#anyway. it will not be until many years later that some of those baby dykes will be able to articulate the vague feeling of betrayal

[gideonisms]

eowyn should have been a lesbian. Eowyn/faramir is like, fine, but it misses the point of eowyn for all baby dyke eowyn stans which is not that she longs for glory in battle and doesn't realize war is ugly and brutal, but that she's caught between two awful options and she doesn't want to be given one based on her gender. She's not in love with aragorn, she envies him because she finds the tasks he has in life more preferable and she hero worships him. Is this the point Tolkien was trying to make? Well, no,

[themonkeycabal]

WandaVision Ep 8 Spoilers

(THERE IS A MID-CREDITS SCENE, BTW)

Previously on WandaVision: It was Agatha all along.

This show has really come along well. I was worried after the first couple episodes, which were extremely slow, but it's tightened up and been entertaining as heck, in addition to being kind of a surprising meditation on grief and dealing or not dealing. You go along with wacky sitcom hijinks and then get whacked with the reminder so many things that have happened here are driven by terrible loss.

Anyway …. Acting Director Dick is Up To Something regarding Vision, and I fear we're all going to have to endure lots of his jackassery this episode. He's the not very fun part of this show, tbh. But we're getting down to it, so hopefully he gets his comeuppance sooner rather than later. And then on to deal with Agatha. Who is fabulously rotten. I love her, I have to say.

I guess this all leads into Doctor Strange 2, which I didn't know until Feige said it at the TCAs this week. So, that's something to look out for, too. Maybe everybody already knew that, but that was new to me, I think.

In happy news, nobody is power washing the sidewalks this morning. Hooray.

Creepy woods, a figure holding a flaming torch, Salem, Mass. 1693. Ah, Agatha's origin story. Burning at the stake. Or, maybe not. So far it's just being tied to one in the middle of a dark, creepy night.

"Agatha Harkness, are you a witch?" "Yes. I am a witch." "Yet, you have betrayed your coven." *gasp* Agatha!

She's been captured by her coven, because she stole knowledge, practiced dark magic, and other sundry evilities. But she says she's innocent, innocent, do you hear her! Oh, I guess not, "I did not break your rules, they simply bent to my power."

The lead witch is her mother, apparently. Since Agatha seems unrepentant, all the witches zap her with witchy magic or something. She screams a lot. But then her dark powers start drawing from the witches, sucking them dry. This is all very dramatic. Mom casts the final bolt, but Agatha is too powerful and she breaks free. All the other witches, except mom, have been grotesquely mummified.

Agatha swears she can be good, mom doubts. Mom zaps her again. Oh, whoops, Agatha drains mom next. She takes the broach from mom's desiccated corpse then zooms off into the sky in a burst of swirly purple magicy mist. The coven really didn't think that plan through all the way.

Present day, we're right where we left off, in Agatha's basement cavern of dark witches and nosy neighbors. Agatha is talking to her rabbit, Mr. Scratchy, and smirking at Wanda. "I know. She does look shocked to meet the real us, doesn't she?"

Wanda's eyes go glowy and Agatha laughs. "Oh, that's adorable. My thoughts are not available to you, toots."

Wanda wants to know where her children are, and Agatha mocks her about her reappearing/disappearing accent. Wanda tries to whammy her. "Huh, your magic's no good here." But Agatha's is. Agatha's no dummy, and now she's got Wanda magically trussed up in the center of the room.

"Didn't you notice? Basic protection spell? One on each wall? No? Nothing?" Hmm. Agatha, tbh, Wanda has like no idea what she's doing. So … "How do you not know the fundamentals?"

Wanda asks "Who are you?" and Agatha asks the same "Who are *you*? All those costumes and hairstyles. I was so patient, waiting for you to reveal your true self. I got close with fake Pietro — Fietro, if you will". Lol. I love her. She goes on about the magicy stuff she did to make Fietro "But you're so crippled by your own self doubt that you believed it. Oh Wanda."

"When I sensed this place, the afterglow of so many spells cast all at once, I couldn't make heads or tails of it." She shows off a mind control spell with some sort of big gross bug. Great. And has it fly at Wanda's face. Super awesome, Agatha. Oh, I see, she's going through the spells she thinks Wanda has cast, all the details, all the control of a whole town and all its storylines. Agatha's impressed and envious, "What's your secret, sister?"

Wanda says she didn't do anything and Agatha doesn't like that answer and tosses Wanda around. Now, see, Agatha, much as your coven underestimated you, I think your runic protection is only going to go so far before Wanda decides it doesn't.

"I tried to be gentle, to nudge you awake from this ridiculous fantasy. But, you'd rather fall apart than face your truth." Well, I mean. She's really been through a lot the last few weeks, Agatha. Like A LOT. Oh, and we're going to relive it. She's casting some sort of memory spell on Wanda, taking them back to the vast emptiness, endless nothing Wanda described to Fietro a couple weeks ago. You're not being very nice, Agatha.

"It's time to look at some real reruns." Wanda doesn't want to play along, but Agatha reminds her that she's got her children.

So, through the magic memory door they step, and into a tiny Sokovian apartment, with Wanda's parents. Her father apparently smuggled DVDs of "I Love Lucy" and "Bewitched". Didn't the people of Sokovia suffer enough? Well, he's got "The Addams Family", too. That's okay, I guess.

Little Pietro runs in reminding Mama and Papa that the only rule of TV night is you have to speak English. They call for Wanda and Agatha nudges her to step into the role of little Wanda. Papa says Wanda can pick what they're going to watch, but outside, there's gunfire. Except, I guess it's no big deal, Mama turns away from the window and the street battle below their apartment, while little Wanda says she wants to watch "The Dick Van Dyke Show", season 2, episode 21. Poor kid. Pietro agrees and moans, "Always sitcom, sitcom, sitcom!"

I'm waiting for the Stark Bomb to fall.

Little Wanda is far too enamored of "The Dick Van Dyke Show". Oh! There's the bomb. Pietro grabs her and they hide under the bed and they stare at the Stark Bomb. She and Pietro discuss what to do, while in the background, behind the bomb, the tv continues to play.

Little Wanda reaches out with her magic hand and then big Wanda is yanked out of the memory by Agatha, who demands to know if she stopped the bomb going off. "You used a probability hex?" Wanda says she didn't do anything, the bomb just never went off.

"So, what I see here is a baby witch, obsessed with sitcoms, and years of therapy ahead of her." lol, but harsh. "Where'd you get the big guns, Wanda?" A good question, Agatha. We never did get that answer before, really, did we? Just a sort of vague suggestion of "hydra did stuff to her and pietro maybe?".

"I don't want to go back there." "I know you don't. But it's good medicine, angel. The only way forward, is back."

Through another magic door we go.

Ha, I just paused and saw the title of the ep is "Previously On".

And into the Hydra lab. "Don't be scared, you already lived it once."

Oh, it's Loki's scepter. And the … whichever stone that is. I can't remember, totally lost track of them. Mind stone?

Wanda is in the containment unit with the scepter. The Hydra scientist wants her to do something with the scepter, and jr scientist says that no subject has survived this and lead scientist is like shut up and 'go ahead Wanda, it'll be totally fine'. 

Wanda approaches the scepter and it starts to shake and the stone breaks free and flies at her, but then pauses and they stare at each other. She reaches out for it. Then the blue outer bit of the stone explodes off and underneath is the the yellow stone. Ok, yeah it is the Mind stone.

Lots of dramatic power stuff with Wanda and the stone. She sees a flying silhouetted figure in the light of the stone and then passes out. She survives! I mean, obviously. The Hydra scientists have her sent to isolation where they torture her by making her watch "The Brady Bunch". Well, no, I guess she likes it. Keep this under your hat, but if you ever want to break me, making me watch "The Brady Bunch" could probably do it.

The Hydra scientists meanwhile are trying to figure out what happened, watching the recordings over and over — they don't see the whole stone flying towards Wanda and the subsequent mind meld. She's just standing there, and then falls down.

Agatha sums this up for us "So, little Orphan Wanda got up close and personal with an Infinity Stone that amplified what otherwise would have died on vine. The broken pieces of you are adding up, buttercup. I have a theory, but I need more."

Door number three reveals her digs at the Avengers compound. She is, of course, watching TV. "Malcolm in the Middle." Well, it's better than "The Brady Bunch." The only thing I hate more than "The Brady Bunch" is "The Partridge Family."

"Where are we now?" "The Avengers compound. It was the first home Vision and I ever shared. Pietro was dead, and I was in a new country. I was all alone."

Vision enters through the wall, back when he didn't remember doors existed, and Wanda invites him to sit next to her and watch TV. "It's funny because of the grievous injury the man just suffered?" Vision doesn't get sitcoms either.

Vision sweetly tells her that if she wants to talk about what she's feeling, he'd like to know. "Should you wish to tell me. Should that be of some comfort to you." "What makes you think talking about it would bring me comfort?" "Well, I read a thing—" that's the Tony Stark part of Vision. "The only thing that would bring me comfort is seeing him again." Poor Wanda.

Vision has a little "I don't know how to respond to that" face journey that is subtle but made me laugh.

She apologizes to him. "It's just like this wave washing over me again and again." She says the wave will drown her, but Vision says it won't. 

"It can't all be sorrow, can it?" IS2G if you two make me tear up this morning, I will … not do anything but be kind of annoyed. I have had the worst allergies the last couple of days, don't make me more snotty!

"I've always been alone, so I don't feel the lack. It's all I've ever known. I've never experienced loss, because I've never had a loved one to lose. What is grief, if not love persevering?" Damn you, Vision. At least I have a new box of tissues.

