#Obviously this is also tied to toxic masculinity that all goes hand in hand

[misspickman]

What are your thoughts about Tim’s queer journey in relation to having a very conservative father (Jack)?

I have a lot of scattered thoughts about this but mainly it boils down to two things, lots of internalized homophobia and a longer period of accepting it. U know, considering how good tim is at repressing whatever he doesnt want to think about, i think it would take more for him to come to terms with it and a lot of that would come from the knowledge that jack would not have supported him, which would definitely weight on him, plus all hes internalized listening to jacks views on sexuality and masculinity

Bc yeah jack loved his son and i dont think hed be someone to kick him out or hit him or anything but i do think tim wouldve spent years hearing jacks throwaway homophobic comments and that sticks! That shit stays with you. Dana also had some pretty conservative beliefs and imo theres a big chance theyd just casually say things they wouldnt think much of bc people like that see homophobia as a very matter of fact thing, would not even consider tim might not be straight bc theyre so far removed from Those People and thinking of queerness as something normal, and even though tim didnt known he was queer at that point it is something hed internalize

+ considering jack is dead he cant even disprove that, like hey ok his dad said some shit but would he still love him? Would he change his mind bc its about his son? Would tim even have come out to him or would it have been just another part of himself he has to lie about? (I do think if jack was still alive he would be shitty about it but again in a very like. Passive aggressive way. And i think hed possibly mellow out about it eventually but boy)

I think theres a good period there where tim is aware he might be queer but pushes that thought away (not enough time, work to do, etc etc) bc noo he cant be like that obviously its fine, he has friends who are gay thats cool! but not him no way. Theres a great deal of shame and denial in there. And eventually when he can admit to himself hes into men he still has all that internalized shit to work through, so yea, i think itd be a long process, one he would probably deal with on his own bc if hes learned anything from jack about this its that its something to be ashamed of

[thenarddogmeister]

Barbie. Dir Greta Gerwig. 2023

Barbieland contains all the child-like fun and vibrancy of Barbie but meets the uncertainty and uncomfortableness of the Real World. Told from the perspective of a women, this accessible film discusses misogyny, humanity, toxic masculinity and identity through the brilliance and sparkle of the world of Barbie.

The film follows Barbie (Margot Robbie) as she goes on a quest to save herself from becoming anything less than perfect, after her human (an intelligent mother who used to play with this Barbie) starts to affect this doll with her existential anxiety.

The film could’ve easily lost any of its feeling as the aesthetics are off-the-chart pink, fantastical and almost dream-like. Musical dance numbers are placed throughout the film, which bring excitement and energy but could’ve also added to the film’s shallowness and lack of immersion. However, this did not happen. Yes, the movie is set in an outlandish space, which on a surface level we have no relation to at all but the themes explored in the film are arguably universal human feelings, which give the movie its heart. I also found it hilarious at some points.

One of these themes is identity. I feel like most people (especially in an era where we are swarmed by social medias, which often makes us feel inadequate and ugly) can relate to the feeling of tying our identities to a specific part of ourselves in order to be loved or liked or respected. Obviously, the film focuses more on Barbie so we mostly experience what it’s like to be a women and live in a world where our appearances are forced to be our identity. Women are told through media and men that how we look defines how successful we are, how respectable we are and how lovable we are. It’s sad and Barbie does such a good job at expressing this complex feeling most women are tuned into and also providing an entertaining and optimistic film to watch.

Now, Ken (Ryan Gosling) is also allowed his share of exploration and emotion. He too ties his identity to a specific superficiality. The attention he gets from Barbie. He exerts himself doing stupid things (such as incessantly flexing his muscles) because he thinks that if Barbie likes him, and he is a strong, masculine man then he has won life. This should be his aim. The film educates Ken as we lead up to a climactic moment where he realises that what makes him his own man isn’t the love of a woman or his beach body abs but something else. We learn from Barbie that Ken needs to find his own identity and it is something that is done alone. It is an emotional moment as (for me at least) we resonated with both the dolls deeply. I’ve felt rejected and ugly and I have based my importance and value as a human on my appearance and how men view me but now I know that the essence of humanity isn’t a measurable unit appertaining to the way others view you, but what we value and what we feel and what we choose to do with our lives.

Barbie learns that she doesn’t want or benefit from perfection but she wants to be imaginative and help young people who also feel confused about their identity and confused about their place in the world. Together, we go on a journey which essentially takes us from our learned, cultivated belief that who we are is in the hands of others to the more truthful and peaceful belief that we decide who we are and what we want to be and we shouldn’t be persuaded to feel powerless, pointless and valueless due to our appearance.

It’s funny, energetic and emotionally impactful (with the iconic moment where Barbie meets the brand’s creator - Ruth Handler - in a sentimental and moving scene. The background has cascading, soft lighting and a close up of the pairs’ hands touching is used to add such significance to the dialogue and such heart to the scene).

I think Greta Gerwig created a film where I can enjoy it and also go through a cathartic experience as my deepest anxieties and upsets about the world are portrayed and validated. And I still felt happy rather than worried or cynical when it was over so I love this film.

[autisticandroids]

ok how would girls au work because i feel like to keep true with the theme of toxic gender roles them being cool and butch feels very at odds with that when like the girl version of that would be like christian girl with an instagram talking about country life and her future husband like it would be an interesting combo for them because john would be like ur an inherent failure for being a girl but also the expectations are lower already for them compared to john and sons

yeah it’s like weird! but i think about it a lot. i made a big fun post with it here.

basically my ideas are a combination of serious (dean) interesting (sam) and self-indulgent (cas).

like first of all i think sam is an out lesbian and i think she came out during the fight before stanford. like, i think she told dean when she was like fifteen, but she told john the night she left. she spat it in his face, actually. 

i think dean is like. dean loves her unconditionally but is also lightly homophobic to her about it, you know? they were accustomed to sharing motel room beds as kids but dean won’t do it anymore now that she knows sam likes girls. dean is also like, weird to her about her interactions with other women, and also talks constantly about men, as though men-liking were a cool exclusive club only dean is invited to.

i think sam has like butt length straight hair and doesn’t wear any makeup ever but doesn’t like. wear mens clothes or anything, like she wears plain clothes that are cut for women. on hunts she puts her hair in a braid. maybe she braids a spiked strap into it like beka cooper.

dean is like........ dean is a lot like young, pre-john mary i think. think the song remains the same. dean is obsessed with performing masculinity, while at the same time terrified of seeming mannish or queer. she walks a weird line, and ends up overperforming both masculinity and femininity. she regularly challenges dudes twice her size to arm wrestling contests in bars, but she never goes out of the motel room without a full face of makeup. like she’s obsessed with doing both. masculinity for respect, and femininity for conformity. you know that thing dean does with his voice? the harshening? the intentionally adopted accent and tough guy tones? she does that too. and her voice is raspy, like rachel miner’s. she’s just as invested in her “heterosexuality” as canon dean.

she wears dean’s same green army jacket but underneath it she ties up a flannel shirt so it bares her midriff. she wears her hair like s13 mary, except that sometimes she puts it in little pigtails. 

cas is the easiest because cas’ gender presentation doesn’t matter at all except in how OTHER PEOPLE relate to her, so it’s less a question of “how would cas do woman?” and more a question of “what would it be fun to see other people/dean specifically react to?”

so basically like. jimmy novak is a frumpy feminine christian mom. still wears the trench coat and probably a suit but when i say suit i mean blazer, pencil skirt, tights, blouse (or maaaybe a button down), low-ish heels. long hair in bouncy curls (think rowena’s hair but no bangs and black). actually jimmy novak probably pinned her hair up in a slight updo.

anyway i’ve decided that i refuse to try and remember what actually happened with cas falling in like, canon, like how close he got to human. this au’s cas gets close enough to human that she has to start like. showering. anyway she can’t take care of the hair so it gets tangled in a giant rat’s nest and dean gives her a bathroom chop. she has to borrow the winchester sisters’ clothes, because she has to start changing clothes but also because she can’t fucking walk in jimmy’s heels or in that confining skirt without the assistance of her grace. 

all the winchesters’ clothes look baggy on her because she’s kind of spindly and narrow and flat as a board. like dean and sam have big shoulders, big hips, and big breasts, and cas has zero out of three, so anything she wears looks like a smock. she keeps wearing the coat over whatever they give her. she’s tallish (five feet eight or nine inches?) but dean is taller and sam is freakishly tall. cas could probably pass for a man alone but when she’s with dean or sam it’s obvious she’s a woman just because of the heights.

when she returns to angelhood at the end of season five, she’s wearing jimmy’s white office button down, but no bra underneath because the only reasons she would need one would be to either make her boobs look bigger or to hide her nipples and cas isn’t interested in either of those things and bras are uncomfortable, no blazer on top, a set of cargo pants that look feminine and form fitting on dean because dean is in possession of an ass and hips, but baggy and dykey on cas because she is not, combat boots (also dean’s), and the coat, and her hair is just like canon cas’ hair but way choppier because dean cut it for her.

anyway, dean treats cas in a WILD way, like. they do some intricate rituals in season four? they are dean winchester and castiel, after all. but after cas butches up in season five and then stays that way dean pushes it into overdrive. “i wish you were a boy so i could date you” shit. dean lets cas put a hand on the small of her back. she jokes that cas is her boyfriend. when cas sleeps, they sleep in the same bed, “since you can’t possibly share with sam, she’s a dyke.” also she called cas cassie a lot when cas looked more feminine but switches exclusively to cas when cas looks more masculine. like it’s this whole “”””straight”””” girl intricate ritual where one is attracted to a masculine woman so one coercively masculinizes her further.

sam tries to check in with cas to see if cas is cool with this forcible masculinization and weird gender relationship, because sam is gay and Understands or at least thinks she does. she also catches wind that cas is here to smash a lot sooner than in canon. but anyway cas rebuffs her because cas hates sam. 

tangent, but one of my least favorite things that happens in mid spn, starting i think in s6, is that they start needing plausible deniability for cas, so they start pretending him and sam are like, friends. like 6.20 “i did it to protect the boys. or to protect myself. i don’t know anymore.” like there’s all this emotional stuff where cas is clearly talking about his emotional connection to dean, but sam gets included in order to make it seem SLIGHTLY less gay. and that’s annoying because of the no-homo-ness but it’s actually more annoying because 1) i liked s5 cas’ bitchiness towards sam i think that killed and 2) if sam and cas are gonna be friends after cas was a bitch and called sam an abomination and shit, develop it! develop it! don’t just Say that they are.

anyway it’s my au and i say what happens so the plausible deniability “both the brothers are important to me” shit does NOT happen and cas is a bitch to sam throughout s5&6. they do eventually bond later? like cas still takes sam’s hell trauma, and sam feels like she owes her for that (even though it was CAS’ FAULT IN THE FIRST PLACE but sam is batshit like that). so that’s what kind of gets them to eventually bond a little and become friends and comrades. 

also sam clocks cas as gay. obviously. sam tries to inform cas about being gay. because sam too is gay. it only kind of sticks. cas doesn’t really understand how human societal roles work. cas has HUGE angel autism and i support her.

also as long as we’re talking about five and six, why don’t we deal with male lisa. so obviously the kid thing doesn’t work. the thing that lisa does that makes dean like :o is not “have a kid that might be dean’s” but “tell dean he was going to propose.” this implies that they were dating in the past longer than canon dean and lisa but oh well. 

however, when dean gets pulled back into hunting, she’s six weeks pregnant by lisa and doesn’t know it. cas immediately tells her, and offers to give her an angelic abortion. she accepts without hesitating and cas does it. the fact that this - cas taking ownership of dean’s reproductive organs in a somewhat invasive way, even if it was wanted - contributes to their whole.... season six..... dynamic. dean never tells lisa about this.

that’s everything i can think of. i have work in four hours.

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

So I watched 10.09 recently, and it has that part where Dean tells a story about him basically being almost roofied as a teen, but somehow it ends up framed as the funny joke and yet another proof that John "did what he could", and I kind of hate this? And it's the same episode in which MoC!Dean killed guys that kidnapped and tried to rape Claire, and you'd think writers would've addressed the parallels and acknowledge that Dean could've been triggered by this situation. 1/2

2/2 But in the end, it's never addressed, and the whole situation is framed as the proof that Dean is evil now. And I'm not even sure what I am trying to say, but with that being the show's approach back in s10, I'm not surprised about the finale anymore. Guess we should've known?

That’s an excellent angle to look at the issue because the Mark of Cain arc is a clear example of how people with different experiences will see the same thing in wildly different ways. There’s this phase of season 10 where everyone is like “oh no Dean is Getting Worse” and when you look at what Dean is doing... you actually go “...good for him”.

Let’s give Caesar what belongs to Caesar. It’s not “the writers” in this case, it’s Dabb. Plenty of other writers don’t fall into this John apologism thing. Just look at how the episode before Lebanon, written by Buckner and Ross Leming, says that sometimes John would temporarily kick Dean out because he was “pissed at him” despite Dean always taking his side to mantain the peace. It almost seems like a statement to sprinkle some salt given what Dabb does in Lebanon, you know? Maybe not, but there is a tension between “John was shitty” writers and “John did his best” writers.

In hindsight, we gave Dabb too much of the benefit of the doubt. We were like, weeell, that’s supposed to be way the characters perceive the truth, which is distorted by the trauma... But now it’s obvious that he truly believed in the John-did-his-best version. He brought him back and got Mary back with him. No matter what happened to the finale, the network didn’t print those pictures of John and Mary to hang on Sam’s wall. He never took Dean’s abuse seriously and it shows.

The “anedocte” of Dean getting drugged and “saved” by John from being raped is obviously there to parallel him with Claire. Which works! It’s so weird because it’s like. You are soooo close to getting the point. Younger Dean was assaulted just like this teenage girl is assaulted and Dean saves her... but apparently John yelling at those people is a good way of dealing with the issue, while murdering child traffickers is an overraction thus bad.

That’s the problem, isn’t it? That Dean’s murder spree is framed as an overreaction. Sam is like “tell me you had to do this! tell me it was you or them!” - the answer to which (by the narrative) is obviously no, it wasn’t self defense, he just killed them because he could. He just murdered those men for no reason except he felt like being murdery. And the audience is supposed to be like “oh no! Dean is murdery for no reason except for murderiness! That’s bad!”.

But it’s a power fantasy, isn’t it? Going on a murder spree on rapists and traffickers. I bet any people who’s been violated like that has fantasized of doing the exact thing Dean does here. Killing them all.

Dean had the physical strength and skill to kill them all, why shouldn’t he kill them? (I mean, in real life I’m against private justice because I’m a fan of the state of law, but the Supernatural universe obviously works on different principles than the state of law. Again, it’s a fictional narrative that plays out as a fantasy for the audience, so.)

So what was Dabb’s intention? I’m afraid it’s the worst one. “John Winchester’s not going to win any Number One Dad awards, you know? But, you know, damn if he wasn’t there when we needed him”. What the fuck, Dabb? It’s been established since season 1 that John WASN’T there when they needed him. Which... I’m afraid... leads us to the Cas-Claire plot in the episode. Cas has fucked off with Jimmy’s body leaving Claire on her own. Parallels how John wasn’t going to win wny Number One Dad awards. But! Cas is there when Claire Really Needs Him i.e. when she’s about to be raped by older men. Parallels how John was there when Dean Really Needed Him i.e. when he was about to be raped by older men.

I think the point is to say, Cas kinda sucked because he took Claire’s dad away but hey! He’s actually a good figure for Claire because he gets there in time to prevent her from being raped. Just like (ew) John kinda sucked as a father because hunting and stuff, but hey! He’s actually a good figure for Dean because he got there in time to prevent him from being raped.

It’s pretty yucky. Literally NOBODY wanted a parallel between Cas and John. But he made one. And he made one to absolve Cas from the guilt he carried for what he did to Claire (Claire’s mother is a mother so who fucking cares about her. She’s basically a Blurry Wife(TM), she’s only a tool for Claire’s arc, Cas apparently only cares about the harm he did the child, not the wife, for some reason.) and to absolve Cas from his guilt it absolves John too. Don’t worry, being a parent is hard. You often screw up. But you can *looks at smudged writing on hand* prevent the kid from being raped by predatory adults and everything’s fine now.

It’s not really important if the child suffered hunger or whatever, the only important thing is that they don’t get raped, because that’s bad, everything else is just a little detail.

All Dabb got with that scene was to paint Sam as extremely unsympathetic because he’s no longer a child, he’s a full adult now and still thinks of that episode at the CBGB as a funny story. That’s not a good look. It almost makes you think that the writer himself saw it as a funny story. Lol teenage boy biting more than he can chew. But then why the Claire parallel? The Claire scene onviously is not supposed to be anything but horrific. I'll give Dabb the benefit of the doubt on this specific thing.

It’s weird, yes, because Dabb wrote Dark Side of the Moon where he establishes that John was a bad husband/father even before tragedy hit the family. But apparently that’s the “not going to win any Number One Dad awards” part, I suppose? I guess he intended to write John as this flawed, ~complex~ figure who was imperfect but still brave and whatever blah blah did his best blah blah. I’m all for flawed complicated characters but a horrible father is a horrible father. A rose by any other name... parental abuse is still parental abuse even if the poor guy was complicated and traumatized and did what he thought he had to do to prepare his sons for a violent world.

Also, the story frames Dean’s escapade as a teenager being stupid. “You know what he got for that? Me whining about how much he embarrassed me. Me telling him that I hated him. But then he stopped and turned around looked at me and said, Son, you don’t like me? That’s fine. It’s not my job to be liked.” “It’s my job to raise you right.” This seems straight from a novel about teenagers doing something stupid that they’re too young to realize that their parents are right to be against them doing. But this isn’t just... a parent walking into a bar to stop their child to drink alcohol. Dean literally describes feeling sick from something that was inside the alcohol.

