#feds and mental health authorities that was a JOKE

[slug-demon]

losing my MIDN ova here......

[jaylamcd68]

The Rookie 4x04

Spoilers Ahead

Episode starts with John and Bailey eating the breakfast Bailey made for them. They are joking about the notorious PD vs FD debate. It’s Lopez’s first day back after her mat leave. Smitty is running to be union rep, a job he’s held since 2006. Nolan asks him a legitimate question about dispatching mental health workers alongside patrol officers and Smitty just glazes over the issue entirely because he doesn’t actually have a response 😂 CHENFORD: Lucy jokes around and asks Tim what he would like his gofer to go for first. Tim makes a comment about her not having a fear for authority. Grey asks Tim if he can take all the 7A-100 calls for an hour because he is going to give a warning to Elijah Stone. While getting the go bags Nyla checks his supplies and mocks his choice of snack. Layer Lucy tells Aaron that if he ever wants to talk shit about being a rookie she’s always around but Aaron tells her respectively she isn’t a rookie anymore so he’s good. Wesley goes to visit Elijah Stone to inform him it doesn’t look good for the sniper he’s representing, but Grey pulls up and Wesley asks if he can go out the back door. John pulls up on a dispute between a husband and a neighbour because a woman ran out of the house looking scared and the husband tries to explain his wife has bipolar and is in the midst of a manic episode so he needs to find her and he needs to give her her meds. He tries to ask Nolan to leave because having cops search for her will only scare her further but Nolan informs him that now that he’s here it’s no longer an option. Aaron asks Nyla if nuts would be a more appropriate snack since earlier she said his produce would go bad. An old friend says hi to Aaron. Apparently she was the only one who stuck up for him with the press when he was being charged with his friends murder. Nolan is searching the neighbourhood for the wife. He finds her but she’s only speaking Russian and she seems drugged. The two men  pull up and it becomes obvious they are not good guys and start shooting at Nolan and the woman who is in the shop. Nolan helps her out of the car but she runs. The shooters get away as Lucy and Tim pull up. They search the house but it looks staged. Nolan finds the security panel but it’s all in Cyrillic and when he presses a random button he accidentally initiates the safe house security. Tim rips into him for this. It looks like a safe house for Russian spies rather than human trafficking since the security is so advanced. Tim says he’s only been in one once before but it wasn’t in this country and when Lucy asks for clarification Tim says he can’t give any because it’s classified. In an effort to lift the security Nolan presses another button and it reveals a secret passage where they find an “interrogation” room where they had obviously been water boarding the female victim. There are also documents going through shredders and smoke from a fire where they had been destroying as much evidence as they could before they abandoned it. Tim says to take as many pictures as they can because once the feds show up they will be iced out. Nyla and Aaron show up at a bike vs auto accident. Nyla asks about the girl from earlier, Leah. Aaron says that after everything none of his old friends really reached out and at least Leah had nice things to say so it would be nice to salvage one friendship. Nyla comments that if she didn’t reach out either then is she really a friend? They find the witness that called 911 who tells them a guy in a silver civic plowed into a guy on a bike and it looked like his legs were broken. The guy mumbled something about a hospital and out the cyclist in his backseat and drove off. Aaron starts taking photos of the scene on his personal phone and Nyla asks him to think about the most embarrassing photo he has on his phone and at the same time picture it being entered into evidence because it’s on the same hard drive as the crime scene photos he just took. Aaron goes to get the digital camera from their ear bags and Nyla tells him that’s a good choice😂 Lopez is upset because the breakroom fridge is broken so she can’t refrigerate her lumped breast milk. Wesley is in interrogation with the sniper trying to get him to testify against Elijah. Angela texts him 911 about the breast milk situation and he is