He sees something funny on the telly and laughs then apologizes. She laughs with him, though. "No, it was funny." They smile at each other, cutely awkward.

Even Agatha wipes at the corner of one eye. Though it could be annoyance. Hard to tell.

"So to recap: parents dead, brother dead, Vision dead." You're still a very mean person, Agatha. "What happened when he wasn't there to pull you back from the darkness, Wanda?"

Wanda doesn't want to play this game anymore. Agatha insists. "Tell me how you did it? Vision was gone, but you wanted him back."

Wanda sort of wakes up, "I wanted him back." Door number four takes us to SWORD's ridiculous and massive lobby. Really, what is with the stupidly enormous monitors hovering over the whole absurd place? So stupid. Nobody wants to watch the news that badly or bigly.

Wanda is walking through the lobby — SWORD's security sucks — but contrary to Acting Director Dick's version of the story, Wanda is politely asking the security guy where Vision is. And not throwing red woo-woos or anything. "Please, please. When I came back, he was gone. His body. And I know he's here. He deserves a funeral, at least. I deserve it."

Speaking of AD Dick. He seems to be watching this on the security feed, he calls the security desk and talks to the guard. Wanda spots the camera. But, security guy waves her through, gives her directions to wherever.

Security guy gets up to buzz Wanda in, but she says she's got it, and she opens the door herself. The footage AD Dick used to make her look like a terrorist. I mean, we knew he was a dick, so this is no surprise, but still. Jimmy! Arrest that asshole for aggravated assholery and general shadiness!

Anyway, Wanda's striding down hallways and as she comes even to the Director's door, the security light goes green and beeps so she goes into his office.

There’s polite introductions and whatever. 

"I understand you're here to see the Vision. To recover his body." "Well, I'm his next of kin." "I understand." You're a lying sleazy snake who's been doing shady things with Vision's body. "I'd like to show you something?" "And then you'll give him to me?" No, because he's a scumbag.

He shows her a lab, she's confused, he says it's what she asked to see. And down in the lab are technicians taking Vision's body apart. Obviously, this is horrifying to her. What did Hayward expect to get from showing Wanda that? Like she'd be all "oh, hmm, how fascinating. Look, he's made of wires and such. By all means, cut my boyfriend's robot head off. For science"?

"What are you doing to him?" "We're dismantling the most sophisticated sentient weapon ever made." I think you're a liar pants, Dick. "It's our legal and ethical obligation."

"I just want to bury him. It's all I want." "Are you sure?" "Excuse me?" "Not everyone has the kind of power that could bring their soulmate back online — forgive me — back to life." You are such a sleaze, Dick. They can't get Vision to work again, so why not emotionally manipulate the grieving woman to do it for you. Gross. DIAF Dick.

"No, I can't do that. That's not why I'm here." "Okay, I can't allow you to take three billion dollars worth of vibranium just to put it in the ground." He's the worst. "The best I can do is let you say goodbye to him here."

"He's all I have." "Well, that's just it, Wanda; he isn't yours." Somebody needs to squash this guy like a bug. I don't care who. Wanda, obviously, deserves the honor most, but let her get on with her life, I say. Monica's probably the next best for sure. SOMEBODY THOUGH! Hand Darcy a wrench, she'll take care of it.

Where were we … Oh, Wanda's doing the head tilt of impending magical ass-kickery. She busts through the glass, drops down to the floor of the lab, and a security team runs out to point their guns at her. AD Dick tells them to fall back. Why, his plan's working just perfectly, no need to interfere with the woman he’s making suffer extra.

Wanda walks around Vision's body to his head. And she puts her hand over the giant hole where Thanos ripped out the mind stone. "I can't feel you." Every bit of this, for me, takes AD Dick from a generic loathsome character, to somebody actually disgusting. Do not like.

Wanda can't feel Vision at all, and she walks away, out of the room, out of the SWORD building, leaving the body behind. THIS IS VERY SAD, MARVEL.

She gets into her car, and in the passenger seat is an open envelope, like for a greeting card or something. And off she goes to Westview, New Jersey. A down-on-its-luck small town, full of sad looking people and dirty streets. 

She pulls into the driveway of a property that's overgrown, with just a foundation, no house.

Damn you show. It wasn't an envelope, it was a real estate deed with a plan of the property with a red heart drawn on it, and the words "to grow old in. v." inside. What did Wanda do to deserve this? I mean, fine, she was in Hydra for like a minute, but she wasn't a true believer or anything, and she redeemed herself. Come on. Stupid Marvel, making all the things hurt.

She's crying, you're crying, I'm crying, everybody's crying, as she walks into the foundation of the home that never was. And then it all just comes pouring out of her in a great burst of red light and grief and power. Creating the sitcom world around her and swallowing Westview. Poor Wanda. 

There. There's your answer, Agatha. Are you happy, you big meanie? Go turn AD Dick into a toad, or something, would you?

Hm, from her power, the yellow light of the mind stone starts to separate out, from back when she and it sort of had their moment in the Hydra lab, and out of that Vision is recreated or reborn or reconstituted or … whatever. Then they're in the black and white world of the first ep, and everything is perfect. Damn you, Marvel.

Real world Wanda looks up from where she's standing behind B&W Wanda and Vision and sees it's all just a TV show set. Agatha is in the audience, clapping. She vanishes and Wanda can hear Billy and Tommy screaming for her. She runs off set and into her front yard.

Out on the street, Agatha has the boys on magic leashes.

Agatha says she knows what Wanda is and that "You have no idea how dangerous you are." Well, keep holding her boys with magic ropes around their necks and we'll all find out. Agatha's gone full witchy here, she looks great.

"You're supposed to be a myth. A being capable of spontaneous creation. Here you are, using it to make breakfast for dinner." lol. Hey! I was actually thinking last night that I hadn't made waffles in a while. Breakfast for dinner is its own kind of magic, Agatha. (note to self: check we have syrup)

Wanda is pretty done with Agatha. She wants the boys released.

"Oh yes, your children. Vision. This whole little life you've made; this is chaos magic, Wanda. And that makes you … The Scarlet Witch!" DUN DUN DUN! CREDITS! !!!!

Well that was all very dramatic and sad. A really good episode, really good. Damn you, Marvel. Kathryn Hahn is great, absolutely love her.

Yes, there's a mid-credits scene, btw. F'in AD Dick, for what it's worth, finally putting his Genius Master Plan into action. What a dick. The biggest sack of tiny dicks you ever saw. No really, I hate this guy. I hope Wanda tears him a hundred new ones. Then sets what's left on fire. With her mind. 

Also, he’s dumb. He can’t possibly think he can contain Wanda when she gets a look at his Genius Master Plan, can he? Is he that dumb? Probably, but couldn’t one of his little minions go “um, sir, she did almost defeat Thanos. I suspect this may end catastrophically for us.” 

Do you suppose Darcy’s still stuck in traffic? 

OH NO! There’s only one more episode left. I’m sad about that. This has turned out really quite good. Well done, show. Well done. 

[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/

[thepersephonecabin]

Questions of Faith (fic)

Short daisy/basira fic about daisy stepping in when some Islamophobes in the station have something to say to basira.

Just as a heads up, I’m not a Muslim, so I’d love input from Muslims about Basira’s characterization and how Islamophobia is dealt with in this fic!

Check out full list of warnings and notes on AO3

The Hunt was the only religion Daisy had ever known, even before she’d known it had a name.

But that didn’t mean she had never had a crisis of faith.

Being a gay cop, even after the Thatcher era, was never easy. Turns out, that even if you did replace the bastards who led the witchhunts and raids on gay bars and BDSM clubs back in the day, it didn’t erase centuries of systemic oppression, no matter how hard you tried.

Believe it or not, Daisy first joined the force for that exact reason. To take out the trash.

She’d gotten the idea in the late 90s. She was sixteen at the time, and had snuck into a local gay bar with a fake ID. It was her first interaction with the gay community, the first time she’d tasted beer. She was so naive back then, a baby butch with a fresh boycut and leather jacket she wasn’t allowed to wear with her school uniform. Not that that had ever stopped her. In truth, she was rather proud of herself when the school’s nuns ripped her a new one for donning it over her green plaid skirt and white blouse, even if the traditional sweater was cozier.

 She’d always been a bit of an agitator, just like her Dad, a staunch Welsh nationalist. So she did the things most “bad” kids did. Listened to loud music, snuck smokes outside the school gates, kissed girls she shouldn’t. Mum and Dad didn’t like that last one one bit.

 But she did it anyway. Really, going to the bar was just the next phase of her teenage rebellion. She was pretty excited about it, too. At least until the butch bartender caught onto the fact that she was underage. That bartender was about halfway through manhandling her out the door saying, “Look, kid, it's nothing personal. It's just sometimes things go down in places like this that a kid shouldn't be here to se-"

 Daisy was about to tell her to take a goddamn hike and that she'd seen plenty of things no one her age should've seen anyhow, thank you very much, when a whole squadron of police officers burst in and chaos erupted.

 Long story short, an hour later, Daisy was sitting in the police station wearing a pair of handcuffs surrounded by a dozen or so drag queens and kings, men in leather, and assorted other characters from the club- the bartender, a young lesbian couple barely older than her who looked scared shitless, leaning on each other for support as much as their restraints would allow. The police were responding to an “anonymous tip” about a drug deal in progress, but from the looks on the faces of the others who were taken to the station with her, it seemed that this an excuse they’d heard many times over.