Sure, it makes sense that he’d lash out to John because of the shame and shock. But the scene is... off. Are we supposed to see this as a typical teenage mistake? Are we supposed to read it as something as horrific as what happened to Claire, literally sold into rape? Or, worse, are we supposed to see what happened to Claire as a teenage mistake, ah silly teenager, blindly trusting shady people, no wonder you end up in a situation where you’d get raped if a father figure didn’t sweep in and save you. I hope that wasn’t the intent.

To get back to Dean’s Mark-of-Cain violence, the writers clearly didn’t intend it to come from the Darkness up to a certain point. It was supposed to an arc about your own inner darkness (consider the Charlie episode, a couple episodes later). Then they came up with the idea of The(TM) Darkness, the suppressed cosmic feminine. While it caused a bit of dissonance in the subtext, it doesn’t really change Dean’s narrative, because his inner darkness is the trauma, and his trauma is inherebtly tied to the “feminine” i.e. the parts of him that don’t fit seamlessly into the scheme of toxic masculinity values. That the violence that comes from the Mark of Cain comes from Dean himself and that’s it, or is connected to the Darkness, it doesn’t change what it means for Dean. Dean and Amara have parallel histories, the feminine principle locked away, the trauma the anger stems from.

In 10x09 we’re still in the Before The (TM) Darkness era, before the suppressed cosmic feminine. The Mark of Cain arc is still about... well, Cain. But the shift is the signal that someone looked at Dean’s arc and said... you know what? “Lucifer gave me this curse so now I’m demonic and murdery” is meh. “Toxic masculinity suppresses the feminine and it creates trauma which rage and violence comes from” is more interesting. I don’t know whose idea it was, but it was a good idea, and surely the idea came from seeing how Dean’s MoC narrative was unfolding.

Dean’s MoC narrative was unfolding in a certain way, in fact, because of a pretty simple reason. There’s a fundamental tension in Dean’s MoC arc. We want him to go murdery, but it’s also our main character, so we don’t want him to do really horrible things because he still needs to be relatable. The audience cannot hate him, so he must NOT do something entirely unforgivable. He still needs to be somewhat relatable, even when demonic or demonic-adjacent.

So he goes on a murder spree... but it’s rapists and child traffickers. He’s demon, but he kills a misogynistic dude that wanted his wife dead for cheating on him. He’s a demon, but beats up dudes that harass women. He does a slaughter, but they’re nazi. He’s off the deep end, but works a case of kidnapped and abused young women...

Speaking of which. 10x23, written by Jeremy Carver. Dean works a case where a girl was killed while dressed scantily and Dean makes some slut-shaming remarks, and we’re supposed to think “whoa Dean, that’s bad”. But later he confronts the girl’s father and what does he say?

I’m just doing my job, Mr. McKinley.

By suggesting my daughter was a slut?

I’ll admit that thought crossed my mind. Then I came here, and I smelled the deceit and the beatings and the shame that pervade this home.

You shut your face right now.

And you know what? I don’t blame Rose anymore. No wonder she put on that skank outfit and went out there looking for validation, right into the arms of the monster that killed her.

Back then the episode was super controversial and everyone hated the case because of the apparent slut-shaming but I loved it! Because it’s not about the girl. It’s about Dean. Dean doesn’t think that a girl gets killed because she dresses in a miniskirt so it’s her fault. Dean is projecting on himself and he’s not actually victim blaming the girl, he’s victim blaming himself. And when he absolves the girl by putting the blame on the father... well, subtextually he’s absolving himself by putting the blame on his father. On the deceit and the beatings and the shame that pervaded his own home. He’s textually not ready to absolve himself, of course, he summons Death to ask him to kill him later, but subtextually he’s on the right path.

Rose McKinley basically did the same mistake Dean did at the CBGB when he trusted some older people who offered him drinks and the same mistake Claire did when she trusted a man who sold her for money because he offered him a place and stability. She trusted the wrong people (in this case, vampires, which adds the whole subtext of vampires and sexuality) who took advantage of her. Except Rose had no one to save her. (Her friend, Crystal, gets rescued by Dean, even if he causes the other hunter Rudy to die in the process.)

Carver’s writing is pretty brutal. The girl made that mistake because was abused at home, so she was desperate for validation and that desperation drove her into the wrong hands. (Rose even has a brother who blames himself for bringing her sister to her future murderers, destructive sibling relationship check.) It doesn’t actually even matter if Dean guessed right about Rose’s family situation, because what matters is what it tells us about Dean. He basically relates to a dead abused girl. Actually all through the season Dean is paralleled to “skanks” “sluts” and sex workers. Obviously this happens kinda all through the show, the whole “the business is based on absent fathers” thing happened much earlier in the story, so it’s not new. But s10 draws a picture of female suffering - abuse, manipulation and death. Season 10 was difficult to go through. In hindsight, it was probably on purpose because it was supposed to be darkest hour of the feminine. Summed with some good old fashioned misogyny, but hey.

The Carver era was wonky but Carver wanted to free the feminine. (I believe that Mary’s comeback, while written by Dabb because of the showrunner shift, was planned before the showrunner shift.) We thought the Dabb era wanted the same, with Mary choosing life and Amara being independent and so on, but it evidently wasn’t the case. Not a single woman arrives at end of the story. It’s hardly ~Bucklemming or ~the network or ~covid because it starts before the very end.

I’m not saying that dead sluts are more feminist than living women, but if the women die or disappear anyway (and they did) I’d rather have an exploration of trauma than nothing. And I definitely prefer a dead slut narrative that calls out parental abuse than a narrative where women live but abuse gets the you-did-your-best treatment.

Whoops! I digressed! But feel free to ask for any clarification or send me any observation or thought.

[itsclydebitches]

ngl voyager gets a whole lot of very disproportional hate from the fandom and i'd hazard a guess that a lot of that is just garden-variety misogyny (and probably racism mixed in, considering how many of the most prominent characters are women, poc, or both). like, is voyager perfect? absolutely not. and no spoilers but there was a lot of executive meddling that wound up leading to the finale/conclusion being lacking and there's a lot of reasonable dissatisfaction with that--but again that was largely thanks to the execs fucking the show over and i recommend looking into that if you can once you've finished the show. but overall? voyager is trek right to its very core--it has heart, it's about family, and it never loses sight of that imo, even if some episodes are weaker or just duds (but, like, would it be a trek series without some episodes that just kinda suck but are still fun to watch???)

anyway, i absolutely love that you're getting into voyager, it is my all-time favorite trek series to this day for a lot of reasons, and i hope that ppl like that anon dont put you off bc i'd love to continue to see your thoughts as you watch the series!

Oh, it would take a whole lot more than some anons being salty that others enjoy things to turn me off :D 

Thus far (I lost internet last night so I’m still only on Episode 7 of Season 2), Voyager is the Trekiest Trek I’ve watched. Which is a weird sentence, but I mean it in the way you said it’s “trek right to its very core.” What is Star Trek, if we strip the intent of the story down to its basics? It’s about exploration, discovery, that “wagon train to the stars,” wrapped up in the argument that life is fundamentally good. We have problems, but we can work past them. We have differences, but they strengthen us. Diversity is the lifeblood of the universe and the future will continue to improve so long as we embrace that. 

Voyager is (again, from what I’ve seen so far!) basically a love song to that premise. I didn’t do too deep a dive because I’m trying to avoid spoilers, but I did look at a couple threads discussing why Voyager is so hated. Again and again I saw the same reason pop up: wasted potential. Now, a lot of fans left it at that (as if the answer to what potential Voyager apparently missed out on is self-evident. It’s not), but those who did expand on the idea consistently claimed that the show needed to be darker than it was, even if they rarely said it like that. Why aren’t the Federation and the Marquis at each other’s throats? Why isn’t the crew going crazy under these circumstances? Why aren’t characters getting killed off left and right in hostile space? “Anything could have happened out there and they played it safe!” but the “anything” here is always... awful. There’s this very pervasive idea that the world is inherently cruel, people are inherently divisive, that when pushed to the brink everything will fall apart... and that (while making for one kind of great story) is very much not Star Trek. 

See, Voyager created an unimaginable scenario--lost in space, 75 years from home, forced to live indefinitely with strangers--and their answer to the question of “What happens?” is “People make it work.” They learn to respect one another, they uphold their ideals, they maintain a love of life and discovery, and they create a family. And that’s fucking fantastic. That’s Star Trek! I’m not going to pretend there aren’t problems with the show, with plenty more to come, I’m sure, but I don’t think this is one of them. Why do so many viewers think that hatred, horror, death, and growing jaded is the only potential here? Why would they expect that in a Star Trek show whose premise is the very antithesis of those things? 

“But they don’t do enough with those things, even if they have happy outcomes.” They do plenty, they just do it in an episodic rather than serialized nature. I can point to multiple episodes where the replicator rations or Maquis differences are driving the characters’ actions. “But without that horror there’s no conflict.” There’s plenty of conflict. Hostile aliens aside, I just watched an episode where Tuvok and Chakotay are pissed as hell at one another because they fundamentally disagree over how to handle problems, but--because they’re adults with a well-tested respect for one another--they apologize and work through it. “But the characters don’t develop at all.” You mean they don’t grow harder. That’s not the same thing as no development. Tuvok is figuring out how to be more flexible, Chakotay is becoming more willing to accept cultures he doesn’t agree with, Harry is growing more confident now that he’s far from home, the Doctor is learning to see himself as a person, Paris is grabbing his second chance with both hands by making strong ties, and Janeway is learning to command and care for her crew simultaneously. I honestly believe that a lot of people think of “character development” as the character becoming a fundamentally different person, unrecognizable from where they started out. But  characters can also grow into the people they wanted to be in the first place. “We’re far from home, in hostile territory, tempted to do horrific things to survive... but no. Right now at least, we’re holding onto who we are. We’re scientists, so we’re going to explore and learn. We’re peaceful, so we’re going to make friends with as many species as we can. We’re members of a society that teaches acceptance, so we’re going to form a family on this spaceship.” That’s incredible!! Did fans miss why Seska was an antagonist in the episode she was unmasked? Because she was trying to convince them to give up everything they believe in in the name of survival, an ends justify the means argument. And the crew said no, we will not give up what we believe in just to make it through. I legit saw a ton of fans saying some version of, “I can’t believe they were that far from home and actually followed Starfleet’s rulebook.” It’s because those rules don’t exist for the hell of it. Overlooking their practical function, they’re a philosophy that the characters believe in, and they’re figuring out how important that part of their identity is to them under these circumstances. Am I willing to steal a specie’s technology if it gets us home? Am I willing to die to help another uphold their own philosophy? (Chakotay in “Imitations”). What regulations should we bend or change to accommodate our new situation? The first two things Janeway does are a) giving the guy who just came out of a penal colony a rank and b) deciding that she needs to be more familiar with her crew than is normally encouraged for a captain because she’s essentially their mom now. Developing doesn’t have to mean characters do a 180 on their initial personality, or characters getting killed off when stuff gets “boring” so that others can do edgy things in response. 

Voyager upholds Trek’s premise and runs it to its logical conclusion: 

Voyager has the most literal trek--a trek back home. 

Voyager has the most diverse crew--a woman Captain, Native American First officer, black Vulcan, Asian-American communications officer, and a White Dude pilot that realizes he wants to be soft and kind towards those who took a chance on him because Toxic Masculinity who? 

Voyager has the most literal family--not just a 5+ year mission, but a crew who expects to raise the next generation. They have no choice but to work together, so they indeed come together rather than pulling apart

Except they do, of course, have a choice. In “The 37′s” the crew is allowed to stay on the Earth-like planet with a city of other humans and Janeway is convinced that a sizable number will choose that. After all, they may never get home and this is a safer, kinder future for them. In fact, the real question is whether so many will stay that they can no longer run the ship... but Janeway would never dictate her crew’s choices in that manner. So she swallows her worry down, opens the door... 

... and finds that not a single person decided to stay behind. And the show has ensured we understand that this is not just because they all have some unshakable belief that they’ll get home (many don’t), but because this is their family now. This is home. 

And fans want to toss that out for a generic, gritty, sci-fi adventure where hope is scarce, the universe is cruel, and people need to be pushed to the limit just to admit that they maybe, sort of, like each other?? Obviously like what you like, but that’s a hard pass for me. I’ll take the bridge crew comforting each other in “Twisted,” thanks. Besides, we already have shows like that. And we already have DS9 which grapples with many of those dark, pessimistic themes. Voyager feels like a breath of fresh air, even within the breath of fresh air that is Star Trek as a franchise. It’s a show that says, “Yes, when everything goes wrong people will come together. They will love each other. They will make it through.” 

What’s more Star Trek than that? 

[artsybanchou]

I’m a big fan of 80s/90s anime and Ranma 1/2 played a big role in my childhood. The premise has sooooo much food for thought when it comes to looking at gender and specifically the performance of gender. I’m about to get INTO it, so, here’s your warning-- read more is a ramble. (LONG ramble)

Oh ho ho ho! WELCOME TO MY HELL!

Aight, so let me set the stage for you-->

Two people, who should not be parents, have a kid. The father, Genma, a fairly successful martial artist, takes their just-born son on a training journey without consulting the mother. By training journey, I mean that they travel all over the world with little to no money, either stealing from or scamming people in order to make sure they can eat, under the guise of training the son, Ranma, to become the greatest martial artist of the “Anything Goes” school of martial arts. One of the most frequent scams the father pulls is promising his son’s hand in marriage to various families in exchange for a dowry before running off with both his son and the dowry, never to be seen again. This-- inevitably-- comes back to bite them in the ass. But more on that later.

We don’t get to see a lot of Ranma’s childhood on the training journey, just the occasional incredibly horrific flashback to something that would become a national incident were it to happen in the real world. For example, at one point in time, his father finds a Chinese pamphlet of an ~ancient lost Chinese art~ that is INCREDIBLY POWERFUL!!!!! wow! It’s called Neko-ken. So he decides to teach his six-year-old this technique, although he can’t actually read Chinese so he does it based off the diagrams-- which detail a process of collecting a good number of cats, starving them for a few days straight, and then tossing his son, covered in fish sausages (possibly tied up, can’t remember), into the pit to fend for himself (and not be eaten alive) for hours on end. Surprise, surprise, Ranma comes out incredibly traumatized and with an intense fear of cats (something his father would’ve seen coming if he was able to read Chinese as the pamphlet says that someone would have to be crazy to try to teach someone this technique and that it causes severe psychological damage-- also could’ve been avoided if his father had any common sense or fatherly instincts, but hey that’s just asking too much of Genma). This is not the result his father wanted, so he tries to “fix” it by doing the exact same thing multiple times, just with different cat foods wrapped around his son because... I genuinely don’t know what his thought process was but yeah. So that’s just a tiny snapshot of what his childhood was like as well as how much of a massive idiot his father was. And since Ranma never interacted with his mother, guess who had the greatest influence in his development (yay........). (save him) (also this is based off my memory from watching the anime YEARS ago, so some small details might be wrong but the big, overarching “his dad is a terrible person” thing is still very much true even if some of these smaller details aren’t)

When Ranma is a teenager, his father brings him to a Chinese training ground full of cursed springs. The tour guide repeatedly tries to explain what exactly this place they’re visiting is, but the father and son pair are two hard-headed idiots and get right to sparring. Ranma knocks his father into a spring pretty quick only to be caught off guard when his father reemerges from said spring as a panda and grand slams our protagonist into another one of the cursed springs. Our manly man martial artist protagonist emerges from this spring as a dainty, busty teenage girl. /The horror./ The panic from both Ranma and his father’s deeply shaken fragile masculinities gives the tour guide enough time to reveal that they had fallen into the cursed springs of the drowned panda and the drowned girl (one guess who fell into which one) and that anyone who falls into a cursed spring will take on the form of the life form that drowned in it. They can return to their original bodies by being splashed with hot water but, from now on, every time they’re hit with cold (or even apparently lukewarm) water, they’ll change into these new cursed forms.

Now, I’m sure you all saw this coming from the type of man that Ranma’s father is based on everything I’ve said so far, but Genma is the worst(TM). So Genma is all, “no SON of MINE can be a GIRL! >:((((((” and Ranma, who has been raised for his entire conscious life by this man, and only this man, is also very much not Okay(TM) with this because he’s a man, a manly fighting man who was raised to be the manliest of fighting men who fight. He can’t be a GIRL. 

Except he totally can. Because these two start taking advantage of Ranma’s feminine body pretty much immediately in order to continue running scams so that they can eat and whatnot while traveling. Of course, Genma constantly shames Ranma by saying things like, “I can’t believe my son is such a failure of a martial artist, being a girl! I’m so ashamed!” and whatnot at every opportunity but especially when they are in an argument and Ranma is winning or if he needs Ranma to do something for him. He frequently manipulates his son by using this kind of guilt-tripping language as though it’s Ranma’s fault that his body is like this. Nevermind that they both frequently profit off of Ranma’s female body for scams, Genma still puts Ranma down for having it and Ranma internalizes that because he’s 15 and his father is the only person he’s ever known.

And I’m sure we all hate Genma now, as we should, because fuck Genma. What kind of woman would ever marry Genma? (And we assume a woman is married to Genma because how could a man this bigoted do anything other than marry a woman all traditional and whatnot). If only Ranma wasn’t taken from his mother so young. Maybe he would’ve turned out a better person~ Well, uh, bad news, lads :/  So, by the time we meet Ranma’s mom in the series, we’ve known most of these characters for a chunk of time. It’s already quite well established how terrible of a human being Genma is. Ranma may or may not have started the episode out admitting he doesn’t know much about his mom after being asked about her. A standard set-up. I don’t quite remember all the details of the episode, only the important things-- here’s the important thing: Genma’s wife, Nodoka, made Genma swear something to her before he took their toddler on a training journey all around the world. He had to raise Ranma to become “a Man among Men” (and we’ll talk about how she defines manliness) and, if he failed, then both he and Ranma must commit seppuku. 

