#even tho she broke up w him for showing up w sam as HER man outta nowhere

[slashersweethearts]

morgchie on the dome tonight. the way so much of their r/s has consisted of morgan tryna convince richie to have some damn sense and leave her alone and him literally doing anything BUT that…

[turtle-steverogers]

I Watched TWS for the Millionth Time So Let’s Over-Analyze This Shit

-TFA theme at the beginning 🥰 (that theme is so fuckin good)

-Sam’s lil jogging route around the Tidal Basin/Mall

-Steve being sassy , just as a general

-Steve’s sadness errands

-Sam relating to Steve on the soldier front and making him feel seen

-Just. Sam Wilson

-The way that Steve’s to-do list in the movie varies from country to country (For instance, the UK list has Sherlock instead of I Love Lucy and The Beatles)

-Also I wanna know Steve’s thai order

-The fact that this whole exchange is happening at 6:39 am

-Natasha drives with all the recklessness of a 16 year old that just got their license

-Stealth Suit Stealth Suit

-Steve deflecting Nat’s date suggestions

-Steve’s aversion for parachutes...reckless endangerment ✨

-Steve speaking/understanding at least a little french

-Tony having designed the Helicarriers to have arc reactor power instead of turbines because “he got a close up look at the turbines” in The Avengers 2012 when he got caught in them

-“This isnt freedom, this is fear” aka the embodiment of Steve’s character

-Steve’s exhibit being in the Air and Space museum even tho he flew a plane once and crashed it

-Bucky’s display having two different birth years (1916 and 1917. the correct one is 1917)

-In the little video of Steve and Bucky, Sebastian Stan was saying “We *are* friends” after the director told them to “act like friends” for that shot

-Steve acknowledging Peggy’s family and therefore acknowledging that their relationship with each other, while still close and special, is not romantic anymore and Peggy telling Steve to move on and start over wtf endgame

-The parallel of Peggy losing her memory as Bucky regains his

-Sam Wilson willing to show vulnerability and not being ashamed of his PTSD and treating Steve like any other attendee and hoping Steve will open up too if he sees that it’s okay to

-Steve’s face after “it was like I was up there just to watch” cuz he gets it and both sam and him had to watch their other half fall

-“What makes you happy?” “I don’t know”

-The Winter Soldier theme is just Bucky’s scream pitched different and made to sound mechanical because Henry Jackman wanted it to sound like a man trapped in a machine

-Why is Steve a lucky bastard that has his own laundry machine

-Steve leaving his apartment building after Sharon points out the music and then SCALING THE SIDE OF HIS OWN BUILDING AND CLIMBING IN THROUGH HIS WINDOW LIKE CAN YOU IMAGINE SEEING CAPTAIN AMERICA JUST CLIMBING INTO HIS APARTMENT THROUGH HIS WINDOW ONE NIGHT

-STEVE’s APARTMENT I HAVE MANY THOUGHTS (i might make a separate post on that)

-The fact that “A Long, Long Time” is playing when he sees Bucky for the first time in the future and the song is about lovers reuniting after the war i’m not saying it’s gay but i am

-He calls Fury “Nick” which really indicates theyre not close in the slightest

-Steve is excellent in adapting under pressure (him immediately catching on and using Fury’s code story: “who else knows about your wife?”)

-Steve is Awful at lying but hes also Excellent at lying

-How tf did Steve get the flash drive in the vending machine without the vending machine dude noticing i-

-“Captain Rogers” “Neighbor >:(“ petty little shit

-Steve’s observation skills are A+++++ as we can see in the elevator scene

-More reckless endangerment like imagine just going through your work day and captain america falls through the ceiling

-Steve stole someones gym clothes after escaping SHIELD. let that sink in

-Natasha has about a billion masks on at all times (“I only act like i know everything, rogers” “the person that programmed this was slightly smarter than me. slightly” “the truth isn’t all things to all people all of the time”) also she’s quite insecure, especially when it comes to being perceived as a good, trustable person

-Meanwhile, Steve’s consistently himself even if it costs him

-Bucky trained Natasha in the Red Room (at least in the comics) so theres a good chance she made the connection between him and Steve and withheld that information

-The honeymoon in New Jersey😭😭

-Steve and Nat both have very different, but entirely valid approaches to situations: Steve’s is that of a tactiction, Nat’s is that of a spy’s. We see this in the scene at Pentagon City Mall

-Steve’s looking for someone with shared life experience and bucky has that

-Bucky killed JFK

-When Zola tells him that his death and life both amount to that of a zero sum, he punches the screen with his bare fist, not his shield, indicating just how much that upset him

-Pierce offers Bucky milk cuz he knows “the asset” can’t refuse or accept offers. He’s taunting him

-Sam drinks orange juice straight from the bottle and also doesnt refrigerate his mustard. There’s also a baseball trophy in his apartment so,,,,, baseball player sam anyone?

-Sam is also a gem who immediately helps out Steve and Nat with no judgement in his tone so they don’t feel ashamed

-Nat straightened her hair somewhere in Sam’s house

-“Cuz thats really not your style, Rogers” “you’re right, it’s not” *rubs sitwell’s arm* “it’s hers”

-Steve and Nat banter Steve and Nat banter

-Sam is just *clenches fist* so cool

-Nat immediately knows where Bucky’s gonna shoot when he lands on the Sam’s car and later she knows how to affectively fight him best because he trained her so she knows his fighting style

-Steve alone saying “Bucky?” was enough to break Bucky’s conditioning the slightest bit

-Sam met Steve like 36 hours ago and he’s already being arrested and made into a government fugitive with him and it won’t be the last time

-Steve is the only one entirely restrained

-“Even when I had nothing I had Bucky”

-Everyone meets Sam and is just like “aight let’s trust him with the highest clearance security information”

-Steve looks super nauseous all through the scene where Rumlow is handcuffing him and later when he says, “he looked right at me, like he didn’t even know me” he sounds sick and choked up

-Steve carries a lot of weight on his shoulders

-Steve’s “Bucky?” after the highway battle and Steve’s “Bucky?” in Bucky’s memory in the Vault Scene being different (in Bucky’s memory, he looks more heartbroken)

-Sebastian’s acting. Just all of it. And the way Bucky just opens his mouth for the mouth guard before he gets wiped....heartbreaking

-Steve realizes an organization that was meant to protect the people has become its own antithesis so hes like “aight. get rid of it” damn that’s the right mindset right there

-In the memory scene after Sarah’s funeral, Steve is so out of it and distressed, that he can’t find his key but Bucky immediately knows exactly where it is and what he’s lookin for

-Bucky was vain as shit and also had money: tailored suit, hair w shit ton of brylcreem in it

-The big breakfast Steve had was at Sam’s house

-The whole scene on the helicarrier between Steve and Bucky is incredible here are some highlights: Steve never backing down from a fight until it’s Bucky he’s fighting, Steve dropping the shield for him, Steve being ready to die if living means he’s living in a world where Bucky’s alive and doesnt remember him

-Their acting in that scene is so genuine and heartbreaking i can’t- i can’t-

-Steve’s got a comm i’m so chances are Nat, Sam and Maria can hear a portion of what’s going down on the helicarriers

-“I’m with ya to the end of the line” is basically “til death do us part” so the equivalent of wedding vows between Bucky and Steve is what ultimately broke Bucky’s conditioning

-When bucky fell, steve didn’t jump after him but when Steve fell, bucky went after him even tho he’s brainwashed. don’t think about steve’s guilt surrounding that. youll only get sad

-Bucky waited until Steve took a breath to leave him

-Sam waited by Steve’s side in the hospital

-In the end credit scene, Bucky and Steve originally were supposed to make eye contact, but the writers didn’t want it established that Bucky remembered Steve until CW

----

Every time I watch it from here on out, I’m gonna add a lil more as I notice hehehe

[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/

[torishasupremacy]

cobra kai season 3 spoilers!!

so I finished watching cobra kai season 3 and as I went I wrote down some thoughts so here they are! under the cut because it got pretty long