 They were booked one by one, but it seemed that she was the only one shepherded into the captain’s office after fingerprinting.

 The chief- Reynolds, collar number PC2729 according to his uniform and badge- was a white man with grey hair and facial hair that was still a tad brown in some places. He had smile lines and crow’s feet, and for some reason that made her angrier than anything else did.

 He gave her a smile as she was pushed into the room and onto a cold, metal chair in front of Reynolds’ desk. Daisy sneered at the officer that had brought her in, pulling her arm from the woman’s iron grip with a little more force than necessary simply for the sake of being contrarian. Reynolds’ smile widened.

 As the door shut behind the female officer, leaving Daisy alone with Officer Reynolds, the man cleared his throat and said, “Alice Tonner, sixteen years old, no priors. Booked on possession of a false driver’s license, underage alcohol consumption, resisting arrest, and assaulting an officer. Normally, for someone your age, a first-time offender, I would simply confiscate that fake ID, call your parents, and let them handle it.”

 “But?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at him.

 “But, assaulting an officer is a very serious charge, Alice. According to the briefing my officers gave me, you struck one officer in the face, elbowed and kicked several others until you were tackled. It makes me wonder if this is truly your first time getting into things you shouldn’t, or if you are simply a repeat offender who hasn’t been caught until now,” Reynolds said.

 “Don’t see how it’s your business anyhow,” she challenged. “Maybe I have done something like this before and maybe I haven’t. If your subordinates can’t do their jobs and stop crime, that sounds like your problem, not mine. And if your subordinates didn’t assault innocent civilians in that club first, I don’t think that I would have had to defend myself against them.”

 “When criminals pose a significant threat, it is sometimes necessary to use appropriate force to subdue them,” Reynolds said calmly, and still smiling. “It’s simply every officer’s duty to enforce the law.”

 “Sure,” Daisy laughed, shifting forward in her chair. “Enforcing a tip from an ‘anonymous do-gooder?’ I don’t think so. Dispatch records and calls to the authorities are public record, after all. Charge me if you want, but the first thing I’m doing if you do is calling my father’s attorney and submitting a FOI request. Do you really want to pretend that I’ll find a call from some worried mum that would justify- what did you call it? Appropriate force?” Maybe having a nationalist parent wasn’t so bad after all. At least it taught her her rights.

 Reynolds wasn’t smiling now. “How does a nice little girl like you get wrapped up in a place like that anyway? If you’re so concerned with the quality of policing in your-” he made a face, “      community    , maybe you should try our jobs and see just how easy it is, Alice.”

 Daisy saw red. “My name is Daisy, actually, and if you knew anything about me at all, you’d know this little girl isn’t so nice,” she snarled. “Thanks for the tip, 2729. Maybe I will try your job, and maybe when I do I’ll come for criminals in higher places. Like this office, for instance.” She took a minute to appraise the room exaggeratedly. “Nice trophies.”

 Officer Reynolds stared her down for a moment. Daisy didn’t know what he saw, but whatever it was, the next thing he did was call the female officer back in and say, “Officer Nicholson? Take Miss Tonner up front and telephone her parents to pick her up. She’s free to go.”

 Officer Nicholson wasn’t exactly pleased with the decision to let someone who had struck several of her fellow officers only an hour ago free without even being formally charged, but in the end it wasn’t her call. Daisy was released to her parents with nothing more than a slap on the wrist and a stern warning noted in her permanent record. All things considered, if mouthing off was all it took to get out of an arrest, it made a little more sense now why Calvin Benchley had gotten away with everything for so long.

 Two years later when she appeared for her police academy interview, and the officer in charge asked why she wanted to be an officer, she remembered Reynolds, and his too-wide smile and his crow’s feet. She was coming for him. Maybe not even him, maybe just the very idea of him.

 At first, it was tough. The other officers made no secret as to how they felt about a dyke like her in their ranks, but Daisy was more ruthless than any of them could hope to be. She closed more cases, by any means necessary and left those impotent, rent-a-cop, busybodies in her dust. When she got sectioned, it almost seemed like the natural next step for a person like her, but now she had scarier suspects to go after.

 Years passed, vampires burned, and Daisy never really considered that along the way she might have started to become the same type of monster she joined up to stop. By the time a new officer fell into her precinct, the homophobic pricks that had fueled her for so long were afraid of her. They were at least smart enough to keep their slurs to the locker room. Whenever she did catch wind of them running their mouths, she made sure to give them a scare, and she reveled in the way they fled with their tails between their legs. Or she did, at least for a little while, but soon, it felt like it wasn’t enough. It was getting boring.

 The new officer, Basira Hussain, was a new sort of breed, she thought. They didn’t know each other well at first, since at first, Basira wasn’t sectioned like her, but Daisy liked Basira. She liked the way her name rolled off her tongue-      Ba-si-ra    , she would whisper to herself in the comfortable isolation of her own darkened rooms at night, just to taste the shape of the syllables. But most of all, Daisy was surprised to find that she liked the way Basira wasn’t afraid of her. It was refreshing, she thought, to finally have someone around with a backbone.

 When she wasn’t tracking, interrogating, or disposing of suspects, Daisy dedicated her time at the office to dissecting Basira’s movements and habits. It gave her an excuse to ignore the paperwork.

 Unlike her, Basira likes paperwork. Once when Basira was happily depositing reports in the proper outbox, she caught Daisy staring and demanded in a teasing voice, “What? Unlike you, some of us actually complete our reports, and even enjoy getting work done. Shocking for you, I’m sure.”

     She’s been watching me, too    , Daisy thought with a delightful thrill. Daisy plastered on a playful smirk, and stretched her arms over her head, catlike and languid. “What’s that old saying? Something about working hard or hardly working?”

 Basira rolled her eyes, but the corner of her mouth quirked up. “Mock me if you want, Tonner, but I don’t mind the tedium of it. It feels nice, to be able to mindlessly do a task and check it off your to-do list.”

     How adorable    , Daisy thought.      How positively quaint.    “I suppose I can understand that. But if you ask me, desk duty’s a waste of your talents. Also, you can call me Daisy.”

 Basira raised one perfect eyebrow at her, “And what talents are those,      Daisy    ?”

 Daisy shrugged noncommittally, hoping it wasn’t entirely too obvious how something deep inside her purred at Basira saying her name like that. “Well, you don’t seem to mind me being around, so I assume that means you’ve got balls. Someone like that should be out there,” she jerked her chin at the window, “handling the real police work. Not stuck inside.”

 “Filing reports is just as important to our job as handcuffing people,” Basira retorted. “Otherwise, how would we account for everything, and make sure we’re not taking advantage of our authority.”

 “And do you think everyone is truthful on those reports?” Daisy asked, leaning forward on her elbows, the way she did in interrogation rooms.

 Basira was silent for a long time, appraising her, and finally she said, “You’re strange, Daisy Tonner.”

 Daisy wasn’t sure she knew what that meant, but she categorized it as a win and moved on.

 After that, Daisy and Basira were a bit closer, trading playful conversation whenever Daisy was actually in the office. It was strange, how Daisy was usually itching to go out on assignment, always ready for a stakeout, but now, she actually missed the opportunity to sit at her desk across from Basira for a while.

 One day, she came into the office to find Basira crouched behind Daisy’s desk, facing the wall. She was rolling out what looked like a small rug, and tensed when she realized Daisy was standing there, watching.

 “Sorry,” Basira blushed. “I just need a place to pray. I usually do it here since the position is right and you’re usually out. I can find somewhere else, if you like.”

 Daisy blinked, feeling dumbfounded, “No, no, it’s fine. Carry on. I’ll be quiet.”

 As she slid into her chair, and heard Basira shifting, and then begin muttering to herself softly carrying a quiet harmony, Daisy pondered this.

 Daisy had never really spent much extended time around Muslims before Basira. She knew Islam was the second most common religion in Wales, but her community had been predominantly Christian. In London, of course, things were a lot more multicultural, with a high population of immigrants and asylum-seekers. But still, she’d never found herself thinking that much about it.

 Suddenly, she felt overwhelmed by how much she really didn’t know about Islam, and she was a bit discomfited by it. She didn’t like feeling like she was fumbling around something, and she liked the knowledge that she’d spent a few months sitting across from Basira without giving any thought to her culture even less. Now she was sitting on her desk flipping through a folder and not taking in any of the information, just to stop herself from Googling stupidly obvious questions about Islam while Basira was right behind her.

 Unluckily, she didn’t have much time to stew in this, because some of the other officers, Shadley and Packwell, her mind helpfully supplied, began stalking toward them with intent.

 Daisy looked up from the file, brows furrowed, glare on, but Shadley and Packwell didn’t notice her at all, their gaze was decidedly fixed on Basira. A quick glance told Daisy that Basira was tuned out, still in the motions of raising and lowering her body to the ground in prayer. Daisy whipped an arm out, and moved to stand, to prevent the other officers from interfering, but she was a second too late, and Shadley pushed right by to stand inches behind Basira.

 “Hussain, get back to work,” he ordered loudly. The whole room had to have heard him, but horrified, Daisy looked around, and everyone- every single person but her- was ignoring it, steadfastly going about their business with their heads down.

 Basira’s brows furrowed, but otherwise, she made no sign of having heard Shadley. Clearly, she was used to this.

 “Did you hear me, officer? Someone’s got to go over these traffic reports.”

 “Step off, Shadley,” Daisy growled, fists clenched. “She isn’t bothering anyone. Go do your own damn reports.”

 “She’s bothering me,” Shadley retorted.

 “And me,” Packwell pitched in.

