#also please let me know if there's more trans characters in comics or books i haven't read

[autisticburnham]

Several people I follow are having discussions about how, despite marketing themselves on diversity and inclusion, Dropout has woefully little representation of trans women in their shows. And while I of course agree that they should platform more trans women given what their whole vibe seems to be, I don't watch Dropout, so I don't have a dog in that fight.

But it got me thinking about the thing that I do love that markets itself on diversity and inclusion and has started including way more trans rep in recent years, and how few trans women Star Trek has. (And before you come at me with "Dax!" Or "That one tng episode!" Or "Lal!" Or any other classic Trek example, or even Seven of Nine getting deadnamed, while I do love all of that, that's not what I'm talking about. It's great and has its place, but I am talking about explicitly transgender characters, not metaphors or characters where their gender works differently as a function of their species. And, if in a medium where actors are involved, played by trans actors.)

And the only trans woman I can think of with Trek is Roz, Chapel's girlfriend from the pride comic book who is such a small character she doesn't even have a page on Memory Beta. And that's so sad. We have got to get more trans women in Star Trek.

And because people are wilfully misinterpreting the Dropout discussions, to be clear, I am not saying I have a problem with the trans characters we do have. I love all of the nonbinary substantial characters we have and Gray. (Though it also sucks that Gray is the only trans guy we have, we need more of them too.) I am just saying we need more trans women in addition to those characters

[thankskenpenders]

I saw some talk on twitter about there being a trans character in the Lara-Su Chronicles, but didn't see this mentioned in your post, so is this really true or just a rumour? I'm trans and just like to see more trans characters in ANYTHING

Believe me when I say you do not want trans rep from Penders lmao. Please love yourself

Anyway: Ken loves to pat himself on the back on Twitter for planning to put Representation in his stories, but it's really just an ego thing for him. It makes him feel important and progressive. None of it is actually present on the page in TLSC: Beginnings despite his many declarations of how progressive these books will be.

For example, he made a big deal out of the fact that Espio's daughter Salma is autistic now and how big of a deal that is for autistic Sonic fans everywhere, but she's not actually in either of the stories here. She is on the endpaper illustration if you want to look at her godawful new design, though!

He's also spent years making a big deal out of the fact that Rotor/"The Emissary" and Cobar were supposed to be a gay couple in M25YL and how that really broke new ground for comics etc. etc., but in this book all that really results in is a single panel of the Emissary holding Cobar and going "Goddess, don't let him die on me."

And, yes, Ken did, in fact, announce on Twitter some time ago that he plans on including a trans character in The Lara-Su Chronicles. It's apparently even a character we've already met, though whether this means he's retconning a returning Archie Sonic character to be trans or it's one of the new characters is still up in the air. It's presumably an echidna based on Ken's statements about how in the new universe "Echyd'nya" society is so totally progressive and they're "not hung up on gender identity the way humans are" and transitioning is "as common as the air 1 breathes," even going as far as implying that they can spontaneously change sex like amphibians. And yet at the same time this character being trans is a secret in-universe "for reasons that will rock someone’s world."

Exactly none of this is conveyed in any way, shape, or form in the book we got.

I don't really know who the trans character is supposed to be, honestly. My first guess was Dr. Zephyr/Zephur, because their design is slightly gender ambiguous, no one every refers to them with pronouns, and they have no data file to clarify their gender. But no, it can't be them if it's supposed to be an Echyd'nya, and also Zephyr/Zephur is probably just a guy because if they were a woman Ken would've given them an hourglass figure. Maybe... Remington? Given all the shit about his unknown origins, is the Big Twist supposed to be that he was DFAB? I don't know. I just know that, whatever it is, if the story containing the reveal of who the token trans character is even gets published, it's not going to be good.

[a-specoftheday]

Baker Thief review

soooo, i finished my first a-spec book !! yay !! (i will continue with the suggestions in the inbox as soon as possible)

now, in terms of a short review i can personally say that the book is a nice and easy read, with some french sprinkled in, it is something that you could easily get done in a couple of days (if you're not an old man like me and you're more used to digital books).

when talking about the book in itself, without spoilers, it is a queer fantasy, with trans and other queer identities specifically discussed in it and with a very diverse queer cast. centering more on trans identities out of the binary and aromanticism.

it is also a more a-spec twist on a classic enemies-to-lovers, but don't expect it to be too slow-burn (which is fine, whatever tickles your fancy). but be mindful that the relationship is a key element of the plot if that is something that you may or may not be interested about.

the more action-based plot is very attention-grabbing, painting a world of steampunk and magic and tackling themes of police corruption and discrimination. the author is able to create a very elaborate and clearly thought-out world that the reader ends up just wanting to know even more about.

if you couldn't tell already: relationship-based stories aren't my strong point (and that part of this book wasn't my favourite), so my review of those parts might need some polishing for future posts, but i do hold the importance that the telling of those stories has. i hope more authors are able to fill their worlds with queer characters and themes and i will always do my part in trying for these stories to reach a wider audience and let someone find comfort in them.

i hope for my reviews to improve with practice so any book, comic, manga, show, film, etc recommendation is always welcomed on this blog and if any of the subjects i talked about in this review grabbed your attention at all, please check out Baker Thief by Claudie Arseneault.

[stressedjester]

Now I'm interested because either rarely hear about ocs from Fallout existing. Please tell me about yours

I'm just gonna go ahead and use this ask to info dump random facts about James since he's my favorite

James:

My Lone Wanderer oc!!! Basically has the mcs backstory for fo3

He's autistic, his special interests are prewar history and electronic/robotic engineering!! He was originally going to be the next doctor for Vault 101 according to the GOAT test but convinced Mr. Broch to let him become a Pip-Boy repairman instead

He doesn't have a favorite food but does have a sweet tooth and a caffeine fixation, he drinks a lot of sweet coffee or Nuka-Cola (his favorite flavor is Nuka-Cherry)

His highest SPECIAL stat would probably be Intelligence

He has near perfect vision and found he has skills as a sharpshooter after he left the Vault

He's trans, he named himself after his dad because he looked up to him so much

Also because of his dad, he has a decent amount of medical knowledge/training (hence why he would've been a doctor too)

His favorite color is "some kind of light purple". He never specifies because it's either lilac or lavender and he can't pick one over the other

He developed claustrophobia after leaving the Vault, and he also learned he has a fear of heights

His Karma would probably be good, he wants to be as helpful as possible and is just generally very caring at his core

Despite being my Lone Wanderer oc, he's also my Courier oc too (idc if it conflicts with canon he's my special guy)

He got very attached to Arcade as he was another autistic queer guy in the Wasteland, they bonded mostly over their knowledge of history

He doesn't like talking about his time in the Capital Wasteland much, it was very traumatic for him. Arcade is one of the few people he's told about it

He likes to draw sometimes, his art style is very much like an old comic book style (ie, 50s DC comics kind of artwork)

He's very organized and likes to keep journals and photo albums. Even if lugging them around the Wasteland is annoying. It means a lot to him

He wears a locket, originally it just had an image of his dad (and late mom) but he ended up putting a picture of Arcade in the second half of the locket

He keeps himself, his clothes, and his items very clean. Many would describe him as a "neat freak" because of how diligent he is with his hygiene compared to other people in the Wasteland

He's left handed so he wears his Pip-Boy on his right arm

He often gets attached to inanimate objects and robots

I feel like I've typed too much already so I'll just leave it here for now...if you'd like to know more about him or maybe about some other characters lmk because I love these little dudes in my brain

[misspickman]

I know tim is the easy one for the comic characters ask meme but I’ll do it anyway <3 (and if someone else already sent tim then uhhhh lonnie please)

A comic you'd recommend to get to know this character: robin 93, i know a lot of people dont like it bc dixons and willinghams writing is uhh sure the way it is but i do genuinely think its a p good show of who tim is and how he changes over time. its definitely not perfect and there are parts you could easily skip but i found it really fun. also young justice ofc<3 comic of all time

A comic you would NEVER recommend reading for this character: i havent liked him in rebirth so i guess. most of that. i found him very bland and just. not tim in yj 19. i dont enjoy his current solo either

A comic you would recommend reading only with the footnotes (aka after reading a bunch of other stuff): red robin! i love it dearly but its definitely not the best Only basis for tims character. esp the second part. also convergence batgirl is soo dear to me for how it shows tim and steph but you kind of need the context for it to be fun i think

A retcon that you wish would be reversed: n52 and rebirth. my beloathed. sorry

A retcon that fixed a LOT of shit: i guess rebirth fixed things as in its not n52 anymore. but im still not happy about it. but it could be worse??

A headcanon extrapolated from all of your extensive reading because no one knows this character like you do: im not gonna start telling you about my trans tim takes bc you know them already. but all of that

A pitch for their next solo (or team) book: we need to kill him just make him stop being robin please im begging. that aside id like to see him in a team book again i miss tim being the teamup guy, and imo hes a lot more interesting as a support character than when hes the main guy of the book (mostly bc authors cant help but try to make him the 'smartest and most competent person in the room' which just gets annoying tbh). also let him team up with helena and cass again

[meowwolfsnothere344]

Welcome to my Tumblr page!

Go to @cupsandmugsau for Cuphead and Mugman’s side of the story!

if your new, please read if you don’t want any surprises/triggers that may make you uncomfortable.

This comic may contain the following:

Romance

sexual acts

S€x

Mpreg (not a kink aight? Just to keep the story going I swear💀💀)

smoking

Suicide/Suicide thoughts/attempted suicide

drinking

abuse (pretty much any and all)

assault

Gore/blood (may be too much for a viewer)

Foul language (cursing, slurs, etc.)

Nudity/NSFW/p0rn (not really genitals, but yk, mostly just everywhere else but there, hehe)

Self harm

Mental disorders

Eating disorders

Relationship problems

Drama

Miscarriage

Pedophilia (not the way you’re thinking, more of the adult doings without consent, you’ll see, but no sex for this part I believe)

And more that are related to the listed things.

Keep in mind, Gizmo and Teenee are NOT related, so there is ZERO incest in this comic.

(I also made these characters to look a bit like Cuphead and Mugman because I was thinking I can help people who don’t want to like the Cuphead x Mugman ship! I don’t judge anyone’s shipping or anything, please don’t hate)

I made this comic for people who enjoy a good spicy story without getting judged! But I need to say this comic is 16+ for viewers, if you’re younger, that’s ok! I can’t control what you do, but you were warned! If you have a problem, let me know! I can see if I can fix it, but if I can’t fix it and it starts to become negative, scrolling is the best option!

This space is LGBTQ+ friendly for any and all viewers! If your Gay, that’s ok! If your Trans, that’s great! Even if your Straight, that’s completely fine here!

Here are the rules for my page:

Please don’t be homophonic, sexist, or offensive in anyway to make everyone uncomfortable in this space!

Don’t send acts that target anyone’s belief’s or sexuality negatively.

Don’t pressure me or anyone about their personal life or sexuality

PLEASE DON’T TRACE MY ART (you can use them for reference but that’s it!)

Don’t send me mean comments please, it doesn’t help or do anything.

Don’t ask to draw your answer out in digital form or sketch form, that is not a custom thing you can ask for

Don’t shame me for my art, I post what I want

Don’t harass me to draw an art piece for you, that’s a useless thing to do🙄

Don’t be afraid to send an NSFW idea for me, I love a good spicy sketch piece, but it’ll almost always be in sketch form in my special book, and I will put a read more and a warning, for people who don’t like p0rn

If your uncomfortable here, then scroll!

I’m uncomfortable with answering any questions about religious beliefs from my personal experience, so please don’t ask about any of that!

I also take drawling requests, but it will work on those when I’m not busy on other personal life things. When you request, try and be detailed so I know what I’m drawling. Don’t expect the art to be done the next day, it will take a bit along with all the other things I need to keep up on. You can request anything but nudity that includes genitals, I’m not in that level of drawling yet, and I’m just uncomfortable posting that online, I’m not ready for that yet. I may also say I can’t drawl a certain character, and I won’t take requests that include someone that you can’t ask about in the Askbox. Either then that, you can request anything!

Characters that you can ask:

Gizmo

Teenee

Mr. Candlehead

Me

(New characters coming soon)

You can use Askbox magic to send my characters things or maybe give them a hug if they’ll allow it, but not all the time please! You guys can ask literally anything, even spicy things~ And maybe give me some ideas by messaging me personally for the comic and I’ll add them to my list! (I may also answer by just drawling the characters out on a piece of paper, so please don’t ask to do your answer in digital art form, or I may not answer your question at all)

Main questions that can be answered now:

Q: Are Gizmo and Teenee related? A: No, Gizmo and Teenee are not related and never will be!

Q: Why did you just copy Evil Cuphead and Vile Mugman and just call them your characters? A: I know they look a lot like them, but they will look more different throughout the story, but they’re supposed to look like them because I wanted to help people who don’t want to like the Cup x Mug ship. Again, I don’t judge other ships, don’t hate.

Q: can I use your art piece as a reference for my drawling? A: Sure! Just don’t trace my artwork! And if your gonna post it, make sure you tag me in it, I love seeing people’s fanart even though it doesn’t happen often! Little secret, I used to trace artwork myself, I realized that wasn’t the best thing to help me learn to draw so I decided to stop and draw myself, and it helped! (and also just ask me this one because you need yk, like real consent before doing so, but most likely I’ll say yes!)

Q: Can you digital draw my question? And why not?? A: It depends if I have time to make it in an ok amount of time and I have a life and personal issues to deal with too, so it just depends!

Q: Can I draw your OC’s? A: Yes ofc! Just make sure you credit the character to me! Seeing other people’s fanart is the highlight to my week and honestly gives me a big push of motivation to actually continue on this Tumblr page because I don’t get a lot of questions.

I may add to this post more throughout this comic, so keep an eye out for any changes once and a while! Now that you finished reading, please enjoy my Tumblr page and maybe drop an ask to the Askbox if it’s not closed!

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MeowWolfsnotthere344

(Seatbelt not included)

[ellesliterarycorner]

What My Followers Want To See More Of In Male Characters

I’m always looking for ways to improve my writing, especially writing male characters, and I’m happy to say that my WIP has quite a few of these. I think we can all agree that with the absolutely sickening influx of dark, broody, bad boys in YA fiction, having male characters with more nuance and hmmm I don’t know actual personalities is refreshing and something that all books need. Thank you guys so much for answering this poll(conducted through instagram), and let me know if there’s something else y’all want to be polled on that I can turn into a post! I didn’t change anything that you guys wrote, so there are some repeats on the list, but I think it makes a point to see how many people want to see the same (relatively simple) things in fiction!

Them being soft and kind 

going to therapy/having mental health struggle 

bisexuality! 

non-toxic religious men

lgbt men(beyond being gay and fetishised) 

feminine guys who aren’t gay 

men of all sexualities being feminine 

physically disabled men who are very masculine 

straight male characters in close friendships with mlm characters 

sensitive and weak moments 

“feminine” men mb, guys who like flowers and stuff while also being very strong cause thats cool I think 

confidence enough to compliment other men

feminine interests without being judged 

discussing things they love doing 

I think it’d be nice if people showed men’s insecurities more often. Also, men also get abused and stuff 

emotions!!!

genuine friendships with someone who’s better than them 

eating disorders, anxiety, insecurities, other common mental health concerns 

guys not afraid to show their vulnerability and weaknesses to the people they care about 

casually wearing makeup and not making a fuss or a statement out of it 

being shy is ok. being nice to the mc and not being a complete douche bag, if the mc is being an idiot and playing with their feelings telling her straight up or leaving her, they don’t have to be attractive to be likable, their dark pasts isn’t an excuse for them to be shitty human beings 

them being vulnerable 

healthy platonic friendships 

vulnerability and insecurity shown through non toxic traits 

soft spoken, kind and gentle voice 

I want to see them cook, sex, or such without invalidating their masculinity 

male characters who express their emotions and aren’t ridiculed by others for it 

I want more soft men tbh. It’s usually all badass and then breakdowns. I want someone who is fragile 

affectionate with their friends and/or in tune with their emotions 

less abs

males who aren’t afraid to cry and be affectionate with their friends 

respect and genuine care for females and people of other genders, thank you 

i would love to see more bisexual/pansexual male characters!!

the ability to take no for an answer 

bisexual males that aren’t the main plot. they just get to be bi and it doesn’t affect the story 

emotional softness 

being vulnerable/crying without thinking that they’re weak for it 

ones that are submissive and fine with it 

Queer! Rep! 

Ones that are fucking respectful of their female counterparts 

talking about their feelings 

kind to their lover without being called a simp 

plus size 

guys being allowed to be gentle and not seen as weak or inferior 

openness rather than being closed off all of the time 

I want to see witty and quirky characters + humor that is shown around EVERYONE

femininity and vulnerability, crying, breakdowns, etc. 

varying sexualities 

real emotion, crying, and for it be okay for them to do that 

treats women like equals without having to be “taught” how to by a love interest 

caring about others without being portrayed as awkward and/or flirtatious 

emotions and kindness

showing emotions that isn’t anger 

not being misogynistic 

smart but not the typical ‘nerdy geek’ just there as an encyclopedia for the MC

Men who are comfortable with being emotionally open (and them being emotionally open DOESN’T automatically mean they’re gay 

emotional maturity and having healthy relationships and behavior 

showing affection to their platonic friends 

respect toward others

male characters that are “motherly” Let them cook, clean, sew, and be good with kids 

male characters who are perceptive and understanding 

male characters with realistic, practical muscles 

wanting hugs and getting giddy over little bits of affection

male characters who wear heels (even if the rest of their outfit is traditionally masculine) 

black male protagonists 

emotional strength instead of physical strength 

males that let the non males take charge and our respectful 

realistic bodies and insecurities 

more males characters exploring their identity 

males who have hobbies, they’re passionate about

physically and mentally strong and resilient. Protective, but respectful and supportive 

not being overtly attractive and being okay with it 

emotionally guarded without being cold or angry 

more sympathy, less naïvety to the female protagonists feelings 

stylish dudes who aren’t gay (not that lgbtq+ rep is bad it’s just a tiring stereotype) 

guys friendships and protectiveness of non love interests 

male characters being feminine without them being queer coded or comic relief

them finding a healthy way to cope with problems 

healthy paternal figures that do not die in the saga please 

big scary guys with hobbies like crochet, sewing and reading books for rescued animals 

soft and loving and caring all the time who cry and are hurt and not badass all the time 

be soft and kind to everyone, not just their bae 

cool mysterious and stuff but not flipping depressed characters please stop that trope

them crying, having close female friends, being lgbt+(especially trans men), showing emotions 

male characters that aren’t possessive/obsessive and know how to accept “no”

raising kids without a love interest involved

societies with men that aren’t stereotypical 

male characters that aren’t naturally good leaders 

a really straight guy having a really gay best friend 

seeing more male characters be comfortable in expressing their feelings and emotions 

[joleneghoul]

Hello! Foe the character ask game, Ted Kord please!

