#being in this fandom is torture

[santamariamadredidio]

Happy New Year everyone! 🎆🥂

Can you believe it? This is going to be the year that we finally get TOG2!

..right guys?

...surely..

PLEASE?!?

[shanastoryteller]

The day his deal comes due, Sam goes missing.

Dean tells himself it’s nothing, that he’s gotten caught up in some research, some last ditch, hail mary nonsense and that he’s just turned his phone off and everything’s fine, that he wouldn’t do something stupid, that he wouldn’t break his promise.

He tells himself that for the first two minutes after he cracks his eyes open and sees the empty bed across from him, and the first time his call goes straight to voicemail, and not much after that. Sam’s broken his promises over things significantly less important to him than his brother’s life.

Dean is dressed and in the Impala five minutes later, heart thudding wildly in his chest. He calls Bobby, Ellen, everyone he can think of, but none of them have heard from Sam, none of them have eyes on him. Sam was with him last night, even if he boosted a car, there’s only so far he can get.

He keeps calling, keep searching, desperate to stop whatever he’s trying to do, to find him, to see his brother one last time before he’s dragged to hell. To make sure Sam is going to be okay after he’s dragged to hell. But the hours tick down, the sun sets, and he can’t find a trace of him. He’s so exhausted and heart sick that when he goes to call Sam again it takes him a long time to read the number on his phone, eyes swimming, the time not making any sense.

1:03

That’s not possible.

That’s not –

His phone rings, blocking out the time with Bobby’s name across the screen, and he answers it but his throat is too thick to say anything.

“Dean?” Bobby says tentatively. “Are you – I got an email from Sam. It just said, I mean, did–“

“What did it say, Bobby?” he asks, even though he’s sure he knows.

Bobby sucks in a breath at his voice, because he knows just as well as Dean that he should be screaming in hell right now, not answering his phone. “To take care of you.”

Dean drops the phone, hears Bobby still talking as he grips the wheel and presses his forehead against the back of his hands. This is what he’d been afraid of. This is why he hadn’t wanted to mess with the deal in first place. This is the one thing he’d begged Sam not to do.

It's easy to find a crossroad.

The demon is laughing at him when it shows up, wicked grin in a pretty face. “That didn’t take you long, boy.”

It’s a different demon than the one he delt with, obviously, but Dean figures they all know the same shit, since demons are a bunch of gossips. “This wasn’t the deal. My brother lives and I die.”

“You traded your soul for your brother’s life,” she corrects, so amused by all this that all he wants to do is kill her, to exorcise her, to make her scream. “Just like your father traded his for yours. There’s no reason Sammy can’t make his own trade. Man, but is your family fucked up. Maybe if you’d just settled down like little Sammy wanted, you wouldn’t all be bargaining for each other’s lives like haggling at a flea market.”

“Untrade it,” he snaps. “My soul for him alive, come on, no year, no waiting, you bring him back and take me to hell right now.”

She laughs in his face. “You don’t have anything to bargain with, boy.”

“My soul,” he repeats, “That’s what this is about, isn’t?”

“Oh, it’s what it’s all about,” she says. “But Sammy’s a clever boy. You know that, don’t you? He didn’t trade his soul for your life, he didn’t have to. You didn’t die. No, he traded it for your soul. Sorry, honey, but your credits been declined.”

At first he doesn’t understand. Sam traded his soul for Dean’s, exactly, so there’s no reason he can’t trade it right back. Then he gets it.

She sees the exact moment it clicks, the moment despair and horror sweep across his face too quickly for him to stop them. “That’s right. Little brother owns your soul now. For some reason he didn’t think you’d take proper care of it. You have it because that’s where he wants it, but no one will be making any deals with you, Dean Winchester. You can’t sell a soul you don’t own.”

“You can’t,” he has to clear his throat, “you can’t just come in and change things at the eleventh hour-”

“Eleventh hour?” she interrupts. “Sammy made his deal eleven months ago.”

His mouth is so dry he can’t speak.

“Isn’t it funny?” she asks, head cocked to the side. “All this time, the deal he’s been trying to get out of wasn’t yours, but his own. Maybe the two of you might have even managed it, except you just wouldn’t help, would you? Insisting that he not research, that he not look for a way out, and he spent so much time trying to convince you, coaxing you to talk about your feelings when he knew you were safe, all he because he thought it would make you feel better when he was gone, because he couldn’t tell you the truth and talk about how scared he was, so talking about your fear was as close as he could get.”