Episodes 1-4

soccer fight was hilarious but why did only the miyagi kids got in trouble

nooo why’d hawk beat up the little kid “he kicked the shit out of me” was such a funny line tho

i would die for kumiko she’s so fucking pretty in those flashbacks especially

danny and johnny had major couple energy when looking for robby holy shit

love whatever’s going on w louie and anouche

mr miyagi is so short??

glad the hate toward sam is getting addressed i feel bad for her

ok didn’t expect miguel to hate johnny like that damn i think ppl are blaming him too much when he says “show mercy” he’s not expecting his son to paralyze miguel??

kreese backstory what what??

omg I feel bad for tory she’s def got anger issues but she’s in such a rough situation as much as I hate him I’m glad kreese was able to get that perv off her back

also sam moon and tory are so pretty, moon was ROCKING that car wash look

so I guess piper doesn’t exist huh

demetri and hawk as enemies is entertaining but I wish they were friends

what is that guy who keeps bullying robbys deal it’d be crazy if kreese paid him to mess w him to drive him to kreese

danny intimidating robbys old friends and then johnny beating them up was hysterical

so they can’t find a place for aisha in the story but they can for yasmeen??? excuse me?? everyone check ‘aisha leaving the school and moving away’ off their season three bingo cards

the mr miyagi letter was so sweet my heart

i wanna go to japaaaaaaaan (i was gonna go last summer but covid)

im glad johnny and danny are trying really hard to be there for robby even if it’s not working out thank god danny apologized but when robby said he couldn’t change I was like noooooooo my boy

the middle finger on the contract amanda larusso is a damn legend can’t wait for her to slap kreese

i don’t give a fuck about tom cole fuck off

i heard a rumor that there would be more queer rep in this season so where the fuck is it bring piper back

“it feels good to talk about it” sir please go to therapy

demetri is being a little shit but hawk is being an asshole so I guess it cancels out 

aww man that scene with bert and the hamster.. hawks face during that was so funny tho he really said :o

YESS SAM GO LEAD MIYAGI DO

if they create a love triangle between kumiko danny and amanda I’m gonna have some issues

aww I’m glad that shannon is trying to be there for robby even in rehab

there’s no way that octopus card actually exists right

bro the difference between johnny and danny w the bullying and everything was shown so well when johnny was beating up that guy and danny was like no!!

“i heard you were the real bully” sir shut the fuck up who fucking cares it was 30 years ago and also you’re wrong 

Episodes 5-6

everything ab chozen was so good. the mutual respect, karate cousins, forgiveness, tHE HONK

the good coming back to danny was so well written my family was tearing up

they fucking broke demetris arm holy shit hawk 

tory and miguel’s relationship ended pretty lamely 

wish hawk had fought kyler but it was actually kinda cool for kyler to be like oh shit this guy is scary

COBRA KAI = TANG SOO DO i literally yelped and pointed at the screen when that was revealed bECAUSE THATS THE STYLE I TRAIN IN HOLY SHIT

kreeses war backstory is actually really interesting. terry silver cameo! if we’ve got johnny obviously in s1 and then karate rival number two chozen in the third season we gotta get silver in there at some point right? anyways I kinda like young kreese except I fear being in any kind of military situation so it’s kinda hard to watch

an edit after watching the finale: i fucking called that

so did kreese kill armands nephew or uhhhhhh

anouche jumping into larry’s arms god that was incredible 

everyone acted like that snake was a bomb just get a long stick or step on it but actually don’t do that I like snakes

i feel so bad for sam she’s really struggling with panic attacks and stuff I feel like danny is gonna train her in pressure point stuff so she can wreck cobra Kai

miguel at the concert!! miguel standing up bc he got mad at johnny!! Let him be happy again please

robby and the bully guy gaining respect for one another yes

robby blowing off kreese was fantastic loved that

please someone check on my boy demetri he was in so much pain :(

did hawk always have a grim reaper tattoo?? where is his mother?? ... I want a mohawk so bad you guys have no idea

“did you date me to get back at some” girl he was literally creating a “let’s get back together” video for her when you asked him out im sorry but you should’ve know he wasn’t over his ex going into the relationship. he still shouldn’t have kissed sam while dating tory but didn’t tory know she was the rebound??

i like the balance theyre using w sam’s character, she’s not a doormat and wants to fight back but she still has trauma surrounding tory 

Episodes 7-8

surprised tory and robby didn’t fight (because thats something i was hoping for) but the way they set it up made sense. really hoping they don’t become a couple I don’t see the chemistry and the last thing we need is another love triangle 

the adults were a mess at that meeting thank god miguel and sam jumped in and made excellent points ab bullying and how their voices mattered most

noooo poor robby seems to walk in at the worst of times 

I’m glad danny and johnny are trying to be there for robby but it’s no wonder he doesn’t want anything to do with them

when is danny gonna teach sam those immobilizing moves huh??

glad that they took sam’s mental health really seriously but im surprised that danny was never like hey you seem pretty traumatized let’s get you a therapist 

god that scene w tory drowning sam was so startling thank god it was a dream

there was so much sexual tension between danny and johnny before robby came out of juvie my brother yelled NOW KISS (in front of our parents) I think he ships them

why did amanda go and hand that random guy lemonade he takes one sip hands it back to her and leave that was such a weird way to get her in the scene

robby joining cobra kai hooooo boy I think hawk is gonna have a lot to say about that

also yasmin and demetri is such a weird pair but they’re pretty entertaining

bring moon piper and Aisha back please 

eagle fang is such a bad name johnny better get cobra kai back soon

so is the rumor that 3 ppl are gonna die in this season true or

i honestly didn’t want sam and miguel to get back together but now that it’s happening it’s pretty cute

miguel got over his injuries pretty quickly which is good for the story but I still feel like cobra kai is ignoring the realities of disabilities again 

hawk is such an asshole I can’t wait for his redemption arc

im sooooo ready for the arc with kreese to be resolved but he does such a good job of being a villain. the close up smirk when robby entered the dojo literally had everyone in my family screaming

johnny and carmen really went for it huh... that was painful to watch

my dad and i are debating ab whether the final all valley fight will be sam v tory or sam v robby, he thinks sam v robby but im really hoping for sam v tory 

honestly I’m surprised miguel wasn’t mad at robby for paralyzing him but I guess they didn’t have much time to talk ab that. miguel was kinda kissing robbys gf so I guess it balances out?? as in its dysfunctional on both sides

yasmin writing on demetris cast was fucking hilarious amazing save not sure why he had to be on the floor for that scene

robby trying to fight miguel like he wasn’t on probation and had already landed the guy in the damn hospital 

johnny training kids in the park is amazing that’s where I train w my karate class since we can’t be inside 

i still don’t know which one is chris and which one is mitch

can hawks posse please get some names and exposition I’m tired of them being nothing but props for the story 

i thought there was gonna be more queer rep this season but guess not

robbys whole predicament is making me saaaaaaad

also I want more tory backstory let us see her brother and mom!!

you know that guy that kept beating up robby in juvie? what the fuck was his deal

yknow things might’ve gone a lot better if johnny and danny took sam with them to pick up robby seriously did they just let him walk home?? where is he staying??

“how long does facebook take to deliver messages” johnny ur killing me here

[waithyuck]

extra elongated tag game

tagged by @gohyuck my love

tagging: @kwantified @honeyyu @jensungf @renjunwrites @neo-shitty @suingjaehyun

O N E

tell me the first song that made you stan your current fave group and why did your faves attract you so much?

okay so my ult group is nct and I can’t remember what song exactly but i remember not being a stan and LOVING back 2 u so much that I had to look into nct

for bts is was serendipity and blood sweat & tears

ateez was pirate king bc we stanned since debut 😔✊

T W O

rule: answer the ten questions and write your own!

favorite item of clothing?

I own a lot of hoodies but my fav is my dark gray we go up hoodie and it’s big n comfy....yeah

if you had to smell like one scent for the rest of your life what would it be?