Gladly! Ted is genuinely my favorite above all dc character I have a lot to say about him! Under the cut again because these posts are so long especially this one because it turned into a lot of rambling.

– Overall opinion of them

Overall like I said, Ted IS my favorite dc character. Which I know that's a lot of characters to live up to but he's special to me for a lot of reasons (some irl influence is on that as well outside of comics as I mentioned in my Booster post).

He is really endearing to me as a legacy hero who has NO powers within a power wielding legacy of heroes. He didn't ask to become blue beetle, he wasn't ready to be a hero (really who is?), he had no training at all and when the scarab didn't work he took it upon himself to find his OWN way to lead the legacy. I just think that's super cool. He never even GETS powers which is the coolest part to me- he is forever reliant on his very own non-superhuman skills. ( I know there are other heroes who do this but not many of those heroes are following a legacy where the hero before them had an insane amount of powers.)

Adding onto that his story becomes one of being disabled/chronically ill in a profession where an illness (moreso at the time of those comics) wasn't something you could HAVE and remain a hero. and that was GOOD for his character. Ted's character arc should have always ended up with a book-end on the blue beetle legacy for him. There should have been one day where he took off that costume, never put it back on, and let go of that legacy he didn't ask for and took care of HIMSELF. And maybe more importantly for Ted's mental health realized he did what Dan wanted him to and was a GOOD hero. Especially since Jaime has the mantle of Blue Beetle now. There is genuinely no reason for two Blue Beetles at once- Ted is a valuable character outside of costume more than IN it narrative wise.

Do i think Ted's disability is treated well, especially now, and especially by writers behind the scenes? No. Do i think it is a super important part of his character and makes sense for him to always ended up retired from heroing? Yes. I just want to see someone realize this and harness that potential!

– Gender/sexuality headcanons I think Ted is a transgender Bi man. I think he had his gender figured out before his sexuality though. I also think there comes to be a point in his life where he gets to challenge the idea of masculinity outside of public perception and make the definition of "man" into his own thing. (but I also feel that way about Ted if he were a "cis" man or unlabeled or anything really!)

That's a very vague concept but it's something I feel would fit with his character and the themes of overall acceptance of WHO he is VS who the people before him (Dan, older heroes, etc) were.

I will also mention there is genuinely TRANSPHOBIA towards ted in comics (I am not going to post that bc it makes me genuinely sick.) joking about him being a trans man that was written by jurgens "fun" fact (sarcasm on the fun). I notice Guy and Ted for some reason get thrown shit like that and its really weird? idk something i've noticed! It's also something that makes me more inclined to reclaim (probably wrong word) Ted from cis writers.

– Favorite moment in canon

I honestly don't think any specific moment comes to my mind as my FAVORITE moment, again he's one of those characters I find a lot of joy in and have a lot of favorite moments.

I really enjoy a moment early on in his solo issue #2 where he literally lifts a burning house off of himself because he's stubborn and can't give up.

I also hold a very soft place in my mind for the issue where Ted goes around sitting with the homeless in Issue #16, asking them stories and learning about them because I myself was homeless when I first read his comics! I think that was a really good opportunity for someone like Ted, who had a wealthy upbringing of sorts to learn perspectives he himself never experienced which is EXTREMELY important when you have a character like him.

Again, could have been handled better and I would have done it differently in some parts, but still is important and shows his compassion for others. I would love to see more of Ted helping people out GROUND LEVEL than just LEAGUE level. I feel at times that Ted's biggest strengths like that are left behind in him joining the JLI but that didn't have to be the case. I don't think Ted would stop caring about those things after joining the league (not that in comics he stopped caring it was just less seen).

– Favorite moment in a fanwork

If I say AGKOL again... will y'all be mad at me.. LOL! Sorry but I do really love the characterization and nuance of Ted within that series. He is treated like a actual person instead of just "boosters friend/partner" and I REALLY appreciate that. I think my favorite character moment so far in that series for him is Contaminated Minds where he talks about his complicated feelings for his neglectful father who is sick.

Um, Outside of that I have to say me and my boyfriends personal universe and stories we have made through the years for Ted. They aren't posted anywhere and are very personal but do remain some of my favorite thing's we have created.

Artist wise! This would have to have the same answer as my Booster post though the biggest inspirations artistic wise for me with Ted have been @bigturtl and @starringbeetle since literally day one.

– Favorite line, in canon or otherwise

I think about this panel from showcase 94 #2 every single day of my fucking life and there was a moment in my life where I couldn't find it and convinced myself that I made it up in my mind(I did not make it up).

– Characters I love seeing them interact with

Booster Gold, obviously. I think a lot of Ted's strongest character moments (IN THE PAST) come from Ted's genuinely care for Booster. How Ted will over and over be moved to the point of inventing new things for Booster or how he defied actual Death to keep Booster alive during judgement day.

I do think some of the stronger Ted moment's come from him holding Booster accountable and vice versa like the first story withing Justice League Quarterly #10 has got to be one of my FAVORITE stories with them. I think there is a lot of love to be expressed in not being afraid to tell the harsh TRUTH to someone you care about.

That being said I do also think writers seeing Ted as only an extension of Booster rather than his own character himself is very detrimental to his character. Like SPEAKING of judgement day afterwards it seems Ted forgets a lot of his relationships and loyalty to the rest of the JLI (I think of Tora and Bea here) in order to cater to Boosters needs. Am I saying that's entirely unrealistic? No...But again it's one of those things I wish was done better or maybe not at all. THIS is not even considering how Ted nowadays in comics is such a non-character and is just a "sidekick" to any of Boosters stories...even in Blue and Gold where he is HALF of the comics title.

SPEAKING OF BEA! She is also one of my favorite characters I like to see Ted interact with, Specifically after Booster leaves the JLI to join the conglomerate it feels as though she's someone who supports him and hangs out with him...a Blue and Green! team up of sorts lol. It's weird to me that a lot of Ted's friendships with women he's had in the past are nowadays looked at as "well he liked them actually romantically" (Bea in convergence then Babs in canon). Likewise I also really love his friendship with Tora before her death.

I know this will be shocking but I'm not the largest Barbara fan (as a character) but I do really appreciate her and Teds FRIENDSHIP a lot. It felt like solidarity between disabled characters that's not seen enough.

LASTLY....BRING MURRAY BACK NOW!! He was Ted's best friend in college and I feel so so so annoyed that all of Ted's pre-JLI friends are just forgotten? That's not an exclusive experience to his character within the JLI but still. Very annoying. Bring Murray back...Like Ted knew him so well he could GUESS his passwords.

– Last thing before sleeping headcanons & Sleeping habits headcanons

I think when Ted is younger and in the league he doesn't get as much sleep as he should...I think he has insomnia that's from a few sources (ptsd, general stress, etc) but combats any thoughts he has while he can't sleep by just hyper-focusing on something else (inventing, anything like that) THUS leading to more staying up and less sleep itself. I think there's a point in his life as he gets older especially with his conditions where...He just has to sleep even if he doesn't want to for the sake of his health. I think though while that's true he's more of a night owl and a day sleeper- he's the type of guy to be awake at 3am like it's a normal time of day. Otherwise, of course before bed he takes his medications. I know he has one of those cute pill boxes or whatever. Also I think he snores like a freight train when asleep and also kicks whoever is in bed with him in his sleep.

– First thing after waking up headcanons

He is the king of staying in bed for hours after waking up just laying there ESPECIALLY if he wakes up during the day time. I think morning and daytime make him feel exhausted and he just prefers darkness (this is backed up in canon as well like the fact he prefers his lab to have no lights on etc). Chronic fatigue life.

– Favorite locations headcanon

He himself said he is a city boy- but anyways I think his favorite places are places he has built himself and are very familiar with. Whether that be his lab or his home, doesn't matter, it's more about the control of knowing where everything is and how everything works in an area.

[7fckingidiots]

Would you be alright with writing some HCs about the brothers and a MC who's a trans guy? Sorry if it's a tall order or too vague, they're a big comfort for me and I'd like to see what ideas you have bcs your headcanons are fantastic ;w;

HELL YEAH DUDE!!!! IM ALSO TRANS!!! AH!!!!! demigirl rights :3 but i also find a huge comfort in the boys and i hc all of them as trans because no one can Stop Me •• but i really hope you enjoy these and remember you’re valid and i care u so much! Also i hope you don’t mind but i kinda made it gender neutral so every trans folk could enjoy!

The Brothers With A Trans MC

Lucifer

He didn’t know until you came out to him honestly. He knew all his other siblings were trans but with all the work Diavolo gave him and adding new students from different realms on top of that he hadn’t really had time to notice any minor changes in you.

He feels guilty about this and immediately makes sure(like everyone else)to ask for your pronouns, name, and how you would like to present yourself from now on.

Fixes your ID cards and your papers with Diavolo right after dinner

God. He’s such a dad and he gets you things that have your new name on them. You wake up to see you have a new pencil case with your name embroidered on it with matching pencils. God.....he’s so weird i love him so much

Asmo does most of your clothing shopping but for formal wear he takes you shopping! He’s not about to buy you some cheap tux or gown ok it’s gonna be over 2000 grim and he’s gonna get you three of them STOP HIM

He’s not the best with verbal affection so he writes down notes that are like “you looked very handsome/pretty today.” or when he first starts writing them they’re like “you’re a boy/girl/kid. i’m proud of you.” Thank u mr morningstar

You want surgery or to start hormones??? He will stop all his work with Diavolo and spend forever looking up things for you, he wants you to be as safe as possible(pls he almost fainted after he realized you’d have to give yourself a shot like everyday dhdhdhjdhd hc that demons/angels don’t have to do hormone therapy i’m so JEALOUS)

Practices saying your pronouns in his study when you first come out. He just wants to make sure you feel as safe as possible in his care(and he remembers how terrible it felt to be misgendered)

Guess what....he loves you no matter what :)

Mammon

You’re blind as hell if you couldn’t see his top scars but I respect it

King DOES slip up on your pronoun change but always immediately corrects himself. Satan has a spray bottle that he sprays Mammon with when he does it. Mammon is NOT amused but the same can’t be said for Belphie.

Gender affirming activities??? Oh yeah like robbing a bank?? That’s pretty gender neutral and trans right?? Yeah!!! Wow such a good supportive brother.

If you want you can wear the formal wear Lucifer bought you to the said bank heist. Boom trans rights

You can practice painting his nails or doing his makeup if you’re too nervous to do it on yourself first!! Dw if it’s bad he also can’t do makeup or paint nails so once you let him return the favor you’re both laughing and Asmo is distraught.

KING at dying hair he will get you whatever you need and if you want an entire different hair cut entirely he’s ON it

Very used to being Loud and Brash but if you need someone to talk to about anything really he always calms down and sits down to listen to whatever you have to say.

Lots of gendered gifts from him. This said for men??? Oh ok adds to cart. Oh pink??? For ladies??? yeah that can go in there too

You’re never gonna believe this.....But he loves you and supports you :)

Levi

He was the first one to come out to you at the house!! He was just so excited! Same hat!!!

Gets literally any video game where you can design the protag/have custom pronouns and will play games like that with you for hours

Would you like a pride flag.....for u.....He has too many.....Please take the trans flag please he has no room....he bought in bulk for a pride event and didn’t consider the consequences of his actions

Miku binder but irl. He will get if for you but unironically.....thanks King. He just likes binders with patterns and i respect IT

Dysphoria?? He gives you his hoodie bc that was his trademark dysphoria hoodie and i GUESS for you he can share............he would give u anything just ask nicely he’s sensitive

Reads any character that matches up with your gender and is like!!!!! That’s you!!!! OMG!!!! You in da IRL

Goes back and edits his tweets if they use your old name or pronouns(also has he/they in his bio. this is for nothing just makes me :D)

If you haven’t chosen your name he’s gonna suggest so many fictional characters. POV levi kin assigns you.

You listen to music together that just has Trans Vibes.....maybe u cry together but there’s no judgment!! It’s just nice :)

God it’s wild but! He loves u and thinks ur great :)

Satan

Enby Satan. That’s all :)

He’s very quite about it, he supports you! He’s just not loud like his brothers

He brings you book about gender studies and LGBTQ history that he thinks would interest you(there some of his favorite books and they’ve made him feel the most comfortable in his gender)

Gives you a name list if you haven’t named yourself yet! He cares about you and wants to make sure you have the right name that suits you

He’s the one that tells you that it’s ok if you’re still figuring it all out, learning about yourself is a very tricky process and if anyone knows that it’s Satan

Any of the brothers would kill anyone who misgendered you but with Satan that shit is ON SIGHT

Asks you how you know and what were the signs that gave it away to you, but only if you’re comfortable telling him!! He just finds everyone’s experience interesting and would like to know yours as well.

Spells for fucking DAYS Satan personally kills body dysphoria the best he can(mainly bc he’s HIGHKEY afraid of you getting surgery he hates knives so much)

Makes your comfort food for you when you’re feeling down about yourself and will read whatever you want to hear outloud to you.

!!!!!! GET THIS !!!!!! He loves YOU :0

Asmo

Fucking excited!!!! This means you two are going to buy so much clothing together and he gets to style you let’s GO

Buys you whatever you want but he will make you try it all on so be CAREFUL what u wish for.....ur gonna be there till the store closes yeah......

Paints your nails with the trans pride flag!! Also does your makeup and gives you tips on how to look more masculine or fem!!

VOICE LESSONS

He will help you lower or raise the pitch of your voice if it KILLS him. It eventually becomes like a mini class after school

Helps with internalized transphobia! Hes dealt with his fair share and knows how awful it can be and he will NOT being having you experience that as well we r practicing Self Care now

Picks apart any one who misgenders you until they’re crying he has NO fucking time for that behavior in this HOUSE

Sometimes self care is eating whatever you want and sitting in the dysphoria hoodies while watching chick flicks with Asmo

He likes dressing you up but he’s always sure to set boundaries so he never puts you into something that makes you feel uncomfortable

ALSO edits his posts and takes down anything that makes you uncomfortable!!

He loves you so much!!!!

Beel

another one to hand you The Dysphoria Hoodie and it’s very large and comfy!

he’ll help you make out a work out routine that will help you get the body you want and it makes him really happy to work out with you :)

he’s gonna hold your hand if you have to take shots and will give you puppy eyes if you don’t let him. He’s just worried!!!! He wants to help

stands behind you whenever you’re nervous about coming out to someone, he will NOT have someone making you feel bad or misgendering you

he’ll see food with trans pride colors and gives it too you, probably doesn’t even know what it is half the time but it made him think of you so he makes sure to get it for you

he doesn’t trip up on any of your new pronouns or name and makes it seem like he never even knew them. dead name???? what’s that??? a type of sauce?????

will let you vent to him whenever needed and will always make you a sundae after you’ve finished. it’s comically huge but it’s tasty and does make you feel a lot better, thanks beel

makes sure you remember to take off your binder if you’ve been wearing it for more than eight hours! and if you’ve been wearing heels to feel more fem he reminds you to take those off too and has a pair of slippers for you in his room that you can wear instead

hey! get this! He loves you so, so much :D

Belphie

you’re trans? ok kid join the club. he doesn’t make a big deal at all

are you still gonna cuddle with him and join him in his quest to make lucifer’s life difficult? yeah? ok then cool what’s ur name 

if he hears someone misgender you he waits till you’ve left the room and just kills whoever did it, dude’s unhinged what did you expect from him honestly

he’s actually really curious about any hormone therapy you’re on and likes listening to you rant about it to him. he likes seeing your face light up and it partly reminds him of lilith

calls your hormones something stupid like “oh dude, your gamer girl juice arrived.” or “hey your little man potion is here.” ...thanks belphie

will NOT let you sleep in a binder or push up bra!!! not healthy!! let ur chest breath guys 

like mammon, he gets you gendered gifts but they’re so fucking weird? you didn’t need a girls version of a collectable hot wheels set???? he got you blue lightning mcqueen sheets?????? those EXIST here????!!!!! when does he even shop......

introduces you to new people like “this is our resident boy/girl/human. they don’t do much but i think they’re cool.”

he really does care about you but he remembers when he came out he just didnt want people to make a big deal about it so he’s just doing what would have made him feel the most comfortable, but you can still see how much love he has for you when you look into his eyes

he loves you, so, so much :)

[ineffableplanner]

Wednesday Spotlight #55 - May 12th 2021

What’s new? A new store spotlight, of course. There is 1 and ½ zine added as well - one is supposed to open today, but as of posting this newsletter no direct link could be added.

Do you have or do you know of a fancomic or zine on sale/pre-order don’t hesitate to let me know.

Lately, you are getting another spotlight that will go on rotation. I’ll link to one etsy/redbubble/insert-platform here, every week. The rotation goes by order of me finding the links and whatever links you guys might send to me. And yes, you’re more than welcome to send me the link to your own online store. Even if you just run a small selection off your social media.

Store Spotlight (GO Merch)

Good Omens merch by TwistedFlaxCreations

I proudly wear the wing pins and the work is fabulous, and what do you know?! There’s a sale on for the rest of May to celebrate that the book turns 31 this month. Happy birthday to GoodOmens!

Good Omens Fanzines/fancomics open for orders/pre-orders:

There are a few new ones coming up - but none of them have any direct links yet. I’ll update the calendar on trello when I have them, and they’ll be featured in the next issue (barring the unforeseen delays that might cause them to be pushed).

Enchanted Omens

Pre-orders for the fairytale-themed Good Omens zine are now open! Over 100 pages of amazing content, available in physical or digital format, and plenty of merch up for grabs!

Please note that there is a sponsor option that you can apply to.

To purchase go here (bigcartel)

To apply for a sponsored copy go here (twitterpost) or directly to the google doc

Across All Omens

What is Across all Omens Zine? It is a digital for profit zine that artists and writers can come together to share their AUs, with a twist! The main idea is to share your AUs with each other! Pair up and create works featuring your collaborator's characters in your universe interacting with your characters!

Please note as of this Wednesday Newsletter May 12th there is no link to orders open but keep an eye out. It has a prior announced date of May 12th.

Link to tumblr

Ineffable Eras: Soho 1967 - preorders are open

The Soho 1967 Edition of the zine is now open for orders, from April 28 to May 26, and you will find several different options for buying both zine and merch.

Ace Omens - preorders are open

A collection of Good Omens art and stories celebrating ace pride and exploring ace stories brought to you by a group of asexual creators and allies. All proceeds from sales will go to the Trevor Project.