Dean’s going to be sick. “Don’t – please, please, I’ll give you anything-”

“You don’t have anything,” she says, gleeful. “You want to know why I agreed? The thing that made it just too delicious to refuse? Sammy’s down there, just starting in on an eternity of torture, and all he has to do get out of it is give up your soul. It’s his, after all, and he can put the original deal back in place any time he chooses. Just one moment of weakness on his end and his beloved big brother will be on the rack instead.” She sighs happily. “It’s almost as good as anything we’re doing to him down there, the knowledge that if he slips up for even a moment then it would all be for nothing. I couldn’t have found a way to twist the knife deeper if I tried.”

There’s vomit crawling its way up his throat and he has to swallow it down before he can speak. “I can’t – I’ll do whatever you want, please, there has to be something.”

She leans forward, cruelty and delight shining in her eyes. “The only thing you can do is what you’ve been telling your precious baby brother to do for the past year. Accept it. Move on. Live a good life so his sacrifice isn’t in vain.”

God. How can she – how can Sammy expect him to –

He’s doubling over, finally upchucking what little he’s ate today, and he’s dry heaving on the dirt when he hears the fading sound of her laughter.

This can’t be real. This has to be Hell, he has to be in it right now. He has to be.

[happypeachsludgeflower]

So, in PIDW, there was obviously wife plots that could bring back the dead (mushroom body being one of them), and since we know Airplane is a hack that reuses concepts over and over, there’s probably multiple wife plots that could work, so like, where’s the PIDW fics where Liu Qingge somehow comes back to life, memories of Shen Jiu trying to save him intact, and goes to hunt the asshole down so he can repay his life debt, and along the way accidentally clears Shen Jiu’s name of all his crimes and now everyone is convinced Shen Qingqiu is a saint.

[messervixen]

“The Black Dog”

“The Prophecy”

“Peter”

Okay Taylor that’s enough feeding the theories for one day-

[pigeonpassenger]

please do not ask me what this post means im still thinking

[trappedinafantasy37]

"Oh, I don't like Minthara cause she's mean to the other companions."

Shut up. All of the companions are mean to each other. Did you just like, completely skip over the passive aggressive comments between Shadowheart and Lae'zel throughout all of Act 1? Did you just skip over the confrontation in which the two of them actively try to kill each other in the gayest, most homoerotic way possible? Or did you just make an exception for Minthara and decided she's the only one not allowed to be mean? Larian had to de-bitchify Shadowheart cause she supposedly was too mean in EA, and she's still a bitch in the release version (and I love her for it). For fucks sake, Astarion is the fan favorite and one of the reasons is because he's an ass to everyone.

"But but her third son comment to Gale is so mean and cruel!" Shadowheart literally tells Astarion he deserves to be publicly executed. You do not have a problem with companions being assholes to each other, you just don't like it when Minthara does it for whatever dumb reason.

Just another example that shows that people have either 1) never recruited her and don't know the full context of her comments and miss out on all the positive things she has to say for all the companions and/or 2) hold her to a standard that they do not hold the rest of the cast to when they are all guilty of the same shit.

To me, this is just a lazy excuse for someone who doesn't actually have a valid reason to dislike Minthara.

[crimeronan]

there's something well-meaning but also kind of insidious about the idea that you have to be Careful and Gentle with how you hurt female characters, lest you accidentally recreate misogynist violence in your work. particularly when this gets paired with "female characters shouldn't cry or break down too often because that's stereotypical feminine weakness" (this particular advice DOES seem to be going out of fashion these days, though. Thank God).

i'm thinking about how people have pointed out that women in popular fiction & fanwork are often comforting their tortured boyfriends about their sad abusive pasts, without receiving any of that same emotional support in turn -- effectively just becoming tools for said sad boyfriend's character growth. and how much rarer it is for that gender dynamic to be flipped, with the boy comforting the girl. and also how this trope is even More prevalent when it's a woman of color + her white boyfriend.

some of it is Men Ignoring Writing Women nonsense, some of it is fanwork of media that's built on Men Ignoring Writing Women nonsense, some of it is an unconscious recreation of a gender dynamic that often exists in real life relationships, etc.