pissy with her but she is pissy right back saying he owes her after the 12 hours of labour and asks why he’s being so moody, to which he just says he just has a difficult client. Back at the safe house the trio are taking as many pictures as they can and then FBI/CIA agents show up. CIA agent Mike Weston introduces himself to Tim, who questions how CIA can work on this since it’s domestic, but the FBI is supervising. He asks for any evidence they have collected and Lucy tells him that Tim had advised them that the feds would be doing the evidence collection so they just secured the scene. Nolan says the woman put her hands on his shop as she was escaping so they may be able to use her prints to get a real ID. Tim says maybe they can solve this whole case before Weston even knows what’s up. An old ratty fridge is being wheeled into the precinct and Angela tells the guy to just take it right back. Nyla give Angela the paperwork for their Bike vs car case and tells her the guys never made it to the hospital which makes it an abduction or missing persons case. Nyla asks Nolan how he is after getting shot at earlier. Nolan then talks about Nyla potentially running for union rep and Nyla shuts him down immediately because that would require campaigning which means being nice to people. 😂 Tim and Lucy ran the prints and the woman’s real name is Katerina Antonof who is a Russian citizen here in an NGO visa which Tim says is a perfect cover for a Russian FSB agent. Nolan asks if they were any hits of VICAP that could lead them to her and Lucy tells him no but she did an internet search and ended up on the Instagram page of an Air force major named Lyle Marks who Katerina had apparently been dating for a few months AKA using him to try to steal intelligence. Tim says Lyle didn’t show up for work today and when Nolan asks if they should loop in Weston Tim says no because if they are on to something he will find them regardless. They get to Major Marks house and find him dead in the chair. Weston shows up at the house, they demand he tells them what is actually going on. They learn that Katerina was a suspected spy who went rogue so they snatched her up. Lucy hypothesizes that maybe Katerina actually fell in love with Marks and was going to defect which is why they killed him and took her. Weston tells Lucy that Russian espionage is not a romance novel to which Lucy responds how would you know, you didn’t even know there was a Russian safe house in LA (damn you go girl) Tim and John both turn to look at Weston like she makes a good point, which Weston does agree with but says he has read her file and she is no hopeless romantic. They have no idea what she was here for. Back at the station Lopez is still not done going through the 30+ cases that Caradine assigned to her which she explains is because of the bureaucratic shit she’s had to deal with today. Caradine tries to ask if this is because of the breast milk situation but he struggles to say the words because he’s uncomfortable. Angela calls him a coward. Wesley comes in with a brand new fridge for the station as an apology. Angela flags down Nyla because she has an idea of who the victim is for Nyla’s case, a recovering drug addict who’s boyfriend didn’t report him missing because he assumed he had relapsed. They talk about this potentially being related to the arsonist serial killer case from last episode since hitting an addict would be a good way to get vulnerable people to have to rely on you. They guess that not everyone the serial killer hit with his car would have accepted his ride to the hospital which would mean the killer would have then raced away so Nyla is going to stay late and look at hit and runs. Aaron meets up with the old friend Leah who it becomes obvious is just using taking Aaron out for the first time as a publicity stunt. Lucy is at home watching crime docs and Aaron calls with a request to talk to “P1 Lucy” to discuss his problem. They talk about how to handle the isolation that comes with being a cop and only really being able to be understood by other cops. Lucy says she became friends with 2 others in her rookie class and they became inseparable. Aaron says his classmates called him No Biz as in he had no business being a cop. Aaron asks who the 3rd person was after she and Nolan to which Lucy struggles to answer and Aaron figures out it was the “guy who died.” They then talk about how grief sneaks up on you.   