Closes May 30th

Our Side Zine: Trans Day of Visibility 2021

Our Side Zine: Trans Day of Visibility 2021 is a trans Good Omens Fan zine made by Good Omens fans for Good Omens fans. This DIGITAL-ONLY zine features art, cosplay, and fiction depicting characters from the book, show, or radio play.

—————–

Note: Zine pre-orders have been moved from Saturday’s newsletter to Wednesday’s Spotlight post. Zine’s will be spotlight’ed until pre-orders/orders end date. Personal comics will get one spotlight for now - if more weeks go by without any new ones, I’ll re-boost some of the earlier ones.

If you have a fanbook/comic for sale or a fanzine up for pre-order, please PM me to let me know or email me at ineffableplanner (at) gmail.com. I may catch it on my own but better safe than sorry ;) - same goes for any events or zine signups you’d like boosted in the Saturday newsletter. Also a shout-out to those of you who ping me with links, both for events as well as comics and zines.

For now no commission info as opening/closing commissions happen so fast sometimes the links might not be valid after a few days. As for patreon pages I can’t double check content, so no.

You can find older editions of the Wednesday spotlight by following the tag #Wednesday spotlight

[redrascal1]

I’ve been on a number of fan forums over the years...but I’ve never seen any ‘relationship’ that has divided people’s opinions as much as ‘reylo’.

Some love it. Some hate it. But what really saddens me....are the reasons some people hate both it, and also Kylo Ren. And the fans of both.

People have ‘shipped’ for years, and frankly, I find it harmless. It’s fantasy, a source of escapism that can be invaluable in these troubling times. But the reylo fandom in particular has been singled out for contempt....and not just from ‘fan forums’, but by major articles written by ‘professionals’, such as the Mary Sue. I’ve posted links to the articles, so people can see for themselves.

There are two major complaints people have with ‘reylo’....one group finds it racist, the other finds it ‘toxic’.

Let’s look at both of them.

First of all, the ‘complaints of racism’. This boils down to Finn/Rey fans who desperately wanted a romance between the two.

That’s perfectly fine. We are allowed to ‘ship’ what we like. I shipped Lokane for years. I even ‘shipped’ Tony Stark/Loki! it’s harmless. People are entitled to ‘ship’ whomever they please. 

But...are they really being fair by accusing those who ship Rey/Kylo ...of being white supremacists?

I find this both unfair and frankly, worrying. Finn was originally meant to be a white character..Tom Hollander was in the running to play him, as I’ve pointed out here before. And he was meant to be a supporting character...NOT leading man. The ‘leading man’ was meant to be a woman - Rey. DLF wanted a female protagonist from the start. By giving the role of Finn to a black actor, but not giving him the leading role, was definitely not racism on DLF’s part. Remember, the PT and OT films had black actors...and Rogue 1 featured a cast who were mostly POC. 

People who ‘ship’ reylo do it because we saw a strong sexual chemistry between Rey and Kylo....not because we prefer the ‘white girl’ to be with a ‘white guy’. Heck, many of us are themselves POC. Finn and Rey, to me and other reylos, seemed more like  good pals, their chemistry that of a brother/sister. But, even though the ST has wrapped and no one ‘got’ Rey (apart from two ghosts and a droid) reylos are still being castigated. We got nothing at the end of TROS. The ‘kiss’ was a farce; Abrams, Daisy, and TROS novelist Rae Carson have insisted it was simply a sign of ‘gratitude’ from Rey. Our heroine never mourned Ben Solo, or even bothered to tell her friends what he’d done. Finn/Rey fans can always look forward to a possible TV series, live action or animated, or a comic book series. Daisy has said she’d return if ‘she could work with John and Oscar again’, so that isn’t an impossibility. For we reylos, and Ben Solo fans, the ending of the ST was not so much a slap in the face........but a debilitating blow.

Yet we are still accused of racism, of bullying John Boyega on SM, of ‘pushing him aside’ for Adam...and sadly, much of this is down to John Boyega claiming he was ‘hard done by’, plus ADF and Abrams announcing - after the sequels were wrapped, of course, that they too had wanted Finn/Rey and DLF had stopped them. They forget that Daisy herself stated post TFA  that Finn and Rey were ‘just good friends’.

They also conveniently forget that there was an inter racial relationship in the ST...Finn/Rose. Loan Tran was treated like dirt by Abrams and Boyega; I often wonder what this classy and dignified lady privately thinks of Boyega’s belly aching when she herself was so badly treated. Shame on them.

I wonder if there would have been as much of a furore over reylo if Tom Hollander had played Finn? I think we all know the answer.

And now...’reylo is toxic.’

Kylo Ren is an ‘abuser of women.’

Excuse me?

When did he ‘abuse’ Rey?

Oh, that’s right....he ‘abused and assaulted her’ when he tried to invade her mind.

But...Rey then invaded his mind - and did a lot more damage than he did.

Ah...but it’s allowable when it’s a woman. When John Crichton first met Aeryn Sun in Farscape, she beat the crap out of him. But hey - Aeryn’s female, so these two are allowed a sizzling enemies to lovers romance...because the woman’s on top, see? And, ‘big bad Kylo’ threw Rey against a tree.

Um...she was going to shoot him, after all.

And he should have allowed her too, because ‘she’s the good girl’.

Then he fought Finn and wounded him.

But...Finn was armed, wasn’t he?

Yes, but Kylo should have let him kill him, because Finn’s the ‘good guy’.

Rey beat Kylo and left him badly scarred. Even when she didn’t have to.

But... REY’S GOOD!

But that isn’t the Jedi way.

It doesn’t matter if it isn’t the Jedi way... REY’S GOOD.  AND SHE’S A GIRL!

Then the follow ups..what Kylo does to Rey:

Saves her from being killed by Snoke - he actually kills him for her

Fights back to back with her against his own people. 

Offers her a position as his queen.

But..but...he psychologically abused her by saying she was a ‘nobody’. 

He then said ‘not to me’, it was a pitiful attempt by a broken young man who himself had been abused for years to show how much he needed her ...more than she needed him.

BUT REY’S A GIRL! YOU CAN’T SAY THAT....TO A GIRL!!!

Sigh....

He told Luke he’d destroy her. But Luke saw straight through him. He was hurt, and felt betrayed and angry.

IT DOESN’T MATTER...HOW DARE HE SAY THAT TO A GIRL!!!!!

And finally...TROS. I think enough’s been said about that one.

In a nutshell, Rey also repeatedly attacked Kylo when he was unarmed, almost killed him twice...and before anyone says that he was attempting to run her down in his TIE, remember he could easily have shot her...and essentially abused him far more than he abused her. 

But she gets away with it BECAUSE SHE’S A GIRL!!!!

To finally sum up...those of us who loved reylo, Kylo and Ben were essentially destroyed by TROS, Abrams, Terrio and DLF themselves...while Finn fans, Rey fans and FinnRey shippers...got exactly what they wanted. But this isn’t enough for them. They continue to hassle us, condemn us, and jeer us ...when they won. 

My one comfort is 82% of the ‘general audience’ favoured Kylo over ALL of the others. So, apart from ‘professionally woke’ commentators and petulant forum members, we seem to be in the majority, even if we did lose.

Oh, and one more thing...those who accuse fictional reylo as ‘toxic’ while fiercely supporting JB’s ‘pipe’ comments disgust me.

Today’s society is a world filled with double standards and hypocrisy...and it’s now bled into popular entertainment. What a shame.

We aren’t allowed any form of escapism these days..without offending someone.

Long rant, sorry!:)

[fantasysamsclub]

so the adventure zone was recently picked up for an animated series.

hooray! good for the mcelroys. i’m glad they’re getting more mainstream. i’m glad they’re able to financially support themselves and their family with this fame. i’m glad taz has a chance to get new fans! i’m glad fans get to see some of the most iconic balance moments animated!

i also think it’s a monstrously bad idea.

(this is long and this may seem pretty mean and radical, but please read before fighting me on any of this. also this isn’t an attack on anyone that’s excited for any of this adaptation stuff! it’s good to be excited for this success. but also there are some things to consider.)

okay! so, up front: i think the taz animated series is a bad idea. i also think, retrospectively, the graphic novel was a bad idea. also i think the vox machina origins comic and animated series are bad ideas.

okay so this is going to get. a little long and rambly. but i’ll try to keep it organized.

1. TAZ Graphic Novel

now, when the first book was announced, i was excited! i’m still excited for the next one. aside from the blue/green elves thing, which i won’t ever forgive, carey’s doing a great job adapting this piece. i’ve met her before and she generally does know what she’s talking about, comics-wise, so i do think she was a very good choice to pick up the graphic novel

there are still problems! oh, are there problems. for example, i think everyone in the novel is characterized in a wildly different way than the original podcast. i can also get into this later if people want to hear about it, but! people have picked at that one before.

out of all the adaptations i’m going to talk about, this one is the best!

2. Vox Machina Origins

alright. context. i don’t know if i’ve said this on this platform before, but i’m a comic book artist (my big project is coming out this year, i’ll announce it on here, that’s not the point of this rant). and i bought the comic on a whim! it was a christmas present to me.

now, i know a lot of people read it and enjoyed it! and that’s great. i’m happy you got joy out of the book, really. i think every piece of art means something to someone, no matter its popularity or quality. and it did well, as far as i know! so that’s very good for CR and its fans. also i think pike is hot.

all that aside, the comic does suck very much.

i could go into a deep analysis of it (i CAN, if enough people actually want to see that?) but tldr: it’s rushed, both in production and story pacing. the character art is good! but you can see the shortcuts. the lettering is. awful. (that’s mostly a problem of modern comics in general though)

and i’m not blaming anyone at CR for these problems! really, if dark horse wants to pick up an adaptation, any writers from the original project should be heavily coached on how to write for a new medium. i’m not blaming matthew for that one! i know from firsthand experience that comic writing is different from anything else you will ever write, and is so difficult to get correct. as far as i knew, matt had never written for comics before! it would be really nice if he had some more resources to get this done right.

but that would cost money.

and that brings me to--

3. The Vox Machina Animated Series

wow! look at all that money everyone raised for this animated series. this animated series that the creators said they were raising money for so they could do it independently. hope they don’t go pitch it to a bigger company to do m--

and, it was sold to Amazon.

like, it didn’t even take them a month.

and in the current climate of how animation is bought and sold, i understand the need to sell it to a streaming service! you need a platform to let people view it, and youtube is in the shitter with its copyright stuff lately, so it makes sense to go private to keep your show safe. and then, you can maybe make more episodes after you run out of kickstarter money. i don’t hate that idea!

but amazon...hm.

it’s probably fine, right?

3.5. Wendy’s

haha remember when CR got sponsored by wendy’s and played their shitty rpg that wasn’t even balanced properly and then people called them out for it and then they donated all the money to a cause wendy’s hated to make up for it (good on them!) and then deleted the VOD off youtube? gosh, good times.

money makes people do strange things.

4. TAZ Animated Series

so, peacock has taz. sure! that works. it’s not the best company to pick this up, but it’s also not the worst. i’ll take that. i looked up the guy that’s slated to direct this and i don’t think he’s ever directed an animated show? which isn’t great, but that’s not what i’m worried about.

you know what i am worried about?

these big corporations don’t care if these adaptations are any good. they just want to cram as many iconic moments from your quirky, small-owned d&d podcasts to get you to give them money. for the mcelroys and the CR crew, it’s a passion project. to amazon and dark horse and NBC, it’s an investment.

you’re going to buy the book to see vax and vex bicker!

you’re going to tune in to watch magic brian!

you’re going to want to read pike meeting scanlan, of course!

you want to see “phantasmal and resplendent” animated!

here’s the other thing. when i see people talking about the animated series, this is exactly what they’re looking for.

“i want to watch merle dirty talk the plants on screen!”

“i want to see the taakitz date!”

“i want to see magnus do the julia scene...”

now, this mindset isn’t bad! no, if you’ve been thinking this, that’s okay! it’s really not my personal thought (i think adaptations are best when they DO change things in the story to better fit the new medium they’re going on) but it’s fine.

we might get tom arnold!

but you know what we’re not going to get?

we’re not going to get apologies and revisions when something goes wrong. we’re not going to get cute extra scenes because that would require more writing. we’re not going to get the same respect for the LGBTQ+ characters on screen. the people working on this show will not get paid what they’re worth.

we’re probably not going to get a trans actress for lup.

we’re probably going to see less of carey and killain.

we’re probably going to see even fewer black and brown characters than we already have.

why’s that?

because it’s a money project. they’re doing it for money. and they want to reach as wide of an audience as possible, right? “really, we need to cut back on this gay stuff so that straight people aren’t uncomfortable. we need to stay more moderate on this project so that more people will watch it!”

(that was sarcasm)

now, NBC has had some good shows! but that’s really the responsibility of their individual writers, and it’s usually in spite of the companies they work for, and not because of them.

once an author or an artist sells their project to a company for adaptation, they often lose all rights to input from it. i don’t know what the mcelroy’s or CR’s contracts are, but unless they have better lawyers than NBC or amazon.....they probably got shafted somehow.

it’s not a mcelroy product. it’s not a CR product. don’t pretend like it is.

you can enjoy it, but please be cautious. this is just a pile of money in a cheap taako costume. don’t trust it as much as you would the podcast.

tldr: individual creators are always going to make more genuine content than corporations that buy those creations for larger adaptations. it’s okay to enjoy these adaptations, but please be aware that it’s not going to have the same spirit or heart as the boys talking about masturbation on a filler show they did quickly so justin could go support his wife in labor.

[doomarchives]

David Annandale’s The Harrowing Of Doom: An In-Depth Review

So, I was kindly offered an advance reviewer’s copy of The Harrowing of Doom by David Annandale for the Marvel Untold series, a new prose line revolving around Marvel’s villains. Although I’m not personally familiar, the author’s prior written work and academic scholarship indicated a strong background in fantasy, science fiction, as well as horror film and literature - all essential elements of Doom himself honestly, whether in his character, design, or formative influences. A promising start from the outset! 

To no one’s surprise, I was especially excited for this one. Doctor Doom is both my favorite Marvel character and area of nerdy comics expertise, and Annandale sounded like the perfect candidate to tackle him. 

The Harrowing of Doom centers around a conflict familiar to those who know the character. Taking place fifteen years after his ascension to the throne, Victor von Doom is still hellbent on rescuing the soul of his mother, Cynthia, trapped in hell by the demon Mephisto. His yearly attempts to save her have been fruitless thus far, but he believes he can really do it this time, enlisting the help of a new character, Maria von Helm, and some of his lesser known subjects (also new characters) to accomplish the task, by building a machine called The Harrower. The noble scheme is further complicated by the reappearance of Prince Rudolfo Fortunov, son of the monarch deposed and murdered by Doom years prior, who is equally determined to take back what he believes is his birthright by any means necessary. The novel is a relatively dense and detailed one, and as a true blue Doom enthusiast, I have a dense and detailed review to match.

The first thing that I personally take note of in any material involving Doom is the author’s perspective on the truth of Latveria’s “benevolent dictatorship.” It immediately speaks volumes about a writer’s perception of Doom’s accountability and sense of morality; it kind of ends up coloring his entire characterization. That being said, I was really pleased by the evenhandedness with which Annandale treats Doom’s Latveria and his influence upon his subjects. It slots in neatly with some of the greats, Lee & Kirby, Jonathan Hickman, Roger Stern, etc with the acknowledgement that Doom is indeed a despot with an iron fist and a will absolute, but one who cares for the wellbeing of his country. Through dialogue from his subjects like the skittish Father Grigori Zargo and diehard loyal Captain Kariana Verlak, the reader gets the sense that Doom’s rule may be the best leadership Latveria has ever known. (A brief aside: another great strength of The Harrowing of Doom that has to be mentioned is the fleshing out of these different original characters. Maria von Helm was a particularly welcome addition, as a close friend of Doom’s mother and a far more empathetic magic user compared to him.)

Verlak is openly married to Dr. Elsa Orloff, a trans woman and neurosurgeon of international renown. Both of them had experienced the Fortunov rule that predated Doom’s, with Orloff even having fled Fortunov’s Latveria when she first come out as transgender, in fear of his tyrannical rule and the dangerously transphobic legislature he enforced called “The Laws of the Person.” It is apparent that Doom exists in obvious juxtaposition to the prior ruler’s bigotry. Beyond the total erasure of all previous discrimination and state-enforced bigotry, he has Verlak appointed in a role of great prominence, gave Orloff the tools she needed to succeed in her field, and even shares an exchange with her where he remarks that he knows her from her publications in the Lancet Neurology and that he appreciates them for their ���speculative” approach. In an excellent exchange between Father Zargo and the rebel Prince Fortunov, the priest, who is by far Doom’s number one fan, explains Doom’s mesmerizing hold on the populace and the benefits they reap from his rule, despite it being a despotic one:

“I’ll be explicit, all the same,” said Zargo. “Doom is a sun king, even more fully than Louis XIV ever was. Latveria is a world power. How? Because of Doom and only because of Doom. Latveria’s strength and its wealth come from his inventions. And the beams of his sun touch every citizen. Universal basic income, free healthcare, free schooling, free universities, free training to the highest level of your calling - all of these things flow from Doom.”

“Free?” Fortunov snarled.

“The price is obedience, yes,” said Zargo, “And yes, Doom is feared.” Zargo stopped himself from saying Vladimir was feared and hated. [...] “Even though Doom is feared, he also is Latveria in every sense that matters.”

What I really appreciated was the author’s ability to walk the tightrope of acknowledging how beneficial Doom is for the country and his protectiveness over his domain, whilst also acknowledging Doom’s intense paternalism that ultimately favors his own goals. Doom, as well-read comic fans would know, is heralded as one of Marvel’s master manipulators. It’s a great strength of this novel to see him exerting his willpower and the strength of his personality to manipulate and sometimes, fully overpower that of his subjects. Father Zargo is definitely the most profound victim of this, a man with ties to both the church and the occult. Through the novel, Doom insistently pushes him towards the latter, his priorities made clear in one sentence: “The work was what mattered. Zargo’s soul was not Doom’s concern.” An especially interesting scene occurs later in the novel. Without too much elaboration, Doom performs an experiment where he uses the old Latverian nobility as guinea pigs.  This was something I immensely liked, corroborating one of my own personal perceptions of Doom. It’s always made sense to me that Doom would continue to hold a certain amount of disdain for Latverian high society, even after he went from low class Romani boy to monarch himself. 

(“The Fantastic Origin of Doctor Doom,” Fantastic Four Annual #2.)