I think I would want to smell like vanilla or lavender

favorite painter? why?

frida kahlo bc she embraced everything about herself and did wonderful self portraits

what’s your favorite horror movie (and if you don’t like horror, why not?)?

I don’t like jumpscares so most horror is not to my taste....however give a psychological horror and I’ll go off ab how much I love it (like idk if it’s considered horror but ‘a cure for wellness’ anyone???)

iphone or android?

iPhone dude

favorite tiktok trend (and if you don’t like tiktok, you can talk about how much influencers suck)?

i only go on tiktok for the kpop content I don’t know trends,,,,also can be talk about how most influencers on that app manipulate literal children into giving them money?? for doing absolutely nothing??

if you could wake up with any new ability what would it be?

the ability to read others emotions and make them happy no matter what (call me a corny ass bitch but it’s true)

favorite superhero/supervillain/antihero?

people consider her a ‘villain’ so I’m saying maleficent (from the movie maleficent) bc ??? she fell in love with a man and he fuckin just,,,,did her so dirty and left her broken-hearted and cut off her wings like ??? hell I’d be mad too I’d curse the little ass baby he had with another woman just as fast as she did. also how about that character development??? she cursed aurora but always looked out for her and eventually came to love her?? and that’s the kiss that broke the spell and woke aurora up?? call that motherly love we stan

if you could only dress in one color for the rest of your life which color would it be?

realistically black is prob the way I would go but gray is also a valid option

who’s your ult and give me five reasons why.

oof y’all already know it’s my boy lee donghyuck

1. his vocals??? the vocals alone are enough reason to stan

2. his dancing??? he is so incredibly talented and I love watching him move

3. his hardwork and dedication to his career, like he loves what he does so much and I love seeing him shine (but also like, pls let him sit the fuck down for a sec)

4. his aura and personality !!!!! is just so loveable !!! he brightens the room with his mood-making personality and I’m just in love with him god

5. okay okay now I’ll touch on the fact that he’s so fucking handsome??? a visual king ???? look at that face, look at those legs, JUST LOOK AT HIS BODY PROPORTIONS. PERFECT.

my questions:

what is your favorite memory from your childhood?

If you could travel anywhere in the world with just a snap of your fingers, where would you go and why?

describe your personality in three (3) words.

what is your favorite thing that you have ever read? (anything you’ve ever read counts! fanfiction, poems, novels etc.) why?

are you the studying type of person or the type to just ‘wing it’ when you have a big test coming up?

between bold colors and pastel colors, which do you prefer?

do you live life in the moment or do you plan every action you take?

what is your favorite holiday and why? (all holidays count! across all religions and cultures 😄)

would you rather stay up to stargaze in the middle of the night or wake up early to watch the sunrise?

what is your favorite eye color on another person?

T H R E E

rule: bold the statements that apply to you, italicize your aspirations, then tag nine people.

AIR ༉⋆͙̈

i have small hands / i love the night sky / i watch animals and birds when i pass them by / i drink herbal tea / i wake to see the dawn / the smell of dust is comforting / i’m valued for being wise / i prefer books to music / i meditate / i find joy in learning new truths from the world around me

FIRE ༉⋆

i don’t have straight hair / i like to wear ripped jeans and overalls / i play an organized sport / i love dogs / i am not afraid of adventure / i love to talk to strangers / i always try new foods / i enjoy road trips / summer is my favorite season / my radio is always playing

WATER ༉⋆͙̈

i wear bracelets on my wrists / i love the bustle of the city / i have more than one set of piercings / i read poetry / i love the sound of a thunderstorm / i want to travel the world / i sleep past midday most days / i love simply lit dinners and fluorescent signs / i rewatch kids shows out of nostalgia / i see emotions in colors not words

EARTH ༉⋆͙̈

i wear glasses or contacts / i enjoy doing the laundry / i am a vegetarian or vegan / i have an excellent sense of time / my humor is very cheerful / i am a valued advisor to my friends / i believe in true love / i love this chill of mountain air / i’m always listening to music / i am highly trusted by the people in my life

AETHER ༉⋆͙̈

i go without makeup in my daily life / i make my own artwork / i keep on track of my tasks and time / i always know true north / i see beauty in everything / i can always smell flowers / i smile at everyone i pass by / i always fear history repeating itself / i have recovered from a mental disorder / i can love unconditionally

F O U R

the ultimate tag: answer whichever ones you want to because there are a lot and then tag a few blogs you’d like to get to know better!

PERSONAL

name: samantha

nickname: sam

birthday: march 9

zodiac: pisces sun

nationality: american

languages: english, currently learning korean

gender: female

sexuality: pansexual :)

height: 5’2” (157 cm)

BLOG STUFF

inspiration for muse: music, tv, movies

meaning behind my url: hyuck is doin too much he’s gotta just give me a break and wAIT A SEC = waithyuck

blog established: 2020 but I’ve been on tumblr since 2015

followers: 791

FAVORITES

favorite animals: pigs, cats, dogs, snakes

favorite books: lord of the flies, the great gatsby, hamlet even tho it wasn’t technically a book

favorite color: yellow, orange, pink

favorite fictional characters: gilbert blythe, prince zuko from atla idk who else

favorite flower: sunflowers, carnations, roses

favorite scent: vanilla, citrus, lavender

favorite season: spring or fall

RANDOM

average hours of sleep: like 4-5

cats or dogs: both

coffee, tea or hot chocolate: hot chocolate

current time: 2:23 p.m.

dream trip: seoul, rome, greece in general, london, dublin

dream job: teaching english as a second language, linguist, translator

hobbies: writing, drawing, singing

hogwarts house: hufflepuff

last movie watched: burlesque lmao

last song listened to: kick it - nct 127

no. of blankets you sleep with: 1

random fact(s): my fingers are double jointed lmaO idk

F I V E

10 things i can’t stop listening to

slow down - chase atlantic

watermelon sugar - harry styles

to die for - sam smith

we go up - nct dream

blue side - j-hope

god’s menu - stray kids

inception - ateez

love me right - rendezvous at two

renegade - aaryan shah

HER - chase atlantic

[chvsingrainbovvs]

       ( ross lynch, agender, he/him, cytus ii ) * &. i know it must be scary for you, xenon, after surviving the takeover. to turn into someone like simon jackson, a twenty-six year-old weekday pm host at wwtf, right here in castle town. just remember that you are as resolute as you are self-distrusting, and to be wary, be safe, be true to who you are : heroic .. . ? villainous ??? neutral…..?????? through and through. ( stream x and a kiss/forever always by the driver era )

        god i’m gonna butcher this character i can feel it i can FEEL it in my bones.  but anyway okay SO i’m only in the late forties for the girls + robo in cytus so i’m not finished the story but i DO . . . know spoilers and also have chipped through to make sure i don’t forget anything bc I really don’t want to fuck this character up but i’m so horrified i will so.

BEFORE CASTLE TOWN. / X E N O N cytus ii spoilers below !!

OKAY SO. For starters his real name is the same as his Castle Town name - Simon Jackson - but to differentiate between the two I’m gonna use “Xenon” for this sections just to. Be clear.

And also I’m trying to keep this part short because again I’m not finished Cytus II myself but I know spoilers & important story stuff but still I. Really don’t want to get something wrong n fuck it up. I love this dude.

JUST LOOK HOW PRETTY HE IS UNDER THE HELMET AAAAAA

bt anyway okay pre-grame , 

in his younger/high school days he was basically a programming prodigy who went undercover as a hacker/musician by the name of X - eventually this was revealed but it’s basically a way to show his skill in the field even when he was younger AND it’s how he got his start

Xenon was in a band called CrystalPUNK with the dudes KAI , Joe , and his then-girlfriend Cherry and holy shit did he love her and they only broke up because like. Cherry & her father were involved with Some Shit and she didn’t tell this to Xenon because he’s very unwavering in his morals ( very justice-centric , always wants to do good and make sure people face the consequences for their wrongdoings ) and this left to him leaving the band because he found out about Cherry and really didn’t like what her father was up to and ... yeah.