Nyla finds the license plate on a silver civic that matches a hit and run from August. Harper calls it in to dispatch for backup but then she sees movement in the building and she tells them she is making entry alone. She finds a body in the building but as she calls it in to dispatch the killer sets the building in fire. Nyla manage to get the body out but collapses afterwards as backup arrives. John and Bailey are at the hospital waiting for news on Harper. Bailey gives Nolan her best war story for their PD vs FD debate and when she’s done Lopez says they can go see Nyla now. Nyla is alright, but the killer got away and both the car and plates on it are stolen so they are back to square one. The guy Nyla found was actually still alive so he’s in surgery and they’ll have to wait and see if he makes it so they can question him. As they are leaving John tells Bailey his Russian spy story from this morning as his ear story for the debate. Bailey admittedly says his story is better and jokingly says let’s spar for the title because she can’t admit PD is better. As they put up their hands John remembers that Katerina had something in her left hand when he put her in the shop but when she came out her hands were empty. The two of them go to the lot to look in his shop for the item. John finds a flash drive but when he turns around Bailey is being held at gunpoint by Katerina. Apparently the flash drive holds a list of people who were in a drone strike. Katerina’s bro her was in the building they hit and she wants revenge. Katerina killed Marks because he ordered the strike but then the other two Russians captured Katerina before she could kill the rest of the men on the list and give away the fact that Russian spies are in LA. Bailey hits Katerina’s gun away from her but Katerina is fast as well and they end up sparring and Nolan gets locked in the area with the shop. Katerina and Bailey are fighting (side note Bailey has some kick ass spy moves of her own.. like where did this girl get her training because firefighters in my town definitely don’t know martial arts like this lmao) while John is trying to enter the code into the lock from the inside but he can’t see what he’s pressing so he’s failing. Katerina knocks Bailey to the ground and as soon as she reaches for her dropped gun Nolan finally gets the code right and swings the gate open and knocks her down as well and arrests her. Weston arrives as they are putting the cuffs on her. Turns out Bailey was a Lieutenant in the Army reserves. Elijah Stone comes into Wesley’s office and as Wesley starts to explain that the snipers only chance looks like it will be a forgiving jury Elijah tells him not to worry because the prison will likely be calling him any minute telling him they found his body in his prison cell. Wesley exasperatedly asks Elijah why he had him killed and Elijah tells Wesley that word on the street was that he was going to turn on him, commenting that he was loyal for 10 years and one meeting with Wesley and the guy got squirrelly. Wesley tried to convince Elijah that he wouldn’t do anything to put his family in danger but Elijah just tells him this is his final warning. At the precinct Nolan goes up to Angela and asks how she got that new fridge for the breakroom since that brand costs more than his car. Angela tells him that Wesley bought it so basically she bought it. Nolan wonders why this is so difficult and there must be some other way to handle it but Angela just says she considered asking her union rep but Smitty had once asked her why woman need tampons can’t they just hold it so she didn’t have much faith in that 😂 Nolan says someone should run against him and Angela tells him to do it. Nolan also asks for an update in the arson case. Aaron is getting his and Nyla’s go bags when Lucy comes in after him and questions that he knows he can’t go out on patrol without his TO. Aaron informs her Nyla is on her way in because apparently being hospitalized after being nearly burned to death by a serial killer arsonist doesn’t warrant a sick day. Lucy hands him over a protein bar for his kit bag since it lasts forever. Aaron tells her he will cherish it forever since there is no way he is ever putting that in his body. Nolan checks in with Bailey after she gave her statement jokingly giving her a junior officer police badge for her exemplary police work last night. He also puts up his campaign poster for union rep