Afterwards his partner, Maria von Helm, muses aloud that she always wondered why Doom let vestiges of the old regime remain, to which Doom responds: “Now you know. The aristocracy has its uses, and the advantages of being disposable.” It’s maybe my favorite example in the book of the exceptions to Doom’s purported benevolence. He does want the country to flourish and for his subjects to prosper, but this intent can be superseded by his innately ambitious nature and his own personal biases. It’s clear at several points in the book that Annandale is obviously well-read on Doom himself, but it was especially in the capturing of this nuance that it really stuck out to me in a big way. (As well as the fun reference to Doom’s brief jaunt in the French Riviera in Supervillain Team-Up!)

Outside of this core aspect of his characterization, I really enjoyed how the novel not only built up Doom’s cult of personality, but emphasized the sheer magnetism of Doom himself, in person. Constantly, characters find themselves buffeted by strength of his will, craving his approval or cowering and scrambling to avoid his displeasure. It’s a great true-to-character depiction of interactions between Doom and Latverian citizens, dynamics that were only touched upon briefly in the periphery of most comics involving Doom. I think, ironically, this is also perhaps the source of one of the novel’s few weaknesses. By keeping the book very Latveria-focused, Annandale does an excellent job of adding world-building on every level, from expounding on Latverian national holidays to the layouts of Doomstadt to the country’s storied history with witches predating Doom and his mother. But the fact that Doom mostly interacts with those beneath him or those who work for him gives the reader a bit of a myopic, overtly flattering perspective of him as almost too certain, too powerful, too unfeeling. I suppose it serves the scope of the novel for Doom to be more an obelisk of a man than fully well-rounded, but I contest that one of the best things about his character is that his indomitable exterior hides a deep well of pain and uncertainty. 

(“In The Clutches of Doctor Doom,” Fantastic Four #17.)

(“Oath of Fealty,” Doctor Doom #7.)

The novel obviously perceives Doom as Byronic, there’s even excerpts from Manfred interspersed between chapters that I greatly enjoyed, but I did find the heart of the Byronic character a little lacking here. Where Manfred bares his soul alone in monologue or to others, Doom, for the most part, does not. There are definitely brief allusions to the trials he’s faced, but he seems rarely prone to doubt or vulnerability until the very end. (For example, the central task is the attempt to rescue Cynthia von Doom’s soul, but little time is spent dwelling on this very human connection between mother and son.) Or even self-admitted imperfection! Interestingly, I only ever caught one mention of his scars in the entire novel. 

The Harrowing of Doom seems to prescribe to the line of thought that the mask is the only true face of Doom’s that matters, but I think with that philosophy, it stays firmly within the character’s own comfort zone. And his psyche never feels truly challenged, because there’s no worthy challenger. Doom knows without a doubt that he is Fortunov’s superior, so there’s no real interpersonal friction there. It left me keenly interested in seeing how the author would write Doom in the presence of someone like Reed Richards, an opponent who has historically brought out Doom’s baser instincts and invoked his self-doubt, drawing out his flaws and humanity in the process. Hopefully Marvel approves a sequel!

Doubtlessly, it’s still a strong entry into Marvel’s Doom canon and an excellent read for anyone who enjoys the character and is familiar with his history. The novel gives a sprawling, detailed look at Latveria and fleshes out both country and countrymen with aplomb. I took real delight at the indirect peeks at Doom’s personality through other characters’s observations or simple exposition. Some notable examples include Doom’s occult librarian wondering if he had been appointed out of spite of his witch-hunter ancestry, Zargo noting the west wing of Werner Academy was dedicated to clinical research in a nod to Werner von Doom’s work as a healer, and my favorite: the paintings within Castle Doom being impressionistic depictions of Doom’s ancestors, “people long buried, long forgotten, and in their lifetimes ignored or worse.”  

The conflict also moves at an engaging, brisk pace and smartly takes advantage of the widely known fact that Doom is preoccupied every Midsummer Night and turns that into an opening to be exploited by Fortunov, who also is well characterized throughout the novel and even experiences his own personal growth.

(“Though Some Call It Magic!”, Astonishing Tales #8)

Essentially, the product is a great novel about Doctor Doom influenced by strong comic lore knowledge, Gothic and Romance literature, horror cinema (According to the author, Doom’s lab is modeled after the lab from The Bride of Frankenstein!), and fantasy. If that sounds like something up your alley, definitely check it out. It gets a wholehearted recommendation from me. 

About Marvel Entertainment

Marvel Entertainment, LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company, is one of the world’s most prominent character-based entertainment companies, built on a proven library of more than 8,000 characters featured in a variety of media for over eighty years. Marvel utilizes its character franchises in entertainment, licensing, publishing, games, and digital media.

For more information visit marvel.com. © 2020 MARVEL

[holyhellpod]

Holy Hell: 3. Metanarrativity: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship? aka the analysis no one asked for.

In this ep, we delve into authorship, narrative, fandom and narrative meaning. And somehow, as always, bring it back to Cas and Misha Collins.

(Note: the reason I didn’t talk about Billie’s authorship and library is because I completely forgot it existed until I watched season 13 “Advanced Thanatology” again, while waiting for this episode to upload. I’ll find a way to work her into later episodes tho!)

I had to upload it as a new podcast to Spotify so if you could just re-subscribe that would be great! Or listen to it at these other links.

Please listen to the bit at the beginning about monetisation and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to message me here.

Apple | Spotify | Google

Transcript under the cut!

Warnings: discussions of incest, date rape, rpf, war, 9/11, the bush administration, abuse, mental health, addiction, homelessness. Most of these are just one off comments, they’re not full discussions.

Meta-Textuality: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship?

In the third episode of Season 6, “The Third Man,” Balthazar says to Cas, “you tore up the whole script and burned the pages.” That is the fundamental idea the writers of the first five seasons were trying to sell us: whatever grand plan the biblical God had cooking up is worth nothing in face of the love these men have—for each other and the world. Sam, Bobby, Cas and Dean will go to any lengths to protect one another and keep people safe. What’s real? What’s worth saving? People are real. Families are worth saving. 

This show plugs free will as the most important thing a person, angel, demon or otherwise can have. The fact of the matter is that Dean was always going to fight against the status quo, Sam was always going to go his own way, and Bobby was always going to do his best for his boys. The only uncertainty in the entire narrative is Cas. He was never meant to rebel. He was never meant to fall from Heaven. He was supposed to fall in line, be a good soldier, and help bring on the apocalypse, but Cas was the first agent of free will in the show’s timeline. Sam followed Lucifer, Dean followed Michael, and John gave himself up for the sins of his children, at once both a God and Jesus figure. But Cas wasn’t modelled off anyone else. He is original. There are definitely some parallels to Ruby, but I would argue those are largely unintentional. Cas broke the mold. 

That’s to say nothing of the impact he’s had on the fanbase, and the show itself, which would not have reached 15 seasons and be able to end the way they wanted it to without Cas and Misha Collins. His back must be breaking from carrying the entire show. 

But what the holy hell are we doing here today? Not just talking about Cas. We’re talking about metanarrativity: as I define it, and for purposes of this episode, the story within a story, and the act of storytelling. We’re going to go through a select few episodes which I think exemplify the best of what this show has to offer in terms of framing the narrative. We’ll talk about characters like Chuck and Becky and the baby dykes in season 10. And most importantly we’ll talk about the audience’s role, our role, in the reciprocal relationship of storytelling. After all, a tv show is nothing without the viewer.

I was in fact introduced to the concept of metanarrativity by Supernatural, so the fact that I’m revisiting it six years after I finished my degree to talk about the show is one of life’s little jokes.

 I’m brushing off my degree and bringing out the big guns (aka literary theorists) to examine this concept. This will be yet another piece of analysis that would’ve gone well in my English Lit degree, but I’ll try not to make it dry as dog shit. 

First off, I’m going to argue that the relationship between the creators of Supernatural and the fans has always been a dialogue, albeit with a power imbalance. Throughout the series, even before explicitly metanarrative episodes like season 10 “Fan Fiction” and season 4 “the monster at the end of this book,” the creators have always engaged in conversations with the fans through the show. This includes but is not limited to fan conventions, where the creators have actual, live conversations with the fans. Misha Collins admitted at a con that he’d read fanfiction of Cas while he was filming season 4, but it’s pretty clear even from the first season that the creators, at the very least Eric Kripke, were engaging with fans. The show aired around the same time as Twitter and Tumblr were created, both of which opened up new passageways for fans to interact with each other, and for Twitter and Facebook especially, new passageways for fans to interact with creators and celebrities.

But being the creators, they have ultimate control over what is written, filmed and aired, while we can only speculate and make our own transformative interpretations. But at least since s4, they have engaged in meta narrative construction that at once speaks to fans as well as expands the universe in fun and creative ways. My favourite episodes are the ones where we see the Winchesters through the lens of other characters, such as the season 3 episode “Jus In Bello,” in which Sam and Dean are arrested by Victor Henriksen, and the season 7 episode “Slash Fiction” in which Dean and Sam’s dopplegangers rob banks and kill a bunch of people, loathe as I am to admit that season 7 had an effect on any part of me except my upchuck reflex. My second favourite episodes are the meta episodes, and for this episode of Holy Hell, we’ll be discussing a few: The French Mistake, he Monster at the end of this book, the real ghostbusters, Fan Fiction, Metafiction, and Don’t Call Me Shurley. I’ll also discuss Becky more broadly, because, like, of course I’ll be discussing Becky, she died for our sins. 

Let’s take it back. The Monster At The End Of This Book — written by Julie Siege and Nancy Weiner and directed by Mike Rohl. Inarguably one of the better episodes in the first five seasons. Not only is Cas in it, looking so beautiful, but Sam gets something to do, thank god, and it introduces the character of Chuck, who becomes a source of comic relief over the next two seasons. The episode starts with Chuck Shurley, pen named Carver Edlund after my besties, having a vision while passed out drunk. He dreams of Sam and Dean larping as Feds and finding a series of books based on their lives that Chuck has written. They eventually track Chuck down, interrogate him, and realise that he’s a prophet of the lord, tasked with writing the Winchester Gospels. The B plot is Sam plotting to kill Lilith while Dean fails to get them out of the town to escape her. The C plot is Dean and Cas having a moment that strengthens their friendship and leads further into Cas’s eventual disobedience for Dean. Like the movie Disobedience. Exactly like the movie Disobedience. Cas definitely spits in Dean’s mouth, it’s kinda gross to be honest. Maybe I’m just not allo enough to appreciate art. 

When Eric Kripke was showrunner of the first five seasons of Supernatural,  he conceptualised the character of Chuck. Kripke as the author-god introduced the character of the author-prophet who would later become in Jeremy Carver’s showrun seasons the biblical God. Judith May Fathallah writes in “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural” that Kripke writes himself both into and out of the text, ending his era with Chuck winking at the camera, saying, “nothing really ends,” and disappearing. Kripke stayed on as producer, continuing to write episodes through Sera Gamble’s era, and was even inserted in text in the season 6 episode “The French Mistake”. So nothing really does end, not Kripke’s grip on the show he created, not even the show itself, which fans have jokingly referred to as continuing into its 16th season. Except we’re not joking. It will die when all of us are dead, when there is no one left to remember it. According to W R Fisher, humans are homo narrans, natural storytellers. The Supernatural fandom is telling a fidelitous narrative, one which matches our own beliefs, values and experiences instead of that of canon. Instead of, at Fathallah says, “the Greek tradition, that we should struggle to do the right thing simply because it is right, though we will suffer and be punished anyway,” the fans have created an ending for the characters that satisfies each and every one of our desires, because we each create our own endings. It’s better because we get to share them with each other, in the tradition of campfire stories, each telling our own version and building upon the others. If that’s not the epitome of mythmaking then I don’t know. It’s just great. Dean and Cas are married, Eileen and Sam are married, Jack is sometimes a baby who Claire and Kaia are forced to babysit, Jody and Donna are gonna get hitched soon. It’s season 17, time for many weddings, and Kevin Tran is alive. Kripke, you have no control over this anymore, you crusty hag. 

Chuck is introduced as someone with power, but not influence over the story, only how the story is told through the medium of the novels. It’s basically a very badly written, non authorised biography, and Charlie reading literally every book and referencing things she should have no knowledge of is so damn creepy and funny. At first Chuck is surprised by his characters coming to life, despite having written it already, and when shown the intimidating array of weapons in Baby’s trunk he gets real scared. Which is the appropriate response for a skinny 5-foot-8 white guy in a bathrobe who writes terrible fantasy novels for a living. 

As far as I can remember, this is the first explicitly metanarrative episode in the series, or at least the first one with in world consequences. It builds upon the lore of Christianity, angels, and God, while teasing what’s to come. Chuck and Sam have a conversation about how the rest of the season is going to play out, and Sam comes away with the impression that he’ll go down with the ship. They touch on Sam’s addiction to demon blood, which Chuck admits he didn’t write into the books, because in the world of supernatural, addiction should be demonised ha ha at every opportunity, except for Dean’s alcoholism which is cool and manly and should never be analysed as an unhealthy trauma coping mechanism. 

Chuck is mostly impotent in the story of Sam and Dean, but his very presence presents an element of good luck that turns quickly into a force of antagonism in the series four finale, “Lucifer Rising”, when the archangel Raphael who defeats Lilith in this episode also kills Cas in the finale. It’s Cas’s quick thinking and Dean’s quick doing that resolve the episode and save them from Lilith, once again proving that free will is the greatest force in the universe. Cas is already tearing up pages and burning scripts. The fandom does the same, acting as gods of their own making in taking canon and transforming it into fan art. The fans aren’t impotent like Chuck, but neither do we have sway over the story in the way that Cas and Dean do. Sam isn’t interested in changing the story in the same way—he wants to kill Lilith and save the world, but in doing so continues the story in the way it was always supposed to go, the way the angels and the demons and even God wanted him to. 

Neither of them are author-gods in the way that God is. We find out later that Chuck is in fact the real biblical god, and he engineers everything. The one thing he doesn’t engineer, however, is Castiel, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Real Ghostbusters

Season 5’s “The real ghostbusters,” written by Nancy Weiner and Erik Kripke, and directed by James L Conway, situates the Winchesters at a fan convention for the Supernatural books. While there, they are confronted by a slew of fans cosplaying as Sam, Dean, Bobby, the scarecrow, Azazel, and more. They happen to stumble upon a case, in the midst of the game where the fans pretend to be on a case, and with the help of two fans cosplaying as Sam and Dean, they put to rest a group of homicidal ghost children and save the day. Chuck as the special guest of the con has a hero moment that spurs Becky on to return his affections. And at the end, we learn that the Colt, which they’ve been hunting down to kill the devil, was given to a demon named Crowley. It’s a fun episode, but ultimately skippable. This episode isn’t so much metanarrative as it is metatextual—metatextual meaning more than one layer of text but not necessarily about the storytelling in those texts—but let’s take a look at it anyway.

The metanarrative element of a show about a series of books about the brothers the show is based on is dope and expands upon what we saw in “the monster at the end of this book”. But the episode tells a tale about about the show itself, and the fandom that surrounds it. 

Where “The Monster At The End Of This Book” and the season 5 premiere “Sympathy For The Devil” poked at the coiled snake of fans and the concept of fandom, “the real ghostbusters” drags them into the harsh light of an enclosure and antagonises them in front of an audience. The metanarrative element revolves around not only the books themselves, but the stories concocted within the episode: namely Barnes and Demian the cosplayers and the story of the ghosts. The Winchester brothers’s history that we’ve seen throughout the first five seasons of the show is bared in a tongue in cheek way: while we cried with them when Sam and Dean fought with John, now the story is thrown out in such a way as to mock both the story and the fans’ relationship to it. Let me tell you, there is a lot to be made fun of on this show, but the fans’ relationship to the story of Sam, Dean and everyone they encounter along the way isn’t part of it. I don’t mean to be like, wow you can’t make fun of us ever because we’re special little snowflakes and we take everything so seriously, because you are welcome to make fun of us, but when the creators do it, I can’t help but notice a hint of malice. And I think that’s understandable in a way. Like The relationship between creator and fan is both layered and symbiotic. While Kripke and co no doubt owe the show’s popularity to the fans, especially as the fandom has grown and evolved over time, we’re not exactly free of sin. And don’t get me wrong, no fandom is. But the bad apples always seem to outweigh the good ones, and bad experiences can stick with us long past their due.

However, portraying us as losers with no lives who get too obsessed with this show — well, you know, actually, maybe they’re right. I am a loser with no life and I am too obsessed with this show. So maybe they have a point. But they’re so harsh about it. From wincestie Becky who they paint as a desperate shrew to these cosplayers who threaten Dean’s very perception of himself, we’re not painted in a very good light. 

Dean says to Demian and Barnes, “It must be nice to get out of your mom’s basement.” He’s judging them for deriving pleasure from dressing up and pretending to be someone else for a night. He doesn’t seem to get the irony that he does that for a living. As the seasons wore on, the creators made sure to include episodes where Dean’s inner geek could run rampant, often in the form of dressing up like a cowboy, such as season six “Frontierland” and season 13 “Tombstone”. I had to take a break from writing this to laugh for five minutes because Dean is so funny. He’s a car gay but he only likes one car. He doesn’t follow sports. His echolalia causes him to blurt out lines from his favourite movies. He’s a posse magnet. And he loves cosplay. But he will continually degrade and insult anyone who expresses interest in role play, fandom, or interests in general. Maybe that’s why Sam is such a boring person, because Dean as his mother didn’t allow him to have any interests outside of hunting. And when Sam does express interests, Dean insults him too. What a dick. He’s my soulmate, but I am not going to stop listening to hair metal for him. That’s where I draw the line. 

 Where “the monster at the end of this book” is concerned with narrative and authorship, “the real ghostbusters” is concerned with fandom and fan reactions to the show. It’s not really the best example to talk about in an episode about metanarrativity, but I wanted to include it anyway. It veers from talk of narrative by focusing on the people in the periphery of the narrative—the fans and the author. In season 9 “Metafiction,” Metatron asks the question, who gives the story meaning? The text would have you believe it’s the characters. The angels think it’s God. The fandom think it’s us. The creators think it’s them. Perhaps we will never come to a consensus or even a satisfactory answer to this question. Perhaps that’s the point.

The ultimate takeaway from this episode is that ordinary people, the people Sam and Dean save, the people they save the world for, the people they die for again and again, are what give their story meaning. Chuck defeats a ghost and saves the people in the conference room from being murdered. Demian and Barnes, don’t ask me which is which, burn the bodies of the ghost children and lay their spirits to rest. The text says that ordinary, every day people can rise to the challenge of becoming extraordinary. It’s not a bad note to end on, by any means. And then we find out that Demian and Barnes are a couple, which of course Dean is surprised at, because he lacks object permanence. 