Turns out tho when her father was arrested Xenon actually ... tampered with evidence so Cherry got off scot-free so.

Fun times !!

There’s also the story of how he met Neko - basically helping her out when she runs away from home & also pm assisting in helping her take down a gang that tried kidnapping her it’s. It’s wild. 

Present day in-game he works with A.R.C. kind of as like... a security dude , like an investigator but not really and he has this neato AI that can mess with signals , rewind them , that stuff. 

He’s also the lead guitarist of his one-man band , Xenon , and all of the other band members are comprised of robots he created.

He’s REALLY good at programming and hacking and shit and regularly works with A.R.C. to try n bring threats to justice bt this turns out . . . interesting when Xenon’s accused , arrested , and eventually jailed for being the main suspect of the game’s sorta-kinda main antagonist , AEsir. And yeah he gets freed but it turns out . . . the real AEsir’s actually framing him , literally ( by using his AI ) fucking with his own memories so he remembers being AEsir. And now even when it’s proven he isn’t . . . Xenon has self-doubt if that’s actually the truth ( because he actually confessed , yes ) , so uh. Fun !!

Yeah he’s basically ,,, my poor, self-doubtful yet still the underpaid babysitter of the group kid. Compared to the other muses I write he’s probably the most blunt & the most no-nonsense ( especially since I don’t have Sam anymore ) , and he’s got a really good heart but also a strict moral code that he very rarely breaks unless it’s something that he needs to do.

Like saving Cherry , for example.

I’d say he’s very lawful-neutral good considering he often abides by the law but isn’t above going in another direction if it means the most people are safe and nobody’s hurt.

Also he’s lowkey a Puffer which in-game is a fan of PAFF aka Aroma !!!

“I’m trying to keep this part short”

AFTER CASTLE TOWN. / S I M O N.

Okay SO his backstory is very... plain. grew up in Castle Town , his father was a police officer while his mother was never in the picture and first Simon was expected to go into the police force too because Simon was raised with a strong moral code bt...

That. Did Not work out thanks to Simon not liking the force and deciding it wasn’t for him , not liking the glorification of the military when it wasn’t doing anything to help the people that actually needed it.

He wanted justice. But not like this.

He worked out getting a radio show on the weeknights at WWTF because he was in a few bands as a teenager and had a good music taste - but also he had interesting... conversational skills.

His radio shows called Simon Says and he didn’t pick out the name so uh he HATES it.

But his main thing is - because he’s so opinionated , his radio show’s sort of popular because it’s interesting to hear him rant about whatever he feels the need to and also deal with callers that either come into to debate him or ( more often ) troll him.

He will sometimes do guitar stuff on his show - he started recording them and sharing them online too since some people who didn’t like his show tried to accuse him of being a fake so his response was “uh watch this” and started posting recordings of the same guitar riffs he’d do on air. He now has a little YouTube channel where he posts these and highlights from his show , just called Xenon !

Oh also bc I can’t write cis or straight muses on his gender he doesn’t rly like,,, care ?? He calls himself agender bt he rly doesn’t care what you call him - he just knows he doesn’t fit in the gender binary and also he’s a roaring pansexual bc I SAID SO. He’ll take any pronouns, doesn’t care on that aspect bt he uses agender as an identity bc he feels the most comfortable with it. 

He’s still like . . . really self-doubtful about who he really is and he lowkey hates it in Castle Town because he knows his memories were tampered with again and that’s uh. Not GOOD bc again fucking AEsir so.

THAT’S KIND OF IT HIS PERSONALITY’S JUST... the same. Bitter annoyed kiddo w/ a stronk moral code that probably gets into a lot of debates and fights over it because he can’t shut the fuck up.

#XenonWillShutUp get it trending

[papistark]

Okay. I’ve allowed a night to let everything sink in. I’m ready to talk about Endgame now.

*cinemasins voice* spoilers!! (duh..)

so the wounds are still fresh. v v v v v v v v v fresh. but my thoughts during the entire movie were just OMG IM TRYING TO REMEMBER EVERY SINGLE THING THAT IS HAPPENING SO I CAN REMEMBER IT AS LONG AS POSSIBLE BEFORE i inevitably go see this movie again

This is what the movie reduce me to like 99% of the time btw

now, I’m gonna try and break this up to be as organized as possible into 4 main sections which will be general thoughts, the highs, the lows, and closing thoughts. that may sound organized but I promise it won’t be and as always I’ll have to use bullet holes to even stay relatively "organized"

I'm sure I'm leaving stuff out that I either loved or would wanna discuss but tbh the ENTIRE FILM i was just like GOD I WANNA REMEMBER THIS FOREVER!! Every scene that happened i was like god there's still 3 hours of stuff that's going to happen but I want to remember it all!!!

Overall

this movie was good. and i’m mad it was so good and i found it so enjoyable for how dirty they did me. The pacing was pretty well done for a first viewing, but I'm sure after a couple rewatches I'll get caught up on the occasional misstep in the pacing and general direction the story took, but I really liked it!!

I thought the Thor stuff was kinda distasteful and honestly a joke that ran too long. Like ha ha okay we get it but also? He went through so much fucking trauma can we just lay off him? Damn? I don't wanna linger too much on it bc honestly the more I think about it the more I get upset the russos did him dirty

all the callbacks??? made me so emotional????? eleven years and almost two dozen films guys holy fucking shit it felt like such a good homage to bring stuff back

Yo literally when they went up to busted ass thanos i leaned over to my bf and whispered "are they just gonna kill thanos in the first ten minutes is that allowed" and uh YEP! WOW

Also the opening scene being Clint's family getting dusted... gasps in my theater y'all they went in hard on us

TIME HEIST!!!!!! FUCK marvel knows how to take you on a fun journey!! The concept was so fun!!

I also appreciate them mixing up the plot a bunch to keep us guessing!! Like fuck, when Thanos was finding out through Nebula... future nebula talking to past gamora i was SO SOFT... sisters...

Hulk was... weird. It felt a weird kind of fanservicey for a little bit, and honestly a little out of place? But. Eh. Wasn't the worst part. Certain parts of it were fun! I think I got used to it haha

Everyone looked. So good. After the time jump. Damn. Thank you make up department for everyone's new looks. I live for silver fox tony always.

I loved seeing Loki again i know it was so little content BUT I DONT CARE I'LL ALWAYS LOVE MY FUCKING PRINCE

We didn't get as much Nebula and Tony content as I was hoping but god it was so cute and tender in the beginning. Imagine all that bonding. Nebula finding tony on the floor, knowing he's on the brink of death, and propping him up in the seat :'(((( tony helping fix nebula :(((( the father daughter relationship we deserved and didn't get to see come to fruition.

AMERICA'S ASS. THANK YOU SCOTT LANG.

All the New York flash back was so fucking fun. The elevator scene. Brilliant. I really thought they were gonna recreate but it was such a fun tease. Also cap making fun of his past self for saying "i could do this all day" I SCREAM why do the Russo's get steve so well

Carol taking a direct punch in the face from Thanos without even flinching? We stan a goddess

ALSO SHORT HAIRED CAROL YESSSS I LIVED!!!!! YES!!!! (But also that movie could've used like way more Carol thats just mY OPINION)

Also AGAIN, I DON'T CARE THAT IT WAS FAN SERVICE, STEVE WEILDING MJOLNIR WAS E V E R Y T H I N G. They have TEASED US since that one middle avengers movie we don't talk about that he was worthy and!!! Our!! Son!! Is!! Fucking!!! Worthy. And the scene of thor making him swap w/ him "you get the little one" i screamed bitch

also I was living for how much Steve swore in this film lol literally fuck joss Whedon's characterization we don't know her!