 “I’m warning you,” Daisy told them, doing her best to shoulder her way between them and Basira. “Walk away.”

 “Or what, Daisy dyke?” Packwell asked. “Got yourself a little girlfriend?”

 Daisy ignored that. This wasn’t about her. It was about keeping Basira safe.

 But then quick as a flash, when her eyes were on Packwell, Shadley reached down, put his hand on the headscarf Basira wore, and      yanked    .

 Red flooded Daisy’s vision, and distantly she heard Basira make a surprised, pained grunt. Daisy’s body was on autopilot as one hand reached over, grabbed her leather jacket off her seat and tossed it at Basira, and her leg kicked out and smashed into Shadley’s shin hard.

 Shadley howled with pain, but Daisy didn’t give him time to recover. She wrapped her hands around his collar and threw him up against a file cabinet with an audible bang. A dispatcher manual toppled from the top of the cabinet from the impact, but Daisy didn’t hear it over the almost inhuman growl that ripped through her throat.

 “Don’t fucking touch her,” Daisy snarled, putting her nose right up to his, “or the next time I swear to everything, I’ll rip you limb from limb, do you hear me? Do you hear me?”

 Shadley whimpered, pathetic, and nodded. He was shaking. She liked that.

 “I don’t want either of you to say a word to her unless it’s specifically related to a case. If I catch you so much as looking at her with ill-intent, you’ll regret it. Now get out of my fucking sight.”

 She pushed him with all her might at Packwell so that they collided and toppled to the floor messily. They both scrambled to their feet and got away as fast as they could. The other people in the room hastened to look away, pretending as if nothing happened once again.

 Daisy was still seething, sneering at the place Packwell and Shadley had vacated. She wanted to hit something, she wanted to      kill    something.

 Then, as suddenly as they came, the thoughts dissipated as she felt a gentle but firm hand on her shoulder, and heard Basira say, “Daisy.”

 Daisy let the tension in her shoulder release, and foggy through the adrenaline, she turned to look at Basira’s stern face, her hijab readjusted so it looked as if it had never been out of place at all.

 “It’s alright,” Basira said. “I can handle myself.”

 “I…” Daisy began, and then blinked a few times to clear her head. Shame began to creep in. She hadn’t meant to overstep her boundaries. “I know you can, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made such a scene.”

 There was something unreadable in Basira’s eyes, but her mouth twitched, and she said. “It’s alright. It’s good to know you’re looking out for me. But maybe next time, don’t assault another officer in the middle of a police station with everyone watching, yeah?” She pressed Daisy’s leather jacket into her hands. “Thanks for letting me use this, by the way.”

 Daisy was too stunned to make heads or tails of how quickly the mood had shifted, and soon Basira had gathered up her prayer mat, and had returned to her own desk, quick as you please.

 The next day, when it was time for Dhuhr (Daisy had spent some time that night looking up the proper times for prayer throughout the day), Basira gave her a nod as she walked around Daisy’s desk and rolled out her mat. This time, Daisy stood once she was through, and made herself a physical curtain between her desk and the file cabinet, so no one would get through. She idly looked over and ticked boxes on the report she’d been working on before Dhuhr started, but mostly she just stood, feet shoulder width apart so she was ready to protect if anyone tried anything, throwing looks at anyone who passed by.

 When she was finished and had rolled up her mat, Basira asked, “What are you doing now?”

 Daisy tried to sound playful, but also a little submissive as she spoke, wanting to show Basira that she would listen, if Basira told her to stop. “Doing my paperwork as you’ve so frequently recommended, Basira, dear, and stretching my legs of course.”

 “I see,” Basira said, quirking a smile. “And the timing of your leg stretching wouldn’t happen to have anything to do with yesterday, would it?”

 “Of course not,” Daisy said with mock surprise. “Not everything is about you, you know.”

 Basira rolled her eyes and snorted, “Sure, it’s not. Whatever, see you again at afternoon prayer.”

 “Looking forward to it.”

 From then on, during all their time at the Met, whenever it came time for Dhuhr, Asr, Maghrib, and oftentimes even Isha, because Basira so frequently worked late, Daisy stood watch, and they never had any incidents like the one with Shadley and Packwell again. Basira often rolled her eyes at Daisy’s “guard dog” nature as she called it, but never objected to it. Daisy knew she was being overprotective, and territorial, but as long as Basira was safe and happy, it didn’t matter.

 No, Daisy Tonner had never known a religion but the Hunt, but she was beginning to think whatever she had with Basira could be one.

[late2theshow]

Loycos AU Bellow Diamond Fanfic: Photo Album

The old photo albums scattered around the kitchen table as Pink and Blue scanned the pictures inside. It was for an art project of Blue’s; who was feeling nostalgic and wanted to do family collage.  The 16-year-old was more fascinated in the idea of seeing her mom’s younger years.  She did like that her mother did such cute projects from time to time with her but not the fact that she had five out of seven photo albums dedicated to herself.

“Mommy, really?”  She groaned with an eye roll.

Blue looked confused “What is it?”

Pink pointed to a page in the baby themed album “This is noting but pictures of me sleeping”

Blue smiled “I know” She declared proudly “You were such a cutie when you napped, how could your mother and me not take pictures of you like this?”  she then pointed to a picture of a two-year-old pink in nothing but her diaper sleeping on top of her blanket with a teddy bear.  Pink shuttered at this.

“Please, never show this to anyone, okay?”

Blue chuckled “Aww, I was thinking about showing these when you got married, or if you finally decide to bring that friend of your over” she said with a wink.

Pink looked in horror and instantly felt her face get hot “C-can we not talk about this right now?”  Her bratty tone attitude now stopped in its tracks from embarrassment.  Blue grinned “Okay, dear” she assured before turning to another album.  This one was different, it was green with a white line going down the middle of it. Blue smiled; this was her and Yellow’s photo album.  She flipped the page to see her young beloved in a brown skirt and a Yellow Blazer that had shoulder pads.  She awed at it.  It was from when Yellow took the bar exam to become a practicing lawyer.  Pink looked over “Who’s that?”

Blue’s smiled widen as she turned the page over to Pink and point “It’s mom, when she first became a lawyer, back in 1982!” Pink looked confused at the image.  That’s mom? Yellow’s big glasses and knock-off princess Diana hair cut did not suit her at all. At least that’s what Pink thought.  Blue on the other hand was awe struck at her young lover and thought she looked so cute.

Blue turned to another page “Aww and look this is her and I when we went to New York” It was another photo both wearing white t-shirts; blue had her hair up in a ponytail while wearing form fitted jeans and black sneakers.  While Yellow wore her hair pulled back with a head band; wearing boyish sitting jeans and sandals, with sock!

Eww, mom was so un-stylish back then

Blue then turned to another page and pointed to Yellow again. Several more pictures of her mother looking dorky, one of her holding a chess team trophy, another with her in more geeky clothes; While her other mom Blue looked the same.  It was hard to believe the Strict mother was a total nerd back then.  

“Mommy, you look the same” Pink said.  Blue smiled and brushed the hair off her shoulder “thank you sweetie”

Pink then snorted “But mom, looks like a total dork”

Blue lightly gasped and giggled “Pink, your mother was the cutest girl I knew; how could I not fall in love with this face” she said while holding a picture of Yellow in a pants suit with shoulder pads again.  Pink giggled “Mom was a dork”

“No, she was super into her academics.  Did you know she was the first female valedictorian of in her Universities history? And the one of only three women to ever win at the chess game nations and—” Blue then paused and covered her mouth to hide herself laugh.

“Okay, maybe Yellow was a bit a dork”

Pink laughed too “A dork with shoulder pads”

“that was the style in the 80’s dear”

“Some of these pictures are from the 70’s right? She still looks nerdy here” Pink said while showing a picture of Yellow in a Flannel jacket sitting at the Universities library.

Blue frowned a bit.  Pink was being a bit mean teasing her poor Yellow, her adorably nerdy wife.

“Pink” she stated in a stern tone.  “don’t laugh at your mom, this was the style back then and you shouldn’t poke fun at it”

“No picture of you has you in shoulder pads” She added in to be a smart mouth.  Blue brushed it off “Well I never looked good in blazers, but that’s not the point, no poking fun at your mother, got it?”

“got it” Pink agreed and got up from her chair “just one thing mommy”

“What is it?”

Pink giggled “Can I please get a copy of this one?” She said holding up another pant suit picture of Yellow.  Blue Scolded “Pink!” she warned.  With that her daughter left the kitchen laughing.  

Blue looked down to see all their pictures together; So many of baby Pink, them with Pink, and so many from their younger days.  She needed to start getting in the habit of taking pictures again. She smiled.

Her Yellow was kind of a dork back then.  

 Later That Night.

 Yellow was home and not so happy to get taunted by her own daughter about the late 70’s and 80’s business fashion.  Once they were finally ready for bed Yellow looked through her old photo album and critiqued it.

“Do I look bad here?” She asked Blue.

Blue smiled and cuddled up to her “No, not at all”

Yellow then pointed to another and groaned “Ugh, how could you let me leave the house in those shoes?”

Blue giggled “You liked those shoes”

“What about me in this sweater?”

“You said it was warm”

Yellow closed the book and signed; moving away from Blue.  “Well, Pink thinks I’m lame and you don’t seem to disagree”

Blue nudged her “What?”

“You think I’m a geek” Yellow sated flatly.  

Blue snorted and snuggled up to her now pouting wife.  “Oh Yellow, you were a of geek, but I liked that about you”

Yellow frowned “I always thought when I was younger I looked like a total bitch, or at least a complete dyke- “

“You know I hate that word” Blue warned.