Yeah, that's right. 

If her son isn’t enough of a man by her standards then he has to commit ritual suicide.

Her son who now transforms into a girl every time he is touched with at least a ladle’s worth water that isn’t steaming.

(hey have i mentioned save Ranma yet? save him seriously)

Her definition of manliness? All the shit the misandrists of tumblr swear is the inherent evils to all men. She thinks her son needs to be unapologetically forceful in /all/ he does. Especially in his romantic forays :///// (yeah this is going where you think it is)

When she does decide he isn’t manly enough (because Ranma was being sexually harassed by an old man who forcibly put him in a sailor outfit, no im not kidding, happosai, said old man, is a whole other element of the show that like holy shit) and tries to get him to commit seppuku, the solution the cast comes up with is to have Ranma “peek” at (his friend? girlfriend? fiance? frenemy? roommate? it’s weird-- technically they’re the two romantic leads but their chemistry is like -5 because she constantly physically hits him for things that really aren’t his fault and just ://) Akane while she is bathing and that will prove his manliness to his mother so that he doesn’t have to literally die. Will having Ranma be a fucking voyeur prove his manliness to his mother, you ask? Yep. This is Manly(TM) and so Ranma gets to live another day. Yay. Once again, molestation saves the day. (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa) All of this is played off as a joke, for the record. No character is really acknowledged as being “a bad person” for any of this behavior-- not molester Happosai, not trying-to-kill-her-own-child Nodoka, etc. 

So these are the people who made Ranma. Who shaped this kid with the ability to spontaneously switch between male and female bodies (presuming he has water on hand). Also, obviously, Genma had more influence seeing as Ranma never saw his mother between the ages of two and (I think) 16(?), but. regardless, these are the people who shaped his understanding of gender. For all intents and purposes, our lad should be such a pressure cooker of toxic and fragile masculinity that he just about commits seppuku himself every time he ends up in his female body. 

But he doesn’t. In fact, Ranma is largely comfortable in his female body as long as his father isn’t trying to hold said body against him (wait did that come out wrong?). Ranma has no hesitations taking on his female form for something as little as a discount on ice cream. He makes the statement, “when it comes to eating out, being a girl is the only way to go”-- because he’s able to get an extra scoop for being “cute”

There’s a scene very early on in the series about exactly that which has always stuck with me. It opens with Ranma in his female body at a cafe with Akane and they both order fancy ice cream parfaits. Ranma is extremely excited and exclaims, “I’ve always wanted to try one of these!” 

Akane replies with, “don’t tell me you’ve never had ice cream before.”

And Ranma proceeds to explain that he’s never had ice cream like /this/ because it would be too embarrassing for a guy. When Akane asks if he isn’t embarrassed now, happily shoving huge spoonfuls of ice cream into his mouth, he responds with, “hey, I’m a girl now. It don’t count.” Akanes shoots back with a “REAL girls don’t eat like that” (because our lad is eating with such gusto-- he’s living, he’s thriving, he is demolishing that parfait and there is ice cream all over his face) 

He goes, “I’ll eat it however I want.” And then finishes the whole thing off and proclaims that he wants to order the chocolate one next.

Moments like that were the ones where I loved the show the most. We can see Ranma’s insecurities about his masculinity (thank you /soo/ much for that genma) in that he isn’t willing to perform an ‘unmanly’ action in public in his male body. He can’t be *seen* eating girly ice cream. But when he is admonished for not living up to feminine standards in his female body (eat more daintily), he just goes, ‘i’ll do what i want’. Young me really resonated with that, being born with a female assigned at birth body and growing up in Texas. 

It feels like there’s a trans narrative buried in the steaming hot mess that is this work by Takahashi Rumiko-- and it is abundantly clear that was never her intention so I wouldn’t exactly recommend trying to give her an award or anything. She said that she wanted to write a work with a male main character but was so worried about how many male readers she had, she made the decision to make (as she described) a half-male half-female main character (essentially so she could have her cake and eat it too if you will-- all the self aggrandizing fantasies of a male protagonist her male readers could imagine themselves as along with a copious amount of fan service-- the great majority of which was at Ranma’s unwilling expense in his female body which like ://////// (remember that old man I mentioned before??)--  with the female protagonist body). And, like, I’m not saying Takahashi Rumiko is a terrible person or anything-- I don’t know what her beliefs are, I only know her works which are quite old at this point. Takahashi Rumiko is a big deal in the mangaka world because she was one of the first big shonen mangakas who was openly a woman. Normally, men wrote shounen (which literally translates to boys) manga and women wrote shoujo (which literally translates to girls) manga-- the genres were literally divided along gender lines in terms of their intended audiences but also, to a certain extent, their creators. If a woman wanted to write/draw shounen, usually she had to use a pen name that sounded fairly masculine in order to not impact the perception of her work. Takahashi Rumiko was working in that environment so I would understand why she’d want to be careful but, at the same time, I still kind of hate a lot of the things that she normalizes in her works. Especially assault. Both physical and sexual assault she constantly used as a punchline. Not as much anymore. Her most recent work I’ve read was Rinne and the punchline with that one was that the male lead is super poor, literally penniless, and is constantly starving so hahahahha humor amirite? Pain being funny seems to be her through line now that assault is off the table. At least he isn’t constantly getting whole ass tables thrown at him by his love interest as though that’s supposed to be a cute relationship dynamic (Akaneeeeeeeee). I digress. Takahashi Rumiko’s works played a big fucking role in my childhood from Ranma to Inuyasha to Lum (which I encountered well into my teens and therefore didn’t jive with at all because I’d finally learned sexual assault =/= funny and this was one of her more dated works) and so on and just--  I don’t know if I can watch her older stuff the same way I used to. I’m scared to try, honestly. Because some of the ideas behind her works are so interesting-- like Ranma 1/2-- but then you have to sit through episode after episode of a teenage boy in a girl’s body being sexually assaulted by a remorseless old man only to try to fight back at which point he is physically assaulted but also he still has to grovel to and respect said old man because he’s his father’s master and therefore he has to learn martial arts from him but the old man is constantly wagering Ranma having to pose for him in incredibly skimpy outfits if Ranma wants to learn literally anything and alsso RANMA IS FUCKING FIFTEEN/SIXTEEN JESUS CHRIST IS THERE NO FUNCTIONING ADULT ANYWHERE IN THE VVICINITY SAVE HIM!

I NEED TO DIGRESS

It feels like there’s an unintentional trans narrative buried in this anime. It’s not a fun one (but most trans narratives aren’t either so). This is a boy who knows he’s a boy-- even when his body disagrees. He frequently asserts that “he’s a boy” even when in his female body because he is. He’s a boy. He’ll reference being a girl “in appearance” like with the ice cream parfait scene earlier, but when it comes to identity statements, he’s always a boy. This narrative is about him navigating gender presentation and societal assumptions in order to live however he wants. He’s constantly contending with his own forms of gender dysphoria, whether that be his own gripes about doing anything unmanly (eating ice cream) or the very real threat of his mother fucking killing him if he does anything unmanly (aaaaaaaaaaaa), and he navigates tons of threats by choosing how he presents himself.

There are characters that are in love with the male “version” of Ranma and want to kill the female “version” of Ranma (who, for the record, goes by the name Ranko) and vice versa. The Kuno siblings are a great example. Kodachi is in love with Ranma (and is not above literally fucking using date rape drugs on him to get to him) and wants to fucking kill Ranko whereas Tatewaki Kuno, her brother, is in love with Ranko (the lovely pigtailed girl, he calls her) and has literally sent assassins after Ranma. Ranma essentially has to choose between being sexually assaulted or physically assaulted every time he runs into either of them in terms of what body he is presenting. 

I feel like I should let you know, ye who have actually read this far, that Ranma is able to protect himself pretty well from the assault. Like, our boy ain’t dead. Later on he literally fucking kills a god because he’s really passionate about martial arts so he puts all of himself into it and god damnit does his effort show but, honestly, his ability to protect himself shouldn’t mean that it is okay to assault him. Assault is assault. And just because he can fight back doesn’t mean he always does. Akane, his main love interest, regularly sends him through roofs and across town with the force of her Up + B (aka magically appearing hammer), usually for things that aren’t his fault in any way. Akane actually came to the conclusion that Ranma was a pervert when she (fully dressed) walked in on him (naked because he was in the bath) even though the bathroom was obviously occupied. She constantly gets mad at him for things that are beyond his control and then takes her frustrations out on him by literally beating him up and he never fights back-- which is admirable of him but also made me never want to root for their relationship because that isn’t a red flag, my dude, that’s a red planet. the whole of mars is out here trying to warn everyone that this relationship is the most toxic thing since RoundUp.) 

Usually, when watching a show, you get really invested in the character’s aspirations. You want them to ‘get the girl’, ‘get the promotion’, ‘become the pokemon master’ and whatnot. All I ever wanted for Ranma was for him to fake his own death and run far, far away from everyone who ever knew him as “Ranma”. He’d have to fake his own death, obviously, because otherwise his father and Happosai would track him down because, for his father, Ranma is a walking meal ticket and, for Happosai, Ranma is a teenage girl he can sexually assault at any time. Those two would chase Ranma to the ends of the earth if they thought he was trying to get away from them so--

Ranma. Help him.

There’s so much more to dissect with this show. It’s kind of accidentally a great way to look at gender presentation, especially all the terrible negatives that come with constrained gender roles. I use He/Him pronouns when talking about Ranma because it is abundantly clear that he sees himself as a man and I respect that. Sometimes nonbinary-me is like, but think what a gender-fluid icon our boy would be-- literally switching perceived genders via fluids-- and I think that version of Ranma would be a lot happier than the canon one but, I think the canon Ranma is an important reflection of what a lot of people go through, cisgender, transgender, and beyond, when trying to parse what it means to present a gender and the roles you’re supposed to play. 

Maybe Ranma can go on a journey of self-discovery with his own gender after faking his death and escaping Nermina. 

I was all over the place writing this but this isn’t an essay and I’m not being graded so ha fuck you (excpet no not really fuck you because you either a) read this whole thing or b)scrolled down to the bottom to see if i’d get to the fucking point already-- which for the record, I don’t really-- and either way it means you were a little curious what I had to say so thanks I guess). None of this is exceptionally well-thought-out. I wouldn’t exactly stamp this with any kind of official gender discourse seal. It’s all just food for thought. 

[amwritingmeta]

15x01: Belphegor, Spells and Symbology - Oh My!

So, my chickadees, we’re one TFW 2.0 member short. Yeah, such a bummer, right? The kid who’s so damnnn symbolic of change overall has bit the big one (courtesy of granddad) (like what?!) and is now in the big black Emptiness in the sky where all angels go when they bite it. (but what is the Empty symbolic of though?) (yessss indeed) (the unconscious where all self-liberation commences)

Okay, Jack be gone, but in his stead we now have this new kid on the block, yeah, and this new kid on the block is taking the place of the linchpin for Team Free Will’s push towards self-actualisation and it’s no wonder, then, that this new kid on the block is a speaker of truth! See what I’m getting at here?

Basically it’s just that Alexander Calvert - darling and dearling - is still playing a character pushing our boys towards Good Positive Change. Or so I believe. I mean, obviously we shall see, but the setup of Belphegor isn’t saying anything else. 

Oh, he can’t be trusted. Absolutely not. Night and day to Jack in that regard. Or, perhaps, I might go so far as to say that he’s Jack’s shadow manifested. *shrug* But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s Speaking Truths That No One Else Is Speaking. 

Man! Still not off the high from that episode, swear to God I would french Andrew Dabb in a heartbeat.

Okay, reeling it in.

So, three things -->

Thing the First: Truths

He calls Cas an abomination in that stupid, dumb trench coat. This goes to the very core of Cas’ internal struggle with his identity, so this calling out of it, threading back through Cas’ journey, feels weighty af. 

He speaks candidly of having worshipped a giant rock shaped like a penis as a human and is, unabashedly, checking out men and women alike (shouldn’t actually ascribe bisexual as his choice sexuality but he is clearly not straight), and then he subtly flirts with Dean, which skeeves Dean out since Jack was kinda his kid, so yeah, stop that immediately, Belphegor. (but hey if he jumps vessel then all bets are off) (just saying) 

*rubs hands together because oh my god I really want there to be textual flirtation that doesn’t go anywhere obviously because Belphegor is already picking up on the tension between two certain someones*

Belphegor also brings up Hell and Alastair and Dean breaking and torturing souls! Like what?!! The callbacks to end all callbacks. To the beginning of it ALL. Like, yeah, we’re in the final stretch here and Dabb is not kidding around.

And yes, Belphegor calls the moment Dean and Cas share at the end of the episode what it is, which is awkward, and then tries to prod Cas to talk about it. Albeit ironically (of course Cas won’t open up to him) he’s still doing it because he just doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him and this is precisely the sort of character these two need to poke and prod at their inability to fucking communicate openly.

Hot damn! 

But. We shall see what we get. :P

It’s interesting that he barely interacts with Sam. Sam is his own man this episode in very many ways and I very much like it. 

Thing the Second: Spells

Graveyard Dirt and Angel Blood

Naturally most of us, I’m sure, immediately thought of the “I’m always happy to bleed for the Winchesters” moment in S7. Here, Cas isn’t so happy. He’s suspicious, and rightly so, of this new player on the scene. Still, he complies.

Now, there are things to take from this scene that have to do with life vs death, mortality vs immortality or even Earth vs (or if you’d rather) combined with Heaven. 

Cas’ strong reaction to Belphegor defiling Jack and Belphegor predominantly having a personal interaction with Cas through calling out the trench coat (symbolic of duty/humanity and at this point that space Cas occupies between) puts the focus on them here. Add to that the need of angel blood and it’s even more heavily linked to Cas symbolically, right?

What exactly does the symbology mean? Honestly, beats me. It feels like a foreshadowing that won’t be clear to us until further down the line (hopefully), but it excites me to think that for a character who has battled for his entire progression with the question of where he belongs, we get a spell that literally combines dirt or earth with the blood of Heaven.

Does that mean that there’s a choice to be made - mortal man or immortal wavelength? - or does it mean that Cas is already a bit of both and just has to accept himself as he is and continue on wearing that stupid, dumb trench coat proudly, the same way he has for a good while now, eh? 

Well, that is the real question, isn’t it?

But then again, I’m a bit biased. :)

Mound of Salt and Human Heart

This one’s very interesting as it’s tied more directly to both Dean and Sam. Cas is a part of it too, as he’s with Sam when the spell is cast and they run for the safety of it together, but Sam is the one most affected by it, and I’m curious to see what effect it will have on Dean as well. 

Why?

Because what does salt mean on this show?

It means protection. The spell is, literally, a protection spell, right? A magic ring of salt a mile wide - no ghosts in and no ghosts out. For characters who have always been incredibly haunted by their past, though in subtext, the external hauntings are being salt-circled away from them, while the human heart of the spell could symbolise the brothers’ hearts actually entering a safe space as well.

Again, why?

Because of what Sam does the moment he passes the perimeters of the spell.

He turns around and he faces a fear that has been very pronounced on the show - his fear of clowns (or, as I’d argue, his fear of people wearing masks, not showing their true face) - and he tells that fear to shut up.

Mind. So. Blown.

What a moment for him! *goddamn fist-pumping the air for him*

The heart is at the centre here, and the heart symbology has always been extremely strong with Dean, but in 13x12 it was Sam’s heart on the line and now both of them are linked to the beating heart on that mound of salt linked to a sense of safety, of protection, of trust. The potential, peeps. The potential of a deeper exploration of what the want in their heart of hearts. Yeah? 

Not just in the coming few episodes within that mile wide magical ring of protective salt, because Lord knows how long that’ll last, but through the symbology of it. I mean, what a way to instil hope that this is what they’ll all be pushed to explore during the coming season. *fingers crossed*

Thing the Third: Motivation

Or possible motivation for Belphegor. 

Given his speech in the crypt about wanting Hell to stay as it always has, it’s intriguing that he’s an opposite mirror of Anael. She had a boring, repetitive job and she couldn’t wait to get out of Heaven. She chose to make a life for herself on Earth because she actually wanted to help people (if that statement sticks) (I’d love for her to come back this season and then all bets are off) while Belphegor wants to help the Winchesters restore Hell to its recent glories so that he can go back to punching that clock. And, you know, torturing souls.

Too simple?

Yeah, maybe. 

Of course he knows who the brothers are (love that there are newspapers in Hell) and this feels like a possible plant for him actually seeking them out specifically. Might not be, but it’s an interesting plant if so. Because of how Lucifer tried to make Nick resurrect him, for one, but also because of the Heaven/Hell dichotomy overall and who’s vying for what and who’s on the side of whom. *curious af*

Here we finally have a character who might have some personal stakes in driving a wedge between these men, and what better way to drive a wedge than to dredge out truths no one’s speaking, thinking it’ll break them apart when we know it’ll actually only serve to open their eyes to their own blindness and will end up making them stronger, individually and, through that, as a group.

*gah*

Could Belphegor not be Belphegor? 

Yeah, but I don’t see why he would be. 

I think he’s Belphegor the demon, but his stated motivations might just be a half-truth. Perhaps he’s even linked to Michael. darkest!Michael would be something tbh. After all, Michael was always, even if God held the ultimate reins, the shadow along the edges of the brothers’ fate. And after a few lifetimes in that cage, I do wonder exactly what might emerge. *goosebumps* 

That said, Michael is a pale representative for toxic masculinity when the Almighty himself has stepped into those shoes, so symbolically it might be more fitting that we get something entirely different. Time will tell!