[ninma]

A look at Dream's punishment through irl rules and taking into account UN's rules regarding prisons. Because it is just interesting and it proves how there is NO justification for it. But mostly because it's interesting to look at and you may learn a thing or two.

I have seen too many times people trying to justify Dream's punishment. I did research and read through multiple articles and documents (over 73 pages of two different documents) about the more legal sides of his punishment. While Quackity's physical torture is obvious, I am here to address that even before that it was still very illegal. I know it is fictional! This is just a look into the real life facts and rules regarding prisons because it is interesting to look at Dream's punishment and Pandora's Vault under the light of these. So keep that in mind while reading this!

Welcome to my ted talk with actual facts and be prepared for quite the ride!

While yes, he has done bad things...however he has not done something so bad that he deserves a punishment so cruel that it's considered too inhumane for even mass murderers. Like actually! Stay tooned and you'll see what I mean.

His sentence is indefinite solidary confinement. Which is defined by the united nations as:

"the confinement of prisoners for 22 hours or more a day without meaningful human contact."

This means his punishment fits the definition for all his time (including visits) except when Tommy was locked inn and now with Quackity (although I'd consider the last one a turn for the worse). Now that we have that cleared up- lets get into the rule breaking. But first, let me introduce you to The Mandela Rules!

"The Mandela Rules reinforce human rights principles, including

 the recognition of the absolute prohibition of torture and other cruel, inhuman

 or degrading treatment or punishment and effective guidance 

to national prison administrations for persons deprived of their liberty"

Now that we have established that, lets get into this concerning fact train!

Rule 43

1. In no circumstances may restrictions or disciplinary sanctions amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

The following practices, in particular, shall be prohibited:

(a) Indefinite solitary confinement;

(b) Prolonged solitary confinement;

(c) Placement of a prisoner in a dark or constantly lit cell;

(d) Corporal punishment or the reduction of a prisoner’s diet or drinking water;

(e) Collective punishment.

Yeah...pretty clear breaking of 4/5 there. They can't even break e! Not to mention the pretty explicit breaking of d that was probably a surprise. You can count it as them breaking 4/4 if you count the fact that they can’t even break e. Rest assured my friend, this is just the beginning.

Rule 44

For the purpose of these rules, solitary confinement shall refer to the confinement of prisoners for 22

 hours or more a day without meaningful human contact. Prolonged solitary confinement shall refer to 

solitary confinement for a time period in excess of 15 consecutive days.

Already broken this one too huh. Even visiting days counts because I don't think anyone has been there for hours and I also don't think Sam's interactions would be long enough or count as meaningful human contact. The time with Tommy and Quackity is the only time it dosen't count as solidary. So this is getting...very much concerinng. But this is still only the start.

Rule 45

1. Solitary confinement shall be used only in exceptional cases as a last

 resort*, for as* short a time as possible and subject to independent

 review, and only pursuant to the authorization by a competent authority. It

 shall not be imposed by virtue of a prisoner’s sentence.

2. The imposition of solitary confinement should be prohibited in the case

 of prisoners with mental or physical disabilities when their conditions

 would be exacerbated by such measures

Woops...so not only is it illegal as a punishment...but also the "he is a psychopath" argument (which is already a bad stereotype, but I won't get into psychology here. It's a common misconception and c!Tommy not knowing is almost to be expected. However please do not say that someone, character or real person, have a mental disorder or illness without proper knowledge about psychology and in the case of characters we shouldn’t put labels unless the writer has said that they have taken mental disorders or illnesses into account when making the character) just got yeeted out the window. Actually that argument just took a loop and now is an argument for the other side. It makes sense because as it says: it exacerbates their preexisting mental illnesses. Which is why it's prohibited. 

"In no case may a detainee’s contact with the outside world be

 dependent on his or her cooperativeness, be used as a disciplinary

 sanction or form part of the sentence."

  - Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Civil and Political Rights, Including the Questions of Torture and Detention, ¶ 43, Comm’n on Human Rights,

“…The medical officer should visit prisoners held in solitary confinement

 every day, on the understanding that such visits should be in the interests

 of the prisoners ’ health. Furthermore, prisoners held in solitary

 confinement for more than 12 hours should have access to fresh air for at

 least 1 hour each day” - Subcomm. on Prevention of Torture [SPT]

Wow Sam...it is almost impressive in a dark way just how explicitly these are broken. The Warden's very punishments for disobedience just straight up counts as torture. And for the obvious record I highly doubt Quackity's daily visits to the green bloob counts as anything but 'the interests of the prisoners' health'. You can disagree here...but I am being very sarcastic.

Rule 22

1. Every prisoner shall be provided by the prison administration at the

usual hours with food of nutritional value adequate for health and

strength, of wholesome quality and well prepared and served.