Valkyrie on a Pegasus thank you THANK YOU i was living

That entire final action scene..... holy fucking shit y'all. It was just crazy enough without being too crazy. I loved the callback to the original long continuous shot

THE HEAVENS OPENED UP AND SANG WITH THAT A-FORCE SCENE. YES. ALL THE MARVEL LADIES LINING UP. THEY ARE HERE AND THEY ARE THE STRONGEST OF US ALL. A-FORCE. FUCKING A-FORCE. Thank you Russo's for my LIFE

Carol's little "hi peter parker :)" god i love them. I love peter. My fucking spider son. I missed him so much. I missed Tom Holland's sweet peach little face AH I CRIED WHEN HE SHOWED BACK UP

Also last kind of ~general~ thought i know i don't get time travel at all and it is an instant way to confuse me in any franchise but wouldn't steve doing what he did fuck literally everything up idk we'll get to steve in a bit

Highs

morgan

H.

fucking

stark

I CAN’T BELIEVE I GOT FED WITH SUCH GOOD TONY CONTENT THIS FILM ONLY FOR THEM TO STOMP ON MY HEART LMAOOO

DAD TONY BEING AS LOVING AND DOTING AND SWEET AND TENDER W/ HIS DAUGHTER AS WE ALL HAVE HEADCANONED HIM TO BE FOR YEARS!!!

TONY GETTING HIS JUSTIFICATION IN BEING MAD not just mad but PISSED at Cap for how everything fell out. catharsis. felt good scoob.

speaking of good tony content of course i need to just take a moment to YELL ABOUT STONY thank you russos for the fan service thank you for having tony ogle and comment on steve rogers’ ass it almost makes up for all the pain and suffering

btw do y’all think the H. for Morgan’s middle name stands for Harley because I LIKE TO THINK SO

also am i lowkey annoyed that like half of viewers won’t recognize an adult ty simpkin at tony’s funeral at the end even tho i know i shouldn't be because ot everyone is a die hard BUT half the articles im looking up for reviews and shit of that scene literally all the results are “SO WHO IS THAT KID AT THE END OF ENDGAME” YOU FUCKING FOOLS IT’S TONY’S FIRST BORN SON HARLEY KEENER FROM IRON MAN 3. FUCKS. im getting off topic anyway i was just happy they brought him back because I am an iron man 3 enthusiast and his relationship with tony was SO important and this confirms that at the very least tony kept in contact with him over all these years!!! and he wasn’t just some insignificant blip

Not to be stony on main but steve being the first person to hold Tony again once he was back on earth :)))) wrow.

Also the first thing tony telling him being "I lost the kid" WOW BREAK MY HEART MORE HUH!! WHY NOT!!

The first thing Peter doing when he saw Tony again :'') just rambling about everything that happened and tony just so happy to see him alive and hugging him so tight I'M NOT FINE!! NOTHING WILL EVER BE FINE AGAIN!!!

I appreciated the closure with Howard like?? A lot?? I'm the last person to be a Howard stark apologist, but I think his character and his relationship w/ Tony and how Tony viewed him as a father and as a man was so well crafted throughout the series??? Idk I liked that scene it was good to my baby.

And now a pOSSIBLY CONTROVERSIAL~~ opinion but..... I loved Steve's ending. I really did. I thought he got a beautiful and fitting ending and I was so happy. It meant so much especially to hear his reasonging being that in a way, he did it for Tony. He was inspired by what Tony told him. He saw Tony get his happy ending and for so many films now Steve has been searching for that and he missed an entire life. Tony helped him realize that. It just made me!! So emo!! Like Bucky's face when he knew Steve wasn't gonna be coming back. Steve's last convo w/ Sam. It was just amazing. I can't believe I'm seeing hot takes from people calling Steve selfish or blaming the fact that the Russos have a boner for Steggy or whatever. Who cares!!! Steve got his happy ending and it was well deserved and a wonderful arc!! Lay off him bc you ship him w/ Bucky or tony more damn!!!! (Idk about the timeline y'all dont come for me i really have no idea i think the Russos just said fuck it for that one even when talking about not fucking up the timeline)

Lows

Natasha deserved better. She did. I understand why they took her character arc the way that they did, and honestly, this is the first time I've felt we've seen Natasha have even a modicum of actual character traits since like, Iron man 2 and Avengers 1. She found purpose in keeping the family together and trying to help the people left living, while never stopping or losing contact with anyone else in their endeavors to fix what Thanos broke. As tired as I am of seeing a female character die for ~man pain~ this felt like so much more than that. In the end Nat wanted to sacrifice herself for the greater good, and that's what she did. I'm still fucking upset though, even though they've butchered her character across almost all the films she's been in

Thor being turned into an entire fucking joke. That's it. I got nothin left for the writers at this point.

So..... let's talk about Tony's death, shall we

"You can rest now" broke me. It truly did. I've never loved any fictional character across any medium as much as I have loved Tony Stark. But Pepper's line at the beginning "you'll sleep, but will you rest?" Is so fucking telling. I think I immediately knew for sure in that moment. Because she's right. And that's the worst part.

Peter :)))) finally :)))) calling :))))) tony :)))) by :)) his :)))) first :)) name :))) as he was dying :)))) asking him not to go the same way he told tony he didn't want to go when he was getting dusted GOD. AND WE THOUGHT THAT SCENE IN INFINITY WAR WAS ROUGH. HAD N O T H I N G ON THIS.

No offense but where was Rhodey when Tony was dying lmao ok

That funeral scene.... seeing everyone there drawn together..... god. It was beautiful. It really was.

Of course I'm not happy. I'm extremely fucking upset. I knew tony wielding the gauntlet would be coming, but I thought they would find a way for him to make it out alive. As soon as they were showing that even the hulk couldn't handle it with the gamma radiation, I knew the nail was going to be in the coffin.

All that aside... what I can say, is that if they HAD to kill him off, I think it was a proper send off. We saw so many arcs of Tony's come to a close, and I knew it was just a matter of time. Also that being said, I really don't believe in death being necessary to end a character's arc. Yeah yeah blah blah we get the sad and tragic but TRUE message that at the end of the day death is inevitable and that tony had to sacrifice himself for the greater good. He and Strange both knew it, and as soon as Strange held up that finger I knew that was it for him.

It wouldn't be so hard if they hadn't given us everything they did with tony after the 5 year jump. He healed. He was HAPPY. But pepper was right, and as long as Tony was alive... he would never truly /rest/. And that's the only way I'm able to make peace with this death. Tony has always been a character who was just going going going, never going to stop even if it killed him, all to protect the ones he loved, and protect the whole world and make it a better place. He had a beautiful story that was told so well over these past eleven years, with admitted shortcomings here and there. He had the most cohesive trilogy films, the best character development and arcs, and an incredible portrayal. I'm grateful for it, but that doesn't make it any easier that they decided to go and show us that Tony was able to FINALLY settle down with Pepper and see him find the best version of himself as a husband to her and a father to his little baby girl. A baby girl that now has to grow up without her dad, and pepper has to go on without her husband, the love of her life. It's fucking tragic and honestly, we didn't need that imho lmao

The hardest parts is that like.... idk. I feel like the only reason they killed him is for shock factor, but somehow without the shock? A lot of us felt or were worried that this was coming. I think the russos and co. We're just totally set on the idea that like... tony HAD to die and that was the only way for this arc to come to a close not just WITHIN the universe, but meta, outside of the MCU as well. They did the same thing with Hugh jackman as Logan and that shit HURTED me y'all. Eleven years we had RDJ give us this amazing character and he is the SOLE reason the MCU is where it is today. So you know what, the Russo's and everyone can circle jerk about how much ~poetic justice~ there is in this ending for Tony, but at the end of the day... it just ain't it fam.

Realistically I know after wielding the infinity stones there is no way Tony, a human, could've survived, even with his armor on. I knew that. And as biased as I am towards seeing Tony living, if he had wielded the stones and NOT died? It would've felt cheap. So again, if they had to end his life, I appreciate the way they did it and thought it was the best send off they could've given him. I also would've appreciated some kind of alternate option where oh i dont know carol or someone strong enough could've handled the snap and tony could live the rest of his days with his wife and daughter and found family but..... ig that's just me huh.