but i Also think there's something to the fandom side with, like. people having hesitations around fictional women that they don't around men. like i HAVE to take some of these things in good faith, and the good faith reading is: writing about men recovering from abuse is a safe, easy exploration of hard topics. meanwhile writing about women the same way feels Strange and Wrong and Uncomfortable because of the Femaleness of it all.

i truly don't know what can be done to combat this beyond writing more suffering women myself.... because it's not all that helpful to yell "EVERYONE IS A MISOGYNIST" (especially because tbh more often i find it's, like. woman writers who just. Don't Want To Think About That Shit) & i also can't Force people to want to write about women suffering horribly.

so i suppose i will end this on a joke instead:

Pleaseeeee Start Beating The Everloving Shit Out Of Female Characters. For Meeee.... 🥺🤲👉👈🙏🙏🙏

[whump-polls]

(what gender do you prefer for a whumpee, not just generally in whump)

i know that this is simplified and doesn't include all possible combinations of preference and attraction, you can't explore a lot of nuance in this format but this is probably the most complex i can get within the poll options, feel free to pick other/nuance and elaborate in the tags or discuss in comments/reblogs!

e.g if you prefer female characters in whump and arent attracted to anyone (not women or anyone else) or multiple genders excluding women, pick the 4th option if you prefer female characters and are attracted to multiple genders including women, pick the 3rd

(of course male/female characters also include trans characters)

[great-pan-is-dead]

I appreciate you all from the bottom of my heart, but there's a trend with TimeRogue fics that had Ruby having left before the Doctor ever finds Rogue, and there's many things that could be said there about fandom, but my stone to grind is that Ruby Sunday is canonically Go Find Your Man Advocate No.1. Show my heartbreak queen the respect she deserves

[arthur-lesters-left-shoulder]

I love looking at fanart and playing my favourite game. Is it a) Jedidiah Martin b) Jonathan Sims or c) Carlos Robles

[stinkypire]

my frustration with the bsd fandom is that their bias hatred towards mori causes them to be stubborn in not analyzing mori's character at all. yes, he has done bad shit, but 80% of the characters has as well. bsd is a morally gray world. they simplify him to "pedo sadist that fiddles children" like just wtf. the sa dazai headcanon and theories spread around and shown in the fics are just so disgusting and triggering. you're taking such an intersting, mysterious, and well written character and painting him as the source of every problem in the BSD universe (basically making him a scapegoat). it's illogical and stupid. you're allowed to dislike characters, just appreciate how well written they are and don't simplify them down/mischaracterize them due to your contempt towards them.

[baby-girl-aaron-dessner]

Celebrity worshipping stans on Twitter have become upset over Taylor Swift not posting on Twitter anymore due to the #SwiftiesForPalestine movement trying to hold her accountable for her silence. It has caused a lot of division within the fandom.

The celebrity worshipping stans who infantilise the 34-year old billionaire are extremely upset:

The fans who care about genocide and social issues also react:

[seven-stars-in-his-palm]

the thing i love about bill cipher is that even after i've learned all of this stuff about him, seen him at the most vulnerable he'll ever get, seen him at his most innocent, i still can't give a flying fuck about trying to justify his actions. yes he's traumatized, yes he was twisted into what we know today, and while it gives a semblance of context to why he did what he did, it doesn't matter. he still ruined ford's life. he still drove and baited multiple humans to suicide. he still tormented every human he saw as his ticket out of the consequences of his own actions. he still took delight in his actions. he was willing to commit genocide for fuck's sake!!! (freezing all of the humans into statues). trying to explain away what he did does not get rid of what he did, but it certainly puts it in perspective. you won't be catching me being a bill apologist any time soon <3

[lucyskywalker]

This will be critical towards 600 strikes. Don't like, don't read.

"Oh, but Dyomedes stabbed a god..."

The last time I checked this story is not about Dyomedes and the God in question wasn't Poseidon.

The context and message behind the myth is completely different. Actually, the message behind Dyomedes duel with Ares and Aphrodite is the opposite. It's to establish one of the main themes of the epic: how human choices and efforts become insignificant when fate and immortals are in control.

Dyomedes myth only proofs that if Poseidon wanted Odysseus dead for good, he would be dead. End of the story.

Odysseus was punished by his Hubris. Like Lesser Ajax was before him, like Niobe and her children also were slain by Apollo and Artemis.

It wasn't just a torturing journey for some petty reason.

It was a lesson.

And when he learned that lesson, he went back home.

Using Dyomedes to defend what happend in 600 strikes is literally absurd.