Raw potatoes every day for the rest of your life..eehhh no thanks. If Dream ever gets out he will probably join me in the 'eating potatoes trauma' box. As funny as that sounds, it isn't a joke. I was force fed potatoes as a child and I hated it to the point where it gave me a mental block that stops me from eating them as my body just does not want to swallow it. It's a problem. But I can joke about it. Maybe Tommy will join us too, although it wasn't really the eating potatoes that caused that trauma...rip. Rest in anything but potatoes.

Rule 42

General living conditions addressed in these rules, including those related

to light, ventilation, temperature, sanitation, nutrition, drinking water,

access to open air and physical exercise, personal hygiene, health care

and adequate personal space, shall apply to all prisoners without

 exception.

I think it's pointless to say more on that topic as it's pretty much already summed up. Let us now move over to what are probably some of the qoutes so specific that it's scary.

“Furthermore, [the Committee] is concerned about the use of solitary

 confinement for indefinite periods of time.... Full isolation of 22 to 23

 hours a day in supermaximum security prisons is unacceptable

(art. 16).” - Committee. against Torture [CAT]

Oh wow.. talk about on the nose. I should've just started with this one as it pretty much says pretty clearly how it is unacceptable. Like yikes...can you get more specific? It is just downright ridiculous at this point. (-_-;)

“Solitary confinement, when used for the purpose of punishment,

 cannot be justified for any reason, precisely because it imposes severe

 mental pain and suffering beyond any reasonable retribution for

 criminal behaviour and thus constitutes an act defined in article 1 or article

 16 of the Convention against Torture, and a breach of article 7 of the

 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights."

Ahaha...ha....yeah for those who justify it...the convention against torture is very much against it being justified...Imagine if the characters could read these rules, that'd be interesting. Although I am pretty sure they don't follow realism for the imprisonment. As I have already said; this is just an interesting look at the irl rules and how Dream's punishment and Pandora's Vault stand under light of them.

“No prisoner, including those serving life sentence [sic] and prisoners on

 death row, shall be held in solitary confinement merely because of the

 gravity of the crime.”

 - Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

Like...there are no loopholes here. It is so extremely clear that it truly is darkly impressive how the characters don't seem to have a second thought about this. How do you accidentally sentence someone to a lifetime of torture without realizing? If they do know...It'd be very dark.

Btw Tommy's exile and his time in prison doesn't count as solidary confinement. Just to clear that up.

It amazes me how badly they break these rules...I know they probably didn't take the realism into consideration. However it is still kind of darkly impressive. Especially considering how scary specific they break them too. Even though this is just a interesting (I was about to write fun, however I wouldn't count realizing how inhuman the prison is is 'fun'. But it is interesting) look at Dream's punishment and Pandora's Vault under the light of real life rules for prisons. (lol my paranoid self have said this so much)

These facts also proves how saying it's justified...is kind of morally bad. Not attacking anyone! I just want to also say how while it is pure fiction and the characters in the story can have whatever opinion they want as they are characters. However when it comes to fans approving and justifying it without taking time to consider how it really isn't something that can be justified (real or no). You can have whatever opinion you want, however just maybe take some of what you have learned today and reflect over it? To think twice after having received new information dosen't hurt. I am not here to tell you what to think, so rest easy. Only to share some facts^^ (*so obviously scared of offending anyone*)

I recommend taking some time to look it up yourself if you want to look further into it. The psychological aspects of it is also interesting to look at!

I hope you have learned something here today and found this post and my research interesting! I spent hours on this so I hope you have enjoyed this! I originally posted this on reddit and I was very surprised at how many stopped by to read it and therefore I choose to post it here as well because you learn something and hopefully also gained a new perspective. 

Ninma over and out!

[stevenbasic]

Melissa Monroe, new Office Manager at Far Horizons Medical Associates, was back in the office after one day away. She’d taken the time off to settle herself, to get her thoughts straight, to wrap her head around - god! - just how fucking exciting it all was, now that he was...omigosh...becoming smaller.

And she was bigger every day...