:(((( Happy asking Morgan what she wanted and her saying "cheeseburgers" SHE'S JUST LIKE HER DADDY I AM SO!!! UPSET!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

And last thought is that I fucking cried AGAIN because the biggest applause moment was during the credits when RDJ's name appeared. My theater gave a standing damn ovation. Also the very last sound after it faded to black... Tony hammering away, building the very first Iron Man suit.... that shit hurted.

If any of y'all read this and wanna yell about stuff w/ me I WELCOME YOU INTO MY DMS LMAO PLS MESSAGE ME I NEED MORE PEOPLE TO CRY WITH!!!

[londonspirit]

Thoughts aka ALL THE FEELS!

I’ve seen it three four times now and I’m still all over the place!!! 

I’ve cried my way through the first viewing: started on Vormir and didn’t really stop until the end! And went full on bawling and ugly sobbing in the last 30 minutes or so.  It got better with every time but in the end I was always in tears, sobbing (not so) silently into my scarf.  Here are some random and not in order thoughts, gathered through the last four times. 

- the first moments where Hawkeye loses his family were terrible, and my heart ached for him. 

- HEARING Sam in the earpiece made me all mushy and squeey and there might have been noises. “On your left” will forever make me all teary eyed from now on! 

- seeing all these portals opening gave me all the goosebumps: that was one hell of a fucking epic entrance!!! 

- as was the Ladies’s Squad moment! So fucking incredible! I cheered so much!! 

- CAROL!!! The HAIR! Her “Hi, Peter Parker” She’s the fucking cutest, and I love her so much!!! 

- Peter freaking Parker!!! As little screen time as he had, it was perfect. And he finally got that fucking hug!!!! And it was a damn good one!!! *clutches heart* 

- Tony Fucking Stark!  My beautiful, flawed, very human superhero! My darling darling heart. God, I can’t even type this without tearing up. 11 years in the making, he’s made the final sacrifice, gave us the ultimate proof that he’s got the biggest and softest heart in all of history!!! I had a bad feeling going into the film,  I feared it would end like this. Yet, it was perfect, the only way I could accept it.  I’m just glad he’d got at least a few years of peace and happiness. Im so proud of him, leaving behind one hell of a legacy in form of his wife and his lovely (and probably clever as fuck) daughter who will carry on her fathers heart and soul inside of her! Im sure she’ll be doing some GREAT things!!! 

- Family Stark! Soft cuddly cardigan wearing Tony,  sweet understanding Pepper, cute kid who’s just as cheeky as her Dad!! *clutches heart*  Im sure there’ll be a shitload of fic covering those five years and I’ll be reading them all!!! 

- Pepper. Gosh, that woman. In the past, she made me want to smack her around the head, tell her to either have patience or just leave him (alone). Yet she stuck around, and for the very first time she actually UNDERSTOOD what her man’s doing. In the end she understood. And she let him go which broke my heart into a million pieces. She loves him. And there it shows. She’s always tried to keep him save, and upon realizing that she couldn’t, she gave him the peace and love he deserved and needed. And in the end, she’d let him go. He can rest indeed now. *sobs violently* Even after a fourth time seeing it (and making it through most of it without crying), that fucking sentence is my undoing. Always. 

- all the tiny callbacks to 22 movies - such a beautiful love letter to everything the MCU achieved and continues to do. The elevator scene, Bucky’s goodbye in the end, Tony’s last line.. all those tiny things (thankfully fresh in my mind due to recent rewatches!) are so lovely and wonderful and I love them all for doing them!!! Such attention to detail - one of the many reasons I do love the MCU so much!!! 

- fucking CHEESEBURGERS!! Never thought some simple food will be the reason for more violent and very ugly sobbing! 

- PEGGY! JARVIS! HOWARD! The Ancient One! All those ‘old’ faces, that was so cool!!! And very unexpected so that was an amazing surprise! 

- the fucking END CREDITS!!! The OG 6 getting their special moment!!! That was soo beautiful and made me sob all over again!!! 

- Cap!! As y’all know he’s NOT my fav (and even though he was a tad OOC in this (LANGUAGE, Cap!), he won me over in this. I loved the quips (”Yeah, I KNOW!”)  tho, and also LOOOOOOOOOVED him wielding the fucking hammer!!! God, that was incredible!!! I wished I could see this for the first time again and again! The entire cinema exploded into cheers, it was amazing!!! (Which naturally leads to me wanting to know whether he faked not being able to move that damn thing back in AoU or if he’s grown worthy during the last few years…)  Im seeing loads of people not liking the ending, feeling that it’s not what he would do. Seriously??? That man’s saved the world/the universe soo many time, sacrificed so much to keep everyone save, and you still think - given the chance - he wouldn’t go and FINALLY have the happy ending he deserves? I mean, I’m not a comic book person, I can only go from the films but honestly, it was the only way they could’ve ended Cap’s storyline. He knows everyone’s save, there’s nothing left to do for him (cause you can bet your ass that Tony made sure EVERY SINGLE THREAT has been eliminated with that damn snap!) why wouldn’t he pursue some happiness for himself after all these years. 

- 3 hours have never felt this short!!! There was barely a lull in the storyline (after my third viewing i would choose only two scenes to run to the loo and they’re pretty early on so…), the pace is incredible, the plot’s tight and well thought through.  Yes, the time-traveling isn’t perfect but honestly, that’s not the point. It’s about the people, the OG Six and their relationships, built through the years, about love and respect, about the trauma they all went through and how they dealt with it. It’s all about the people, the plot for once is only secondary. And that’s fine. It works when you don’t think about it too hard (just don’t, you’ll only get a headache from it). And even if, there’s a few explanations out there already, and I can totally live with that. I don’t need this explained in the smallest detail. It works perfectly (for me), that’s all I care about. 

- I also wonder about a few things: just read that Hollands lines might have been altered and now Im dying to know whether that’s true. I wouldn’t put it past the Russos to have him say something else entirely and then did ADR with a gazzilion lines only to throw him off.  Same goes for everyone else: did they KNOW they were filming Tony’s death and his funeral? Or did they film more and differently and didn’t tell them what as actually happening? When did they tell RDJ that he was going to die? And how? Was he allowed to have a say in it? SO MANY questions. I NEED ANSWERS!! 

- Tony’s speech in the end!!! That was not only Tony speaking, to me that was also RDJ, saying goodbye (finally able to actually LISTEN to him w/o sobbing  too loudly). And that makes it even more wonderful and sad and heartbreaking and lovely!´I will miss him so fucking much. He’s been MY hero from the start; and even though there have been more over the years to adore and worship, when it comes to choosing one over the others, I will always chose Iron Man! .. .no, I will always chose TONY STARK! He’s been my first superhero, I’ve been with him all the way, and I will always remember the time when he was Iron Man, ready to die for the world, hell, the universe, sacrificing all he had for the lives of everyone else. Which in the end he did without hesitating. 

All in all it was the perfect homage to the Original 6! A perfect ending, coming full circle after 11 years! Everyone got their arc closed, their story told. There’s new blood now, Carol and Scott, Shuri and Valkyrie, Strange and Spidey, and more, they will keep everyone save! 

So yeah, seeing it four times (with a fifth one in the works (on Sunday) and perhaps a sixth with a friend along the line), I’m still loving every damn second, and it’s still the best and most epic and perfect film in the entirety of the MCU!  I will miss Tony, his snark, his biting sarcasm, his huge heart, his looking after everyone whether they want it or not.  But the MCU is in good hands, I have the feeling Carol will be taking over that part (the sass is already there!), and I’m sure the rest will do pretty damn great!  You can rest now, Tony

[vdoesbookrecs]

the Heartbreak Hoard No. 1 - fuck you homer

Blurb: Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus and his perfect son Achilles. Despite their differences, the boys develop a tender friendship, a bond that blossoms into something deeper as they grow into young men.

But when Helen of Sparta is kidnapped, Achilles is dispatched to distant Troy to fulfil his destiny. Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus follows, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they hold dear. 