This is no doubt influenced by how a good portion of the transformative fandom are queer, and also a nod to the wincesties and RPF writers like Becky who continue to bottom feed off the wrong message of this show. But then, the creators encourage that sort of thing, so who are the real clowns here? Everyone. Everyone involved with this show in any way is a clown, except for the crew, who were able to feed their families for more than a decade. 

Okay side note… over the past year or so I’ve been in process of realising that even in fandom queers are in the minority. I know the statistic is that 10% of the world population is queer, but that doesn’t seem right to me? Maybe because 4/5 closest friends are queer and I hang around queers online, but I also think I lack object permanence when it comes to straight people. Like I just do not interact with straight people on a regular basis outside of my best friend and parents and school. So when I hear that someone in fandom is straight I’m like, what the fuck… can you keep that to yourself please? Like if I saw Misha Collins coming out as straight I would be like, I didn’t ask and you didn’t have to tell. Okay I’m mostly joking, but I do forget straight people exist. Mostly I don’t think about whether people are gay or trans or cis or straight unless they’ve explicitly said it and then yes it does colour my perception of them, because of course it would. If they’re part of the queer community, they’re my people. And if they’re straight and cis, then they could very well pose a threat to me and my wellbeing. But I never ask people because it’s not my business to ask. If they feel comfortable enough to tell me, that’s awesome.  I think Dean feels the same way. Towards the later seasons at least, he has a good reaction when it’s revealed that someone is queer, even if it is mostly played off as a joke. It’s just that he doesn’t have a frame of reference in his own life to having a gay relationship, either his or someone he’s close to. He says to Cesar and Jesse in season 11 “The Critters” that they fight like brothers, because that’s the only way he knows how to conceptualise it. He doesn’t have a way to categorise his and Cas’s relationship, which is in many ways, long before season 15 “Despair,” harking back even to the parallels between Ruby and Cas in season 3 and 4, a romantic one, aside from that Cas is like a brother to him. Because he’s never had anyone in his life care for him the way Cas does that wasn’t Sam and Bobby, and he doesn’t recognise the romantic element of their relationship until literally Cas says it to him in the third last episode, he just—doesn’t know what his and Cas’s relationship is. He just really doesn’t know. And he grew up with a father who despised him for taking the mom and wife role in their family, the role that John placed him in, for being subservient to John’s wishes where Sam was more rebellious, so of course he wouldn’t understand either his own desires or those of anyone around him who isn’t explicitly shoving their tits in his face. He moulded his entire personality around what he thought John wanted of him, and John says to him explicitly in season 14 “Lebanon”, “I thought you’d have a family,” meaning, like him, wife and two rugrats. And then, dear god, Dean says, thinking of Sam, Cas, Jack, Claire, and Mary, “I have a family.” God that hurts so much. But since for most of his life he hasn’t been himself, he’s been the man he thought his father wanted him to be, he’s never been able to examine his own desires, wants and goals. So even though he’s really good at reading people, he is not good at reading other people’s desires unless they have nefarious intentions. Because he doesn’t recognise what he feels is attraction to men, he doesn’t recognise that in anyone else. 

Okay that’s completely off topic, wow. Getting back to metanarrativity in “The Real Ghostbusters,” I’ll just cap it off by saying that the books in this episode are more a frame for the events than the events themselves. However, there are some good outtakes where Chuck answers some questions, and I’m not sure how much of that is scripted and how much is Rob Benedict just going for it, but it lends another element to the idea of Kripke as author-god. The idea of a fan convention is really cool, because at this point Supernatural conventions had been running for about 4 years, since 2006. It’s definitely a tribute to the fans, but also to their own self importance. So it’s a mixed bag, considering there were plenty of elements in there that show the good side of fandom and fans, but ultimately the Winchesters want nothing to do with it, consider it weird, and threaten Chuck when he says he’ll start releasing books again, which as far as they know is his only source of income. But it’s a fun episode and Dean is a grouchy bitch, so who the holy hell cares?

Season 10 episode “fanfiction” written by my close personal friend Robbie Thompson and directed by Phil Sgriccia is one of the funniest episodes this show has ever done. Not only is it full of metatextual and metanarrative jokes, the entire premise revolves around fanservice, but in like a fun and interesting way, not fanservice like killing the band Kansas so that Dean can listen to “Carry On My Wayward Son” in heaven twice. Twice. One version after another. Like I would watch this musical seven times in theatre, I would buy the soundtrack, I would listen to it on repeat and make all my friends listen to it when they attend my online Jitsi birthday party. This musical is my Hamilton. Top ten episodes of this show for sure. The only way it could be better is if Cas was there. And he deserved to be there. He deserved to watch little dyke Castiel make out with her girlfriend with her cute little wings, after which he and Dean share uncomfortable eye contact. Dean himself is forever coming to terms with the fact that gay people exist, but Cas should get every opportunity he can to hear that it’s super cool and great and awesome to be queer. But really he should be in every episode, all of them, all 300 plus episodes including the ones before angels were introduced. I’m going to commission the guy who edits Paddington into every movie to superimpose Cas standing on the highway into every episode at least once.

“Fan Fiction” starts with a tv script and the words “Supernatural pilot created by Eric Kripke”. This Immediately sets up the idea that it’s toying with narrative. Blah blah blah, some people go missing, they stumble into a scene from their worst nightmares: the school is putting on a musical production of a show inspired by the Supernatural books. It’s a comedy of errors. When people continue to go missing, Sam and Dean have to convince the girls that something supernatural is happening, while retaining their dignity and respect. They reveal that they are the real Sam and Dean, and Dean gives the director Marie a summary of their lives over the last five seasons, but they aren’t taken seriously. Because, like, of course they aren’t. Even when the girls realise that something supernatural is happening, they don’t actually believe that the musical they’ve made and the series of books they’re basing it on are real. Despite how Sam and Dean Winchester were literal fugitives for many years at many different times, and this was on the news, and they were wanted by the FBI, despite how they pretend to be FBI, and no one mentions it??? Did any of the staffwriters do the required reading or just do what I used to do for my 40 plus page readings of Baudrillard and just skim the first sentence of every paragraph? Neat hack for you: paragraphs are set up in a logical order of Topic, Example, Elaboration, Linking sentence. Do you have to read 60 pages of some crusty French dude waxing poetic about how his best friend Pierre wants to shag his wife and making that your problem? Read the first and last sentence of every paragraph. Boom, done. Just cut your work in half. 

The musical highlights a lot of the important moments of the show so far. The brothers have, as Charlie Bradbury says, their “broment,” and as Marie says, their “boy melodrama scene,” while she insinuates that there is a sexual element to their relationship. This show never passed up an opportunity to mention incest. It’s like: mentioning incest 5000 km, not being disgusting 1 km, what a hard decision. Actually, they do have to walk on their knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. But there are other moments—such as Mary burning on the ceiling, a classic, Castiel waiting for Dean at the side of the highway, and Azazel poisoning Sam. With the help of the high schoolers, Sam and Dean overcome Calliope, the muse and bad guy of the episode, and save the day. What began as their lives reinterpreted and told back to them turns into a story they have some agency over.

In this episode, as opposed to “The Monster At The End Of This Book,” The storytelling has transferred from an alcoholic in a bathrobe into the hands of an overbearing and overachieving teenage girl, and honestly why not. Transformative fiction is by and large run by women, and queer women, so Marie and her stage manager slash Jody Mills’s understudy Maeve are just following in the footsteps of legends. This kind of really succinctly summarises the difference between curative fandom and transformative fandom, the former of which is populated mostly by men, and the latter mostly by women. As defined by LordByronic in 2015, Curative fandom is more like enjoying the text, collecting the merchandise, organising the knowledge — basically Reddit in terms of fandom curation. Transformative fandom is transforming the source text in some way — making fanart, fanfic, mvs, or a musical — basically Tumblr in general, and Archive of our own specifically. Like what do non fandom people even do on Tumblr? It is a complete mystery to me. Whereas Chuck literally writes himself into the narrative he receives through visions, Marie and co have agency and control over the narrative by writing it themselves. 

Chuck does appear in the episode towards the end, his first appearance after five seasons. The theory that he killed those lesbian theatre girls makes me wanna curl up and die, so I don’t subscribe to it. Chuck watched the musical and he liked it and he gave unwarranted notes and then he left, the end.

The Supernatural creative team is explicitly acknowledging the fandom’s efforts by making this episode. They’re writing us in again, with more obsessive fans, but with lethbians this time, which makes it infinitely better. And instead of showing us as potential date rapists, we’re just cool chicks who like to make art. And that’s fucken awesome. 

I just have to note that the characters literally say the word Destiel after Dean sees the actors playing Dean and Cas making out. He storms off and tells Sam to shut the fuck up when Sam makes fun of him, because Dean’s sexuality is NOT threatened he just needs to assert his dominance as a straight hetero man who has NEVER looked at another man’s lips and licked his own. He just… forgets that gay people exist until someone reminds him. BUT THEN, after a rousing speech that is stolen from Rent or Wicked or something, he echoes Marie’s words back, saying “put as much sub into that text as you possibly can.” What does Dean know about subbing, I wonder. Okay I’m suddenly reminded that he did literally go to a kink bar and get hit on by a leather daddy. Oh Dean, the experiences you have as a broad-shouldered, pixie-faced man with cowboy legs. You were born for this role.

Metatron is my favourite villain. As one tumblr user pointed out, he is an evil English literature major, which is just a normal English literature major. The season nine episode “Meta Fiction” written by my main man robbie thompson and directed by thomas j wright, happens within a curious season. Castiel, once again, becomes the leader of a portion of the heavenly host to take down Metatron, and Dean is affected by the Mark Of Cain. Sam was recently possessed by Gadreel, who killed Kevin in Sam’s body and then decided to run off with Metatron. Metatron himself is recruiting angels to join him, in the hopes that he can become the new God. It’s the first introduction of Hannah, who encourages Cas to recruit angels himself to take on Metatron. Also, we get to see Gabriel again, who is always a delight. 

This episode is a lot of fun. Metatron poses questions like, who tells a story and who is the most important person in the telling? Is it the writer? The audience? He starts off staring over his typewriter to address the camera, like a pompous dickhead. No longer content with consuming stories, he’s started to write his own. And they are hubristic ones about becoming God, a better god than Chuck ever was, but to do it he needs to kill a bunch of people and blame it on Cas. So really, he’s actually exactly like Chuck who blamed everything on Lucifer. 

But I think the most apt analogy we can use for this in terms of who is the creator is to think of Metatron as a fanfiction writer. He consumes the media—the Winchester Gospels—and starts to write his own version of events—leading an army to become God and kill Cas. Nevermind that no one has been able to kill Cas in a way that matters or a way that sticks. Which is canon, and what Metatron is trying to do is—well not fanon because it actually does impact the Winchesters’ storyline. It would be like if one of the writers of Supernatural began writing Supernatural fanfiction before they got a job on the show. Which as my generation and the generations coming after me get more comfortable with fanfiction and fandom, is going to be the case for a lot of shows. I think it’s already the case for Riverdale. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the woman who wrote the bi Dean essay go to work on Riverdale? Or something? I dunno, I have the post saved in my tumblr likes but that is quagmire of epic proportions that I will easily get lost in if I try to find it. 

Okay let me flex my literary degree. As Englund and Leach say in “Ethnography and the metanarratives of modernity,” “The influential “literary turn,” in which the problems of ethnography were seen as largely textual and their solutions as lying in experimental writing seems to have lost its impetus.” This can be taken to mean, in the context of Supernatural, that while Metatron’s writings seek to forge a new path in history, forgoing fate for a new kind of divine intervention, the problem with Metatron is that he’s too caught up in the textual, too caught up in the writing, to be effectual. And this as we see throughout seasons 9, 10 and 11, has no lasting effect. Cas gets his grace back, Dean survives, and Metatron becomes a powerless human. In this case, the impetus is his grace, which he loses when Cas cuts it out of him, a mirror to Metatron cutting out Cas’s grace. 

However, I realise that the concept of ethnography in Supernatural is a flawed one, ethnography being the observation of another culture: a lot of the angels observe humanity and seem to fit in. However, Cas has to slowly acclimatise to the Winchesters as they tame him, but he never quite fit in—missing cues, not understanding jokes or Dean’s personal space, the scene where he says, “We have a guinea pig? Where?” Show him the guinea pig Sam!!! He wants to see it!!! At most he passes as a human with autism. Cas doesn’t really observe humanity—he observes nature, as seen in season 7 “reading is fundamental” and “survival of the fittest”. Even the human acts he talks about in season 6 “the man who would be king” are from hundreds or thousands of years ago. He certainly doesn’t observe popular culture, which puts him at odds with Dean, who is made up of 90 per cent pop culture references and 10 per cent flannel. Metatron doesn’t seek to blend in with humanity so much as control it, which actually is the most apt example of ethnography for white people in the last—you know, forever. But of course the writers didn’t seek to make this analogy. It is purely by chance, and maybe I’m the only person insane enough to realise it. But probably not. There are a lot of cookies much smarter than me in the Supernatural fandom and they’ve like me have grown up and gone to university and gotten real jobs in the real world and real haircuts. I’m probably the only person to apply Englund and Leach to it though.

And yes, as I read this paper I did need to have one tab open on Google, with the word “define” in the search bar. 

Metatron has a few lines in this that I really like. He says: 

“The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.”

“You’re going to have to follow my script.”

“I’m an entity of my word.”

It’s really obvious, but they’re pushing the idea that Metatron has become an agent of authorship instead of just a consumer of media. He even throws a Supernatural book into his fire — a symbolic act of burning the script and flipping the writer off, much like Cas did to God and the angels in season 5. He’s not a Kripke figure so much as maybe a Gamble, Carver or Dabb figure, in that he usurps Chuck and becomes the author-god. This would be extremely postmodern of him if he didn’t just do exactly what Chuck was doing, except worse somehow. In fact, it’s postmodern of Cas to reject heaven’s narrative and fall for Dean. As one tumblr user points out, Cas really said “What’s fate compared to Dean Winchester?”

Okay this transcript is almost 8000 words already, and I still have two more episodes to review, and more things to say, so I’ll leave you with this. Metatron says to Cas, “Out of all of God’s wind up toys, you’re the only one with any spunk.” Why Cas has captured his attention comes down more than anything to a process of elimination. Most angels fucking suck. They follow the rules of whoever puts themselves in charge, and they either love Cas or hate him, or just plainly wanna fuck him, and there have been few angels who stood out. Balthazar was awesome, even though I hated him the first time I watched season 6. He UNSUNK the Titanic. Legend status. And Gabriel was of course the OG who loves to fuck shit up. But they’re gone at this stage in the narrative, and Cas survives. Cas always survives. He does have spunk. And everyone wants to fuck him.  

Season 11 episode 20 “Don’t Call Me Shurley,” the last episode written by the Christ like figure of Robbie Thompson — are we sensing a theme here? — and directed by my divine enemy Robert Singer, starts with Metatron dumpster diving for food. I’m not even going to bother commenting on this because like… it’s supernatural and it treats complex issues like homelessness and poverty with zero nuance. Like the Winchesters live in poverty but it’s fun and cool because they always scrape by but Metatron lives in poverty and it’s funny. Cas was homeless and it was hard but he needed to do it to atone for his sins, and Metatron is homeless and it’s funny because he brought it on himself by being a murderous dick. Fucking hell. Robbie, come on. The plot focuses on God, also known as Chuck Shurley, making himself known to Metatron and asking for Metatron’s opinion on his memoir. Meanwhile, the Winchesters battle another bout of infectious serial killer fog sent by Amara. At the end of the episode, Chuck heals everyone affected by the fog and reveals himself to Sam and Dean. 

Chuck says that he didn’t foresee Metatron trying to become god, but the idea of Season 15 is that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all their lives. When Metatron tries, he fails miserably, is locked up in prison, tortured by Dean, then rendered useless as a human and thrown into the world without a safety net. His authorship is reduced to nothing, and he is reduced to dumpster diving for food. He does actually attempt to live his life as someone who records tragedies as they happen and sells the footage to news stations, which is honestly hilarious and amazing and completely unsurprising because Metatron is, at the heart of it, an English Literature major. In true bastard style, he insults Chuck’s work and complains about the bar, but slips into his old role of editor when Chuck asks him to. 

The theory I’m consulting for this uses the term metanarrative in a different way than I am. They consider it an overarching narrative, a grand narrative like religion. Chuck’s biography is in a sense most loyal to Middleton and Walsh’s view of metanarrative: “the universal story of the world from arche to telos, a grand narrative encompassing world history from beginning to end.” Except instead of world history, it’s God’s history, and since God is construed in Supernatural as just some guy with some powers who is as fallible as the next some guy with some powers, his story has biases and agendas.  Okay so in the analysis I’m getting Middleton and Walsh’s quotes from, James K A Smith’s “A little story about metanarratives,” Smith dunks on them pretty bad, but for Supernatural purposes their words ring true. Think of them as the BuckLeming of Lyotard’s postmodern metanarrative analysis: a stopped clock right twice a day. Is anyone except me understanding the sequence of words I’m saying right now. Do I just have the most specific case of brain worms ever found in human history. I’m currently wearing my oversized Keith Haring shirt and dipping pretzels into peanut butter because it’s 3.18 in the morning and the homosexuals got to me. The total claims a comprehensive metanarrative of world history make do indeed, as Middleton and Walsh claim, lead to violence, stay with me here, because Chuck’s legacy is violence, and so is Metatron’s, and in trying to reject the metanarrative, Sam and Dean enact violence. Mostly Dean, because in season 15 he sacrifices his own son twice to defeat Chuck. But that means literally fighting violence with violence. Violence is, after all, all they know. Violence is the lens through which they interact with the world. If the writers wanted to do literally anything else, they could have continued Dean’s natural character progression into someone who eschews the violence that stems from intergeneration trauma — yes I will continue to use the phrase intergenerational trauma whenever I refer to Dean — and becomes a loving father and husband. Sam could eschew violence and start a monster rehabilitation centre with Eileen.

This episode of Holy Hell is me frantically grabbing at straws to make sense of a narrative that actively hates me and wants to kick me to death. But the violence Sam and Dean enact is not at a metanarrative level, because they are not author-gods of their own narrative. In season 15 “Atomic Monsters,” Becky points out that the ending of the Supernatural book series is bad because the brothers die, and then, in a shocking twist of fate, Dean does die, and the narrative is bad. The writers set themselves a goal post to kick through and instead just slammed their heat into the bars. They set up the dartboard and were like, let’s aim the darts at ourselves. Wouldn’t that be fun. Season 15’s writing is so grossly incompetent that I believe every single conspiracy theory that’s come out of the finale since November, because it’s so much more compelling than whatever the fuck happened on the road so far. Carry on? Why yes, I think I will carry on, carry on like a pork chop, screaming at the bars of my enclosure until I crack my voice open like an egg and spill out all my rage and frustration. The world will never know peace again. It’s now 3.29 and I’ve written over 9000 words of this transcript. And I’m not done.