[liquidstar]

You know, I talk A LOT about “heirship” as a theme with my OCs, but never fully broke it down. And…... I want to!!! Fuck it! No one asked, but I’m going to anyway. Maybe for my own indulgence, but hopefully this will interest at least a couple of people! Note: I’m gonna say “heirship” a lot, it’s gonna start sounding like a fake word, and honestly in this context it’s more of an abstract concept. Also this is going to be long so I’m sticking it under the cut.

First of all, what is heirship? In the story it boils down to becoming what you are expected to become or live up to, but it’s different for every person. The topic of being an heir is a neutral thing, it can be both a positive and toxic aspect of a characters life, but mostly the latter. Aspiring to be something or someone you look up to is not an inherently bad thing, and it’s a good motivator and pure cause. However there are ways in which that can be twisted, when heirship is forced onto you in one way or another. It becomes suffocating, toxic, and even abusive at times. When you’re forced (Sometimes by yourself) into a roll regardless of what you want (or think you want) heirship becomes a prison, and no one is really free from this. From being an heir. It’s the most prominent theme and motif in the story, and there’s a reason so many of the characters are literally heirs to thrones or companies. So I’m going to dive into what exactly each of my main characters are “heirs” to, but I do want to note that this affects EVERY character in the story, every single one of them in one way or another (Some more than others) so if you ever wanted to know about a specific one feel free to ask me!

Amary is the main character, so it’s obviously the most fitting for her to be THE heir, the heir to the entire kingdom, she’s it. Amary is a princess, she was designed to have the most frilly “princess” design I could give her without looking to snooty. Her literal heirship is in becoming a queen, that’s what a princess does! But her mother is dead, and she left behind a life for Amary to follow in the footsteps in, always wondering if this is what people would want out of her mother. On the other hand though, her “prison” of heirship is one defined by traditional femininity, one where she’s expected to be a perfect princess and a perfect puppet, submissive and quiet and always listening to what the king says. 

Rue is a bit hard to get into because a lot of her deal isn’t explicitly revealed to other characters until later on. She’s the mysterious goth type, what’re you gonna do? But I still can say that her mother is a big reason she is who she is, in a weird sort of reverse-heirship. One where she denounces everything and rebels, one where she wants to be NOTHING like what she’s supposed to be, so she becomes the exact opposite in a sense. And in trying so hard to be free of this concept, she re-traps herself in it through her own expectations. Her own fears become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because rather than being her true self she just became the opposite of what was expected. In a way… It ends up being the same thing.

Aloe is a good example of heirship, a healthy example. He idolizes his mother, he looks up to her and wants to be like her, and she encourages his goals and helps him no matter what they are. There’s really not all that much to say on that, it’s pretty cut and dry! But I wouldn’t say it’s PERFECT, because he still does struggle with placing a certain ideal of what he should be onto himself, which can sometimes make him feel like he’s not living up to what he should be. He’s got time though, he’ll be ok. 

Sorrel, on the other hand, is an example of extremely toxic and abusive heirship. One where he’s forced into a roll and has to abide by what he should be strictly, or he’s going to get in trouble, and trouble in this case is more than just a time-out. His father’s abuse of him and his siblings is to mold them into perfect wizards to carry on the family legacy, perfect heirs required to do whatever he says. This affected all four of them in different ways, but that’s another post for another time. 

Carnation’s sense of heirship is self-imposed, but still toxic. She has to be the perfect smart girl, because she’s always been, but also because she knows that’s what her mother could have been if she didn’t have her. Carnation has complicated feelings about her mother that I should also probably get into in another post. But the bottom line is she feels like she has to justify her own existence by being perfect, or she feels worthless. She doesn’t understand that at a surface level though, consciously she only knows she has to be smart and perfect because that’s what she should be. Never less than 100%.

Pine’s heirship is COMPLETELY self-imposed, not relent on any parental figure in the slightest, but still perpetuated by them. They’ve always been gifted and talented and an amazing inventor, they’re praised for being a technical wonder-child! So obviously this lead into “Gifted Child Syndrome” where by highschool they’ve completely shut down in almost all categories outside of inventing stuff. Their grades suffer, they don’t eat well, they BARELY get any sleep, all because they started to slip on what they were expected to be. 

Geran is the heir to the sea region, there’s the obvious literal heirship angle to him but that also feeds back into his metaphorical heirship, one where he’s expected to play out a certain role of masculinity and strength. His idea of strength is one directly tied to emotions, where he has to stay stoic, but that’s not really true to who he is, even in his design the water drops in his eyes are meant to look like tear drops. It’s just a roll he felt he had to take on, as an heir, he just has to be “strong”. Him and Amary were always intended to be inverses of each other in this way, even with a subplot where they’re supposed to be fake-engaged, as a literal performance. You know, like how they’re performing heterosexuality, all the time, always. It’s all fake, that’s not who they are, that’s not who he is. 

Fennel has a more unique type of heirship, one not related to a parent’s or his own expectations of himself, but a younger sibling. Fennel’s little brother looked up to him a lot, what little sibling doesn’t? He was his brother’s hero! Notice the past tense though? His brother died while they were still young, and it wasn’t even all that long ago for him. Fennel feels like he’s obligated to live up to that perception of himself through his little brothers eyes, it’s really why he wanted to be a wizard to support his family, of all things. Wizards are heroes after all.

Protea is another example of healthy heirship, and like Aloe’s, hers is a lot simpler. Her moms own a potion shop together, it’s a cute little shop where she grew up and even worked at as a kid (Not WORK work though, it was like chores), and Protea loves her moms a lot and wants to take over the shop one day. She was like their student, learned all the potion making she could from them! It’s fully her choice to do this, she always looked up at them as an example of a happy life, and she wants that too. The downside is waiting to get there though, sometimes that can be so hard. 

Daisy’s form of heirship goes beyond parental figures, she aims to be her village’s new wizard. But she not only has to live up to the old one, she needs to surpass him. The old village wizard was unable to protect them against a monster and died trying, the village needs someone stronger to protect them. Daisy wants to do this because she never wants anyone to ever live through a tragedy like that again. She also has an interesting arc when it comes to heirship, one about progressing from childhood to motherhood because of the symbolism associated with daisies. (I don’t mean literal motherhood, she’s still only 18 by the end and I don’t plan to tackle teen pregnancy with her, for clarification). In her village she was seen as the babysitter for all the children post-monster attack while everyone was rebuilding, even though she was still so young, it’s another reason she feels like village wizard is a position for her.

Gallica and Musk are twins, but Musk was the prodigy, he was the perfect boy when it comes to academics, he always got so much praise for being so successful and gifted. Meanwhile Gallica was lacking in those categories, though she excelled socially and creatively. Their parents always made sure to reward them both for the things they were good at, but they were also busy, and sometimes it would seem unbalanced. For Musk that meant he clung to his sister even harder, but for Gallica it meant envying her brother. Though she doesn’t recognize it at first, she sits on those feelings for a while. Musk feels a lot of pressure to fit into that heirship possession, but Gallica just wants to feel like she’s the favorite, she wants to be that heir without knowing what that really means. 

Maggie is similar to Gallica, she’s an heir to the forest region, but she isn’t the heir apparent. That title goes to her older sister, while Maggie is left as the second in line. In life she’s always compared to the “real” heir, always made out to be second best. She just can’t measure up, but instead of wishing for that position, she gave up. The pain of being “second best” never really went away for her, but she doesn’t want to be the heir, she just wants to be herself. That’s even represented in her design, the rest of her family is green (Like her mother, currently in charge of that region), but she’s yellow (Like her father, who chose his own path that just happened to be marrying into it).

Tam is a bit unique given that what they have to look up to is… dragons. However, it's actually a very healthy example of heirship, because her dragon family took them in when they were a baby, and treated them just like all the other dragons. In a since Tam is an heir to them because their dragon-mom was their leader, but that doesn’t mean they don’t doubt themselves. And it doesn’t mean they don’t sometimes feel like an outsider when it comes to humans AND dragons. But they can do it, they’re just as dragon as the rest of them and they all know it, no need to be nervous. 

Holly was a doll to her parents. When I say that I don’t mean she was sweet to them, I mean they treated her like a doll. It’s not that they didn’t love her, but they were important people that needed to make an important impression, that means using their kid for it. You know, dragging her to big parties, dressing her up all cute (whether she wants to dress that way or not) and forcing her to sit still and behave and act cute. This sort of lead into her needing attention from people to feel validation. Not to mention she’s also literally an heir to their company. But after everything, does she really want that job? Or does she just want approval? Probably the latter, but it’s okay because eventually she’ll be able to live for herself.

Hyacinth’s love for books and reading is because of bedtime stories their mom would read to them when they were little, and although you can say their mother is the source of this heirship, she isn’t the focus of it. No, what Hyacinth looks up to and wants to become is the classic adventurer storybook hero. That’s all they want to be, they want to be like someone from a book. Someone confident, strong, brave, and… Not at all like they are now. They don’t like themselves much. Mostly because they can’t live up to their own ideal, a fictional ideal made up in their own escapist world. This is represented in their magic too, transformation magic. They literally become other people. One day though, being themselves will make them happier than anything. 

Aster is last, I was gonna do just the main students but I felt like I should mention at least one adult, and she’s the main one after all! Aster was her adoptive father’s protege, he taught her everything she knows. She went down the same path he did, becoming a student, then a wizard, then a knight, and eventually a teacher and surrogate mother figure, but she chose it because she wanted to. She may have gone down the same path but she made it her own, and her dad is proud of her for it because he’s an incredibly doting moron. However Aster’s path was still influenced by Ambrosia, and vice versa.

ANYWAY I rush-wrote this all at 7AM with no sleep on impulse so... I’m sorry if there are typos and it’s not the best written but I just wanted to ramble about my own OCs so... :)

[pynkhues]

Honestly I think Turner is a very bit as problematic as dean. I have a theory that hes super obsessed with Beth because she outsmarted him initially and triggered some sort of inferiority complex. Specifically the scene when she blames him for not being able to keep Rio in custody after she "basically did all the work for him" I think that made him feel incompetent especially since hes never been able to even get close to catching Rio. After that it was like Turner is after Beth personally.

Oh, anon, you are speaking straight to my heart here. I totally agree. 

I’m actually really interested in Turner as a character at the moment, because he is growing more and more insidious as the series goes on. He seemed to be capable, but also a fairly benign antagonist in season one, but I think there’s been a really definitive shift in him this season and I think, like you said, a lot of that is tied to the fact of Beth having played him.

Like I’ve talked about a bit here before, male ego is a really huge throughline on this show, and Turner is more and more starting to occupy the space that Boomer did back in Season One and that Dean continues to do. All three of those characters have underestimated all of the girls, but in particular Beth, and all three have been forced to reckon with that at various points in the show - from Beth knocking Boomer out and kidnapping him in S1, to Turner realising Beth’s involvement in the crime world runs a lot deeper than just fucking someone in it, and Dean being forced out of Boland Motors. Interestingly though, each has spawned different story threads and themes - Beth was never Boomer’s focus, and besides, her actions didn’t really seem to change his opinion much of her - even up until the point of his death, and while Beth absolutely is Dean’s focus, I think he’s still very reluctant to see Beth for who she is now - he obviously still thinks that Rio’s manipulating her, or forcing her hand, and that there’s still the Stepford Wife version of Beth within her. 

Agent Turner is almost the polar opposite of Dean though - he now only sees the criminal in Beth, and I think both Dean and Turner’s reactions there are because they refuse to actually see her at all. They only see the versions of her that work for the stories they’re telling themselves they’re in - Dean, I honestly think, believes he’s in some sort of action/romance movie where he’ll win the girl at the end, and Agent Turner thinks he’s in some crime thriller where he’s on the hunt to put ‘bad guys’ away and Beth’s a femme fatale in an apron, and I actually think that’s why Beth’s going to be able to continue to evade both of them in her own way, because they genuinely don’t know or understand her, or even try to.

And it’s interesting too, because Dean and Turner are both bad people. Dean for obvious reasons lol, but Turner has a wife and kids back in Baltimore, yet is shacked up with his boyfriend. He’s basically stalking Beth at this point, and coercing and blackmailing Ruby, and that’s to say nothing of the way he’s treated Mary Pat. His behaviour is totally all ego, but more and more, it’s reflective of toxic masculinity too. He’s deceptive, manipulative, controlling and belittling to most people, but especially the women on this show. I mean, compare the way he treated Boomer to the way he’s treated Mary Pat? I think that’s really telling. 

[redorblue]

The Story of a New Name, by Elena Ferrante

I just finished reading The Story of a New Name, the second part of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, and I’m completely blown away by how good this book is. The first one, too, and I can’t wait to read the third and fourth part, but this one genuinely makes me want to bow down to Elena Ferrante and promise her my firstborn child. I’m not saying that it doesn’t have its lengths, but the amount of detail that she puts into the settings and the richness of the characters’ inner lives makes me want to read twenty more of its kind - it’s just that good. It even makes me want to freshen up my Italian because the difference between speaking standard Italian and the Neapolitan dialect is an important part of the book and would probably add a lot more depth, but... I can’t wait that long.

The first two installments of the tetralogy are mostly set in Naples in the 1950s and 1960s, in a poor neighborhood at the outskirts of the city. This is where Elena and Lila grow up: two girls with very similar backgrounds (working class fathers, stay-at-home mothers, miserable living conditions, a lot of domestic and street violence), but with very different personalities. Lila is a very extroverted person, direct to the point of rude or aggressive, courageous, impulsive, sometimes manipulative, very passionate, and gifted with a very creative and astute kind of intelligence. Elena is more of an introvert, a very diligent, responsible and disciplined person who tries to avoid conflict at all cost and has a good eye for unwritten social rules, with a rich emotional life but an aversion to sharing it with others. She’s also gifted intellectually, but rather as a result of hard work; she’s what you’d call booksmart as opposed to Lila’s intuitive intelligence that’s mostly focused exclusively on her rather volatile fields of interest.

In short, in many regards they’re each other’s opposite, which makes their friendship incredibly fascinating from the outside and alternately fortifying or toxic from the inside. When things are good, they ignite each others’ brains with ideas and they support each other no matter what; when they aren’t, Lila manipulates Elena into things that hurt her (or both of them really) and intentionally ignores her discomfort, while Elena distances herself, judges Lila and tries to assert her own superiority. The competitive streak that runs through their friendship at times inspires both of them to surpass themselves, but it also leads to them constantly trying to outdo each other - and let the other know. No matter how fraught their relationship gets though, they are always the most important person in the other’s life, both the anchor that stabilizes them as well as the benchmark that they measure themselves against. It’s a defining element of both the main characters’ lives, even as their paths drastically diverge: Elena, because of a combination of luck and hard work, gets the chance to continue her education after primary school and even goes to university, while Lila, who has the talent but lacks the luck, is not allowed to go to school any longer and is ultimately forced by circumstance to get married at 16 - which, considering her personality and the society she lives in, obviously does not go well. All in all, it’s a fascinating portrayal of a lifelong friendship under (at times) incredibly difficult circumstances that shapes both of them at their very core. It doesn’t romanticize or trivialize a bond like that, but shows it in all its ugliness and glory, and what’s more: it makes this friendship the central relationship of the book.

But the story is not only a brilliant examination of female friendship (and it is very distinctly female: both characters can never escape their roles as girls/young women in a heavily patriarchal society), it’s also a very observant analysis of the ways that class and gender intersect to shape and constrain the paths and personalities of Elena, Lila and their friends and neighbors. I’m tempted to add ethnicity to the mix, too; I’m not sure if ethnicity is the right term, but I can’t think of a better one, so I’ll stick with that. I’m not exactly knowledgeable about Italy’s demographic makeup, but if I remember it correctly, there is a quite distinct divide - culturally, economically, socially, linguistically... - between the North and the South, with the North as the economically stronger (and possibly less corrupt) part and therefore in a position to look down upon the South. This is an especially important aspect of Elena’s story in The Story of a New Name, when she goes to Pisa to study and feels forced to hide her Neapolitan background as much as possible. However, in the neighborhood where Elena and Lila grew up and where most of the first and second book takes place, ethnicity plays less of a role. Externally, within the framework of greater Naples, the main dividing line is class, expressed as income, way of speaking, access to education, clothing, and general display of wealth. The neighborhood itself, on first glance, is more homogeneous: even the local bigshots, who own a car, give out shady loans to the entire neighborhood and maintain ties to the mafia, aren’t particularly educated or refined in comparison with the Neapolitan upper classes. What they do have is money, and that’s one of the observations that I love about this book: money, no matter how much of it you amass, can never be the same as being born upper class; it can buy some privileges, but it can’t buy parity with the truly powerful. Within the limited domain of the neighborhood, however, money is one of the main mechanisms of stratification, the other being gender.

Toxic masculinity plays an important role in the story, and it shapes the lives of everyone in the neighborhood in different ways. We don’t meet many of the older men (= parent generation), but that’s a statement in and of itself: many of them are either dead, dying, or in prison. Those that are left are characterized by submissiveness and resignation to those with more power, and they channel their feeling of powerlessness and the resulting emasculation by beating and abusing their wives and children. The older women have lived too long under such circumstances: they do care about their children in some way, but the methods they use to make especially their daughters conform to patriarchal expectations and thereby protect them from male wrath end up doing just as much harm as the fists of the fathers. Female solidarity and close personal friendships such as that of Elena and Lila are rare because of the women’s feeling of disempowerment, trauma from a lifetime of violence and general economic hardship. And so the vicious circle repeats itself, with everyone caught up in it absolutely miserable, but unable to do anything about it, since class limits make it virtually impossible to get out.