Yellow shrugged “Sorry, it’s just I never thought you saw me like that”

“I just figured you knew, I mean, c’mon sweetie, you were in the chess club, comic book club, and you still subscribe to crossword monthly.  Those are very endearing and nerdy traits” Blue tried to assure Yellow it was no big deal.  But one glance into her eyes she saw Yellow looked bothered by this revelation. “Aw, honey don’t be mad”

“I’m not.  I just thought you saw me as attractive back then” She said before moving off the bed. Blue quickly tried to grab her “Of course I did! Where are you going?”

“To cancel my crossword puzzle subscription”

“Yellow! Come back!”  blue whined; not wanting to leave the bed.  

She forgot that Yellow had a sensitive side when It came to her looks. She should have realized this when Yellow starting wearing more make up and went for laser eye surgery.  She couldn’t bare the thought of her Yellow not thinking she was attractive.  But Yellow was in a sulking mood and she knew not to bother her.  She’ll wait until the morning to talk to her.

The Next day she didn’t see her much, after she took Pink to school Yellow was already out of the house.  To Blue’s disappointment she looked through her old photo album.  It looked like someone had gone through them since last night; but she didn’t care about that, Blue looked through some of her old photos of Yellow.  She remembered back when she was in college she wanted an expensive camera; so Yellow surprised her with one for her birthday.  She was so happy she ended up making Yellow her muse.  She always found away to take pictures of Yellow whenever she could.  She secretly always wanted to take dirty photos with her; but she knew Yellow wouldn’t go for it.  Even today she can’t get a nude of her wife.  Once she got her mind out of the gutter she noticed one of her favorite photos. Of Yellow’s law school graduation party.  It was an unflattering shot of Yellow trying to eat cake.  It was cute to her.  Blue had always loved looking at her wife.

How could she think I didn’t find her attractive back then?  Look at her; I could I not adore those hazel eyes, blonde hair, and cute butt. God, I the things I wanted to do to her a that dessert table.  Did she forget what I did her when we got home?

As much as her thoughts got her hot and bothered; she understood why Yellow thought the way she did.  Yellow was a tad insecure and she never once called her nerd.  She thought it a few times but never said it directly to her. What’s wrong with being a nerd anyways?

She heard the front door open as she realized Yellow was home.  She brought the photo album with her and made her way to Yellow’s private office.  

“Yellow can I come in?”

“go ahead”

She entered in to see Yellow was in the middle of some paper work. “Hello sweetheart I missed you this morning”

Yellow looked up “Sorry, I wanted to run an errand early, so it would be done it time before Pink got home”

“Oh, Well I just wanted to see how you are feeling?”

“fine”

“Just fine?”

“Yep”

“Still mad about yesterday?”

“No, I just didn’t think you thought I was a nerd”

“I don’t think you’re a nerd”

“You don’t?”

Blue moved closer to her and began to sit on her lap; arms around Yellow’s neck as she whispered in her ear “I think your sexy”

Yellow starting to feel her ears burn but ignored the sensation and pretending to still look down at her notes.  “Oh?”

Blue smiled “When I looked through all those old photos I was reminded of how attracted I am to you, shoulder pads in all” she said booping her nose.  Yellow couldn’t even look at her after that statement, she looked down with her face turning red.  Blue giggled and cuddled up to her neck “You never change, I love it”

Yellow let out an embarrassed laugh “Um, yeah, neither do you”

Blue lifted up her head “Actually I do in some ways” She then got off from Yellow to show her a particular page in the photo album.  

“See, I was kind of fat in the 80’s” She pointed to a picture of herself wearing a sundress, her curves and bottom slightly larger than now.  Yellow grinned “You’ve always been bottom heavy, love. Nothing wrong with that”

Blue scoffed “Really Yellow, because this is a picture from us in Texas; You can’t even see the rest of the background because my butt is blocking everything”

Yellow laughed “Everything is bigger in Texas”

The two laughed and then shared a kiss.  Blue then turned to ask.  

“So, what was the errand you needed to do so early?”

Yellow smirked “I wanted to teach Pink a lesson so I—”

Just then they heard a yell from down the hall “Mom!” It was Pink rushing towards the office “Who put this in my room!?” she exclaimed.  Holding up a framed black and white photo of herself as a baby; running in the back yard with no diaper on while carrying a teddy bear.

“One of my friends could have seen this, Seriously!”

Blue covered her mouth and looked at her wife; who had a smug grin on her face “It was the style back then Pink” Yellow said.

Pink rolled her eyes “Ugh, well I’m throwing this out” she turned to leave and Blue gasped.

“No, if you’re not going to hang it up, then I want it” Blue said coming towards her.

Pink then backed up to run out of the room “No, you’re going to put it somewhere people can see”

Blue then began to follow her down the hall “I was thinking the guest room”

Pink started to run “No! I’m burning it!”

Blue rushed after her “Don’t you dare young lady”

Yellow just sat back and enjoyed the bantering and smiled to herself.

Guess I’m not the only nerd around here then.  

[mybumpbirthandbeyond]

Here we go again...

I’ll be honest I think I’m still a bit in shock, so I’ve tried to articulate my feelings on this as well as possible, but I can make no promises.

 It seems strange to say it’s a shock when we were trying for a baby, but this happened much quicker than we anticipated. I had, for some reason, suspected it would take longer the second time around, to the point we started trying slightly earlier than we had originally planned. Anyone who knows the story the first time around, knows we were told by a doctor I was pregnant because every test we did was negative. We must have literally just missed the best opportunity to test, because it came up in seconds in the doctor’s surgery.

This time around there wasn’t much indication other than being late, but I don’t have regular cycles and had already been about a week late the cycle before. I was feeling sluggish and fatigued and rehab was just not something I had any desire to do. I forced myself Sunday 2nd August and almost instantly regretted it. A chin-up felt like I was lugging a 10 tonne weight up and I couldn’t blow up a balloon to save my life, much to my frustration (and rage!) but I think I brought about a few laughs that night (even if they weren’t my own!), judging the responses to my Instagram videos!!

The next night I had finished work and Alex joked – you want to take a test just do it and see. I was adamant I was waiting until I was at least 7 days late, but something about the way he said it made me do it. I took one of each – a cheap one and a ClearBlue digital one (not the ones that tell you how far along you are, but the ones that spell it out digitally). It was instant. Granted, it was not the most magical moment telling Alex because I was so shocked that I just blurted it out, but it felt very special telling Cailean he was going to be a big brother. He had no idea what we were on about, but he still smiled! What I haven’t told anyone is, the date we found out about this pregnancy (3rd of August), was exactly the same date we found out about Cailean, two years ago. Funny how life works sometimes.

There were 3 people I had to tell, and they were not family. Of course, I’m referring to my physios. They are responsible for my rehab and I’m guessing it wouldn’t have taken them long to guess something was up. For my own health and well-being given the progress I had made, I could not kid myself that I could continue to keep that up at the same level given how the previous night had went. To be completely honest, I always knew I was going to tell them when it happened because it just made sense.

What I could not get over, was how quickly my tummy changed. Rightly or wrongly, I had always assumed second time round it would take longer to change – I had a tummy already and knowing my situation, no one would dare suspect anything else. I guess my progress may have made a rod for my own back, or maybe, it just wouldn’t have mattered, and I was always going to change quickly. From what I know, you show quicker second time, I just mistakenly thought this wouldn’t apply to me as quickly or in the same way. My tummy changed almost overnight. I’ll not lie when I say I was bit (a big bit) disappointed. I had worked so hard for so long to make real, physical, aesthetic progress, and within hours of finding out I was pregnant, I was starting to look every bit as. I couldn’t believe after working so hard for so long to get to that point, it was going to disappear quicker than snow off a dyke.

Not only that, but this was going to be a hell of a lot harder to hide than I thought. At approximately 8 weeks pregnant, I looked as I did when I was 4 months pregnant with Cailean!! I had to be really careful around people, in particular my mum, who takes Cailean once a week when we’re working and is also round regularly anyway.

 I don’t feel I have to justify my decision to have a second child to anyone, however my diastasis hasn’t had the impact you might think. The goal was always to get strong enough for the next pregnancy and thankfully, thanks to my amazing team, that has happened. However, we have always said we would like 2-2.5 years between our children and that didn’t change because of my condition. There is the consideration that I am not getting any younger (33 in a month), and ideally, I would like to finish having children by the time I was 35, when things get more complicated. Aside from that, I guess the added consideration was surgery. I want to make sure I’m still relatively young and fit as I can be to get through a major surgery and get back to fighting fit. I’m not going to be getting surgery immediately after a second child, so I have to account for the time between.

I’m guessing some of you may ask what my fears might be this time around given everything that has happened. My physios know that despite their reassurances, I can’t help but still be fearful of some aspects. However, I am in the best possible position to have them to guide me through this. I couldn’t ask for a better team anyway, but certainly not for this next stage.

 I used to be fearful of the fact it could get worse but Gráinne has told me that in her experience, many women in my position are more aware of it, and therefore manage it better this time around so it doesn’t necessarily get worse, or even as bad as the first time. She’s definitely eliminated that fear for me. To be honest, even if it did get worse for some reason, at least I know what I’m dealing with this time around, and at least I know I won’t be waiting almost 4 months postpartum for help either. I know what to do and I have the best people to help me to do it.