She had summoned him - summoned him! - to her office, on this cold, rainy October morning. She’d told her girls to call him to her and he had come, without complaint. Her boss...or, haha, her ‘boss’...at her beck and call. Nnngh it made her squirmy. He had the title, but they..oh god...they both knew who was in charge where it counted. It made her feel every ounce a woman, dominating a man like this. It was early Friday and it was time for their weekly coffee date. Coffee, haha!  She’d be feeding him more milk than ever, she thought with a laugh to herself - haha haha, it’s so funny! - and making sure he took off his jacket so she could see his thin, weak shoulders.

God!!!

It had been pointless, she thought to herself, as she sat up on her knees next to him on her office couch. She’d been calm when she asked him to sit. She’d been professional when she’d given him the tablet, pre-loaded with the new application photos and videos of a bevy of girls ripe for her team. She’d been dutiful, as she helped him out of his jacket, fed him his warm milk, and straightened his hair, set pillows behind him. But now, as she slowly rose up next to where he sat, she knew her “mental health day” had been a joke. She knew, no matter how conservatively she’d forced herself to dress this morning - in this vest, blouse, these pants - it was all for naught. In fact, the day away - instead of calming her - had made her jittery, like she was jonesing for a hit. She needed to see him, be in the same room as him, breathe air that had him in it. And, when she finally had him sat down next to her, as she felt herself slowly towering over him more and more, she knew she really had no control over these new urges she’d been having. Get a grip Missy, haha! she scolded herself, He’s still your boss!!

She straightened his funny little shirt collar for him. He’s just so small!!

”M-m-Melissa..?” Dr. J finally peeped. He’d been feeling it himself, secretly, this urge to see her. What was wrong with him?? It had gone way beyond just surreptitiously wanting to ogle her huge tits, her powerful legs. Admittedly it had started that way but now it was more than just looking for any chance to marvel at that god-given ass. He felt like he physically needed to be near her, and now after a day away he’d come to her when she called, obediently taken her directions, and had sat in relative silence. He felt cowed, and ashamed of himself. She works for you!! he told himself, Get a grip, man!!

“I’m sorry...just so excited to see y-...to be back,” she giggled, straightening up next to him just so, to get her breasts just under his eye level, “we have so much work to do, with these applicants, and I thought it’d be better if we do this together. Is it okay?”

“y-yeah, sure,” he replied, trying to focus his attention on the ‘applications’, on the images of these young, healthy, pretty women on the tablet she’d handed him, and not on the J-cups stretching the business blouse right next to him.

“I always get just so excited for our Friday coffee dates,” Melissa added, straightening her shoulders, “And you all dressed up for me...in a, is this a tuxedo shirt? You look so nice...”

It’s all I had that fit me; I wore this back in high school.  ”Th-thanks,” he stammered, “and they’re, uh…’meetings’, not ‘dates’...” He was flailing, grasping for any semblance of authority. “...and I-I usually like to do these outside the office…”

“Oh, but why would you want to be anywhere else for our Friday coffee date?” Melissa cooed, scooting in closer to him, “It’s so cozy here, just the two of us. And it’s cold outside, rainy. So nice in here…”

She watched him shiver, even as he pretended to still be focused on the applicants. She could tell he needed her, needed her warmth. His little body was aching for it. It drove her nuts. ”But maybe we can do our dates at night…like, I could take you out to dinner…”

That got his attention!

Haha! Look at his face! Maybe, she thought, maybe she did just overstep there a teeny bit haha. But she was getting to the point where she couldn’t help herself. She felt reckless, she felt drunk on him and the idea of smothering him with her size. And she loved how nervous he just got. She just asked him out! And, she noticed...he didn’t say ‘no’.