This is equally true for the younger generation. The boys are taught from a young age to associate male behaviour with violence, aggression, a very prickly sense of honor, and a superiority over women that allows them to possessively watch over them and use violence against them to keep them in line. This holds true for rich and poor neighborhood boys alike, which proves that it is not an issue of class alone. The author further supports this argument by giving counter-examples like Alfonso, who in theory is just as predisposed to toxic masculinity as all the other boys: a violent father, (temporary) economic deprivation, violence in his peer group... What makes Alfonso different from most of the other boys is his personality on the one hand and his advanced education on the other. I think the author is saying that education is the key to overcome at least the worst outgrowths of violent male behavior. Of course education is contingent upon the class a person is born into, but with Alfonso, and partially Enzo (and Nino, too, much as I hate to admit it), she proves that neither class nor gender automatically make a man violent - and that neither one is an excuse for toxic masculinity. This claim is strengthened further by a counterexample, namely Bruno Soccavo, the son of a rich industrialist who leads a privileged life and still thinks it his right to sexually exploit the female workers at his factory.

But since the focus of the story is on Elena, Lila and their female friends and frenemies, this is where we get the most intimate insights into what toxic masculinity and economic deprivation/dependence together do to f**k up the lives of girls and young women. The girls mostly display a pretty thorough understanding of how things work: they know what they can and can’t tell the boys in order to avoid violence among the boys and towards the girls themselves. I’m pretty sure that even Lila knows how to avoid offend the boys’ sense of honor, but between her recklessness courage, her desire for freedom and her self-destructive streak, she just doesn’t care very much. But even this understanding, the result of a lifetime of studying the behavior of the men around them, does not help them very much because it doesn’t leave them enough room to put their feet down, let alone breathe. Lila is the best example of this: after being denied further education and blossoming into a beautiful teenager that attracts the attention of every male around her, including a rich mafioso, she really has no other option than to marry the (seemingly) most acceptable of her suitors at 16 years of age. But of course, he turns out to be violent and controlling, too, and since he’s more powerful than her brother and father, she really has nowhere to turn to. And as I mentioned already, neither the older women nor the girls have enough emotional or material capacities to meaningfully help each other. Some of them also simply don’t want to (the author doesn’t romanticize anything here, either), but I dare say that even that is a result of economic deprivation plus toxic masculinity: from a very young age they’re drilled to think of marriage as their only way to relative economic security, and their future husband’s affection as the only way to avoid being beaten or even killed. So it’s natural that female solidarity, as desirable as it’d be, is not very wide-spread in the neighborhood. Basically, what the book says about toxic masculinity and patriarchal systems is this: yes, it hurts both men and women, young and old, rich and poor; but in the end, it’s always the women, and especially the poor women, who end up with bruises on their face.

[mentalcurls]

7. Ho fatto un casino

It’s been almost a week but here I am, back with my thoughts on episode 7 of the 1st season of Skam Italia. I talk about being calm and cool and chill, about toxic masculinity and the parallelisms between Silvia and Eva. The results for the Bechdel test for this episode are at the end as usual. Enjoy!

the episode starts on the most lovely note: the girls, alone, having a conversation about about a really interesting, engaging and thought-provoking topic *drumroll* the Villa guys. Yay.

the silence of the girlsquad while Silvia talk about Formentera, the perplexed stares

Eleonora is holding back from commenting so hard! Her “What are you doing with that sandwich?” is a bit judge-y, sure, but not as judge-y as the instinctive “What are doing destroying that poor sandwich?” I would have gone for

that fake nonchalance from Silvia! She’s being low maintenance! She doesn’t need to talk, it’s cool that the guy she likes made out with another girl, it’s fine! She didn’t take it badly, “ti pare”?

IDK why but I love Ele looking back towards Eva to look for confirmation and support when Silvia seems not to know what she’s talking about

Silvia is cool as a cucumber and just casually piling on justification upon justification and diverting the conversation as far from Edoardo as possible

she’s so casual!!! She made out with someone while she was so drunk she can’t even remember who it was and it’s whatever!! Chill!!!

and to continue the streak of super casual, nonchalant people, here’s Eva asking about Federico, just out of innocent curiosity, you know

that thank you kiss (that goes on for nearly 20 seconds) is completely chill as well

Gio: promises Eva 2am crepes also Gio: actually only ever brings Eva coffee from a vending machine that he only got because the machine ate his money in the first place

Eva casually asking Gio where he is going with his friends, despite complaining a lot in previous episodes about said friends and the person Gio becomes when he’s with them: not out of character at all, Gio won’t notice anything! She’s suave!

cue Gio noticing, but being too kiss drunk and letting himself be convinced (and oh how the tables have turned! This is some mild gaslighting from Eva!)

super casual, super smooth public declarations of love

and then Federica, cool as anything, asking about Marti’s relationship status

this clip was titled “Il panico” and I love this title so much. I would have gone for something like “And everyone was chill” but this antiphrasis-cum-Silvia-quote is pretty good too 

going back a second, Marti’s face while Gio and Eva kiss! He’s awkward and avoiding looking at them exactly like the other girls, but there’s so much annoyance there too! We’ve already seen him break up at least one of their kisses (first clip with the “A zozzoni!”) and I bet he’d totally pull an Ammucchiate!Niccolò here if he thought he could get away with it

that pool is a really cool place, I really want Marti to take Nico there at some point cause it fits his aesthetic for romantic places perfectly

how smooth, how suave of Gio to lose control of his skateboard and end up falling on his ass in the mud 

Marti’s hair! It’s tremendous! Baby, cut it please, I’m begging you (AND I KNOW THIS IS AN UNPOPULAR OPINION OK but you can’t deny he needs a bit of order on that head)

M: “I see things are going better” E: “Yeah, [...] everything is fine” COOL AS CUCUMBERS, the both of them. The fake nonchalance. The facade of chill.

then Eva swallows, takes a deep breath and it all comes crashing down

Eva is 100% talking to Marti instead of one of the girls because they would obviously tell her off for listening to a dumb boy’s advice and she’s scared they would turn on her for “making” another boy cheat like it happened with Laura over Gio, when in reality the girls would/will take her side both with the Federico/Alice situation and the Giovanni situation; on the other hand, she is convinced from their previous conversation Marti is on her side, she’s looking for validation of what she did when she took his advice despite feeling stupid for taking it herself, but she also wants someone who will tell her off for cheating on Gio, who maybe will fight her about it cause it’ll be cathartic, so Marti is the obvious choice of confidant here

and Marti is taken aback: I don’t think he expected Eva to actually go to Laura, Laura to actually tell the truth and most of all to cause such an earthquake with a half-assed line about going to the source

is Marti that concerned about Federica that he really thinks of her first when Eva tells him about kissing “Fede” or is he that unaware of what Eva’s social life has looked in the past few months and of the hierarchy at school? Both, I suspect. He’s a disaster.

“Hai capito” he’s so shook! He doesn’t know how to react! His mind starts going a million miles an hour

and again! He’s Gio’s best friend, he’d put himself in front of a bullet for Gio, but he makes it sound like he’s siding with Eva, like he’s giving advice based on what’s best for her and Eva believes him without a second thought! I just can’t with these kids. She even thanks him!

the shots focused on Gio skateboarding down in the pool are from both Eva and Marti’s point of view not only in the sense that they come from their position, where they’re sitting close to one another, but because they both see him in the same way: boyfriend material

what’s Silvia doing wearing that ugly jacket?? I mean she looks great anyways, but it’s so ugly and plasticky and it doesn’t compliment her figure at all??

and oh, this poor baby. She’s been so brainwashed into believing a) that she needs a man; b) that her self-worth lies in the social status of the man she’ll get herself; c) that men treating women like shit is par for the course and a sign they actually like them, they’re just being manly she just. Doesn’t. Get. It. Her first thought when Eva asks about Federico is that she likes him, not that she likes gossip, or that she needs blackmail to get rid of the guy who we know and the girls know has been hitting on her, despite knowing she has a boyfriend (which would have been my first thought tbh). She thinks that Edo’s silence is jealousy and she’s absolutely devastated when she finds out about the lows teenage boys can get to when it comes to status, sex and proving their masculinity

Eva and Silvia’s clothes have similar colors in this clip, but inverted (pink shirt and blue jacket for Silvia, blue t-shirt and red-purple shirt over it for Eva) which I think is significant: everyone knows Silvia’s been with Edo because she’s advertised it to be more popular, while Eva’s doing her best to prevent her story of her kiss with Fede from coming out, so the colors are inverted; at the same time, they are part of the same color families because Silvia and Eva have both “been” with one of the Villa boys and therefore they’re both on that wall and in both their cases there’s a third guy involved (Gio and Rocco Martucci); Eleonora on the other hand is in black, neutral.

and Ele calls the wall “posto di merda” and I couldn’t agree more: it is a sanctuary of sexism and misogyny, a place specifically created to celebrate the guys’ sexuality, while demeaning and ridiculing girls for theirs, along of course with other, “lesser” boys who are not in their circle and don’t have as much sex (in the Villa guys’ perception) as them or don’t get girls as hot as theirs: it’s obviously the new frontier of a classic of toxic masculinity, comparing dick sizes, with a dash more misogyny thrown in for good measure, and it’s public in a way notches on the bedframe (another great toxic masculinity classic) aren’t, since those are a twisted way of demonstrating how good you are in bed to women along with how you’re a casanova not looking for anything serious, the wall is a self-congratulatory group activity for the elite, accessible to anyone in theory, but unknown to most people; the only thing I have to say that’s even just vaguely positive about the wall compared to the Penetrators sweatshirts in the OG is that it’s less about “possession” of the girls, who are still objectified, but are not marked in an outward way to indicate they “belong” to a specific group or a specific member of the group

EVA, GUARDAMI EVA: why the fuck would you call him? You already know he won’t take you seriously, he’s never taken you seriously while talking to you face to face, why would he be any better on the phone!

Eva just really doesn’t know how to lie. She’s shit at it, with anybody. The only secrets she manages to keep are those who only require her to omit the truth without having to make up excuses: the only lie we see her successfully tell is about spending Easter with Sara and Laura, while was with Gio, and even then she kind of betrays herself later when she tells her mom her and Laura haven’t been talking much since they were put in different classes

I’ve been disproved! She successfully pretends Fede is her mom on the phone right then. Whoops.

cue Federico disregarding Eva’s requests and instructions because he’s a self-centered, sexually objectifying ass as usual and calling her and making fun of her

I don’t have much to say about the conversation between Gio and Eva on the couch, except that Gio is obviously avoiding the words “drug” and “marijuana” because he wants to ignore the potential addiction he has shown he could develop, that conversation in which people disagree on something important but them man distracts the woman by being silly always make me uncomfortable cause I feel he thinks her thoughts are valid and that Eva  must be feeling so shit when Gio tells her he’s decided to tell her everything and never lie AND IT’S BECAUSE OF MARTI who told her not to communicate with Gio

fully siding with Eleonora on the wedges discourse

so much sarcasm in that conversation at Baretto

Sana’s first response to Silvia, who treated her like shit and was racist towards her, is to repay her in brutal honesty, and it’s honestly cruel sometimes, but genius cause what can Silvia do or answer?

“Sticazzi degli altri” and this moment is so important! Everything the girls have been trying to teach Silvia in the past few months about self worth, confidence, about not giving too much weight to other people’s opinions and about feminism coagulates in this single moment for Silvia: she couldn’t be low-maintenance enough for Edoardo to keep her? Fine, now she’s gonna be fucking high maintenance and loud and proud and hand him his ass. 

except it’s all facade, she’s still a scared, naive girl who’s a bit of a pushover inside, so when she actually confronts her monster she caves immediately when the interaction doesn’t play out as she envisioned, and in the end she comes out of it destroyed and with the idea that being confident, proud etc. is only harmful for her social status

Silvia can’t even get Edo to listen at her! Not until one of the other girls arrives and calls him out

that “Ciao!” is the epitome of the fake confidence Silvia’s portraying, she’s trying to be cool and suave and destroy him like Ele or Sana would (and will)

and what an haphazard, unthreatening group the girlsquad looks when compared to the Villa guys, all in black, far taller, forming a more compact front, arms on shoulders, exchanging looks behind Edo

“If you think you can reduce me to an X on a wall” that would be bad enough! But even worse, Silvia is not even an X, she’s not even on Edo’s radar enough for him to know her name, despite her giving him her first time!

Silvia is a cautionary tale for teaching girls about consent too, both because of how she handled the sex with Edo and making out with Martucci, and conversely because despite all the signals and implied messages from Edo telling her no, that he’s not interested in her, she still continues to go after him

and like, I said before that I got why Edoardo is doing this, but he’s such an ASSHOLE about it, I wanna punch him in the face so bad

he throws her off straight away, pretending he doesn’t know what she’s talking about (Silvia should have predicted that, really, as I said before, it’s an ELITE thing, not many people are supposed to know about it so why would Edo acknowledge that something exists, that he knows anything about it and that it’s a secret Silvia has been allowed into too?

then he interrupts her! And I don’t think I need to say anything more about manterrupting than what has already been said

Silvia is completely frozen. This is the man of her dreams. She had sex with him. Only a little over a week earlier. The entire world crashes down on her. He doesn’t seem to remember her at all.

and after confusing her, breaking her heart, disproving her theory, treating her like a child and humiliating her, Edo just has to dig a bit deeper still and mock her

re: Ele’s roast, I’m just gonna 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

the girls though: while Edo is talking to Silvia, Sana and Ele are simmering with barely contained rage, while Fede is as chided as Silvia is and Eva is worried about Silvia, but also about Federico, I bet she was checking what he was doing out of the corner of her eye for the whole conversation; then when Ele talks, and afterwards, while they leave, their bearing completely changes, they stand up straighter, their chins are high and they leave with nonchalance and an air of superiority

Giovanni complaining about not answering perfectly a particularly hard question he was asked in a test is such a classico mood though

Eva is so cute, being worried for Silvia and checking in on her

Alice has anger management issues obviously, but I stan Mr Boccia’s female colleague who is an impressive example of female solidarity and  teaching the right messages, even if her methods are not very conventional of pedagogically great; basically the whole PE department in this school is 💯

and then there’s the fight: Alice arrives with a group of friends, like a proper ambush; I love killer Sana with the dictionary, that poor girls on the other end of things will have some very nasty bruises; all the girls get in the fray, even Silvia and they form a shield behind which they hide Eva

Ele is super interesting to me here: she’s in proper boxer stance, like she knows how to fight, and she probably does, doesn’t she? What with being a beautiful girl in a big city in a sexist world and what with Filippo being her brother and gay and flamboyant and probably getting bullied when they were both younger. On top of this, as soon as Alice calls Eva “troia” she gets mad as a hornet ‘cause she just can’t stand people who use the derogatory terms that condemn women simply on the basis of how much sex they’ve had and stigmatize sex workers, especially when it’s women against other women (see also ep.1 with Laura calling Eva “puttana”)

and after that, much as she won’t believe it, Silvia’s moment with Edoardo is forgotten; more importantly, though, Alice and Federico’s fight during PE is forgotten, as is the fact that this situation is his fault since he cheated; no, the thing that lasts in people’s mind is the catfight between girls outside the school gate and how that redhead from 3B is a whore

Bechdel test: this episode doesn’t pass the Bechdel test. I’ve thought quite a bit about it, because there are technically two conversation that pass the test: one while the girls are at Baretto, in which they talk about Fede’s pink wedge shoes, but I decided not to count it just like I didn’t count the conversation on the windowsill about Margot in the last episode, cause it fades in and the topic changes after just a few seconds; the other immediately follows and it consists of Silvia telling the others she got 7 in Maths and that she found the ananas cake on a website: I decided not to count this one because it almost completely one-sided and Silvia starts talking about Edoardo the very next minute.

This post is part of my complete series of meta about Skam Italia season 1.  If you’d like to read more of my thoughts about the other episodes, you can find the mastepost linked in the top bar on my blog under SKAMIT: EVA. Cheers!

[dimples-of-discontent]

13x16 thoughts (from Paleyfest)

(I may need to go back and refine later but these are my post-Paleyfest notes on 13x16.)

I loved this episode!! It was a ton of fun. It was slapstick and silly but did some heavy lifting too. Honestly, it worked the way a lot of our favorite crack episodes did and alluded to at least one of them explicitly (”Changing Channels,” obvs, and I think there may have been more subtle references to others).

I’m too tired to do a full meta analysis but here’s a kind of bullet recap, first of the most plot-based elements:

The plot turns on the fact that the Scooby Doo world, suddenly, ends up functioning like the world Sam and Dean inhabit. The boys enter the cartoon assuming all usual cartoon rules would apply (and Dean’s ready to have a rollicking good time with them) only to discover that the first murder in the haunted house is real. Ghosts are real. Death is real. Sam wants to tell the Scooby gang about it from the get-go but Dean wants to protect them and preserve their innocence.

It’s already obviously about childhood, and losing it, but Dean makes it explicit by talking about how much he loved Scooby Doo because no matter where their dad had dragged them it would always be on. They were his friends and constant companions. He is really being thrown into the best part of his childhood….and you can see why it would be the best because it’s probably his fantasy and deepest wish that the ghosts, demons, etc. of the world he inhabits would turn out just to be bad guys in masks, death wouldn’t be real, etc. It’s Dean safe place in childhood because it takes his actual life (ghost hunting) and makes it safe and even fun. Dean wants to keep his safe place safe and is shocked and horrified when the rules of his universe invade.

It’s Sam who wants to tell them the truth about monsters from the word “go” even before it’s been revealed that death can come to Scooby Doo. (Dean laments, heartbreakingly, that it doesn’t matter if he dies…what’s important is that they make sure Scooby doesn’t die because clearly he’s such an innocent creature.) Sam, who did not have his childhood cut as abruptly short as Dean and who did not have to seek solace in a cartoon world because Dean helped him make a safe space in the real world, doesn’t see the point of lying about ghosts being real. Dean, who worked to keep Sam safe from this knowledge for YEARS of his own stunted childhood by acting as a parent, does want to keep the gang in the dark because he wants them to retain their innocence. It’s a huge lampshade to the different experiences Sam and Dean had as children and as sons.