 My own personal fear is actually surrounding the rehab after. First time around I was just so glad to be getting help I just did it and did it consistently and was committed to doing all I could. This time, I’m worried that now I know where I can get to, what happens if I can’t make it back there? Or what happens if along the way, my expectations are too high and get frustrated and stop complying? What if I keep comparing myself and this time it’s completely different? What if having two kids makes it harder to dedicate the same time and energy to doing it? That probably seems ridiculous and to be honest, it’s as ridiculous for me to say out loud. I know I will make the time, and I have every confidence that I will get back to the same things under the guidance of my team. The thought of the time it will take, the mental and physical battle I will have to deal with and everything else is the overwhelming part. I guess I have no excuse this time around though – I’ve already done it once, I have to do it again.

The mental side has already been a struggle, but I always knew it would be. Can I repeat this over and over? It helps that I know how positively it ended up the first time, but I truly did expect this to be slightly easier, at least at this stage. I got to a point where I wasn’t worried about my tummy. I barely checked it because I didn’t need to. I didn’t worry about my breathing or engaging my pelvic floor - I didn’t need to worry about those things.  Now all I feel I do when I do exercises is worry about my tummy and what it’s doing. I’ve already had to start rolling on to my side to get out of bed because of some weird doming. I say weird, because the shape is nothing like it was previously – almost coming to a peak. It’s all soft which is good, but I’ve to try and minimise that where possible. As a result, I knew I had to ask about sit-ups. I think I knew the answer before I asked, but Gráinne confirmed exactly what I thought – it may be roll-backs from now on. At least until she’s seen the tummy and can call it definitively. When I sent over videos of a headlift, sit-up and roll-back the answer was actually worse than anticipated – no sit-ups, no roll-backs and if I do a press-up it was to be on the wall. I found them way too easy when I initially got back to press-ups, so asked if we could compromise at the slant bench and she agreed. When we had a face to face consult (more on that in another blog), she actually said roll-backs were okay which confirms there is no substitute for being able to assess in person, especially now. That aside, this was exactly what I was worried about – feeling crap 1st trimester and doing very little, and by the time I came to getting back into it, exercises would have to be modified or removed altogether. It feels like it’s accelerating so much quicker than I expected and that’s the most frustrating part. I totally got this all completely wrong – the process of modifying, the changes that would happen practically overnight, the difficulty in hiding it. All of it. If I’m honest, I feel stupid as a result, and I never deal well with feeling stupid. I guess I can’t be too hard on myself – I may have had expectations, but I’ve never been in this position before so how could I know what the actual reality would be? I now just need to forget structure, goals and expectations. That is undoubtedly the hardest part of all of this. I have built my progress wholly on the foundations of goals my physios and I put in place. Even at the point of no limitations, I was still trying to structure my workouts to different muscle groups, different exercises and different modifications. My expectations are always set so high that nothing but reaching them is acceptable. A fundamental flaw I know, but that flaw has kept me motivated and striving for perfection since day 1. I just need to accept my body is not my own again - I’m sharing it and there can be no expectations now. That may take some adjusting.

The physical side has been tough. Tougher than I thought. Already I feel I’ve been out of breath at times, something that didn’t happen until much later in my first pregnancy. My heart rate seems to be more elevated sooner as well, and I have had pain in my abdomen beyond just the normal stretching. This is not my body merely adjusting to another pregnancy. This is my body – that has been worked hard for over a year, that has thrived on high level activity, that has gotten to a point that I’m stronger than I ever have been – going from 3, sometimes 4 (mainly 4 until I was told off!) times a week high level activity to doing 2 times a week if I’m lucky, nothing if I’m not. I was hell bent on working hard, not just for me, but also for my physios. Mainly for them. Anything other than that would disrespectful and completely unacceptable in my book. I’ve always worked hard but this was even more important – I was proving them right to everyone else; showing that their practices work. I was addicted to the progress; addicted to the high of achieving, of pushing hard and succeeding where before I wouldn’t have dared to dream of it. That is not something you wean yourself off lightly. The higher you go, the further you have to fall. If you struggled with the idea of not being able to do something but knowing it might take time – imagine knowing you can’t do something you previously could, and you don’t know when you’ll do it again. I didn’t know the last time I did a sit-up would be the last time for a long time. This is not me being ungrateful. This is me being honest. I stopped by the mirror the other night and almost did a double take. I have changed so much already, and it really is a miracle what the human body can do. But the rate at which I’m having to adjust; the rate at which my body is changing this time around, is making my head spin and it almost feels like it’s out of control.

I should point out that it’s different this time. Last time, I lay down to all the symptoms of early pregnancy. I didn’t do a thing in my first trimester and went to the gym once in my second. Other than walking the dogs and pregnancy yoga, I did very little. Anything I do this time around is already more than what I did last time and I managed to produce a very strong, healthy baby boy. That is all that matters at the end of the day. Whatever happens with my own recovery this time around, if my baby is healthy then that’s all that matters. I’ll deal with what I have to deal with when the time comes. I’ve done it before; I can do it again. I was strong enough once; I’ll be strong enough again.

 I never want my frustrations to be misconstrued. I am and always will be eternally grateful to my physios. I might not like what they tell me in that I am disappointed – certainly at this early point – but I fully respect and appreciate it and I will follow everything they tell me without hesitation. I trust them implicitly and I have no doubt whatsoever in anything they tell me. I am lucky to have them, and you will never hear anything other than that from me. I hope they know that by now. My frustrations are just a product of expectation vs reality: exactly the same as that graph Gráinne sent me that I’ve mentioned previously. I had an image in my head of what I thought would happen and it hasn’t happened that way. Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe I should I have brought this up before now and asked the question. The truth is, I’m not sure they could answer – no one can predict how each individual’s body is going to respond to the massive changes pregnancy brings, or the rate at which they occur, and that’s without a diastasis.

It helped me massively to say a lot of these things out loud. Not everything – some of this has come with time to reflect, but some of the key things anyway. We had a consult a few weeks ago – the first in a few months – and from my perspective, it was definitely needed. I haven’t been able to be honest about how I’m feeling because nobody knew, and even more to the point, nobody could understand. I couldn’t share what was actually happening with my rehab because I was at risk of giving the game away. I have been open and honest throughout but have had to hide this for what seems like ages. The three people I needed to speak to most were my team. That day, they were incredible as always and vocalised how they would support me every step of the way and told me how they know I have this in hand. I may cut a laid back, and relaxed figure who made a few jokes, but the truth is I was overwhelmed and touched by their words and didn’t know how to respond other than to thank them. Pretty lame. I can articulate myself well most of the time, but in this experience, so many things have made me speechless I’ve started to think I’m losing the knack.

I can’t put into words how they made me feel in that consult. Grateful and lucky beyond measure that they could have done so much for me already and want to do even more to support me going forward. Emotional that they would want to do that for me. I could blame the hormones but that would be a lie and I’m not so great at that – even in writing. At the end of the day, as I have already pointed out – I am one of many, many women who they see in my position – I’ll not be the first, the last or the most memorable, but I can guarantee that I will certainly never forget what they have done for me - even to this point - let alone what’s to come.

So here we go again? Well…not quite. This will be a very different experience to last time. I have all the help and support I need with this from day one and could not be more relieved by that. I’m sure there will be days when it’s a slog like last time. I’m sure there will be tears like last time. I’m sure there’s going to be a hell of a lot of hard work like last time. But I also know there will be the highs and the progress like last time and that, and of course my team, will keep me going every day. I owe it to the countless numbers of women in the same position, the countless physios who have contacted me to remark on my progress, and most importantly, to my own incredible physios to give this everything I have, once again – so that part? Definitely here we go again…

[stunudo]

The Navy has both a tradition and a future--and we look with pride and confidence in both directions.

Admiral George Anderson

Navy to FBI to BAU: 6075 until 1810 remain

One of the Six: A Criminal Minds Fan-fiction 

Featuring: Bethany Devereaux     Setting: Prior to Pilot Episode

Self-prompts: Who left the opening in the BAU for Greenaway to fill? What was the BAU like before Gideon’s sabbatical?

My name is Bethany Devereaux. I was one of the six agents killed by Adrian Bale and this is my story.

A/N and Warnings: If you haven’t, please read Early Years for context. Very subtle mentions of sexual harassment and assault. If you or someone you know has suffered from sexual assault please Call 1-800-656-4673 (US) for help. I also just want to say we need to do a better job of helping our veterans and active duty service members deal with this problem. Offensive slang. Longer, but the academy and Navy service afterwards is a minimum of 9 years! xoxo Stu  (Special thanks to @dontshootmespence, you’re amazing)

To say that I was unprepared for my induction summer and life as a Plebe isn’t accurate. I would say I was blindsided by the exhaustion. We got up at dawn. We ran the yard. We did formations. We ate in the mess hall. We were always a unit. The company became our family, friends and brothers in arms (no one actually said much that there were women present). We slept maybe six hours a night. It was a team-building, honor inducing, painfully mesmerizing blur. But I did it: I survived my seven weeks of bodily torture and got to see Mama and Daddy.

They had tours and history lessons while I had my regular duties. After the parade we waited alphabetically for our parents and guests to find us. I remember seeing Daddy with Mama’s fist holding his arm tightly, naturally she wore heels that were sinking into the grass of the yard. I couldn’t wait, I ran to them. The familiar hugs and scents overwhelmed me and I cried tears of happiness.

“Bethania, that is enough!” Mama shushed me, taking out her handkerchief for me to clean up.

“Looking trim there, Bets.” Daddy commented. His eyes were sad. I kept staring at them, watching as they exchanged glances.

“What happened?” I demanded. “Is it Charlie? Is he alright?” My older brother had been overseas, but not in a conflict zone.