Middleton and Walsh claim that metanarratives are merely social constructions masquerading as universal truths. Which is, exactly, Supernatural. The creators have constructed this elaborate web of narrative that they want to sell us as the be all and end all. They won’t let the actors discuss how they really feel about the finale. They won’t let Misha Collins talk about Destiel. They want us to believe it was good, actually, that Dean, a recovering alcoholic with a 30 year old infant son and a husband who loves him, deserved to die by getting NAILED, while Sam, who spent the last four seasons, the entirety of Andrew Dabb’s run as showrunner, excelling at creating a hunter network and romancing both the queen of hell and his deaf hunter girlfriend, should have lived a normie life with a normie faceless wife. Am I done? Not even close. I started this episode and I’m going to finish it.

When we find out that Chuck is God in the episode of season 11, it turns everything we knew about Chuck on its head. We find out in Season 15 that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all along, that everything that happened to them is his doing. The one thing he couldn’t control was Cas’s choice to rebel. If we take him at his word, Cas is the only true force of free will in the entire universe, and more specifically, the love that Cas had for Dean which caused him to rebel and fall from heaven. — This theory has holes of course. Why would Lucifer torture Lilith into becoming the first demon if he didn’t have free will? Did Chuck make him do that? And why? So that Chuck could be the hero and Lucifer the bad guy, like Lucifer claimed all along? That’s to say nothing of Adam and Eve, both characters the show introduced in different ways, one as an antagonist and the other as the narrative foil to Dean and Cas’s romance. Thinking about it makes my head hurt, so I’m just not gunna. 

So Chuck was doing the writing all along. And as Becky claims in “Atomic Monsters,” it’s bad writing. The writers explicitly said, the ending Chuck wrote is bad because there’s no Cas and everyone dies, and then they wrote an ending where there is no Cas and everyone dies. So talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. Talk about giant craters in the earth you could see from 800 kilometres away but you still fell into. Meanwhile fan writers have the opportunity to write a million different endings, all of which satisfy at least one person. The fandom is a hydra, prolific and unstoppable, and we’ll keep rewriting the ending a million more times.

And all this is not even talking about the fact that Chuck is a man, Metatron is a man, Sam and Dean and Cas are men, and the writers and directors of the show are, by an overwhelming majority, men. Most of them are white, straight, cis men. Feminist scholarship has done a lot to unpack the damage done by paternalistic approaches to theory, sociology, ethnography, all the -ys, but I propose we go a step further with these men. Kill them. Metanarratively, of course. Amara, the Darkness, God’s sister, had a chance to write her own story without Chuck, after killing everything in the universe, and I think she had the right idea. Knock it all down to build it from the ground up. Billie also had the opportunity to write a narrative, but her folly was, of course, putting any kind of faith in the Winchesters who are also grossly incompetent and often fail up. She is, as all author-gods on this show are, undone by Castiel. The only one with any spunk, the only one who exists outside of his own narrative confines, the only one the author-gods don’t have any control over. The one who died for love, and in dying, gave life. 

The French Mistake

Let’s change the channel. Let’s calm ourselves and cleanse our libras. Let’s commune with nature and chug some sage bongs. 

“The French Mistake” is a song from the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles. In the iconic second last scene of the film, as the cowboys fight amongst themselves, the camera pans back to reveal a studio lot and a door through which a chorus of gay dancersingers perform “the French Mistake”. The lyrics go, “Throw out your hands, stick out your tush, hands on your hips, give ‘em a push. You’ll be surprised you’re doing the French Mistake.” 

I’m not sure what went through the heads of the Supernatural creators when they came up with the season 6 episode, “The French Mistake,” written by the love of my life Ben Edlund and directed by some guy Charles Beeson. Just reading the Wikipedia summary is so batshit incomprehensible. In short: Balthazar sends Sam and Dean to an alternate universe where they are the actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, who play Sam and Dean on the tv show Supernatural. I don’t think this had ever been done in television history before. The first seven seasons of this show are certifiable. Like this was ten years ago. Think about the things that have happened in the last 10 slutty, slutty years. We have lived through atrocities and upheaval and the entire world stopping to mourn, but also we had twitter throughout that entire time, which makes it infinitely worse.

In this universe, Sam and Dean wear makeup, Cas is played by attractive crying man Misha Collins, and Genevieve Padalecki nee Cortese makes an appearance. Magic doesn’t exist, Serge has good ideas, and the two leads have to act in order to get through the day. Sorry man I do not know how to pronounce your name.

Sidenote: I don’t know if me being attracted aesthetically to Misha Collins is because he’s attractive, because this show has gaslighted me into thinking he’s attractive, or because Castiel’s iconic entrance in 2008 hit my developing mind like a torpedo full of spaghetti and blew my fucking brains all over the place. It’s one of life’s little mysteries and God’s little gifts.

Let’s talk about therapy. More specifically, “Agency and purpose in narrative therapy: questioning the postmodern rejection of metanarrative” by Cameron Lee. In this paper, Lee outlines four key ideas as proposed by Freedman and Combs:

Realities are socially constructed

Realities are constituted through language

Realities are organised and maintained through narrative

And there are no essential truths.

Let’s break this down in the case of this episode. Realities are socially constructed: the reality of Sam and Dean arose from the Bush era. Do I even need to elaborate? From what I understand with my limited Australian perception, and being a child at the time, 9/11 really was a prominent shifting point in the last twenty years. As Americans describe it, sometimes jokingly, it was the last time they were really truly innocent. That means to me that until they saw the repercussions of their government’s actions in funding turf wars throughout the middle east for a good chunk of the 20th Century, they allowed themselves to be hindered by their own ignorance. The threat of terrorism ran rampant throughout the States, spurred on by right wing nationalists and gun-toting NRA supporters, so it’s really no surprise that the show Supernatural started with the premise of killing everything in sight and driving around with only your closest kin and a trunk full of guns. Kripke constructed that reality from the social-political climate of the time, and it has wrought untold horrors on the minds of lesbians who lived through the noughties, in that we are now attracted to Misha Collins.

Number two: Realities are constituted through language. Before a show can become a show, it needs to be a script. It’s written down, typed up, and given to actors who say the lines out loud. In this respect, they are using the language of speech and words to convey meaning. But tv shows are not all about words, and they’re barely about scripts. From what I understand of being raised by television, they are about action, visuals, imagery, and behaviours. All of the work that goes into them—the scripts, the lighting, the audio, the sound mixing, the cameras, the extras, the ADs, the gaffing, the props, the stunts, everything—is about conveying a story through the medium of images. In that way, images are the language. The reality of the show Supernatural, inside the show Supernatural, is constituted through words: the script, the journalists talking to Sam, the makeup artist taking off Dean’s makeup, the conversations between the creators, the tweets Misha sends. But also through imagery: the fish tank in Jensen’s trailer, the model poses on the front cover of the magazine, the opulence of Jared’s house, Misha’s iconic sweater. Words and images are the language that constitutes both of these realities. Okay for real, I feel like I’ve only seen this episode max three times, including when I watched it for research for this episode, but I remember so much about it. 

Number three: realities are organised and maintained through narrative. In this universe of the French Mistake, their lives are structured around two narratives: the internal narrative of the show within the show, in which they are two actors on a tv set; and the episode narrative in which they need to keep the key safe and return to their own universe. This is made difficult by the revelation that magic doesn’t work in this universe, however, they find a way. Before they can get back, though, an avenging angel by the name of Virgil guns down author-god Eric Kripke and tries to kill the Winchesters. However, they are saved by Balthazar and the freeze frame and brought back into their own world, the world of Supernatural the show, not Supernatural the show within the show within the nesting doll. And then that reality is done with, never to be revisited or even mentioned, but with an impact that has lasted longer than the second Bush administration.

And number four: there are no essential truths. This one is a bit tricky because I can’t find what Lee means by essential truths, so I’m just going to interpret that. To me, essential truths means what lies beneath the narratives we tell ourselves. Supernatural was a show that ran for 15 years. Supernatural had actors. Supernatural was showrun by four different writers. In the show within a show, there is nothing, because that ceases to exist for longer than the forty two minute episode “The French Mistake”. And since Supernatural no longer exists except in our computers, it is nothing too. It is only the narratives we tell ourselves to sleep better at night, to wake up in the morning with a smile, to get through the day, to connect with other people, to understand ourselves better. It’s not even the narrative that the showrunners told, because they have no agency over it as soon as it shows up on our screens. The essential truth of the show is lost in the translation from creating to consuming. Who gives the story meaning? The people watching it and the people creating it. We all do. 

Lee says that humans are predisposed to construct narratives in order to make sense of the world. We see this in cultures from all over the world: from cave paintings to vases, from The Dreaming to Beowulf, humans have always constructed stories. The way you think about yourself is a story that you’ve constructed. The way you interact with your loved ones and the furries you rightfully cyberbully on Twitter is influenced by the narratives you tell yourself about them. And these narratives are intricate, expansive, personalised, and can colour our perceptions completely, so that we turn into a different person when we interact with one person as opposed to another. 

Whatever happened in season 6, most of which I want to forget, doesn’t interest me in the way I’m telling myself the writers intended. For me, the entirety of season 6 was based around the premise of Cas being in love with Dean, and the complete impotence of this love. He turns up when Dean calls, he agonises as he watches Dean rake leaves and live his apple pie life with Lisa, and Dean is the person he feels most horribly about betraying. He says, verbatim, to Sam, “Dean and I do share a more profound bond.” And Balthazar says, “You’re confusing me with the other angel, the one in the dirty trenchcoat who’s in love with you.” He says this in season 6, and we couldn’t do a fucken thing about it. 

The song “The French Mistake” shines a light on the hidden scene of gay men performing a gay narrative, in the midst of a scene about the manliest profession you can have: professional horse wrangler, poncho wearer, and rodeo meister, the cowboy. If this isn’t a perfect encapsulation of the lovestory between Dean and Cas, which Ben Edlund has been championing from day fucking one of Misha Collins walking onto that set with his sex hair and chapped lips, then I don’t know what the fuck we’re even doing here. What in the hell else could it possibly mean. The layers to this. The intricacy. The agendas. The subtextual AND blatant queerness. The micro aggressions Crowley aimed at Car in “The Man Who Would Be King,” another Bedlund special. Bed Edlund is a fucking genius. Bed Edlund is cool girl. Ben Edlund is the missing link. Bed Edlund IS wikileaks. Ben Edlund is a cool breeze on a humid summer day. Ben Edlund is the stop loading button on a browser tab. Ben Edlund is the perfect cross between Spotify and Apple Music, in which you can search for good playlists, but without having to be on Spotify. He can take my keys and fuck my wife. You best believe I’m doing an entire episode of Holy Hell on Bedlund’s top five. He is the reason I want to get into staffwriting on a tv show. I saw season 4 episode “On the head of a pin” when my brain was still torpedoed spaghetti mush from the premiere, and it nestled its way deep into my exposed bones, so that when I finally recovered from that, I was a changed person. My god, this transcript is 11,000 words, and I haven’t even finished the Becky section. Which is a good transition.

Oh, Becky. She is an incarnation of how the writers, or at least Kripke, view the fans. Watching season 5 “Sympathy for the Devil” live in 2009 was a whole fucking trip that I as a baby gay was not prepared for. Figuring out my sexuality was a journey that started with the Supernatural fandom and is in some aspects still raging against the dying of the light today. Add to that, this conception of the audience was this, like, personification of the librarian cellist from Juno, but also completely without boundaries, common sense, or shame. It made me wonder about my position in the narrative as a consumer consuming. Is that how Kripke saw me, specifically? Was I like Becky? Did my forays into DeanCasNatural on El Jay dot com make me a fucking loser whose only claim to fame is writing some nasty fanfiction that I’ve since deleted all traces of? Don’t get me wrong, me and my unhinged Casgirl friends loved Becky. I can’t remember if I ever wrote any fanfiction with her in it because I was mostly writing smut, which is extremely Becky coded of me, but I read some and my friends and I would always chat about her when she came up. She was great entertainment value before season 7. But in the eyes of the powers that be, Becky, like the fans themselves, are expendable. First they turned her into a desperate bride wannabe who drugs Sam so that he’ll be with her, then Chuck waves his hand and she disappears. We’re seeing now with regards to Destiel, Cas, and Misha Collins this erasure of them from the narrative. Becky says in season 15 “Atomic Monsters” that the ending Chuck writes is bad because, for one, there’s no Cas, and that’s exactly what’s happening to the text post-finale. It literally makes me insane akin to the throes of mania to think about the layers of this. They literally said, “No Cas = bad” and now Misha isn’t even allowed to talk in his Cassona voice—at least at the time I wrote that—to the detriment of the fans who care about him. It’s the same shit over and over. They introduce something we like, they realise they have no control over how much we like it, and then they pretend they never introduced it in the first place. Season 7, my god. The only reason Gamble brought back Cas was because the ratings were tanking the show. I didn’t even bother watching most of it live, and would just hear from my friends whether Cas was in the episodes or not. And then Sera, dear Sera, had the gall to say it was a Homer’s Odyssey narrative. I’m rusty on Homer aka I’ve never read it but apparently Odysseus goes away, ends up with a wife on an island somewhere, and then comes back to Terabithia like it never happened. How convenient. But since Sera Gamble loves to bury her gays, we can all guess why Cas was written out of the show: Cas being gay is a threat to the toxic heteronormativity spouted by both the show and the characters themselves. In season 15, after Becky gets her life together, has kids, gets married, and starts a business, she is outgrowing the narrative and Chuck kills her. The fans got Destiel Wedding trending on Twitter, and now the creators are acting like he doesn’t exist. New liver, same eagles.

I have to add an adendum: as of this morning, Sunday 11th, don’t ask me what time that is in Americaland, Misha Collins did an online con/Q&A thing and answered a bunch of questions about Cas and Dean, which goes to show that he cannot be silenced. So the narrative wants to be told. It’s continuing well into it’s 16th or 17th season. It’s going to keep happening and they have no recourse to stop it. So fuck you, Supernatural.

I did write the start of a speech about representation but, who the holy hell cares. I also read some disappointing Masters theses that I hope didn’t take them longer to research and write than this episode of a podcast I’m making for funsies took me, considering it’s the same number of pages. Then again I have the last four months and another 8 years of fandom fuelling my obsession, and when I don’t sleep I write, hence the 4,000 words I knocked out in the last 12 hours. 

Some final words. Lyotard defines postmodernism, the age we live in, as an incredulity towards metanarratives. Modernism was obsessed with order and meaning, but postmodernism seeks to disrupt that. Modernists lived within the frame of the narrative of their society, but postmodernists seek to destroy the frame and live within our own self-written contexts. Okay I love postmodernist theory so this has been a real treat for me. Yoghurt, Sam? Postmodernist theory? Could I BE more gay? 

Middleton and Walsh in their analysis of postmodernism claim that biblical faith is grounded in metanarrative, and explore how this intersects with an era that rejects metanarrative. This is one of the fundamental ideas Supernatural is getting at throughout definitely the last season, but other seasons as well. The narratives of Good vs Evil, Michael vs Lucifer, Dean vs Sam, were encoded into the overarching story of the show from season 1, and since then Sam and Dean have sought to break free of them. Sam broke free of John’s narrative, which was the hunting life, and revenge, and this moralistic machismo that they wrapped themselves up in. If they’re killing the evil, then they’re not the evil. That’s the story they told, and the impetus of the show that Sam was sucked back into. But this thread unravelled in later seasons when Dean became friends with Benny and the idea that all supernatural creatures are inherently evil unravelled as well. While they never completely broke free of John’s hold over them, welcoming Jack into their lives meant confronting a bias that had been ingrained in them since Dean was 4 years old and Sam 6 months. In the face of the question, “are all monsters monstrous?” the narrative loosens its control. Even by questioning it, it throws into doubt the overarching narrative of John’s plan, which is usurped at the end of season 2 when they kill Azazel by Dean’s demon deal and a new narrative unfolds. John as author-god is usurped by the actual God in season 4, who has his own narrative that controls the lives of Sam, Dean and Cas. 

Okay like for real, I do actually think the metanarrativity in Supernatural is something that should be studied by someone other than me, unless you wanna pay me for it and then shit yeah. It is extremely cool to introduce a biographical narrative about the fictional narrative it’s in. It’s cool that the characters are constantly calling this narrative into focus by fighting against it, struggling to break free from their textual confines to live a life outside of the external forces that control them. And the thing is? The really real, honest thing? They have. Sam, Dean and Cas have broken free of the narrative that Kripke, Carver, Gamble and Dabb wrote for them. The very fact that the textual confession of love that Cas has for Dean ushered in a resurgence of fans, fandom and activity that has kept the show trending for five months after it ended, is just phenomenal. People have pointed out that fans stopped caring about Game of Thrones as soon as it ended. Despite the hold they had over tv watchers everywhere, their cultural currency has been spent. The opposite is true for Supernatural. Despite how the finale of the show angered and confused people, it gains more momentum every day. More fanworks, more videos, more fics, more art, more ire, more merch is being generated by the fans still. The Supernatural subreddit, which was averaging a few posts a week by season 15, has been incensed by the finale. And yours truly happily traipsed back into the fandom snake pit after 8 years with a smile on my face and a skip in my step ready to pump that dopamine straight into my veins babeeeeeeyyyyy. It’s been WILD. I recently reconnected with one of my mutuals from 2010 and it’s like nothing’s changed. We’re both still unhinged and we both still simp for Supernatural. Even before season 15, I was obsessed with the podcast Ride Or Die, which I started listening to in late 2019, and Supernatural was always in the back of my mind. You just don’t get over your first fandom. Actually, Danny Phantom was my first fandom, and I remember being 12 talking on Danny Phantom forums to people much too old to be the target audience of the show. So I guess that hasn’t left me either. And the fondest memories I have of Supernatural is how the characters have usurped their creators to become mythic, long past the point they were supposed to die a quiet death. The myth weaving that the Supernatural fandom is doing right now is the legacy that will endure. 

References

I got all of these for free from Google Scholar! 

Judith May Fathallah, “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural.” 

James K A Smith, “A Little Story About Metanarratives: Lyotard, Religion and Postmodernism Revisited.” 2001.