Plot: Written from Patroclus’ PoV, the book retells the classic tale of the Iliad with a focus on Achilles.

Good Things to Say About This Book: It’s beautifully written, for one. With almost no dialogue, it reads like an orally told story -- which the Iliad originally was. Those little parts of dialogue are always just snippets, and they stick with you and make you cry later (example: “Name one hero who was happy. [...] You can’t.” “I can’t.” “I know. They never let you be famous and happy. [...] I’ll tell you a secret.” [...] “Tell me.” “I’m going to be the first.” He took my palm and held it to his. “Swear it.” “Why me?” “Because you’re the reason.”). Also, even though Patroclus seems to be a relatively neutral narrator at first, you slowly realise that he isn’t. The further the story progresses the easier it is to read something bitter-sweet into his narrative, like grief mixed with nostalgia, and, of course, his undying love for Achilles. Also, the author knows what she’s doing: Madeline Miller teaches Latin and Ancient Greek (she’s got a BA and a MA in both), and it shows. There are numerous passages where Patroclus clarifies which word a character used -- because there are many ways to say ‘I love you’ in ancient greek. The characterisations are on point (™) and the author makes them stand out: I guarantee you will be able to remember all of their names even after a while, even though they aren’t shown to be truly remarkable. Yes, they are kings and warriors and half--gods, but that’s not why they stick with you. They stick with you because Patroclus shows them as human, and you begin to feel that you know them. 

How This Book Broke My Heart: The better question is maybe: How did this book not break my heart? (oh, also: *clears throat* MAJOR SPOILER ALERT FROM THIS POINT ON, EVEN IF YOU HAVE READ THE ILIAD AND THEREFORE KNOW WHAT HAPPENS) The first thing was maybe Patroclus’ backstory. He is a disappointment to his dad. It is heavily implied that his mother is severely mentally disabled due to an injury inflicted to her by her father, and often does not recognise her own son. When he kills a boy in self defence, his father exiles him. He is forced to propose to Helen (yes, the late Helen of Troy) at age nine (9) and endure ridicule from not only his father but also all the gathered heroes. He suffers from nightmares, and the other boys exclude him from their activities, claiming he is cursed. Like, he’s a child. He has to go through so much, he’s alone and convinced that he’s worthless right until Achilles ‘adopts’ him. And this is another thing: Achilles. Throughout the first two thirds of the book he’s this radiant boy, full of love and hope and pride and mischief, he’s open and accepting and honest and naive and he truly believes that he will be happy. But then there’s war, and he doesn’t have a choice anymore. He has no idea what’s coming, you know? He’s only ever heard of war in the stories his father tells, he has never seen anyone die, he has never even fought against anyone outside of his lessons. But he is pushed into this war, and he changes. He becomes angry and hardened and bloodthirsty and pride begins to consume him. He’s a child when he kills a man in battle the first time, barely seventeen. The only person who can still bring out that bright boy he used to be is Patroclus, but his mother puts a strain on their relationship. Thetis is traumatised and terrified of losing her son. She tries to scare Patroclus away many times, and to persuade Achilles to leave him, looming over their love like a dark cloud. Speaking of their relationship, they love each other so much, so much it almost hurts. They are completely devoted to each other, they are each others happiness, and they make it blatantly clear that they would die for each other. Eventually they do, and it’s so heartbreaking, because if Achilles would have been a little less proud, or if Patroclus would have been a little more convincing, then he never would have had to get on that chariot, he would never have had to wear that armour, he never would have tried to climb the walls of Troy, and he would never have died. Theres this scene when they bring Patroclus’ body to Achilles and he realises what he has done and he reaches for his sword to kill himself and he realises that he can’t, because he gave his sword to Patroclus, and he just breaks down. That’s the point where I started getting a bit blurry eyed. But wait! It gets better! (no it doesn’t). Achilles finally cremates his lover’s body (after like, five days of just crying over his corpse) and tells everyone who needs to know that he wants his ashes buried with his when he dies, and then he does die, and his f*cking a**hole of a son turns up and is like “I’m not writing the name of dis servant boy on me dad’s grave” so Patroclus’ soul, which has been in limbo because he can’t go to Hades until he’s properly buried, is forced to stay on earth while Achilles’ goes on, and he waits for months but no one comes by, and he watches everyone leave and he just stays there, on Achilles grave, waiting for someone, anyone, to come by and write his name on the f*cking piece of stone. Can you believe it? They’ve gone through so much, they love each other more than anything else in the world, Achilles calls Patroclus his ‘most beloved’ , and because this one f*cker shows up they’re kept apart even in death. It’s not fair. They hurt so much. They deserve to be happy. But that’s not even the worst part (also because they are eventually reunited) (doesn’t make it hurt less tho). The worst part is that when all that shit goes down, you remember all those little dialogue parts from the happy bits, because Miller brings them up again, only in a different (and infinitely more painful) context. When you’ve read the book through, all those soft happy moments in the beginning will make you cry, because they’ll all have a bitter, bitter taste of foreboding. This book will destroy you. 

How Can I Make My Reading Experience Even More Heartbreaking? Contemplate this: many historians think that the events described in Homer’s Iliad (the book The Song of Achilles is based off) actually happened in a similar manner and all the heroes are based off real people. Also try listening to sad songs while reading the last few chapters (I recommend ‘Lay Me Down’ by Sam Smith, ‘Unsteady’ by X Ambassadors, and ‘Wish You Were Here’ by Pink Floyd or songs with similarly depressing lyrics) in order to never feel an emotion other than devastating grief ever again in your life. Then think about what would have happened if Thetis never showed up at her son’s grave. Lastly, go reread chapter ten right after you’ve finished the whole book. 

Should I read this book anyway? Yes, yes you should. You will cry for hours but you will be happy about it because honestly, the love story is worth it. 

ISBN: 978-1-4088-9138-4

T/W: period--typical misogyny, rape, violence against women, religious and supernatural themes, human and animal sacrifices, major character death, plague, war, slavery, underage sex, abduction of a minor, child murder, child neglect, murder, oath-breaking, child soldiers 

[dbtrilogy2]

What a Day(14 pt1)

Stanley

I was in my chemistry class working on a big project when I’m called to the main office. Of course the imitate kids oh and ah like I’m in trouble.

On the way I see Julian coming from the stair halls. As I start to call out his name a small hand grabs his.

“Hey wait up….would you show me to the gym I’m new and still learning where everything thing is.”

“Yeah sure I was headed there anyway. Julian.”

“Joan. I’ve seen you around a lot you must be pretty popular.” They walked ahead of me together.

I shouldn’t think to much into this. We know how each other feel. Then again he’s a single guy just like I’m a single girl. We’re both young still in school with the rest of our lives to worry about something like dating.

Who am I kidding my little bit of self esteem just shrieked up a bit. Rather ready or not I should’ve just made us officially. But that would just be like setting myself up for possible failure. He’s a big red target in this school. All the girls throw themselves at him constantly…I’m gonna lose him before I can even really have him.

My walk slowed down the closer I got to the main office. Eventually I did and find my dad standing.

“Um hi?”

“Hey princess-”

“Please don’t do that. What are you doing here?”

“To pick you up for your eye exam.” He smiled winking coming closer. “I know I’ve been a little MIA but I’m back.” He pulls a little stuffed kitten.

“Eric look I’m done with you. I can’t have you in my life if you only want to be around for half of it. I’m growing up quickly and the last thing I need is an unstable father.”

“W-what? Stanley I’m sorry for not being here like I should but-”

I put my hand up stopping him. “I got my last name changed. I won’t be anymore of a burden for you.”

I’ve had enough thought on this. The moment he missed my birthday after being gone for months was the day I let all hope in him go. In a way I’m glad I have him the chance because now I know for sure it wasn’t just my mom being bitter or Chris and Camila not wanting to share me. He’s not a good father I now see it for myself and don’t want that in my life.