“Charlie is fine, Bets,” Daddy began slowly, “It’s Pop-pop, he’s gone to heaven, baby. A few weeks ago.”

I know I was upset and grieving, but I will never shake the disappointment I felt. My parents, these two people in my life that I had trusted had withheld something so monumental.

There were only around 100 women alongside me as I began my studies that fall. The class size was roughly 1150. Routine was something that kept me focused. I worked hard and kept my head forward. Not down, not on a swivel. Eyes on the prize. I ignored the snark we got from time to time for being female, I was used to it.

Edwards and Vaughn were the other female midshipmen in my company. Edwards put up with nothing. If a guy so much as looked at her too long she was tearing him down with her thick Brooklyn slang. Vaughn was quiet, she would flinch if someone said something too loudly or catcalled. I wish she could have developed a thicker skin. Maybe its because she didn’t have the big brothers I did or maybe she had never been praised in her whole sorry eighteen years. I don’t know, but the sharks smelled blood.

It was the week before Thanksgiving leave that I found her in the lavatory. Her face was red from crying. The hard tile floor cooling her bruising skin. I don’t know how long she had been there, but I picked her up and took her to the infirmary. She moaned, “No, please” when the male doctors touched her. Her strained voice is etched into my memories.

“Midshipmen Devereaux, you can return to your classes.” Someone sent me away.

I visited Vaughn that night during study break. She didn’t want to talk about it. So I talked about the day, the awful food in the mess hall, how Jennings and Martin had been given extra laps. Nonsense small talk. She left before the end of the week. Back to Kansas, a landlocked state for the girl that dreamed of the sea. I never found out who had hurt her, she was too scared to tell. But from then on: my head was always checking two steps behind me as well.

My family had tickets to the Navy- Army game my second year at the Academy. It was in Jersey, so I had to get special leave privileges to go along. Charlie was there, thankfully my Midshipmen pulled out a victory after an otherwise embarrassing season. Gambling is not strictly promoted in the Fleet, so I am not going to say that I won a bet. Just that I left the game with some cash in my pocket.

“Hey, Bets!” Another Virginian drawl called out to me in the middle of the stands at Giants Stadium. I looked up to find a very filled out T.J. Stevens, grinning lazily at me. He was wearing a faded NAVY tee shirt, so I figured I could play nice. “How did you get away for the game?” He asked.

“Used every favor I had.” I smiled. “Wait, I have seen you! You’re a fucking Plebe! Why didn’t you say something to me in the yard?” I realized all my focus on my duties and routines I had missed my old family friend.

“Too shy, besides it’s not like they encourage socializing.” T.J. shrugged.

“Well, I’m glad it took you all the way to Jersey to say hey.”

“Maybe, want to hang out sometime? I mean, we could get together on town liberty next week?” He was six feet of shy and sweet southern charm, I nodded.

We did a good job sneaking around. Every upperclassman had different duties, but Plebes only had a chance of freedom on Saturday nights. Drinking was out of the question, we were both too young and dedicated. We found ourselves at the local bowling alley, on a fairly regular basis during that spring semester.

Unfortunately, my Company Operations Officer, Thomas (who was not the most pleasant fella) happened upon T.J. and I, a few weeks after Mid-term leave. “Well, well, lookie here.” His dark eyes scoring over us like a cobra. “And I had pegged you for a dyke, Devereaux.”

I rolled my eyes, like I hadn’t heard that one before. “Sir? Is there something we can help you with, otherwise I would like to continue to beat Stevens’ ass.” I quipped as I strolled down the alley and cleaned up with a spare.

T.J. was frozen. The upperclassman was watching his every twitch. “You’re up, T.J.” I tried to act casual. Finally he got up and took his turns. In the meantime, Thomas sat besides me and whispered with his beer breathe.

“You’re dead Devereaux. Plebes are off limits and you know that.”

I turned and looked him square in his beady eyes, “You have no proof. I have known Stevens for years. I was just making sure he was relaxing on his liberty.”

“You better watch yourself, girl.” Thomas’ southern drawl felt dirty now. “He’s got a few weeks before Sea Trials, hate him to mess that up.”

Turns out Thomas’ threats were empty. T.J. did fine at his trials, but he broke up with me anyway. Too scared of the attention, even though now we had nothing to hide. Life is funny that way. You throw things away when you finally have a chance at happiness. Or you are so afraid of the possibilities that you hightail it the other direction. I didn’t want a coward, even if he was sweet. I just had to keep telling myself that.

“After graduating from Annapolis I spent my time on a ship or two. Before a friend of my Daddy suggested I apply for something closer to home.”

I was part of a crew. I had earned a degree. I was serving my country, still making Pop-pop proud. The years in the Fleet held a sense of purpose and routine that could not be repeated in any other environment. I saw the entire world. I saw the Persian Gulf, after Desert Storm, but I got to those ancient waters and so many more.

I slept, ran and ate Navy. I worked with some amazing sailors. But I was restless. After Charlie had been at the Pentagon for two years, he kept telling me to keep my options open. I knew I didn’t have another enlistment in me, I didn’t want to command a full ship.

It was ironically a Stevens that told me to apply to the FBI. T.J.’s uncle Carl was teasing me during a big New Year’s bash at my folks’ house. It was now 1997, I had only six months left. Why not? How hard could a single target be after years of chasing shiploads?

The academy was nothing I wasn’t already trained to handle. The classes were more specific to law enforcement so I had to relearn my vocabulary. I was easily the oldest person in my class, surprise surprise. The mental stimulation was refreshing and tougher than I cared to admit.

The FBI was a good fit for me, I liked the results and being able to see my targets in person. The small unit working together was how I thrived. I had been placed in the Carolinas, it kept me near the water, but the honeymoon phase ended quickly. I began searching for bigger challenges after just two years. Then I found an internal posting for a profiler position in Quantico.

It was the late nineties and being a woman in the FBI was still uncommon. The position that had been vacated was that of the notorious ladies’ man and founding member, David Rossi. (He later became an international best selling author of True Crime books.) I interviewed with SSA Cole in a dimly lit basement office. After the second interview I got the impression they didn’t want to fill the position. That was the only time I did not achieve my objective and as a Devereaux, I didn’t just let that slide.

I returned for my second attempt at the promotion nearly ten months after my first interview with Katie Cole. Now it was her position that had been vacated. A talented clinical psychologist and profiler, her reputation and name left a large hole to fill in the small unit. But the fact that she had broken into the old boys’ club of the BAU made my opportunity all the more possible.

I had been working in the Boston field office, in the interim, hoping the diverse caseload would deepen my understanding of the work the profilers did. Irish mafia and vice cases helped develop my intuition and my confidence grew with each collar.

The offices were in a cement lined basement at the headquarters, just like the last time. Jason Gideon was regrouping after Rossi’s and Cole’s departures. Their poster boy Aaron Hotchner was running the interview process because Gideon didn’t have the attention span to interact well socially. Hotch was an arrogant lawyer with a chip on his shoulder when it came to child abuse cases. But his irrefutable moral compass held the whole unit together.

Aaron, remarkably, remembered me and asked pertinent questions to my expanding experiences. After an open-ended Q&A session I was told they would be in touch. I shook hands all around and made my way through the cave of file cabinets. SSA Gideon was staring at the cork side of an ancient chalkboard on wheels. There were photographs of victims and their dumpsites. I didn’t think he had registered my presence until he began to speak.

“Why would he wrap the bodies, but leave the faces exposed?” His musings were to himself, but I took it as an opening.

“Sir?” I pointed to a victim’s face. “He wants to see them, he comes back to check on them.”

His dark eyes turned on me as if I was speaking Swahili. I pointed to the position the bodies were in and the nearest footpaths. They were left directly in line of sight.

“What else can you tell me about this unsub?” Gideon asked, not making eye contact again. But I felt him watching my micro-expressions, my processing obvious on my heavily browed face.

“He takes talismans or mementos from each of the victims. He relives the deaths even when he can no longer visit their graves.”

“Hotch?” Gideon called. “Agent Devereaux is coming to Indiana with me. Handle the transfer while we’re gone.”

And just like that, I was in.

Next Chapter: New Girl on the Unit

@teatimewithtiya I hear you’re the expert, how did I do?

@criminalwriting @dontshootmespence @cherry-loves-fanfic @gubl-oser @imagicana @reiding-and-writing @milkandcookies528 @lookingforgalifrey @reidbyers @rachficrecs @hotchnerfuckmeup @criminal-navy-writings

[pldcrl]

Walls

My uncle wrote a great essay about history and walls. His name is Peter Vella. He doesn’t have an “internet presence” or any social media accounts, so I thought I would post it on his behalf.

Henry Ford said, "History is (more or less) bunk." He was wrong. Just like his timing for the Model A, and his idea that Adolf Hitler was a swell guy, Henry was wrong about history. History gives us a chance to avoid the mistakes that our predecessors made. Recording and studying human events means we will never have to sport mullet haircuts again, we will never think it is someone's right to smoke a cigarette inside an airplane, and we don't need to go to war to stimulate an economy.

Donald Trump’s signing of an executive order to start the construction of a wall along the U.S. Mexican border shouts that the newly elected president skipped a history class or two.