"Oh, but Poseidon deserved it."

The fact you say that proofs u don't know shit about Greek Mythology and how it is deeply rooted in how this ancient society worked and worshipped those gods.

Poseidon didn't deserve any of this. Not within this myth.

Odysseus was the one who committed Hubris, over and over again during his journey.

Odysseus was the one who believed to be above the gods due his witty and cunning nature.

Odysseus was the one who put his crew in danger because of his own pride more than once.

Odysseus was the one to harm Poseidon's son and left him alive in an act of mockery during the Odyssey.

Even during the retelling of Jorge in Epic the musical, many things Odysseus have done are pretty much debatable and are the roots of all his problems.

Even in Jorge's retelling, he stablishs angering the gods is not a good idea. Like in the song Munity, when Eurylochos kills Apollo's cows (or Hellio's).

Even before it, he established that not hearing them or going against them is not smart choice.

My Goodbye and Remember Me.

Odysseus tought he was wiser than Athena for showing mercy. But the fact is... he wasn't and he paid the price for believing such thing. Which can also be depicted as a consequence of Hubris.

It happend again during his entire journey later on. Odysseus choose to go to the underworld to avoid Poseidon. He choose to sacrifice six of his remaining men to not face Poseidon.

Because Poseidon is that much of a threat. It is a force of nature so powerfull, Odysseus cannot expect to face it.

Later, in Thunder Bringer, once again we are reminded of how powerfull, mighty and terrifying the gods truly are

Making some kind of final battle between Odysseus and one of the eldest gods, where he ends not only torturing Poseidon, but also commanding him, and somehow gets out alive, not only goes against all his journey lessons and everything the Odyssey is about, but it is also extreamly ooc of Jorge's own writing.

Odysseus never rellied on strength and a face to face battle to win.

Actually, he is "a warrior of the mind". He rellies on strategies and deceptions. He was never meant to be like Herakles nor Achilles.

And be helped by the ghosts of his dead crew? When he is pretty much the reason why they are, uk, dead? Even if they were willing to help, how did they left the Underworld? By a bus of ghosts?

What is Hades doing? Throwing a party?

I'm not even going to debate the jetpack stuff.

You can say whatever you want to apologize the writing be it "the fates wanted that way, so it doesnt matter", "he won because of Ares's blessing".

Whatever. You just crossed the line of an adaptation to a straigh up fanfiction.

Study the classics about the tale you so claim to love instead of saying so many things with no basis with so much pride.

[minty-bunni]

Danny developing any chronic condition that leads to periods of joint stiffness (and other things, but the major part is stiffness) has a ton of angst potential in regards to his status as one of the living.

Imagine being something in between life and death and then your joints get all stiff for the first time. I'd imagine someone in that situation who is unsure of their humanity *might* just jump to thinking it was rigor mortis starting to kick in.......

[crimeronan]

one big thing about polyshipping for me is, like. you know how some people will have their eyes opened to homoerotic relationships in media bc they'll realize, "wait, if these people were two different genders, i'd 100% assume they're into each other. i have a double standard that i never noticed"?

there's a polyamorous equivalent in certain media that's basically just. "if you didn't assume this character is monogamous, you would 100% believe they have crushes on & are dating all of their friends." OR, "if this character wasn't dating somebody else already, you would 100% interpret this new friendship of theirs as a crush/budding romance."

usually the creators of the media aren't thinking about polyamory when they make it! usually the creators of the media are thinking "i want this character's friends to be as important to them as their romantic partners, we don't get enough of that in media," which is great and true and also EXACTLY WHY IT WORKS AS A POLY NARRATIVE. people will be like you don't Have to polyship why can't you just let platonic relationships be important ugh 🙄 & i'm like i did my years in the "why can't two men just be friends why does everything have to be gay 🙄" trenches. you're not doing this to me. we're not doing it about polyshipping. we're skipping over that whole discourse cutscene because i am Too Tired For It. don't even start

sometimes characters are so full of love and affection and joy for so many people that i start gnawing off my hands about how polyamory isn't normalized. because i'll watch/read certain media and i'll be like. listen. this is a polycule. i know you don't know this because your creators don't know this and that is totally okay but you are a Wildly polyamorous person who's ambiguously trapped in the 2000s/2010s with Big Monogamy psyops eating your brain. please let me free you. please i can give you Everything .

PLEASE KISS YOUR FRIENDS