Cameron Lee, “Agency and Purpose in Narrative Therapy: Questioning the Postmodern Rejection of Metanarrative.” 2004.

Harri Englund and James Leach, “Ethnography and the Meta Narratives of Modernity.” 2000.

https://uproxx.com/filmdrunk/mel-brooks-explains-french-mistake-blazing-saddles-blu-ray/

[popculturebuffet]

New X-Men Xtrospective Part 2: Germ Free Generation (Annual, #117-120)

Hello all you happy mutants! And welcome back to my look one of my faviorite runs of one of my faviorite super teams by one of my faviorite comic book writers!

For those of you just joining us.. it’s been a while. I did the first instalment of this retrospective back in early January as a present to my friend for christmas, as he had never read E is for Extinctoin and what with this run being vital to the current, utterly brilliant Krakoa era of X-Men. But with both Black History Month and Valentine’s day, February had no real room for this one and march ended up being just as crammed with me doing essentially the entire della arc of ducktales in one month. I didn’t mean for this retrospective to get pushed so far back, but since I gave up doing weekly coverage of Final Space I had some room on the schedule so this retrospective is back with a vengance with two entries this month and hopefully at least one a month afterword to keep it at a decent clip. 

Last time I covered the background of this run and didn’t really find much for the issues after, so I won’t have to spend as much time on background. 

So since i’ts been a few months, a refresher is probably in order

PREVIOUSLY, ON X-MEN:  Our merry mutants enterted a marvelous new era. As Charles redidciated to the dream with new equipment and a new uniforms our hero encounter a new villian: The Mysterious Cassandra Nova, a powerful telepath who used an uwitting patsy from the trask family and a defucnt sentinel factory to slaughter the mutant nation of Genosha, killing 16 million mutants in the most horrific act of genocide against mutants ever known. And the fact there has been more than one genocide against mutant kind MIGHT, just MIGHT be the reason they blackmailed for peace with life saving drugs instead of helping willingly and freely in the current comics. Just maybe. 

Cassandra was captured by the X-Men soon after but escaped and nearly got a hold of Cerebra only to be stopped thanks to a combination of former enemy, genoshan resident at the time of the genocide, and that bitch Emma Frost who snapped her neck and Charles himself who uncharacteristically shot Cassandra in the head. That night Charles took a bold step over that would change the X-Men forever and told the world on live tv:

While all of this was going on we got caught up on the team’s personal struggles, currently consisting of Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast and Wolverine with Emma joining as of the issue we’re about to cover. Beast is grappling with a secondary mutation that makes him look like Aslan, the jesus of narnia and all lions. Meanwhile Scott and Jean are grappling with their non existant sex life as Cyclops possesion by Apocalypse shortly before this story has severely rattled him and caused him to close himself off emotionally. 

So that’s where we pick up. Our heroes are now no longer hiden saftely in the shadows from a world that hates and fear them but are out front and center with the world watching. And we’ll see both how that helps their cause and how it puts them directly in the cross hairs under the cut.  Content Warning: This review discusses Transphobia and a scene involving a school shooting. If either of these are a trigger for you or something you do not want to read about  please skip this part of the retrospective for your own well being. Thank you and have a lovely day. 

The Man From Room X:

We have three stories today: an annual that introduces our final team member and the main villians of our next arc, a one off that moves the main plot for the first 12 issues along, and a three part arc about said villains.  Before we get into the Annual, I have to talk about it’s weird gimmick: The issue is entirely sideways. I don’t mean it’s bad though some parts are problematic I mean when bought it’d be on it’s side and in my trade I have to flip the whole thing over on it’s side to read it. It’s just a .. weird choice. Not the weirdest thing about this issue somehow but not unexpected from Grant as they like to play with the formula. 

We open in said Room X, a location in China where a mutant named Xorn is kept and showed off to a mysterious group of dickweeds in suits representing “Mr. Sublime”.  His jailer, General Aao Jun,, shows him off as most bad guys would : By undoing his helmet and thus disntegrating two innocent children just by looking at them. Sublime says they have a deal. 

Meanwhile also in China the X-Men are there for a funeral and Emma and Scott trade insulting questions back in forth: She mocks him about his lack of sex with Jean lately and he brings up her criminal past. As for why Emma’s still with the x-men.. it’s out of pragmatisim. WIth Genosha gone, the x-men are the saftest faction to throw in with. 

As for why the X-Men are in China, Charles has rapidly expanded his operations now he’s public by setting up X-Corps, a multinational humantarian aid organization dedicated to helping mutants in need wherever they sprout up. He’s set up offices in Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Mumbai and Melborne. 

He’s also half assed it, at least for the Hong Kong office and only gave them two employees: Domino, who those of you not as familiar with the comics may remember from deadpool and Risque.. who I honestly had never heard of before New X-Men and frequently forget existed. I just looked her up for the first time and she’s a minor mutant who was an associate of X-Force and Warpath’s love intrest. She could compress matter causing it to implode. My assumption here is that Morrison simply picked a minor mutant at random for the job. 

But yeah naturally with only two mutants charged with, according to domino “All of asia” went horribly and the x-men are there for Risque’s funeral and to find out what happened. Unsuprisingly it’s tied into our cold open: Risque had found evidence of a mutant trafficking operation and died fighting them off and Dom is naturally f eeling in over her head since said operation involves the chinese goverment, who according to her exccute most mutants at birth and John Sublime and his cult. 

We soon see a press confrence from this asshole and find out what his deal is: Sublime is the head of the U-Men, a group that belivies they are a ���third species” of mutants trapped in human bodies that deserve to have the surgery to make them into mutants, and thus wear weird suits until the world is pure and allows them to have surgery for it. 

Yeahhhh this.. this is really fucking uncomfortable and is going to be present throughout today’s piece so let’s just go ahead and rip that band-aid off:  The U-Men come off as HIGHLY transphobic. They use terms similar to trans people call themselves trans species and are trapped inside a body they don’t belong in. It’s VERY uncomfortable to read as a result and something that hadn’t really sunk into till thsi reading but once it had.. oh god does this not age well. 

The one thing that keeps this from runing the run and Grant Morrison as a whole for me.. is that I do not think for one second it was intentional. Grant themself is genderqueer, nonbinary and a cross dresser. None of this means they CAN’T be prejudice, being Queer does not magically make you immune to being prejudiced. But before this Grant had the genderqueer sentient street Danny the Street over in doom patrol and a trans main character in his book the invisibles, Lord Fanny. And given New X-Men’s biggest flaw as a whole is clumsy early 2000′s unforutnate implications such as a good chunk of the things about Cyclops affair with Emma, we’ll get to that at the right time, Angel in the next arc and Dust, who was introduced as from afganastan wearing an outfit not seen in the country and speaking a language not spoken in the country. Grant didn’t make these mistakes TWICE, it’s why I still have respect for them, and this won’t be the first or last comic i’ve forgiven for being stupid for it’s time. But I will still call Grant out when I see it. Just because I respect an author just because they changed my life does not mean I won’t call them out when they fuck up. And if they prove to be truly vile, have harmed someone or what have you I will cut them the fuck out of my life. I’ve done it with JK Rowling, Warren Ellis, Brad Jones and Joss Whedon. I would do it with Grant if I truly belivied they were transphobic and instead didn’t just write something very stupid without thinking the metaphor through 20 years ago. 

So anyway back to the comic book bollocks as Wolvie and Dominio prepare for an infiltration and flirt a bunch. We also find out Jun is a mutant himself with a power only Grant could dream up: his skin, hair and what have you that falls off him turns into a naked golem for a bit before expiring. And if you hadn’t read this issue before reading this review, yes that actually happened. While the first arc had a BIT of Grant’s trademark batshit insanity, the series REALLY starts to pick it up from here: This issue has a mutant with functioning star for a head, a poorly thought out bucnh of sci fi new age organ theives, and a general whose power is “makes naked clones out of his dandruff”. Oh and his fondest wish?

I just... I don’t know how to respond to that. I don’t know how you respond to an old man’s weird murder fetish that he tells a somehow even creepier cult leader while said cult leader is paying him to buy a star man, and their both surronded by the creepy old guy’s skin golems that weirdly look like mudokons. Look i’ve  read Grant’s entire utterly bonkers run on doom patrol. I’ve seen a man who looks like a question mark use a bicycle that makes everyone high like their on LSD for president. And THIS is what breaks me. 

So while.. THIS is going on, Dom and Wolverine plan to do it all night long on the professor’s credit card, no really he gives all his professors carte blanch to use school fun, and inflitrate, Dom through the elvator this horrorshow just took place in and Wolvie james bond style. Also I gotta say I REALLY love how Morrison writes Domino. She’s wittiy, entertaining and her power is as awesome as always, super luck if you didn’t know. It’s a real shame he didn’t add her to the team: She wasn’t on any other x-teams, with X-Force having been rebranded into X-Statix by this point. She would’ve been a fun addition to the cast. 

Naturally wolverine is found out.. but that was the entire plan, for him to serve as a distraction then cut his way to domino while she steals something from the vault. As for the rest of the X-Men, Cyclops, Beast and Emma are all downstairs in the parking garage and find a secret entrance. Jean is not on this trip and that’s a major plot point for this run. This is where Risque died.. and it only get’s worse when Hank goes inside, finding a bug like child, basically htink a giant caterpillar but with tons of human arms inttead of legs with her wings cut off. 

Thankfully as Logan and Dom escape above, the U-Men are dumb enough to storm down bellow.. and while they incapacitate beast with some launched tiny knives, designed to incapcicate but leave them in tact for harvest, Emma beats the shit out of them and get the info out as only she can....

Granted she could’ve just turned back to normal and used her telepathy.. but what fun would that be? Plus they have blockers and you know CUT UP A FUCKING CHILD. SO yeah fuck them, let emma have her fun. 

Thanks to her they find out the U-Men are a front for illegal organ harvest, and while they can’t prove sublimes attached Emma suggests killing him.  Good idea but Scott suggests the lighter approach and we find out what Dom stole, a key, something Emma can psychcially scan. She warns it might take her a bit to get something.. only to be flooded instantly and we find out who the man in the box was. Shen Xorn... i’ll let emma tell you more herself. 

It’s stuff like this why, despite some serious flaws like the U-Men debacle and some stuff to come, some I mentioned above other that’s just with the plot that i love this run. Morrison just gets how to really tell an x-men story and the real tragedy of being a mutant. That just for being diffrent, you get shut out, or in this case thrown into a box when you could’ve and should’ve been something more. As emma turns herself to diamond to deal with the psychic backlash, Beast has some solemn words to share. 

That night Scott rests in his bedroom while presumibly hearing some truly horrific and sexy things next door while talking to jean before clocking out.. only for Emma to head in in a sexy dress with champagne. What happened? Well we won’t know for sure for most of the run. 

The next day the U-Men prepare to load and we get some scrap of what the idea was supposed to be: John talks to Ao Jun about his procedures. We see wings crudely sewen to his back and his throat implaants hurting “But one day I will fly”. THe IDEA is their supposed to be lunatics, people who envy mutantkind but don’t actually respect their culture or their sense of personhood. It’s not the worst idea and had Grant not used trans termnology for htis, it would’ve been a great one. I think he INTENDED for them to be coopting the idea of being trans and what not to maks their true intentions.. which is problematic due to debates like the ones on bathrooms where a lot of transphobic asshats make the bad faith argument a bunch of people are going to pretend to be trans to assault people. 

We’re.. we;’re not even to the main storyarc yet. 

But things soon go wrong as Xorn’s starhead starts to collapse into a black hole, with no solution as the x-men took the key to his helmet.. and assault the compound. Turns out the star collapse thing is Jun’s revenge on humanity for lockig him down here and he gets his neck snapped.  Scott has a solution though.. and it’s stuff like this why I fucking love Scott Summers and get annoyed when people call him “boring”: He realizes Xorn is comitting sucicide.. so he’s going to talk him out of it. Not just for everyone else but he deserves to live. And while Emma points out only logan among htem knows chinese and she can’t get through to Xorns’ head due to the way his brain works, Scott has a simple workaround: Use the nearest chineses speaker to teach Scott chinese. So.. with that he talks to Xorn. 

And that my friend is Scott Summers. A man who faced with powerful man whose given up, whose lost all hope... convinces him he can still go on. That living’s better than dying.. and that it does get better. The issue closes with Xorn basking in the sunlight for the first time in decades while Domino sweats having an extremley powerful unknown mutant out in the world. Scott’s already thought of that.. and signed him up with the x-men. Granted it won’t be until our next article that he actually fully joins the team, but w’ell get to that next time. 

This issue is great... while the U-Men stuff is pretty bad and isn’t going to get better, the tale of xorn is excitiong, Aao Jun is an intresting antagonist and the sideways gimmick suprisingly works. So now we’ve finshed our apitizer let’s get on to the main course. 

Danger Rooms:

We open in well.. the Danger Room with Beast training a new student. 

This is Beak. Beak is my faviorite character Morrison came up with and one of my faviorite X-Characters. Beak is a bird like boy who can fly, it’s just a struggle and due to looking diffrent and not having the most impressive power has very low self esteem. It’s also part of something Morrison took a concerted effort to do: introduce more mutants with genuinely odd apperances and drawbacks. Like we saw with Ugly John last time and Aao Jun in the previous issue, Morriosn really likes adding weird mutants but he also uses it to give a genuine downside to being one. While this isn’t NEW to x-men, Morriosn upped the scale and number of characters like this with weird powers and apperances. We see a bunch of human passing ones too but the backgrounds just jammed with all sorts of unique designs and students. It’s also the point where the school became far more crowded like the movies, a good call on my part both to help those coming in from the movies, and to help sell the mutant baby boom going on. After all it wouldn’t make sense if the school was just about 5-7 students and a bunch of grown adults doing superhero stuff like usual would it.

But we get to see that Hank is a good teacher, as he reminds the boy that he’s getting better and won’t be an x-man overnight, and worries about him to the professor, wanting the boy not to slip through the cracks, figuratively, and not to feel like an outcast.. especaily here. But Hank dosen’t feel blue for long, metaphorically he was blue long before he became the lion minus the witch and the wardrobe, as he has a date to night.. and so does Charles. 

Or rather he did.. his girlfriend trish, a long time love intrest of his and a reporter.. breaks up with him. Over voice mail. While in washington. And the reasons she gives are not great

Yes Hank’s transformation is radical.. but not only was it not his choice... she’s being a coward, sending the message it’s okay to dump someone because hteir a mutant or because they happen tobe diffrent and that efffects your career. Again it’s moments like this that make the run soar over the more awkward bits. 

Meanwhile Logan’s off doing logan stuff, i.e. gazing at a deer. Wow. Jean followed him. Both notice a space ship: Despite recently outing himself as a mutant, leading to an increased number of students and a bunch of rioting morons at the gates, Charles has decided NOW’S a good time to take a vacation to the Shiar empire. As for why Jean’s really out here, her marriage to Scott isn’t doing so good and while Logan encourages her to stay it’s just not that simple: Her telekenisis is coming back, stronger than ever. She feels the most alive she’s been while he’s shutting her out and feeling his deadest. She tries to turn to logan for comfort but he shuts her down. Just wait two decades jean... he’ll open up to a threesome. In all seriousness though having Jean try and come onto Logan .. will backfire slightly on later storylines. But we’ll get to that eventually. 

In the basement Hank is studying Cassandra or rather a virtual version of her since her body is naturally in storage. And he’s found out something disturbing: She’s Charles Genetic Twin.. oh and it gets way worse. The Professor’s weird behavior? Barely staffing the hong kong office, leaving suddenly with rioters t the gates, outing himself? About that...

Cassandra tourtures Hank with the possiblity he’s devovling and then tries to mind controlli him into cleaning himself with his diploma when Beak enters. The good news is this allows hank to shake off her control and tackle her, showing off why hank mccoy is fucking awesome in the process. 

That is the Hank McCoy I know, love.. and miss dearly. The one we’ll probably never get back sadly after what others did and what Percy’s had to do to reconclie with all they did. 

Unfortunately beak being around means cassandra can force him to beat beast into a coma with his bat. She plans to tear Charles dream down around him and make him watch.. and cryptically says he tried to kill her. She then cheerfully leaves Jean in charge.. and talks about just how much damage one could do with an entire interstellar empire in the wrong hands....

This issue is also excellent and sets up the next two arcs nicely while giving us a nice peak in hank’s head. Great stuff. The artist also hid the word sex in a lot of the images see if you can find them. 

Germ Free Generation Issue 1: 

So now we get into our main story for today. This story and the one before it were drawn by Ethan Van Sciver whose a talented artist.. but also highly contrversial for being a conservative. I myself.. don’t know what he’s said or did, though calling himself “Canceld Superstar’ on twitter really isn’t a good sign. So I really can’t comment on it but I also know someone would mention it if I didn’t bring it up and if you know what he did please enlighten me. 

So we open with a school shooter who also scooped out a guys eyes and is part of the U-Men. He get shot by the swat team while making his speech> it’s an effective opening but one that’s become more uncomfortable to read with each passing day due to school shootings going up and up in number. And mass shootings in general and I... I need a second. I need something to relax me

Thank you Stoopy. Your doing Odd’s Work. 

So the news reports on this and we soon see how Jean watches the news.. by using Cerebra to read the minds of every person on the planet. Neat. Everyone’s talking about them. We also get a hint for later as we hear on the suicide of one martha johanson who wrote the note in her own blood. She’ll be important later.... and I mean that both in the context of this retrospective and for the fact she’ll go on to be part of x-men in perpetuity. 

This is also where another great concept of Morrison’s pops up: Mutant culture. After all mutants are a minority, they should have their own culture. It’s something Hickman’s era has taken and ran with, but it’s a damn good idea and one that it shoudln’t of taken almost 20 years for someone else to use given Decimation was undone way back around 2012 in Avengers Vs X-Men, aka that event half hte articles on the mcu around the fox sale used as either their image for the article or asked about happneing. And yes that is a pet peeve of mine: while I do think like Civil War AVX could use a movie version to make it better, I don’t think it’s an event that could be done right away and would have to be almost entirely redone anyway given the context for AvX is entirely couched in decimation i.e. something NO ONE wants in any x-adaptation. 

So it turns out while watching the news in a next level way Jean is also talking to Logan. “Stay out of my personal fantasies”. Yeah I .. I don’t think your ready for a hairy canadian dry humping a transformer.. specifically killbison. And yes.. that is an actual transformer and why yes, I have been waiting to bring him up. 

And he is , and I am not making any of this up, part of a group of decpticons known as the breastforce. Your life is better for knowing that and you are welcome. 