They do eventually have to tell the Scooby gang and, wonderfully, it induces an existential crisis in them. Watching Daphne question the existence of God based on what she has inferred about the afterlife is amazing. It is not what I expected. Dean brings them back from the brink by reminding them of all the good work they had done before.

I’m going to tell the ending now and then double back to some other observations: the phantom they are chasing is the ghost of a small boy who is being manipulated, through a cursed object (a pocket knife given to him by his beloved father before he died), by an unscrupulous man (the real estate agent who we met in the beginning) who unleashes the boy’s anger on whoever he chooses for his own purpose…to scare people off of property he wants to buy. This way, the villain of a typical Scooby episode actually becomes the villain of this SPN episode…the evil real estate developer.

Before heading back to their world, where they burn the pocket knife and free the ghost, Dean convinces Sam and Cas to lie to the Scooby gang and tell them that they were right initially–ghosts aren’t real. He goes so far as to stage the unmasking of the cartoon villain (the one from the original Scooby episode) and helps them to explanations involving wires, cornstarch blood, etc. Sam is grumpy about it but does it anyway. It’s crucial to Dean that they leave the Scooby gang as they found them and not saddle them with the world the Winchesters live in.

Let me just reiterate…the ghost that has been terrorizing them is frightened little boy. Who kept a pocket knife (much like the one we see being used to carve the Winchester’s initials into the Impala) as a token of his dead father. His father is symbolized and memorialized by a weapon. The weapon is the object the little boy is tied to and that another man–a bad man–can use to manipulate him into hurting others because “I just get so angry sometimes.” To be free, the knife (weapon, father’s legacy) has to be burned. There are closeups on a very sad Dean while this happens (some sad Sam and Cas too).

It is blindingly obvious that the little boy, who is wreaking havoc on the cartoon safe space of his childhood, represents Dean. To stop the destruction Dean has to let something go (he starts the episode referencing Elsa and EXPLICITLY SAYING THIS LINE I CAN’T EVEN). Something that is keeping him angry. Something that is tied to his father. Something that can be used to manipulate him, employed as a weapon to hurt other innocent people (Mark of Cain/Demon Dean plot lines). Dean is full of anger and of self-loathing and it’s coming from the same source. That source is toxic masculinity. Let it go, Dean. Let it go.

Is it also tied to issues of sexuality? I think so. I’ll reflect a little bit below, but I wanted to do the whole plot-based analysis first.

And now the less plot-based stuff:

Ok, so can the ghost represent repressed sexuality/a different form of masculinity? SO MUCH YES. Point one: Cas is the only one who stops to take a look at the ghost and is thisclose to seeing through it’s big ol’scary disguise and finding a vulnerable child. He stops and squints at it, Cas-style, and says “I’ve never seen a ghost wear such a ridiculous costume. Unless…” and then he reaches out to it, starting to push aside the veil only to be pulled away. Now if that isn’t metaphorically precisely what Cas did, and does, for Dean and his performing facade I will buy a hat so that I can eat it.

Point two, there is a scene where the ghost is chasing everyone through a series of doors on either side of a hallway (you know the scene…they run across the hallway, doors open and shut on either side, feet flying everywhere). They successfully shut the ghost in a closet with iron chains, though it’s close to breaking out. Daphne presses her body up against the door to hold it. Dean checks her out very obviously in a way that is both superfluous to and inconsistent with the plot. This means that the silhouette of a conventionally sexy woman is QUITE LITERALLY holding the closet door closed on the ghost. Metaphorically, it shows how Dean is able to use his attraction to conventionally sexy women to hold back what’s haunting him…attraction to men, ideas about a certain type of masculinity. Does it work? BIG FAT NO. The ghost breaks out anyway. (<Puts on professor cap> Have you guys read “The Beast in the Closet”? It’s by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and is about “intense male homosocial desire as at once the most compulsory and the most prohibited of social bonds.” It’s about Henry James’s work but I think you would all dig it. <Takes off professor cap.>)

I wanted to start with that because I can tell that people are going to be very upset about Dean’s excessive flirtation with/pursuit of Daphne. And, yeah, I almost injured my eyes by rolling them so hard at some of the things he says. BUT THAT’S THE POINT. What he’s saying is a child’s idea of how a grown man would act with a woman he likes. And it bears a great deal of similarity to how Dean does act sometimes. We call it performing!Dean and wonder to what extent Dean is conscious of his performing. Given this episode I’d say..maybe .not that conscious? I feel like the overstated heterosexual dudebroness was done specifically to give us an over-exaggerated literal cartoon version of heterosexual Dean to compare to regular Dean so that anyone who doesn’t know Dean performs in his own life will have a lens through which to see it.

Also, Daphne is his childhood crush. OF COURSE he’s going to act like a moron around her. If I encountered [insert childhood TV crush here…for me it was Kevin from “The Wonder Years” for whatever reason] I’d act dumb as fuck! But you have to remember that she represents innocence for him…it’s established that all the Scoobies do (heh - puns!). Even if he’s kissing her hand or putting an arm around her or whatever there is no danger there, just like there’s no danger in the ghosts. Sexuality to Dean isn’t scary in Scooby Doo because it’s simple: it’s just a girl he likes. Except, just like how the ghosts are also dangerous, the love plot isn’t going to be that simple or that straightforward (heh - straight). You see where I’m going. Dean would rather be in a universe ghosts weren’t real because it’s safer and easier and kind of a fantasy land but they ARE real and he will have to deal with them; Dean would also rather be in a world where he was a suave, irresistible ladies’ man because it’s safer and easier and a kind of fantasy….but he’s not. Jensen even said so in his interview. Granted, Jensen’s comment may have just meant that Dean’s not suave like he thinks. But the actual episode draws a parallel that’s pretty damn clear.

Another reason to not worry: Daphne is zero interest in Dean at all. She has negative interest in Dean. Her lack of interest in Dean has created a void that is sucking all the air out of the room. She may not even know that Dean is hitting on her. She is so focused on Fred that no one else exists for her as a romantic interest. They are so obviously a pair, even though they are never shown to be together as a couple explicitly.<Stares directly into the camera like I’m on The Office.> Can Dean not see that? Is he blind? Well, he does see it, but he thinks Daphne is “settling” for Fred who represents a kind of masculinity that makes him uncomfortable (more in a sec). In point of fact, no one is romantically interested in Dean in this episode…unlike Sam who gets a lot of appreciation (and an eventual kiss) from Velma.

As for Fred, Dean begins by really hating him (so much that Sam remarks on it) and when pressed about why he attributes it to Fred’s self-confidence despite things like his “stupid ascot.” Dean comes to like and admire Fred and, ultimately, have the confidence to wear an ascot himself BECAUSE HE LIKES IT. It didn’t make Fred less of a man. It doesn’t make Dean less of a man to wear it with his plaid shirt. Fred helps Dean along the way to some self-acceptance. It’s nice. Fred is there to serve as a contrast to Dean’s overblown notions of what is “masculine” and offer another form of masculinity that is, manifestly, still appealing to the ladies.

Now, remember the Scooby Doo universe doesn’t have sex in it. It’s a cartoon. And they bend those rules only the tiniest bit here. All of Dean’s advances and even his jokes are PG. That innocence on the part of the Scoobies is played for laughs, Daphne remarking that Dean is silly for not knowing that “boys and girls don’t sleep in the same room” for example, but it’s also integral to the plot. (There are some other jokes too and, for a glorious second, I thought that they were legitimately going to reveal that Daphne and Velma were a thing but sadly not.) No one would want to ruin the Scooby universe by telling them about sex…not even Dean. Again, it contains a child’s conception of relationships.

I’m imagining some people will also be upset about how the episode treats Cas. I was especially stung that, right at the outset, Dean says flat-out that “Cas is basically a talking dog.” I made a noise of indignation that made people look at me. BUT let’s also remember how much Dean loves that talking dog. He’d die for him. He wants to protect him at any cost. He doesn’t want to spoil his innocence. So, yeah, that’s not a nice thing to say but it’s also not the whole story. Cas is grouped with Scooby and Shaggy the whole time and he bonds with them, SMILING (ALERT ALERT CARTOON CASTIEL KNOWS HOW TO SMILE) AND LAUGHING when he has to leave. He thanks them for showing him the importance of humor even in dangerous times. I think it’s a good lesson for Cas and his real affection for them reminds me of what a soft character he is inside, wanting to get a cat or save monkeys or keep bees. That’s been missing from Cas lately (even though I do LOVE bamf!Cas) so maybe this will help him recall it.

I want to say again that Cas is the one who can see through the ghost and its “ridiculous costume.”

Interestingly, both his entrances (his first appearance after Fred and Dean take off to drag race; when he reunites with the boys in the haunted house) frame him as a scary villain. The first is from behind and you just see the coat billowing out (though this did remind me of the girl running the drag race in “Grease” which…lol); the second he’s silhouetted in a window, approaching it in the rain, and is then covered with a sheet before he’s “unmasked” by Dean and discovered to be a friend. This is…pretty much Castiel’s character progression always. Looks like a threat but is discovered not to be.

Once they get back to their regular world Dean makes a remark about how that was the most fun he’s ever had “including that time with the Cartwright twins.” Cas studies him and asks “What did you do with the Cartwright twins?”. There’s a long beat in which Dean looks shifty and grins and shakes his head and turns away. Sam says “I don’t think I want to know.” Cas says nothing. Cas does want to know. This is new and part of a general progression that @amwritingmeta wrote a great analysis of where Cas is becoming able to think something like Forget that sacred oath…I must know what Dean did with those twins.

There was probably more, you guys, but it’s super late for my poor body clock. Please feel free to pass this on to anyone you think would like it but bear in mind that a) there are MASSIVE SPOILERS, b) this is just my interpretation of the episode, and c) I only saw it live once so my details may be wrong.

I thought this as a fantastic episode the more I think about it and I’m SO EXCITED to hear your thoughts!! <3

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

15x01: an allegory for Dean’s psyche. Part 2: the town

In this post I offer a possible analysis of the graveyard scene as an allegory regarding Dean. Now I’m going to use the same lens to analyze the other part of the episode, the one set in the town, Harlan, Kansas. This is intended as a possible interpretation and a non-exhaustive one, that does not exclude multiple readings (I won’t discuss here in depth the subtext regarding Sam or Cas except where it meets Dean’s).

The first we see of the town is two girls, playing around with makeup and toy jewelry. They comment on one of the girls’ mother buying her a lot of stuff because she feels guilty after the divorce--“divorce is awesome”. Of course the connection we are supposed to make is Dean and Cas, the couple going through a breakup after Jack’s incident.

The girls are playing at femininity--and they die. They’re killed by Bloody Mary, a ghost that was tied to the idea of guilt. It’s likely that the girls in this episode did not carry the guilt of getting someone killed, but Chuck’s tantrum gave a “boost” to the ghosts. It’s still significant that one of the ghosts evoked by the episode is one so closely connected to guilt... and she kills two characters specifically portrayed in the act of dressing up with symbols of femininity, while a song about needing the boyfriend of your dreams is playing in the background... it’s almost like we’re supposed to make a connection between femininity and guilt.

Meanwhile, on the road, the woman in white has targeted a man in a car. We know nothing about the guy, but what we’re supposed to focus on is the song playing inside the car, a song about being in love (which also says “if you ever depart from me / I’ll live in misery”, more reference to separation/divorce). Metaphorically, if Bloody Mary punishes femininity, the woman in white punishes love. If Bloody Mary represent guilt in a more general sense (she punished people who carried the guilt of getting someone killed), Constance Welsh represented a more specific kind of guilt: she destroyed her children in revenge for her husband’s betrayal, and punished men guilty of the same kind of betrayal, unable to get to rest because of her actions towards her children. In the pilot she represented both John and Mary, guilty in different ways of destroying the lives of their children and spouse; now Dean was placed in the position to kill his child and himself in revenge, but refused to do so, although that still caused the child to be killed by a different, more “traditional” father figure. But Constance also represented Dean, unable to “go home” because of trauma.

And then the third ghost, the serial killer clown John Wayne Gacy. He targets a family: it seems that the husband, and possibly other children, have been killed, while the wife and one child are trying to escape. It seems to be a pattern: femininity, love, family/domesticity are being targeted by the Chuck-revived ghosts.

The mother runs with her child into the garage, but the power goes out and the buttons won’t open the door. The manual handle breaks, trapping them inside (and she is unable to get help from outside, the noise doesn’t reach the passer-by). We are seeing another closed door, after the doors to the crypt that they bar to protect themselves from the zombies but also trap them inside to starve unless they find a proactive solution to the problem outside. We have a series of doors: the (visually reminisced in the crypt scene) fridge door that trapped Michael in Dean’s mind last season, that trapped a threat inside, but was an unsustainable solution and eventually failed; the crypt door, that trapped a threat outside but was an unsustainable solution because they couldn’t survive inside; and now a door that traps the victims inside together with the threat. (Also, Bloody Mary appears between the girl and the door as she begins to head for the door, preventing her escape.)

The girls punished by the embodiment of guilt for performing femininity are a Dean mirror, the car driver playing love songs punished by the embodiment of the inability to deal with trauma due to family tragedies is a Dean mirror, and the terrified mother trying to carry a child out a monster-infested house and trying to reassure the child despite her own dear is a Dean mirror.

Cars are also heavily featured in two of the three attacks: the woman in white targets a person in a car, and the mother and child hide in a garage, and the ghosts circles the car, expecting them to be hidden inside. In fact, he first checks the garage window, then the car windows. We could say that one element connects the three: glass, either mirrors or windows (which also function as mirrors). Bloody Mary appears in the phone screen and the mirror inside the girl’s room, we see a flashback of the woman in white appearing in the rearwiew mirror, and the clown serial killer is reflected on the car windows. Just in case it wasn’t clear we were talking about mirrors... Sam and Cas are also mirrored in the episode, of course, but I’ll keep this post about Dean.

Well, maybe not, because here the mirrors merge. Cas investigates the Bloody Mary house, Sam the John Wayne Gacy house. If the girls are a mirror for femininity punished by the Big Father Figure through the embodiment of guilt, that works for both Dean and Cas. (Femininity obviously is to be intended in a very loose manner, as what femininity represents in the language of the show, which can be roughly summed as the opposite of toxic masculinity and cycles of abuse and control, with all that represents.) Both Dean and Cas have always struggled with their respective father figures and what they represented for their lives, finding an identity outside of that and the guilt that comes from that.

Sam and Dean are mirrored by the child and mother (the visual of the mother carrying the child in her arms to escape a house is reminiscent of Dean carrying Sam out of the house when Mary died), trying to escape the supernatural threat that is going after them and trapping them in their literal house (the Winchester family dynamics?). The serial killer clown is simultaneously God and Michael and Lucifer and everything else (yes, the Lucifer connection is clearer as clown imagery has been used in this sense before, but I think in this case the clown also represents the way the supernatural in general has trapped them, and we know that Lucifer and Michael and all have just been pawns in Chuck’s hands anyway). Not a coincidence, Sam tries to save himself and Dean the child and mother from the supernatural threat, but can’t do it on his own, and Cas intervenes to help.

Meanwhile Dean has been hanging with the representation of queerness in our allegory. Belphegor now needs ingredients for a new spell, this time salt and a human heart. Salt is obviously a symbol for the hunting life; I wonder if the heart is supposed to represent the opposite of it, connection where the hunting life (in John Winchester’s “old” model, of course, not the recent developments) is lonely, emotionality where the hunting life needs you to harden and close off to emotions, love where the hunting life means losing your loved ones. I wonder whether the spell represents the combination of the two: hunting life and love, hunting life and connections, being a hunter and allowing yourself to open yourself to others. A “human heart” is also what Castiel has essentially been accused of having by the other angels...

Now Dean gets associated to the woman in white, but I’ve already talked about the significance of this association. Something else that has grabbed by attention is how Bloody Mary attacks the little girl and her mother from a pond, from water, which is still a reflective surface but definitely something that deviates from the norm. The visual of the child standing above the water is reminiscent of the boy Lucas in the episode Dead In The Water; and I know I’ve been saying that the girl in this episode represents Sam while the mother represents Dean, but now the parallel seems to widen to include Dean too--after all, Dean is both mother and child, terrified parental figure trying to do their best to keep their child safe and little child muted by trauma (again reminiscent of Lucas). The embodiment of guilt tries to grab them and pull them under water... which makes me think about the entire Michael arc last season, which was about Michael, i.e. his trauma, drowning him (first with possession that Dean describes as drowning, then the hallucination loop where Dean is in this enclosed space while water pours outside, then the box-in-the-ocean conundrum).

Belphegor traps the ghosts. The ghosts are still there, the effects of the abuse and manipulation from God and the angels and John and everyone else is still there, but confined. Of course this isn’t a permanent solution, they’ll need to get rid of their trauma and the effects of their abuse definitively, and we’ll see how that goes...

[reading-musing-writing]

Hello!

Allistic sister of an autistic brother who is about 20 here. I've grown up with a hearty percentage of my social circle having autism andI'm hella sick of seeing them horribly represented in my media.

Some things about my brother:

-Fully verbal since he was about six. Speaks pretty well, a lot of people love to say "Oh I didn't even know he was autistic!", which like, is NOT a compliment btw. Rude to do to anyone who's not neurotypical.

- Also stims a lot. Loves to run around the house and twitch his hands. He doesn't do this randomly, he does it when he's thinking of stories. Most stimming is tied to something else, whether a calming behavior or another habit, same as people with ADD or anxiety do.

