x19 Sam is also left to bleed out while Dean is fighting the ghouls and it’s very tense but Dean honestly want to get to him to save him – I have seen these moments paralleled anyway)

MOMA Hey. Don't be bothering my girl. She's going through something, a process.

JODY What did you do to her?

MOMA Fed her my blood. She's on her way now. All that's left is to feed.

Like I said, weirdass womanhood rituals going on here. First blood and all that, but instead of bleeding it herself, Alex takes it from another woman… (yeah I know Alex is older than this but… metaphors… Especially as Moma goes on to imply Jody is menopausal and is obviously barren herself either because vampire or because she was also menopausal when she was turned so could never even hope to have a replacement baby of her own – anyway Alex is being forced to take blood from both these mother figures, representing the end of her growth and stunting her before she can become a real adult…)

ALEX Please, mama. Let her go. I already drank from you. Let her go.

MOMA Made an impression on my girl, I see. Baby, this is the human half of you talking. After the change, this human -- she ain't nothing to you.

At this point I’m pretty much just quoting ominous lines to point at them

I like the “Human half” – I was talking a little way up about how Dean had some good left in him, and in a way the real metaphor for Dean is that he doesn’t fully “become” demon!Dean Cain 2.0 until he kills Sam – like Alex won’t be fully turned until she drinks from Jody. So demon!Dean still has a whole “human half” if you look at it that way, that there’s a final act of turning.

(Which was also compared in 10x03 to Soulless!Sam killing Bobby to “scar his vessel” too much for a soul to go back in it – to kill the human part of himself that could have remained. I have just read an essay about souls in supernatural and there’s a lot of conflicting philosophy bouncing around in my head so I’d better leave off here… Maybe by 10x03 I’ll have a clearer sense of what I’m thinking about this :P Also in 10x03 Dean is on a sliding scale of human to demon by how much blood is in him…)

MOMA I have fed her, clothed her, loved her going on nine years. You think motherhood's just about blood? You don't know the first thing about it.

JODY Maybe not, but I know what it isn't. And it ain't about forcing her to be like you the second she becomes inconvenient.

Motherhood does not get a whole lot of exploration in this show for obvious reasons, since Jody is one of the only mother characters to really survive like this and open us up to plots like this. And even taking in Alex and then Claire, her stories haven’t REALLY been strongly about motherhood outside of this episode, because she’s a fascinating, complex and interesting character with a ton of crap going on in her life :P

Anyway it’s a “family don’t end in blood” type message but again twisted and messed up as it’s coming from the villain. Honestly if you flip it around and make Moma into Bobby’s perspective but not evil, that’s kind of a lot of stuff he said about Sam and Dean in 7x10, in the best episode about FATHERHOOD in the show. And of course he’s the originator of the “family don’t end in blood” line.

Jody, though, is continually watching out for coercion and lack of choice (which is probably why Dean is banned by the plot from talking to her about his problems for, what, 3-4 seasons now of her offering, because as soon as he delves into it a lot of truths that Jody’s eye for this can pick out will suddenly be really uncomfortable for Dean).

This is also – from Jody – a good line addressing John’s parenting, especially looking at it like Dean was forcibly turned into John by subliminal emotional coercion… demon!Dean reminds us of 3x10 constantly because of how up to this point it’s the only exploration of what that would REALLY be for Dean, and that ended up with the “my father was an obsessed bastard” speech about everything he put on Dean. Now we’re back in this territory, we have this mirrored example of monstrous motherhood instead, but still mirroring where Dean’s going to end up…

Oh yeah there Dean goes with immediately being prepared for the fight, having been holding a syringe of dead man’s blood ready for the instant a vampire touches him. Beautiful choreography of the vampire grabbing his hair and him lunging up at it in one fluid movement but kinda sad there’s not a longer hair-pulling moment :P heh.

JODY Alex! Was that her name? You named her after someone. Was it your daughter? I couldn't figure out why you changed her name. I thought maybe you were ashamed of your theft, but you have no shame. You said that I was using her to fill a hole in my life, and you're right. I am. You are, too.

Just Jody nailing projection perfectly. See above: can’t talk to Dean about his shit :P

Meanwhile: Dean is stronger than a vampire and does the whole “Look at me, bitch!” thing when he kills it, which is… maaaybe a sign he’s not doing too well. I’m pretty sure we’ve lost him at this point in the story (all the stuff that keeps him distanced from being the emotional POV here especially) and we’re essentially one episode away from him being TRULY consumed by the darkness after he kills Abaddon

I guess there’s another episode in between though :P

He goes to help Sam and has a completely pointless bit of snark about their fight:

DEAN Yeah, I know. You wouldn't have done the same for me.