Anyway as you’d imagine a genocidal old woman in her brothers’ body leaving the X-Men to fend for themselves after having a teenager bludgeon one into a coma after publicly outing them with a rabid bunch of bigoted morons at the gates has not gone great. Henry is still out and despite the short staffing Jean needs logan to stay where he is as he’s close to an emerging mutant and within range to go get her. 

Emma of course has never been so fucking irate in her whole life and is plotting various forms of psychic tourture with the help of her proteges the Stepford Cucokoo, 5 teenage mutants who functoin best as a unit and are easily some of MOrrison’s most prominent additions to the x-cast. Unlike a lot of the x-kids, they’ve been featured prominently in every era of x-men after this including the current one. 

Jean decides for a less “Make them hate us even more” approach, but no less pissed off, opening the gates and going out directly to chew out the assembled bigoted morons, pointing out the ones carrying “Mutants Go Home!” signs are especailly dumb as this IS her home. And while she dosen’t point this part out, it’ the same for all of them: most of the mutants are either adults who choose to live here, teenagers who along with their parents choose to live here, or in the majority teens who have no where else to go due to either being abandoned by their families or it being way to dangerous for said families for them to stay due to bigoted assholes like the ones holding mutants go home signs. 

A member of the press asks if she’s willing to talk to the media and she refutes most of his bullshit allegations: He asks if their building an army, she and Scott respond they are not and are simply educating mutants and protecting them. When he counters with the fact their living weapons and wearing uniforms... she counters with the fact she’s wearing them to protect herself, rightfully, from people like her, and the x-men are an aid orginzation going where needed to protect the world and while asshole points out no one apointed them.. jean shuts him down by pointing out there are no mutants in goverment and a genocide just happened, so someone has to do the job. Another random asshole tries to pipe up with “Genosha declared war on us” and Emma senses this is just going to go round and round and round and simply presses the assembled mob’s “bliss buttons” in their brains to knock them out. Non violent but honestly warranted: A dangerous part of bigoted assholes is they’l bring up racist bullshit to try and couch it like an actual conversation. None of these complaints really hold water if you looked at the x-men’s history for more than 5 minutes. Yes Charles is training them to fight and yes hte ingial class was an army but every class since has only been trained for self defense: they still got into adventures and what not, but it was usually by their own choice or because they were thrust into them by circumstance. Xaviers is exactly what jean said and endudgling these morons, while good on paper, only makes them seem legit. 

Jean retreats to the infirmary where she’s on the verge of breaking down from the sheer weight of everything. Cyclops proves that despite not being the best husband right now... he still loves his wife, offering to go look into Sublime with Emma and hoping Hank wakes up. Turns out his mind for now is a big blank room.

So she can’t get any info off his skull, and neither of the two think what happened with Beak adds up. Something is up here. Their also coming down with colds which will be important later. And just as important.. Magneto is becoming a symbol among people and merch sales with his image are on the rise.  We then get this. 

So Jean is trying to be a supportive, honest wife, and while the questions incredibly insulting.. his answer is equally so. Spoilers, as mentioned we do get an answer long after this.. and they did not. So Jean is wrong to be suspcious, at this point, but is at least trying to be polite about it and gave him the benifit of the doubt.. and Scott basically said he slept with her without actually saying it despite not having to. You could’ve said “no we did not have sex, we simply talked all night”. It’s not ENTIRELY better given the horrible state of their relationship right now, but it’s still better than HEAVILY implying he rocked her body to the break of dawn for no damn reason. 

So we meet our next major addition to the cast Angel Salvador, an abused teen who is a mutant.. and whose abusive and molesting step dad beats her and throws her out over this. The scene’s a bit overdone, coming off like an after school special.. but it’s what happens AFTER that’s truly heartwrenching. 

A poor scared teenager clutching herself, finding herself homeless alone and desperatly wishing she wasn’t what she was. It’s just a striking image and shows how well Grant uses the mutant metaphor. I could easily see myself in that position had my parents not been good peopl and had I come out far sooner as bi. The idea of desperatly hoping your not what you are simply becaus eof what hell it brings, despite all the joy it can bring too. . it’s heartbreaking to hear. 

Naturally though things don’t get much better as the next morning the U-Men have found her, calling her a freak and successfully kidnapping her.. if only because while she uses acid spit to escape, she flies into a power line. 

We then get Sublimes meeting with Emma and Scott and a BETTER use of teh u-men as while Grant made the horrible mistake of calling them “transpecies”, seriously what the fuck were you thinking, the way sublime frames it here is a MUCH better, much less accidently bigoted concept. 

The idea isn’t bad: A group of humans jealous of the mutants powers, blatantly ignoring the horrible downsides and mountain of persecution that comes with being one. Grant just made the mistake of couching in in Trans metaphors, clearly trying to have the U-Men steal from Trans People too as a way to make themselves seem legit. And I say if you want superpowers.. fine.. wanting to be a superhero or a mutant is fine, the issue with the U-Men is their copoting a culture, trying to be part of mutantkind without having any of the drawbacks and by actively butchering them. It’s why the concept HAS shown up elsewhere; it’s not TERRIBLE, Grant just made a bad creative choice that’s only gotten worse as Transphobia has ramped up further and further. 

Sublime denies it when our heroes bring up Hong Kong.. but naturally he’s simply just keeping them talking long enough to bring out his trump cards, an army of u-men and a brain in a jar he uses to incapacitate them.. and announces his plan to use the school as an organ farm for his third species. 

Meanwhile Logan finds the U-Men in their truck preparing to rip angel apart.. and given he snikit’s soon after.. i’ts very clear whose REALLY about to get ripped apart. 

Germ Free Generation Part 2: 

Part two begins wth Sublime monologoging about how Mutantkind are just cattle to them and reveals the brain is martha’s, her sucicide having been faked and her brain currently being controlled to use as a weapon. 

So while Johnny monlogues we find out what happened with Wolverine last issue he didn’t cut up the guys yet as they fired their little flichete guns at him... it was about as useful and effective as you’d expect and the massacre you were expecting occurs. Though in a nice bit of reality the fact wolverine’s soaked in blood and just killed a bunch of blood shockingly does not make the already frighttend teen feel he’s safe and she spits acid on him. Logan pours some stuff on the acid, figuring rightly a black ops murder farmacy would have something to counteract it and tells her she’s safe now .. and tells the guy behind him not to try it. He’s stupid and does anyway and likely gets a claw to the head off panel. 

They go to a diner to eat and find a local asshole who threatens them with a shot gun to leave once angel uses her power to digest and goes on a rant about how he snapped his own son’s neck to prevent him being born a freak. Just.. fucking hell this arc is not good for my depression. We get some more angst from Angel and whiel her dialouge is not the best, i’ts a too bit mark millar flavored edgelordy for my taste and if I wanted that i’d go read Ultimates or Ultimate X-Me, her pain is real and Logan helps her through it. 

Back at the Mansion the U-Men are on their way to strike, whlie Jean unaware continues to buckle under the weight of all the shit she’s had to deal with, feeling SOMETHING is making them weak with the colds and something worse is going on and thus tries going to Beak’s mind instead and gently helps talk him through it, showing her grace and empathy.. and in return finding out Charles was the one responsible. The alarms flair up and Jean tries calling the police now that’s an option.. but it goes exactly how you’d expect. 

Also a second artist took over for this issue and the next Igor Kordey. He’s fine, but not nearly as good as Quitely or Van Sciver and it shows. Meanwhile Beast awakens and heads for the body drawer with Cassandra’s body, and professor’s mind in it. 

However Jean’s finally had enough and got her second wind. She’s outgunned, outmanned and left to her own devices. And she’s fucking fed up with it. She steels herself and assembles the students. This is obviously a last resort.. but some of them can defend themselves and their going to need to. But today they won’t be learning.. they’ll be teaching and as the U-Men call them defensless Jeans simply asks “Are you sure about that?”

Germ Free Generation Part 3:

So we come to the finale of this arc. Angel is once again an ungreatful brat to logan and he opts to just leave her there if sh’es going to be like that pointing out being a mutant sucks, it’s going to keep sucking.. and she needs to deal with it instead of lashing out at him and herself over it. 

We get back to the U-Men, one of whom is utterly flabergasted they want to him to cut of Cyclops head... only for Emma to awaken.. and take back her regular form meaning she has her telepathy back. The only reason they were able to get her ealier is she was in diamond mode which is stronger but lacks that, a nice way to check and ballance her new powers. She quickly takes them out and disables Martha. 

Back at the school we get one of Jean’s definting moments for me and a true chance to show how badass she can be. Before this while Morrison wrote her well, and his version’s still my favoirite, she didn’t really get to do much and was motly in the background. This arc has been her time in the limelight, having trouble grappling with all the stress of running this place by herself.. and emerging from it stronger, more capable and ready to kick some racist weirdo ass. She tries a few diffrent tactics first, having a mutant with a voice power project it to make them think their san invisible army and having the cuckoos fuck with their heads but when both fail, Jean REALLY gets to show off. Thier blade ammo gets turned into a cool looking 3 dimensioinal shape with her telekneisis, and in a cool moment and a wise use of something gross makes the only one of them with useable powers throw up, before issuing a badass boast, wreathed in flames all while she crumples their guns into uselessness. and tears open their suits. 

Bad ass.. and logan and Angel arrive just in time for the cecendo as hte u-men flee in terror

The Phoenix has been Reborn. Jean Grey has risen from the ashes and returned to full power. 

Meanwhile Sublime is pankcing.. and it gets worse when Emma shows up, fully enraged after all of this and has some words for him. 

Iconic. Emma prepares to drop him out of a building but Scott rightly tries to get her to back off, pointing out the pr nightmare it’d create and the fact that they have enough evidence ot shut him down. Martha however has other ideas and gets him to let go of his own accord, falling to his death.. but given he’d aranged a stunt for the press apparently this gives our heroes deniability and Martha her revenge. 

So we end this three parter as Jean revels in her new power, and Beast returns with an announcment:

Final Thoughts for Germ Free Generation:  This arc is pretty good if forgetable. The struggle of Jean to run the school herself and her rising from the ashes of her own pain at the end with the power of the phoenix at the end is fantastic, finally both giving her a chance to shine.. and a worrying sign for her friends given what her phoenix force copy whose memories she has a copy of, long story, did is awesome. The other parts are okay and ehhhhhhhhh though. Scott and Emma’s investigation into the u-men while having a really good climax, is pretty standard x-men stuff, and Wolverin’es trek with angel is just okay with Angel being highly intolerable during this arc, with Morrison trying a bit TOO hard to make her a “realistic” teen instead coming off as horribly unplesant. She’s supposed to just be lashing out but comes off obnxious as a result. That said this arc does furhter a lot of Morrisons best idea and introduce more, and is a great setup for our next arc, which we’ll get to in two weeks. Soooo

Next Time On X-Men: We find out just what the hell Cassandra Nova is, what her plans are, and what happened with her and charles as our heroes come down with a cold as the might of the shiar empire bears down on them. It’s IMperial in two weeks. 

Next Time ON This BLog: Speaking of long Delayed Projects, I finally return to The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck as a young Scrooge starts his prospecting career, learning the ins and outs from a rich new mentor, and finding the price tag striking it rich comes with. Raid a copper hill with me tommorow. 

If you liked this review, subscirbe for more, join my patreon, and if there’s a comic you’d like me to cover suggest it in the comments or outright comission a review from me via ask. See you at the next rainbow

[sinagrace]

Iceman’s been back on my mind lately. It started with the internet rumor that Shia Labeouf was being considered to play the role of Bobby Drake in a Marvel Cinematic Universe version of the X-Men. My DMs and @Mentions on social media were a mixture of intense reaction and then asking my take on who would make a great Bobby Drake (for the record: in my head I always saw him as a younger Antoni Porowski with a theater background, ‘cuz playing the funny guy with a vulnerable streak requires serious acting shops). My mind went back to the time of BC, when I was doing a lot of touring, and answering this very question because of my work on the Iceman book at Marvel. One thing led to another, and I decided to take a trip further down memory lane to look at my favorite volume of the series: Amazing Friends. Now, I know I’ve spent equal amounts of time publicly stating what a gift working on Iceman was, while also calling out the challenges that came with the experience, but the third volume really was a pure blessing. I was able to take every valuable lesson I learned as a writer, and apply it to telling a story that would be interesting to one person: Me. I’ve been a lifelong X-Men fan, I live and breathe comics, so my own expectations for a return to the series seemed like the only ones to really worry about meeting/ surpassing. The first two volumes had been so bogged down by rotating editors, complex continuity, company-wide events, multiple artists… The third volume was my chance to focus on what an Iceman series was outside of so much context. All that mattered was challenging myself to do an X-Men story that focused on the aspects of the franchise I felt were valuable and relevant, meaning: excuses to have Emma Frost be an asshole and finding an opportunity to make fun of Kitty Pryde’s haircut. Before moving on from Marvel, Axel Alonso made time to call me for a pep talk about the series. I wanted to get the series extended, and he wanted to help me succeed with the ten issues he could commit to. First, he offered an eleventh issue to give me more time on the stands. He took a look at everything I had planned, and basically told me to restructure with an eye for ramping up the pace. My writing background comes from prose and essays/ think pieces… both of which are methodical and provide some allowance from the reader to really take your time and set up the world before diving into the meat. That’s not the case with comics. You gotta work fast. Especially in today’s market, there is less and less room for a retailer to say, “give it two volumes, because shit starts really coming together by the third trade.” That was literally my speech for hooking people on such iconic series as Invincible, Fables, and Strangers in Paradise. Nowadays, every single issue is not a brick to be laid down as foundation so much as a bullet in your gun. Conflicting imagery, but that’s the point. Axel told me to think about the Big Moments in my life and sort out how to inject the mutant metaphor into it and make the most compelling comic book story I could. This was epic advice that I took with me into the new arc, but I struggled a bit with what could be bigger than the “coming out” storyline in volume one. Love was off the table because I wanted to keep Bobby single and ready to mingle. Death was off the table too, because my editor felt like we’d done enough with Bobby’s parents in the first two volumes. Upon looking at my own life, and considering the stuff me and my friends were dealing with, I landed on something a bit more reflective than LIFE or DEATH. I wanted to focus on that moment when a gay guy looks outside of himself and realizes the folks around him may not have it so easy. After everything we’ve been dealing with this summer, Iceman’s “big issue” of the arc feels oddly prescient. Bobby Drake had to reconcile his accidental complicit role in keeping the Morlocks down, and he has to investigate new approaches to being a better ally to those who don’t want to or can’t live under the protection of the X-Men. I used the Morlocks to allegorically speak to the issues that the trans/ NB community face today. Considering that trans folks are facing higher rates of homelessness and murder than other members of the LGBTQIA+ community, all I needed to do was find a perfect villain to treat the Morlocks as “lesser-than.” Cue Mister Sinister, who I wrote as particularly Darwinist with a major flair for interactive theater. While Amazing Friends definitely is the most fun I’ve had working on the book, it was also full of the heaviest shit I’ve written about. I’m so grateful that my editor let me use Emma Frost for a story about the trauma of gay conversion therapy with her brother Christian, but I’m still annoyed he wouldn’t let me put her in a sickening Givenchy outfit for her reveal. Similarly, creating the Madin character required that I chat with several mental healthcare professionals and members of the NB community to respectfully portray them as a resilient and fleshed out hero. I included personal lessons that I learned from years of the therapy (the sandcastle / sea image, a Jay Edidin fave moment). My editor and I weren’t always aligned, but we definitely were on each other’s side. He understood what I was trying to do and asked questions when something flew over his head, and he even had the good instincts to stop me from going too heavy handed with the ending. My original idea for the arc’s finale was to have Bobby become permanently scarred in his fight with Sinister, where he’d have a cool ice gash running across his face or something, a la Squall from Final Fantasy 8. The goal was to show Iceman stripping himself of his ability to pass as non-mutant to save the Morlocks, but the Mutant Pride fight scene being a stand-in for the Stonewall Riots kind of already made enough of a statement. Plus, no one in editorial wanted to deal with remembering to track his scar in other books. At first I tried to balk at his point of view, but when I looked over my original notes for the series, the point was to focus on optimism and hope. Giving Bobby a permanent scar and emphasizing the notion of sacrifice was too bleak a message for a series wherein the hero carbo-loads hoagies while riding an ice scooter and mutant drag queens emcee local festivals. Of course, the crowning achievement of the series… my mutant drag queen :) I’ve witnessed a lot when it comes to the world of pop culture and myth-making, and I 100% believe that you can’t plan the success of something. I’ve seen bands forced into breaking up because labels spend six figures failing at making listeners connect with an album. I witnessed firsthand how The Walking Dead was built from relatively humble beginnings as a buzzy cable drama into a literal international phenomenon over the course of its first three seasons. Everyone hopes for the best, but you never know how something will land with audiences. When the Shade character took off, I was truly astounded. Things I posted on Instagram while half-asleep became official quotes on major news sites. Queens and cosplayers were interpreting her like Margot Robbie had unveiled a new Harley Quinn lewk. The impact was so legit and immediate that we had to jump in and give Shade a proper Marvel hero alias, to truly welcome her into the X-Men canon. Hence the name change to Darkveil. (Funny story: I tried to fight hard for Madame X as an alias, but CB didn’t want another Agent X / “X-Name” character. Three months later, Madonna announced the Madame X album. Phew!) There was a time where I felt uncertain that the folks in charge at Marvel would bring Darkveil into any stories outside of the ones I wrote. My understanding was that Hickman was like the Cylons and had A Plan-- one that didn’t include her character. I made peace with my contribution to the Marvel Universe being contained, but then someone on social media pointed out that Darkveil showed up in an issue of Marvel Voices. After breaking down and reading Hickman’s House of X, I saw that his Plan was one of endless possibilities, and that he was moving EVERY character into new and dynamic places. I have hope now that he sees the possibilities with Darkveil, and takes advantage of her and all of her many body pouches. Amazing Friends really is my favorite thing I’ve done for the Big Two. I made a lifelong friend out of artist Nate Stockman (DC, please hire us for a Plasticman book), and I got to run a victory lap with the most encouraging and supportive readers out there. It was worth every dreadful conversation, every shitty thing a person said to me online, and all of the fun nonsense that goes into being creative for a living. Being stuck at home in quarantine has given me a lot of time to reflect on the gift that my career to date has been, and I feel so grateful to be where I am today. Other people may groan when they have to talk about something they’ve moved on from, but not me. I made people happier, I got to work with my favorite characters at Marvel, and and I'll say it again: it’s a frickin’ gift to make people move from your work. So, I will engage every tweet or message asking me my thoughts about who should play Bobby Drake in the Marvel Cinematic Universe… I’ll just never have a good answer.