- Not good at math, but AWESOME at writing and reading. And I got an English Degree with a concentration in Creative writing. He's good, not as good as me obviously *hair flip*, but only because of lack of experience.

- Emotional as hell. He cried during That Scene in Titanic. He cries more than I do tbh, but we also tried not to instill that toxic masculinity in him.

- Also! He's kinda low empathy, but he is one of the few men who has known what to do when he's seen me cry to comfort me. I know a lot of allistic men not capable of the same affection he is.

- He's pretty anti-social outside our family circle, and he has the ADD attention span so those are a few kinda stereotypical traits.

- He has troubles with language acquisition.

- Has understood and used sarcasm appropriately since he was about seven. In my family you learn or you don't communicate.

- Scary good with a shotgun and a very in depth knowledge of weapons, but is a complete pacifist who would probably cry before hitting you. But thay's what big sisters are for.

- He's had both advanced and remedial classes in the same year. He's not a savant (and I swear if I see that trope one more time im going to the writer and personally egging their house), but he's a pretty smart kid.

- He's noise sensitive but absolutely loves heavy metal.

- He does get easily frustrated and overwhelmed which leads to him yelling normally. Like, gotten up and yelled at the teacher during class. (But he's been working on that and gotten better at controlling outbursts, so he's like changed and matured in his life like any other human being)

- Had the five prettiest girls in his grade come to his eighth grade birthday and they were all aparently good friends of his but he never told anyone in the family about??? We were all very surprised tbh

Autism is a SPECTRUM. Yes, we have the savants and the non-verbal folks, but there is a whole lot more. We have a cousin who is non verbal, but still fully capable, although he needs help and supervision when he goes out. My roomate was finishing up her Bachelor's in Engineering while we lived together (which remember girls tend to show symptoms differently than boys and are suuuuper under diagnosed), and she went out on the town more often than I did. She was super social, super dedicated to her studies, and hella smart.

In reference for the things to avoid list, you can use that as like a list of prejudices that autistic people have to go through. My brother is the youngest boy of the family on top of being on the spectrum. My parents literally had to scream at my grandparents because they were coddling him to the point where they were actively undoing his progress from therapy. People are always surprised by how smart he is, and that's just insulting. People with autism (and in my family it was worse because we're Cubans which means they take helicopter parenting to the next level) are often coddled by family memebers, and that's another issue they face. A lot of them are either ignored or given a LOT of attention.

If anyone has any questions for me about my experiences with my autistic friends and family from an allistic perspective feel free to ask! If you have questions about what it's like being on the spectrum I can pass them on to my brother if you're looking for multiple perspectives! But you should talk to multiple people on different points of the spectrum to do proper research.

Hope this helps!

Now go give my brother some good representation damnit!

writing an autistic character when you are not autistic - a masterpost

completely double spaced version on google docs here – this post is more blocky for the sake of people’s dashboards, but still long so people will be less likely to glaze over it. my apologies if that makes it hard to read

things to look for and avoid in an autistic character

• symptoms only manifesting as “nonverbal and rocking” • super smart / living calculator • super dumb / doesn’t understand anything • all the symptoms you can come up with for them are “awkward” and “has special interest(s)” (please do more research) • trains, technology, and/or math as special interests • acting like a child • getting treated like a baby • unreasonably cruel and uncaring about others’ reactions to them being cruel • if they’re comparable to sheldon from the big bang theory, start over • animal comparisons • a lack of feelings • please no stories about what it’s like to be autistic told by allistics

the right way to write an autistic person

• lots of symptoms, including secondary ones not included on a general diagnosis requirement list (here’s a list i rather like that was made by an autistic person – their blog is also a good resource) • having a good amount of general knowledge and actually talking about it (i cannot believe that i have to say this) • talking about things outside of special interests (again…. come on……….) (special interests are usually the default things our brains go to when theres no stimulation or we want to entertain ourselves – it isn’t literally all we think or talk about ever. if a conversation has no connections to a special interest, reconsider having your autistic character bring it up in a context that is not an introduction.) • explicitly expressed to be capable of attraction and romantic feelings – if your character is an adult, add sexual feelings to this point • capable of general functioning, just with a disability that makes it more difficult – not a walking disability (….sigh) • a wide amount of feelings and emotional turmoil (but perhaps only being able to express it in limited ways) • we’re people • just people whose brains are wired differently

things to avoid in research for an autistic character

• autism moms / autism blogs and websites not run by autistic people • any affiliation with autism $peaks means you should walk away and never look back • a scientist trying to create explanations for what autistic people do without actually asking / not mentioning asking autistic people • anything about a cure for autism • a person that “worked with autistic kids” phrased in the same way as “worked with animals” • talking about autistic people as if they are mysteries, are like animals, or are otherwise othered weirdos instead of people

things to look for in research for an autistic character

• actual autistic people talking about their experiences and symptoms • just stick to that and you’re good but it’s hard to find sometimes ngl. just look for the above red flags

things i would personally like to see in an autistic character

• less easy to swallow sadness and more destructive anger. i would love to see a canonically autistic character who was frustrated easily by small things and had trouble communicating why • not a story about being autistic, a story that happens to have a character or characters who are autistic – it isn’t pointed out or questioned, they’re right at home with the rest of the cast and not othered (a la symmetra from overwatch) • intensive sensory issues / small sounds making large reactions • clear communications about not liking x sensory thing (for example being touched) • poor motor skills / clumsiness and not being laughed at for it • walking funny (body bent downwards, walking very fast, walking slowly, big strides, shuffling, stiffness, etc)  – no one treats it as if it’s funny or something totally strange • a big personality that has a presence so they can’t be cast aside (but feel free to have quiet characters too) – if this was along with being nonverbal they would probably leap to being one of my favorite characters ever • a fear of asking for clarification on sarcasm or jokes because of past experiences and an arc about the character becoming more comfortable asking questions

>> if any fellow autistic people want to add something, feel free <<

allistics are encouraged to rb this

[starstuffandalotofcoffee]

Defenders Write-up

It was a super busy week so here’s my write-up at last.

Overall: good! I like these characters a lot (Iron Fist excepted) and even when I’ve been frustrated with the plot (DD S2, the back half of Luke Cage) I’ve wanted more - my frustration has been “why can’t this awesome character get better writing and more of a story” and not “why can’t this end sooner.”

Pacing was still definitely a problem; if you have 8 episodes taking the better part of 3 to get together is kind of a drag. Setting it over a very short timeline was a good idea but it took too long to start and then the last two episodes could have used more time to breathe.

So...overall, let’s talk good, bad, and meh. Spoilers, obviously.

Good:

Nice job reintroducing us to the characters, especially Jessica and Luke who we last saw over a year ago. I’m hoping this also means we’ll get more crossover in their shows. I know it’s probably a mess for scheduling but the fact is one of the fundamental great things about comics universes is that heroes pop in and out of each other’s lives all the time and if you aren’t using that you should have stuck with standalone. Even an ADR-ed phone call or two would be fine. But: I feel this did a good job with bringing in the side characters and later setting up some known comics team-ups (Misty and Colleen specifically).

The villains. Moving away from random ninjas to the actual five players was a nice parallel for the team-up of the Defenders, and, frankly, one of the few things Iron First did right with Bakuto. I wish we’d had more time with The Hand (I really would have liked them to have either added another episode or maybe cut down the first two episodes for a flashback episode into their life over the years) but Alexandra was awesome and Madam Gao DEFINITELY survived, right?

The boardroom was the only fight that had that ‘hallway scene’/Crispus Attucks vibe (Jessica Jones was never about fight choreography, and Iron Fist wasn’t, you know, good) but it was a lot of fun and having it in a bright corporate setting instead of a dingy building was pretty great.

The character chemistry was better than I’d thought. Jessica is great with everyone, and somehow Luke and Danny worked which is weird since Iron Fist was pretty universally criticized, and Mike Coulter caught a little flak as Luke for being somewhat overly stoic (I felt it worked personally and Luke Cage’s issues were more the backstory arc). Matt and Luke are wary of each other in a way that makes sense (namely, Matt lied his ass off about both Elektra and Stick and then proceeded to sort of take charge; also as the only anonymous one he’s asking for some special treatment; Luke is in many ways a better leader for the group but isn’t as invested in a broad sense of justice but rather helping individuals).

Dialogue was also surprisingly good - the shows themselves were again uneven, with some great stuff and some cheesy stuff (highlights: basically all of Jessica Jones, DD season 1′s Nelson v. Murdock and Foggy and Matt in general, every damn word out of Mahershala Ali’s mouth in Luke Cage; lowlights: some of Luke and Reva’s stuff, a lot of DD season 2 especially with the Stick and Elektra stuff which is weird because Matt and Elektra work pretty well together but their dialogue is terrible, a lot of Iron Fist). Everything between Alexandra and basically anyone was pure fucking gold, but really almost all the conversations worked. Standouts include Luke’s contempt for Danny’s privilege and anything Misty or Jessica said.

The whole plot coming together initially was pretty great if it hadn’t taken 3 FUCKING EPISODES OUT OF AN 8 EPISODE SERIES.

The hooks for the next seasons of the show are all pretty strong, even for Danny for whom I don’t particularly want an s2 at all. In particular, as someone who read Waid’s run on Daredevil I’m excited; Luke seems to actually have his life reasonably together and I want him to win this time (that’s the other thing - Daredevil and Jessica got to win against the enemy in their season 1s and Luke went to jail, which is probably accurate social commentary but I just want him to get a win against Mariah); Jessica is still a mess but slowly making progress (also: more Malcolm please).

Bad

Pacing oh my god why is this so hard

The fact that the next show in this world is Punisher which I do not want. I mean, he was good in season 2 of Daredevil but I like that this world’s heroes are refreshingly devoid of that particular sort of toxic masculinity. All are genuinely interested in community service, even Danny the thundering dumbass.

That’s really the only thing that was egregiously bad honestly.

Meh

(lots of meh)

The death scene led to a great reveal but speaking for myself...I didn’t buy it. It’s comics.

There wasn’t enough time for side characters other than Misty, Claire, and Colleen, who to be fair are basically the best side characters (also, Stick, who I always found really annoying but was supposed to be). I get that there wouldn’t be, but Trish and Malcolm are some of my favorite characters, we didn’t even get to see other Luke Cage minor characters like Bobby Fish though he got a shout out, Hogarth was minimally involved despite having direct ties to two characters and indirect ties to a third, and while Karen I’m sure will show up in The Punisher I do want to see more of Foggy.

I still don’t entirely get what the fuck a Black Sky is which seems like a problem. I mean...just a good fighter, right? Also why other than drama reasons would Murakami refer to a Black Sky as such and not the translation of the words in Japanese? See, this is why we needed a Hand flashback.

I’ve given up my fight on overhead trains at this point since a. the 125th street 1 train is in Harlem near the water so I could see Luke ending up there; b. Jessica goes all over in her investigations so maybe she’s not in Manhattan, and c. Chinatown is near the bridges. However, the scene in which the heroes were on the subway was 100% on the PATH train to Jersey, and as I mentioned, Season 1 of fucking Mr. Robot, a tiny show no one knew about at the time and which I still need to catch up on, managed to film on a real-ass subway so I don’t know what the problem was here.

I also feel like we never got a great feel of the cosmic Hand vs. Chaste battle, since Iron Fist wasn’t very good nor was the Hand part of S2 Daredevil. Kind of a bad place to drop the ball, kids. However, as mentioned, the villains were sufficiently well-played to carry it and I’m pretty glad the Hand is no longer the threat since the local fights were way more interesting anyway.

[amwritingmeta]

14x14: Dean and Cas and Questioning the Status Quo

Note: I found this in drafts and I believe I chopped it into smaller pieces, but I thought I’d post the whole long thing because it actually ties back to the lack of communication currently happening in S15 and the need to shake up the status quo. By, you know, someone actually speaking words. And the other, you know, actually listening. :) 

Let’s take a closer look at this, because it warrants a closer look, or so I’d like to argue: these two idiots are (and Sam too but Dean and Cas more prominently so in this ep) locked in a status quo that is informed by Dean’s inability to stop believing that what he wants is something he can’t have.

Know what I mean?

Now, I think the dance around this fact in 14x14 is quite elegant, way I see it, and though what exactly the gorgon represents is up for interpretation, the simple facts are:

Noah the gorgon in and of himself is a snake symbol, and per the ouroboros of the title, the snake symbolism in 14x14 might be leaning towards renewal, rebirth and a conjoining of opposites rather than, you know, the snake that brought knowledge to mankind and helped us rebel........ Yeah, kinda good either way you look at it, no?

Noah also Biblically brought the flood, which is a mighty symbol of rebirth, so he’s this double-edged sword where both edges spell renewal

Noah looks at you, assesses you and sees the truth of you, established with the truck driver, his note to Dean and with Jack - a bit of a narrative tie to Michael in 14x01, who blasted onto the scene reading the truth of people’s motivations left and right, and subtle foreshadowing of how Michael will shed Dean and go looking for a new skin *shudder’

Noah enjoys both men and women (yes indeed bisexual symbol and nope I am not the first to point this out of course)

That’s the basic makeup of Noah’s demi-god character, yeah?

Now a bit of a look at the interaction we have in the episode between Dean and Cas. (I have a very strong urge to refer to them as nothing but the two idiots for the rest of this post but) (I shall not)

1. Invisible Cas (and Jack)

It’s rather striking. The first image we get of Sam and Dean breaking through that door together, and alone, only for a mirror moment to come barely a minute later of them doing the exact same thing, only now Cas (and yes, Jack) is stepping through the door with them. *goosebumps all over*

What does it mean? Could mean a host of things. To me? 

Well, Noah can’t see angels. Right? Fair enough, he can’t see either Cas or Jack so it’s not like Cas is special here, not really, but what does Noah represent? I talked briefly in an ask about whether he’s representative of toxic masculinity and how I don’t think he is. 

He’s submitting to his fate, isn’t he? He’d rather not, but for survival’s sake, he doesn’t really have a choice. He’s performing ritualistic killings because that’s what’s expected of him. He’s not taking any real pleasure from it. Not very toxic, especially when compared to Michael the Dick Archangel, who breaks his promise to Rowena and slaughters the innocent’s of the bunker without mercy.

I would say Noah is more likely to be representative of suppression/repression, predominantly suppression in Dean, because oh, man, is Dean tying himself in very knowing knots this episode, and predominantly repression in Cas and Jack, which is why it makes enormous sense to me that he cannot see them.

You see, where Dean is completely aware of his emotions and is actively and consciously suppressing them - which is so fucking unhealthy - Cas and Jack are both shown, throughout the episode, to be unaware of how deeply their unconscious repression runs. I’ll talk about Jack in a separate post, but oh god. It’s lovely.

Sidenote

Suppression is a psychological term for when we consciously push down unwanted thoughts or urges. Used healthily this is where self-control lies, but when an unwanted emotion or urge is ignored out of fear, this suppression tactic can turn into a pattern of behaviour that may lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms (like drinking, casual sex, violent outbursts, addiction to danger etc) *side eye Dean Winchester* and irrational behaviour and lack of self-control due to lack of self-awareness.

Repression is a psychological term for when we push down unwanted thoughts, urges or very often memories into our unconscious, where our conscious mind is protected from having to deal with these particulars, because our conscious mind is kept wholly unaware that these particulars are a part of us. However, these repressed thoughts, urges or memories will push to be recognised, because anything we try to simply forget, that is deeply affecting, will never stay forgotten, and being unable to confront these buried thoughts, urges or memories may result in unhealthy outlets, such as the coping mechanisms and irrational behaviour mentioned above.

(long af)

2. Almost Liturgical

This scene is so incredibly wonderful for setting up Dean and Cas’ attitudes for the rest of the episode. Cas is observant and supportive and quietly brazen in making Dean be honest with him, and Dean can’t resist opening up, not when Cas asks him to. Prompts him to, even.

There’s so much softness from Dean here, and I’d say Cas sees it, and still doesn’t see it at all. Dean’s been looking at him with heart eyes for so long without it meaning that anything between them is developing or, I don’t know, renewing, that Cas just takes that softness and those heart eyes at face value.

There are subtle shifts throughout this scene between them, but the biggest one, to my mind, comes once Jack is back at the table and tells them he’s fine, because Dean then tries to swipe his opening up to Cas, as well as the severity of his reminding Cas of Plan B, aside by being flippant and adding this smile:

Which basically gets him a stern look from Cas -->

--> because no, Dean, Cas isn’t fine with everyone being fine. You can’t just make him be fine with Plan B, because Plan B is anything but fine.

And Dean looks contrite enough -->

--> and, I would say, realising exactly how open he just left himself to Cas’ scrutiny. Feeling exposed and vulnerable and a little raw and this isn’t helped by Cas putting himself in a position of having the upper hand by using a word that’s not in Dean’s vocabulary, because whenever Cas gets the upper hand it serves to remind Dean of? 

Yes, that Cas isn’t his to make heart eyes at.

Because? 

He believes, to his core, that what he wants, he can’t have.

I’d like to shake him. And shake him hard. Because even when Cas, over and over, through his actions and reactions, tell Dean exactly what he’s feeling, Dean still doesn’t see.

And so he goes from the soft expression and full on openness with Cas...

...to that ^^^ detached and Got Work To Do expression.

*shake shake bloody shake*

Now, of course, the fact that he’s being open and making heart eyes and feeling all sorts of things that are scary as all fuck to him and always have been - the scariest thing of all is love, right? - makes him go to great and unnecessary lengths to cover those feelings up to anyone who might be watching him.

And to suppress them to himself.

Stop wanting, essentially. Letting that hope flare that Cas could love him back only leads to pain and pain and pain, because in his low self-worth idled brain, his thoughts are stuck running along the same lines that they’ve always been running along, saying the same thing they’ve always said: why would an angel rescue him from hell? 

Which translates to: why would he ever deserve Cas’ love? 