Dean still kinda sees killing monsters as saving Sam (messing up the line between saving people hunting things) and he’s still harping on that fight.

I’m guessing the words have got all twisted up and poisonous inside him along with the literal darkness doing this to him… Not a good time to have a serious argument while one of you is infected with a brother-killing curse that will feed off these dark feelings :P I think his descent is being accelerated by that – which also explains how it was much slower in season 10, to me, because Sam rescinds this statement while Dean is dying, and though they’re still completely messed up by the time they get back on track a little with doing MotW and living their lives, the fighting is replaced by Sam trying to help Dean… But then towards the end of the season when things are bad between them again because of the Book of the Damned nonsense, and then Charlie, Dean immediately and dramatically drops again.

Meanwhile: Alex saves Jody by rebelling against her old family and picking a new one.

JODY [to ALEX] Don't watch this, sweetheart.

I just love Jody so much.

“It looks like you were enjoying it, maybe too much…” Was I following a thread of Sam really really not seeing the warning signs until it was far too late? Dean brushes it off as part of the job – pretending it’s business as usual with the one liners, pride in what they do… You can imagine him on a good day seeming to act similarly, but Sam’s definitely picked up on the difference. I remember when I got to fandom reading something I think adjacent to this episode about Dean killing that vampire in 2x03 with the saw as one of the most brutal kills he ever made on the show… Again, vampires, again being used to show that something’s seriously wrong with him, and Sam being super alarmed to witness it. Of course this time Dean busted out some superhuman moves and strength to finish the fight so even ignoring his personality change, Sam should be worried :P

Jody interrupts this argument, which is always a bad sign when characters aren’t allowed to get to the end of discussions where something might have actually come of it. Sam was genuinely starting to dig into how Dean feels and has been acting and his VERY NEXT QUESTION could have got him the sort of answer he needed to be Truly Concerned about Dean, but nah. Here she is :P

Jody shifts the need to apologise back to herself, after Sam and Dean try to tell her she was right about Alex, which I think is Jody now too deep in her own confused feelings about wanting to keep Alex to really think straight about it. Moma did kind of get to her, but we’ll see when she goes to talk to Alex that it was in a good way where Jody’s even more clear and careful about boundaries and suggesting what Alex should do next than she would have been even as her normal caring self who wouldn’t exactly have been un-equipped to have this conversation… Anywho here with the Winchesters it kinda sucks that she exonerates them for their opinion of Alex – which while it was founded in experience, lacked the usual empathy even Sam at least should normally have for a victim. Jody’s feelings saved Alex’s life and she’s still apologising for being messed up about it >.>

Then aahahahaha oh my god Berens you fucker:

JODY Feelings I've been trying to bury for years, you know, buried it under work, religion...even dating. We know how that worked out.

*cut to a shot of Dean looking horrified/amused* Yeah, that’s Crowley they’re talking about and that’s Dean reacting to the thought of dating Crowley to bury feelings that have been sat on for years. I mean. Wow.

I knew Berens shipped Drowley like nobody’s business but I’m still finding nonsense little gems down in this part of the show which we couldn’t have seen coming at this time – even with people seeing a LOT of what came next :P

Anyway Jody says she’s going to address all her sad feelings head on because she is a well-adjusted character when it comes down to it and certainly in comparison to the Winchesters. Terrible example set in front of them :P they might actually learn to talk about their feelings!

/sarcasm directed at Carver era Sam n Dean from the safe perch of Dabb era

Oh god thinking of Dabb era remember how he nearly was a showrunner on something else like, next episode? Yiiiiiiiiiiiiiikes.

Anyway Alex says thank you very politely for Jody offering her something to eat, after she shrugged off Jody making her a sandwich earlier, so her return to humanity is marked not just by the cure but by showing her behaviour changing too. Now the threat of the vampires is all gone and she’s chosen humanity, she can begin to act like it too (after all of Jody’s comments about her being feral earlier)

The episode ends on a final gesture of empathy from Alex, which I guess is the biggest sign of humanity, and finally links them together in a way where from those 2 words you know they can try to build their family together:

JODY You don't have to explain. I know. Whatever you want from me, I'll give it. If you want, I'm here. But what you've been through the last 48 alone, losing your entire family, everything you've ever known or loved -- no one can understand that.

ALEX You can.

#9x19 #weird rewatching #spn rewatches #marshmallow era #rape mention cw #general talking about all sorts of grim stuff which you can guess from knowing this episode for ts #my stuff

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