There have been ten or so major walls constructed in the history of the world. The biggest wall by far was the Great Wall of China. Its length varies depending on who you ask. The most famous portion built in the Ming Dynasty measures 8,850 kilometers. A different source claims the entire structure spans 21,196 kilometers. It was built and rebuilt from 700BC to 1644 AD which is longer than it took to finish the Montreal Olympic Stadium. It was meant to control immigration and military intrusion. However, international news agency GB Times reporter, Riho Laurisaar claims “the Great Wall may have been a manifestation of power that put fear into the hearts of barbarian raiders, but it failed miserably when it mattered most". And, “The Great Wall was nothing more than an ambitious project contrived by a vainglorious emperor, trying to make a clear distinction between civilized people and barbarians”. Now that sounds familiar. Today the Great Wall of China is a tourist attraction.

The Romans were usually pretty bright, yet they built (not one, but) two walls in England. Hadrian; the Roman Emperor from 117 to 138 AD was responsible for the first one. It was to” keep Romans and barbarians apart”. The 110 kilometer wall wasn’t working too well so Hadrian's successor Antoninus built a wall north of Hadrian's to supplement the whole process, and get his name on a wall as well. This second wall was like having a mud room to keep cold drafts from coming into the kitchen when you open the back door; except that mud rooms work. The barbarians (Scots) got by anyway. Hadrian's Wall has become a famous hike and today is a tourist attraction.

The history of Jerusalem is a litany of "build it up, and knock it down" by all the major Fertile Crescent state religions and the Romans as well. The West Wall or Wailing Wall in Jerusalem is part of the fortification of the Temple Mount. It was built by King Herod about twenty years before he supposedly tried to kill baby Jesus. The wall around one of the holiest of holy places may as well have had a revolving door on it though. Today it is Israel’s biggest tourist attraction.

The French Maginot Line was not really a wall per se. It was a wall of defence consisting of bunkers strung in a line along the French German border. The bunkers were connected by underground trains and were equipped with artificial sun rooms and gourmet canteens. Built in the 1930s, the line was meant to keep Nazi invaders at bay. However, the Panzer tanks took the Belgian detour route and you could order schnitzel in Paris restaurants a week or so later. The Maginot Line does get tourists, but most of them are German.

If we zip over to Turkey we have the Walls of Troy. This edifice withstood a lot of abuse in a ten year war with Greece about 1190 BC. As the story (myth) goes, those crafty Greeks gave up on knocking the wall down and set up a large wooden statue of a horse stuffed full of soldiers by one of the gates. Curiosity got the better of the residents of Troy and they dragged the faux equine into the secured area. That night the Greek soldiers popped out and the expression, "Duh" was heard for the first time in history. The Walls of Troy are now small sections of stone but are definitely in the Lonely Planet guide to Turkey.

If Donald Trump was a guest on Celebrity Jeopardy he may be forgiven for answering that the Ming Dynasty is a Chinese soap opera, or that King Herod was the guy that opened up that department store in London, or that Hadrian was Rocky's girlfriend, but he should know the story of the world's most recent wall; the Berlin Wall. Built by East Germany (aka the Soviet Union) and eventually covering a distance of 96 miles, “the Wall” marked the region where American and Russian troops had met in their occupation of Germany. After about fifteen years of tense co-existence, the two “allied” victors decided that they would start a war against each other. It was only a Cold War; still, it cost a lot of money, and kept most Europeans awake at night. Starting in 1961, the Berlin Wall became a physical monument to the world’s efforts to avoid a third World War and nuclear devastation. What made the Berlin Wall novel was the fact that it was built to keep people in, not out. This might be the same premise for Trump's next secret project; “The Canadian Wall”. It will be there to keep “Trump Dodgers” from skating across the frozen Detroit River to Windsor, or claiming refugee status when they step off cruise ships in Vancouver or Halifax. The Berlin Wall lasted only twenty eight years and the deconstruction party became lore. This was the only functional world wall that could be witnessed in my (or Mr. Trump’s) lifetime. I did cross it at the infamous Checkpoint Charlie gate. The elevated tourist passage showed me that the Berlin Wall was actually a pair of walls. In between them was the “death strip” consisting of mine fields, speed bumps, ditches, electric fences, and a series of frightening looking steel structures. “X” shaped rough cut metal protrusions with rusting edges were meant to snag would be escapers until they could be shot by guards in towers. Maybe this is where the expression, “overkill” came from.

A beautiful building or sculpture is a testament to the imagination and ingenuity of the human race. The Berlin Wall was all about what ails us; divisiveness, fear, and control. I was there on a gloomy overcast day, and it felt like it was the Wall that was sucking all the light out of the sky. Approximately two hundred people died trying to escape the Berlin Wall. Today it is a tourist attraction.

History demonstrates that only one substantial wall was built in the United States of America; so far. Situated in the city of Boston, the ominous sounding “Green Monster” has been part of the mystique of the Fenway Park baseball stadium since 1912. At almost four storeys high, it was intended to keep non paying spectators from watching the Boston Red Sox games from outside the park. That only worked until television was invented. The Green Monster did serve to keep hits that would have been line drive home runs in most other parks well within the realm of outfielders. However Jose Bautista and a few other players have foiled the Monster on several occasions. Fenway Park holds the Major League Baseball attendance record at 794 consecutive sell out crowds. Many of those would be tourists. Possibly, concerning the rhetoric needed to sell Congress on the idea of the Mexican Wall, Mr. Trump may alter a famous baseball phrase, “Build it and they won’t come”.

The Dutch are known for dykes to hold back the sea, but you may not be aware that they are also responsible for creating a wall that was relied upon to impede the process of millions of invaders. The “modern” contraceptive diaphragm was developed after the vulcanization process of rubber was patented by Charles Goodyear in 1844. Eighteen years later Wilhelm Mesinga not only designed the device but his name would be used on the only brand available for sale for decades. It may be a dubious distinction. Even though one third of American married couples were using the “Rubber Wall” for contraception in 1940, there is physical evidence that the diaphragm was only moderately effective. Some of that evidence may be in the same room as you right now. There are three cities in the world that have been able to advertise a contraception museum as part of what tourists may want to visit; the cities are Toronto, Vienna, and Cleveland.

There were other walls; in places such as Peru, Croatia, Iraq, and Zimbabwe but the recurring theme that comes from this frightfully abridged history lesson is, that large walls do not work as static defense: not for long anyway. It seems the inherent flaw is size. Even if you have tens of thousands of slaves to build an enormous edifice, how do you secure it? A perfectly good soldier is at their post sixty kilometers away from the subverting action enjoying the sunset or playing solitaire on their I-pad.

The total border length between the United States of America and Mexico is 3,201 kilometers; or 1,989 miles for those that live on its north side. There is already 700 miles of security fencing where the Border Patrol feels the majority of illegal action is focused. That leaves a 1200 mile reno. Donald Trump's wall to keep out “drug dealers, criminals and rapists” is going to cost 10 to 25 billion dollars to build. He says he is going to get Mexico to pay for it. That would make his wall historically unique at least. Is it going to be a toll wall?

A wall in this climate zone is going to be hot dirty work to build. Your average American isn't going to want to do this kind of work. So.....why not hire Mexicans. Save them all that travel to do farm work in Ontario or housework in Los Angeles. The trick will be to somehow get them to pay to do the work. That would really secure Don's place in history. But even if he pulls it off, how effective will it be. What about an innocuous bus filled with Mexicans dressed like Japanese tourists; or a giant Trojan Piñata that looks like it just might be stuffed with donuts?

Admittedly there are still large numbers of illegal aliens entering the United States, but the numbers from Mexico have been reduced by more than half in the years of 2008 to 2012 according to a joint study by the University of Texas and the University of New Hampshire. The researchers believe this is due to a drop in the birth rate and the availability of work in Mexico. They go on to suggest that the most recent illegal immigrants are leaving Mexico to “flee violence”. Twenty five billion dollars could go a long way to help Mexico clean up its internal problems, and end the need to escape Mexico for good.

Maybe the whole thing is intended to fail and become a tourist attraction like all those other defunct walls. Maybe there will be a theme park. Speaking of theme parks, the first theme park in the world was built by none other than Henry Ford whose Greenfield Village ironically became a "historical" reproduction of a rural Michigan town site, like the one he grew up in. In his later years Henry spent more and more time strolling around in Greenfield, happy to be in another era than the one he invented. So much for history being bunk.

When the Trump Wall is torn down, like Berlin, there will be a heck of a party. I see a big show with lots of celebrities. The highlight will be the famous Mexican guitarist Carlos Santana playing "Soul Sacrifice" which he scorched through at Woodstock in 1968. Check it out on U Tube. By the way, the walls didn't work at Woodstock either.

In case you were wondering, Donald Trump’s mother was Scottish and his father was German. So his relatives have had experience being on the wrong side of a wall.

[nyansense-the-nyanbinary]

#look it is LESS objectionable than other similar fantasy storylines because tolkien is making a point about the brutality of war#but i do think he correctly observes a particular impulse in some women without fully understanding the underlying tensions#he's like. for reasons unknown some women would prefer to face horrible dangerous circumstances than stay at home & tend the family castle#don't you see the castle is the important thing!#the castle is more important yes that's not the POINT#anyway. it will not be until many years later that some of those baby dykes will be able to articulate the vague feeling of betrayal#guy jobs are horrible and exploitative too on this we agree. but you see some of us will die if we have to figure out how to be nurturing

via @gideonisms put the rest of the post in the post thank you

eowyn should have been a lesbian. Eowyn/faramir is like, fine, but it misses the point of eowyn for all baby dyke eowyn stans which is not that she longs for glory in battle and doesn't realize war is ugly and brutal, but that she's caught between two awful options and she doesn't want to be given one based on her gender. She's not in love with aragorn, she envies him because she finds the tasks he has in life more preferable and she hero worships him. Is this the point Tolkien was trying to make? Well, no,