In his head, he doesn’t deserve good things. 

And he’s perpetuating this conviction out of fear, rooted in losing his family at four years old, a loss that has cemented the belief of how Good Things Don’t Last, and this cementation has occurred in Dean out of sheer ego self-preservation, and Michael now is the ultimate proof of that. Michael in his head. Because Dean said yes. So -->

3. Overcompensation

This is Dean’s default reaction to Cas being in an obviously superior position, no matter how small that superiority might be. In 14x14 it’s something as simple as Cas having a deeper vocabulary and Dean being in the sudden situation where this is revealed to Jack, who couldn’t give less of a fuck, but since Dean just spent five minutes laying his soul bare to Cas, this moment is like a slap back to reality for Dean.

And what does he do?

He does what he always does. He tries to put himself in the superior position, because, truthfully, he knows he never really can be superior to Cas, because, um, angel. Yeah. Can’t really bypass that fact.

This ^^^ is all about Dean desperately trying to cover, trying to act like Cas knowing things beyond what Dean knows makes him, somehow, inferior. 

Look, Dean’s habit of pulling Cas down to Earth is never malicious in intent, but all to do with Dean’s insecurities and, in many scenarios, also directly linked to his falling in love and not believing, ever, for a second, that Cas the angel - as an angel - could or would or should love him back. 

The angle in 14x14, where he makes light of Cas’ superior vocabulary by putting him in with the brainy kids in AV Club - and look at how it sets up for Dean with his next breath trying to impress with his knowledge of Medusa, that turns out to be based in a movie that’s exaggerated the myth for entertainment purposes, which leaves very little of his knowledge to feel as impressive as Cas’ observations regarding the gorgon - the AV Club reference aids in Dean’s suppression of his emotions.

All the while this utter verbal denial of what it is that he truly loves about Cas serves to underline to us how he really feels deep down, and knows he feels deep down, which is why he’s scrambling to cover it up, terrified the truth is written all over his face, the way it is whenever he looks softly, softly at Cas and dares to open himself up to everything Cas means to him.

So instead, in dialogue, he goes:

-- Oh, look at the baby in the trench coat. Not so powerful now. -- Oh, look at the weird, dorky little guy. He’s not a commander. -- Oh, look at the nerdy dude who knows words. He is so not my type.

Yeah, okay, sure, Jan.

Meanwhile, Cas is like The fuck? -->

*darling Cas*

Now, when it comes to not seeing, we are presented with a baddie who eats the eyes of his victim to glimpse the future. Obviously he doesn’t snack on anyone’s eyes out of TFW 2.0, but he does carry a bit of the whole other side to him, where he can read people’s fate, with him in how he interacts with them, doesn’t he? It’s like he reads Jack’s palm, once he has him in front of him. And Dean and Cas?

Well, not the first one to point out that they’re both flat on their backs on the floor by the end of their encounter with the flood. 

I mean, their encounter with Noah. 

Who is actually the saviour away from the flood. Almost like their interaction with him constitutes the way out of drowning, for both of them. Funny that. But I’m skipping ahead.

First -->

4. Regards, Noah

Dean,

I see you standing alone by the truck stop reading this. I see you and the tall man and the red headed witch chasing me. I will always see you. Stop, or I will make you stop.

Regards, Noah

I’ll get back to this.

5. He’s a Lover, Not a Fighter

So, we arrive at the confrontation, which opens with the statement Noah makes of how he’s a lover, not a fighter. Interesting, isn’t it? Because this is truly the core trait of the entire TFW 2.0 --> innately they are not killers, they are protectors; they are not weapons, they are shields.

In the confrontation scene we also get a previously invisible and now not at all invisible Cas focusing on giving the antidote to the victim, while Jack keeps Noah distracted by listening to the fable. 

Cas is mildly on guard about the whole thing and finally comes right out and questions Noah’s motives for telling the story to Jack. When Noah gives voice to what could be read as Cas’ own worries concerning Jack burning off his soul, Cas attacks, because he doesn’t want to even think about the implications of what Noah is seeing, or unable to properly make out, in Jack -->

--> in this context, Noah as a manifestation of Cas’ suppressed fears about Jack’s choices.

Cas being in denial of how serious Jack’s situation is, is given to us in the El Saboros, because we see Jack alone healing himself, burning off his soul, and returning to the table with a ready lie of how he’s fine. Cas might not be convinced, but he’s also unaware of how Jack is still coughing up blood, and if he wasn’t suppressing his constant worry, arguably writing it off as him being overprotective, he’d most likely take actual action in order to stop Jack from walking down the dangerous path he’s stubbornly treading. 

(rather than the righteous path) (*clears throat*)

Back with the confrontation, where Noah very easily disarms Cas (demi-god that Noah is and all), slaps Cas twice, once across each cheek, and then kisses one of those cheeks, effectively paralysing Cas with gorgon poison. 

Cas goes rigid and falls to the floor, unable to move, but the antidote doesn’t work on Cas.

Why does the poison have the same effect on him as on a human, but the antidote doesn’t? Why does it take Jack sacrificing a piece of his humanity in order to tap into his angelic powers for Cas to be released from the poison?

Mh-hmh, let’s look at Dean before we try and answer, shall we?

Dean bursts in and Noah very easily disarms him (Noah can fight y’all) and knocks Dean’s head once, twice against the wall, rendering Dean unconscious.

Let’s glance back for a moment at how we got to here:

Throughout S13 Dean was confronted with toxic masculinity representatives leading right into him saying yes to having the most outstanding toxic masculinity representative literally possess him by the end of the season. S13 was all about making Dean aware of how toxic the ideal he’s modelled himself after for so long truly is, and he did begin to move away from it, this in order to be equipped to recognise Michael’s true colours, once he had to grant them absolute access.

S14 has been very much about confronting the past and all those suppressed/repressed fears and hangups being pushed to the surface. This while TFW 2.0 have all been asked - in not so many words - to find the answer to the question of What Do I Want? 

Dean’s reply to this question in 14x12 is so far from what the narrative is continuously angling for it to be, that only two episodes later that answer is not only nullified, but brings on a possible narrative punishment, because odds are that Jack, through self-sacrifice, is opening himself up to a world of hurt, and if Dean’s answer to the question of What Do I Want? had been different, if he’d reached that point in his individuation process where he could be honest with himself, then the outcome would have been different too.

But he hasn’t reached that point, and so the outcome is what we’re given in 14x14. So, what’s Dean’s answer to the question What Do I Want?

Plan B.

You see, Dean doesn’t believe that they’ll find another way to beat Michael, not really. Dean is humouring the people he loves, but he’s expecting them to be the ones to do all the emotional work and let him go, rather than him doing the necessary emotional work and confronting his fears, collected in the manifestation of his shadow-self: Michael.

Dean’s answer to the question What Do I Want? is to symbolically put himself into the box of societal norms that has dictated his relationship with his shadow-self for his entire life, and drown his ego, his consciousness, with the cycle of unhealthy suppression/repression that the darker side to his shadow-self is responsible for maintaining. (Dean’s suppressed longing for more, for a long and happy life; and his repressed childhood neglect)

Why? Because his fears run so deep that he doesn’t know how to confront them without annihilating his identity. To get to his true identity, though, he must confront these fears and understand the truth: that his fears are nothing but a construct, and that he can choose for them to no longer hold any merit.

6. Shake Shake Shake

Now, diving back into 14x14, where Dean and Cas are both flat on their back thanks to Noah.

So, let’s pull on the symbolical threads I set up at the start of this post. Threads that are very much tied to the Jungian doctrine of individuation, which I first wrote about here and have been reading up on since. (seriously it makes for deeply satisfying study) (Carl Jung was a great man)

Cas

When it comes to his worry for Jack, Cas deals in suppression, but when it comes to answering the question What Do I Want? Cas deals wholly in repression. He is not being honest with himself, and it’s given to us in his exchange later on with Jack, where he talks about humans as burning bright, unlike "things like us”. 

Yes, an unspecified thing is what he identifies himself with. 

He doesn’t identify himself as an angel, which, to my mind, is important, but for him to also step as far away as he can from humanity is equally pertinent because, well, this meta writer does believe that he needs to admit to himself what it is he truly wants for himself before he’ll be able to properly begin the final leg of his journey towards internal balance. 

Noah’s note underlines how he sees Dean, but Noah couldn’t see Cas, and to me this is all because Noah is much more narratively tied to Dean, while serving - as representative of suppression/repression - to narratively highlight these habits in all of TFW 2.0, but there’s another layer to it, where Noah is tied to Cas’ repressed true identity, meaning Cas is blind to his own repression.

(and Jack is blind to his own internal conflict, given to us in dialogue when he yells at Michael - childishly - that he’s not a child) (because Jack still is a kid)

Looking at the setup of Noah not being able to see Cas and Jack, it could be argued that he can’t see them, that he’s cut off from them, because they’re unaware of him, and so he’s unaware of them.

Awareness is key to confrontation. So, to me, it’s delicious that it’s Cas and Jack who grow aware of Noah and go to confront him, allowing him to see them, because it’s the ego’s awareness that allows for any internal imbalance to be confronted and worked through.

Moreover, Cas’ continued unawareness - his inability to recognise what it is he’s actually doing - of his own repression is what is keeping Cas complacent.

It’s keeping Cas accepting the status quo.

It’s keeping Cas paralysed in his own skin.

See what I’m getting at? Cas’ confrontation with Noah is brief, very, very brief, and Cas is disarmed very, very quickly and receives the kiss that paralyses him after being slapped, like a proverbial wakeup call, on either cheek, by the representative of his repression.

And, look it, when it comes to the question of why the antidote doesn’t work on him: if Cas had been human, it would’ve.

But Cas - being an angel - needs Jack to help him, needs Jack to burn off a piece of his soul in order to get the poison out, needs Jack to unlock his limbs and get him out of the paralysis. 

Jack, who in 14x08, was shown to be such an incredibly important tool for Cas’ individuation, since Jack is the one who symbolically (and literally) woke him, making Cas aware of his shadow-self.

And where Dean is unable to face his shadow-self due to his low self-worth making him fear what it will mean for his ego, aka his self-view and understanding of who he is if he were to confront his deepest fears, Cas’ low self-worth is equally exposed through his acceptance of the shadow-self’s threat to come and take him in his happiest moment. Cas doesn’t believe he deserves more, so for his happiest moment to be a point of punishment makes perfect sense to him, and this makes it incredibly difficult for him to break out of his complacency.

Better the status quo than the Empty.

Better a useful thing than daring to consider what would actually make him happy by truthfully answering the questions of Who am I? and Who do I want to be? and going for it.

*shake shake bloody shake*

The poisonous kiss from his repression, and Cas’ inability to get himself out of a state of paralysis without Jack’s help, doesn’t necessarily set up for what’s to come, but to me it does underline what is: as an angel Cas is stuck in a place where, as a human, he wouldn’t need help getting out of.

And this place that he’s stuck in takes a toll on the one person he’s tried, for seasons now, to protect - Jack - and this moment is entirely reflective of - and of course helps set up for - Jack’s choice to step into this exact same position for Dean, when he kills Michael. 

Dean

Oh, Dean.

Old patterns are a bitch. 

Actually, old patterns are turning into his greatest enemy, which gets me all kinds of squeakily excited for him. The lessons he’s been set out to learn for many, many moons now, are, at this point, hitting him so hard over the head they’re knocking him out against a wall.

Dean was fighting his toxic masculinity in S13. Growing aware of the ideal and moving away from it so that he can see Toxic Masculinity Michael for what he truly is, but because of patterns that have informed Dean’s sense of identity ever since he was a child, modelling himself on John and his mode of Feelings are Weaknesses that Will Get You and Your Brother Killed, Dean can’t bring himself to believe that there’s a way out of this confrontation with his shadow-self without killing the ego. Meaning without killing his conscious idea of himself. And because of the fear this brings of losing his sense of self completely, his incapable of believing there’s a way of beating Michael.

Even when Dean is sitting in front of the key to his own faith in the future, and yes, indeed the key to Dean’s faith in the future has always been Cas, and Cas is basically telling Dean that there’s no way Cas is ever giving up on him, and that they’ll find another way, Dean still can’t submit to his own need to believe, because his love of Cas is tethered to just as much fear as anything else, and confronting that fear, his fear of love and having hope for the future and believing that Cas does or could love him back, brings on just as much of an identity crisis as the thought of confronting his shadow-self.

And it’s all connected, of course. Because Dean’s internal fears don’t exist in a vacuum. But if he dared lean on his love for Cas and the faith and trust it’s always brought him, then he’d find the strength to confront his shadow-self and question all the lies it keeps filling his head with when it comes to perpetuating his low self-worth. Likewise, if he dared push past his identity crisis and begin to question the lies of his shadow-self that keeps his self-worth low, he would begin to feel the faith and trust Cas instils in him, and he’d start to believe in the love that Cas is continuously showing him.

But Dean can’t.

Dean is stuck in the belief that lingering in the status quo, and keeping to what he knows, is preferable, because there’s this huge thing in the way for Dean to be able to do anything else.

And holy fuck it’s formidable how this is now set up. (if I’m right in this reading)

The huge thing in the way for Dean to dare open himself up to his true identity is his inability to let go of old patterns, and 14x14 makes it explicit to me that this inability is rooted entirely in his neglected inner child. 

So what truly needs nurturing and attention and for Dean to grow aware of exactly how much he’s been neglecting it, is Dean’s inner child. An inner child that he’s been ignoring through his repression of his yearning for love. This yearning has been present in him since childhood and he’s repressed it by adopting the adage that feelings are weaknesses, and adopting this very harsh take on love in order to protect himself from a father incapable of providing the affection every child needs to feel truly safe and protected.

Moreover, Dean has been putting up walls to keep out the memory of the horror of his mother’s death and the guilt that’s haunted him and the mistrust it’s produced in him of anything good ever truly lasting for very long, and this, all this, is why he, in 14x14, teases Cas and tries to cover up how he’s really feeling and it gets him his head smashed into a wall by the representative of all of the above fears collected into his lifelong habit of suppression and repression of his true identity.

Noah sees Dean.

Noah will always see Dean.

And the narrative punishes Dean’s inability to break old patterns by having those old patterns knock him out cold, because clearly something needs to happen to shake up the status quo. 

Because the representative of Dean’s neglected inner child is...?

Jack.

And so Dean’s inability to do the shadow work needed, or to fully trust in those he loves, brings about the necessity for the representative of his inner child to step up to the plate and take matters into hand by expelling the manifestation of Dean’s shadow-self, while taking part of it into itself.

Yeah, I know right?

To my mind, Jack swallowing Michael’s grace is set to lead to not very good things.

Well, ultimately it will, I believe, but, oh, there may be quite a bit of glorious turbulence ahead. Or, at least, a huge push for Dean to face his internal imbalance and find a way to start all the emotional work needed if he’s to take full responsibility and stop running.

7. Off With Their Heads

This image is so powerful, because it serves so many possible purposes and can be interpreted in so many different ways, but here’s what I see:

A foreshadowing of the snake in Dean’s head (Michael) shedding his skin

An underlining for what Michael shedding Dean truly stands for: the first step toward internal rebirth/renewal for Dean

A plant for Jack picking up Felix and claiming him for a pet, which is deeply symbolic when looking at what Jack represents in the narrative, and what Jack himself needs for his own progression

But first, we get Sam also thrown across the room, very, very easily, by Noah the suppression/repression representative, because of course, Sam’s got his own shit to work through. Like his inability to take a moment for himself. His codependent behaviour runs so deep that he has no idea who he is unless he has people to look out for. And, good Lord, all the people under his protection getting killed by Michael after Sam insisted they bring Dean back. The internal conflict must be tearing Sam apart. *hands clutched to mouth* It’s not your fault, Sam!!

Once Sam hits the floor without getting knocked out (feels possibly significant here because Sam leading the way in letting go of the dependency and pushing himself into adulthood feels so important for Dean to finally allow himself to do the same) (but we shall see about that) we get Jack cutting off Noah’s head.

And looking at the fact of how Jack is the one to place his hands on either side of Rowena’s head, driving Michael out of her, you might say he cuts the head off both snakes in this narrative, right?

But, as I wrote here, he also swallows one of those snakes down, taking its essence into himself, while keeping a little piece of Noah in a glass box in his room, and so it can be said that he, symbolically, is tied to both symbols (suppression/repression/shadow-self) and is the last snake standing.

So. Turbulence.

Because Jack is no snake.

Jack has felt like a powerful symbol of internal balance for all of TFW and so for this symbol to now be in such absolute imbalance is quite possibly heralding Jack’s own dark arc, which could prove a necessary push out of the status quo that Dean and Cas and Sam are all in. 

Something to shake shake bloody shake them awake already.

Please. And thank you. :)

8. Access Denied

Cas has tried, on more than one occasion on the ride back to the bunker, to heal Dean, but he can’t. He can’t even see what’s going on inside Dean’s head.

*slow eyebrow raise*

Dean’s repression knocks him out -->

leading to Dean’s shadow-self no longer staying suppressed

leading to Dean’s inner child confronting the shadow-self with a declaration of how its not a child

Dean’s inner child swallowing the essence of Dean’s shadow-self down and declaring that it’s now itself again, restored to its former glory through taking into itself the toxic masculinity representative that’s the source of Dean’s repressed longing for love and his neglecting of his inner child in the first place

Oof.

Cas suddenly has no access to Dean because Dean’s repression runs too deep, and faith can’t reach where it’s not welcome, where it’s constantly shut down and mistrusted, and neither can love.

Especially not a faith or a love that doesn’t actually believe it belongs there.

The fucking status quo acting like the barrier it’s always been between these men, the barrier sitting like an enormous obstacle in front of open communication and honesty with each other, but foremost with themselves.

*so frustratingly amazing*