I walked out before he could try to sweet talk me. I did keep the little kitten I guess as a reminder. Now that I’ve dealt with him I kinda miss my mom. She and I talk here and there but not a lot.

After she got out of prison then rehab she moved to Washington and became a rehab nurse. She helps people not to the point she reaches and I couldn’t be more proud of her. Maybe I can visit her.

Instead of going back to class I went to the library. A good book will bring my spirits back up.

“Oh hey Stanley.” The librarian says looking up from her computer.

I waved heading for an isle. While looking for something to read I saw someone creeping by. I knew heard the back door open and close since I was close to the back exit and got curious. I probably should just mind my business. But then again I’m sure whoever that was would prefer to be caught by a student rather than the librarian. I flipped a mental coin and just went for it.

What can I say I’m a curious girl. I snuck over slowly opening the back door.

“I’m glad you came to see me.”

“You know I couldn’t go to much longer without seeing my baby. Imma still pick you up tonight tho so be ready.”

I gasp getting their attention. This guy looked at lease by the most twenty maybe eighteen. Frowning I storm over snatching her up.

“You know she’s fourteen right?” I asked mugging this pervert.

He chuckled deep digging in his pocket pulling out a cigarette. “Yeah but it’s all good she’s mature for her age plus that shit ain’t nothing but a number.”

“Oh really is that what your gonna tell the judge. The amount of years you spend behind bars is just a number?” He rolled his eyes. “And you!”

“Stanley relax it’s not that big a deal. We just friends.”

“Please don’t insult my brain. Why are you doing this you have a boyfriend already and it’s his brother!”

“Their not serious…he can’t handle her like I can.”

“Oh really but I bet Big Ben will be able to handle you in the showers.” He smirked looking me up and down. Disgusting! “This has to end how can you do this to Sam?”

“Sometimes you need something else. Shawn is that something else for me we don’t focuse on ages either it’s not a big deal to us. He’s really good company and don’t worry he’s a gentlemen to me at all times.”

“But he got you skipping classes and probably sneaking out the house. Mona please just stop this now no good is gonna come from this guys like him….older but prey on younger are no good and most of the time are just looking for a quick thrill until he finds a woman.”

“I am a woman.” She frowned.

“No you are a fourteen year old girl you can’t even drive yet what could you two possibly have in command. How old are you anyway?”

“I just turned twenty one I got so wasted that night shit was lit as hell! Look I came to spend my break with my girl you taking up time I could be putting to better use.” He came up wrapping her arm around Mona.

“You gave him your flower?”

“No Stanley he just means making out and…some other stuff. I know your just looking out for me and I appreciate it but I’m good. Just don’t tell anyone you’ll be the only person who knows about us.”

Camila

At the food court we both share a Cinnabon with the girls. They ended up with frosting all on their faces.

“They eat like you.” I wipe Mylan face with a baby wipe.

“True I’m a messy eater. You would know that best.” Chris winked wiping Morgan face. “We done shopping or you wanna go somewhere else?”

“I think I’m-” my phone rang cutting me off. It was Maliki pre school. “Hello?”

“Yes Mrs Washington I’m calling about a slight problem that happened with Maliki and another child.”

Damn my bad ass kids!

“Ok we’ll be there shortly.”

“Well the other parent is threatening to call the police.”

By now I had already got up taking the twins with me. Somebody gotta die today.

“Why would the police need to be involved because of some tussle between four year olds!?”

“I’m trying to talk her out of it but it would help a lot for you and your husband to be here.”

Chris was running behind me with all the shopping bags and the rest of his Cinnabon hanging out his mouth.

“Camila Rose Washington if you don’t help me with these damn bags!”

After strapping in the twins and folding up the stroller. “Man up and just stuff that shit in the trunk somebody trynna put my baby in jail!”

“Damn what Mona do now?”

To save time I’ll hit him later. I sped up to that school thanking everything and everybody when I didn’t see any cop cars. I got one of the twins while Chris got the other and followed me to the main office.

“Ki come here.”

He pouted running up hugging my leg. “Look.” He showed me his arms that had a bite mark in both.

I noticed a lady sitting with a little girl looking upset but I can guarantee she not on my level. Chris still looked confused but sat with me. Maliki teacher was next to the principle.

“Mr and Mrs Washington this is sally and her mother Ms May. During recess the altercation happened.”

“So what happen.”

“I noticed them playing then Maliki pushed her and she pushed back then leaned over bitting him on his arms and he pushed her again.” The teacher said.

I sigh pinching my nose. “Ki-”

“Come here boy.” Chris hands Morgan. “Is that true did you push that girl?”

He looked at me. “Mommy?”

Chris grabbed his shirt pulling him in front. “I’m talking to you….did you push that girl?”

“Yes.”

“Why and don’t you lie to me.”

“She…she.” He started tearing up.

Catching me off his scream made me jump. Now I’m not for hitting the kids but Chris on the other hand. “Baby-”

“I got this….you have no reason to be crying I just asked you a question. Don’t you ever put your hands on a female like that again. I don’t care what she does you man up and walk up ass away and tell your teacher what happen. Only weak boys with no home training pick on girls and you are neither. Get over there and say sorry to that young lady.”

Maliki sniffed turning. “I so-OW!”

“Talk like you four not two we stopping that shit right now.”

“I’m sorry Sally.”

“For what?”

“For pushing you.” He came back over wiping his face. “She called me stupid for not wanting to play with her.”

“That doesn’t mean you push her. Sit down.” Chris sighed sitting back.

“Uh ok….well since sally did bite Maliki I think it’s only right for her to apologize as well.” The teacher broke the silence that fell.

The other mom nods. “Go ahead sally.”

“I’m sorry for calling you stupid and bitting you Maliki.”

The teacher said both kids would go without recesss for two days. After getting his things we walk out back to the car.

“When we get home go straight to your room you hear me Maliki?”

“Yes daddy.”

“Chris did you really have to punch him?” I’m still mentality flinching.

“Yes Camila I told you we be to soft on him. He’ll be fine I didn’t even hit him hard.”

“I know I just hate when you hit any of them.”

“I know mama but one of us gotta be giving them the ass whopping that’ll help them become the next president.” He smirked.

“Whatever. Max and Isabel want us to come to dinner with them and the Willis couple tonight.” I grab his hand sitting back as he drives us home. “You talk to Carlton by the way?”

“Nah not much lately he’s been working with Robin for her album.”

“I heard Rebecca told me he’s been coming in really late. You don’t think he’s cheating do you?”

He turned up his face. “No way my boy ain’t dumb but I’ll see what’s up with him. I might try to convince him to get another producer for Robin. Honestly I told him not to take her on alone cause I knew she’s a little flirty.”

“Oh she is? Has she tried you?”

“Yeah but I put that to a end as quick as it started. You know I ain’t with no easy woman I hate when a female is so eager to be seen or be with a man where she has no standards. She knows we’re both married with kids but she don’t give a damn.”

“You told her all of that?”

“Yes Camila I did don’t worry about her you all the woman I need.” He kisses my hand. “Come on let’s get in those two are looking sleepy.”

In the house Maurice and Elias were playing his game. Maliki slowly walked up the stairs to his room like he was told. Chris was behind him with the sleeping girls. I had the boys go get all the shopping bags out the car from earlier.

“Aunt C!” Julian came out the kitchen with a sand which.

“Hey where the girls?”

“In their rooms I think.”

Going up I check on Mona first. She was sitting on doing homework while on face time on her iPad.

“I do not have a big head…ok yeah my forehead is kinda big but it’s not like out this world…shut up…boy bye I look just as good as my parents and they a fly ass couple. They ain’t make no ugly babies.”

“True who you talking to?” She jumped.

“Knocking helps.”

“My house my room. Who you talking to?”

“Sam a little privacy please?”

“Don’t get hurt little girl. We going out tonight I want you and Stanley to keep a eye on the twins and don’t just leave them in their room.”

“Ok ok I got it bye.”

Cutting my eyes I point. I swear that girl is gonna be the death of me.