Melissa laughed quietly, knowing his little personality was having trouble handling everything she was throwing at him right now. Realizing just how very much the alpha she was in this moment, she knew she needed to treat him gently, and couldn’t be too aggressive. “We can talk about that another time,” she said, making sure her voice sounded warm with understanding...and patient. She pet his shoulder, rubbed the back of his neck as she sensed his tension relaxing. “Now,” she began again, “it's been four days. We have, omigod, more than a hundred applications and we need to make some decisions.” She watched him nod, turn back to the screen in his hand. “I’ve put aside 20 that look good…”

With him still holding the tablet, she began to swipe through pictures of girls. Videos of girls. Resumes of girls. She would watch his face as a particularly pretty one from Hooters appeared, or a tall one from Evolution. “Ooo, look at her!” she would coo. She saw his eyes dart when the cleavage got too aggressive, and it would make her giggle. It was obviously - haha - making him uncomfortable, looking at these girls with his female Office Manager at his side. He was trying to hold it together, sound and appear relaxed, but his comments were becoming confused, his speech devolving to incoherent mumbles.

She swiped out of the applications. She knew what she should do.

”It’s hard to focus, with all this going on, isn’t it?” she enjoined, dropping her voice low, compassionate, suddenly tender.

”It...it is, kinda,” he answered. She watched as he turned back up to her, looking for some relief from the onslaught of cheesecake from the screen. Looking to her for comfort, guidance.

“It’s a lot, isn’t it?” she asked, words dripping with concern, empathy. She knew she could, if she wanted, flood him with her pheromones, make him feel the way she wanted. They were so close, though; she might kill him haha.

“It...it is, with...with…” she listened to him stammer, watching the little wheels and gears fit and start in his face. He was flailing, the poor thing, clueless and impotent, so adorable. He needed a woman.

”...with the divorce, hm?” she offered.

”y-yeah”

”shhhh, I know,” she consoled him, “it must be scary, huh? Life might get hard for men, without a woman, a wife. You’re all a mess, confused.” Her heart was beating in her chest so hard; he wasn’t even trying to argue, to be ‘strong’. She knew she could take him another step. “Here, I know what’ll help,” she said, “You need something to focus on...now, I want you to relax…”

With that, she sat up straight, sliding her hand from behind him, and began to unbutton her vest.

”m-Melissa?” he peeped, just the meager sound of his voice making her chest swell with pride, knowing how she was affecting him. He could do nothing but watch as she peeled the vest away from her chest and slide it off her shoulders.

In a moment it was laid, forgotten, on the couch behind her, and her hand was back behind his head. He was staring, she saw, right at her tits.

“shhhh…I know, sweetie, I know. It’s all so confusing, so hard,” she purred, “But relax...I’m here.”

He reeled inside when he heard himself moan, a weak little whine. He knew he should pull back, step away, recover whatever dignity he had left, but the sight of her mammoth bosom, stretching tautly at her sheer-thin, snap-up blouse, held him rapt. She was just so...big. So big and soft. Her chest in that moment was a safe refuge, magnetic and majestic, a sanctuary.

“Sheryl’s divorcing you, sweetie, it’s a hard fact to face but it’s true,” Melissa continued, “She’s leaving you with nothing, no money, just this job. And, really, she owns the practice, and the building, doesn’t she? So she’s really your boss. But she’s letting you stay, in the job, in the apartment she owns upstairs, right? She’s being very kind, really…”

She saw him glance down at the envelope of papers on the low table in front of them.

“...and she doesn’t need to be. She doesn’t have to be so patient. She just wants you to sign those papers, sweetie. Before she has to make things hard for you.”

She heard him whine again, and smiled as his eyes came back to her breasts.

“I’ll keep the papers here,” she consoled him, petting his hair and fighting the urge to just ease his face straight into her tits, “When you’re ready you come to me, I’ll help you sign.”

Her heart nearly broke in two when his sweet brown eyes then rose to meet hers, pleadingly. His lip quivered, he looked so distraught, so at a loss. “M-Melissa, I…” he began, trying to find his words, “I...I can’t…”

“Shhhhh…” she hushed him, “I’m here. We’re here. You need to let us help you through this. And the more of us there are, the easier it’ll be for you”

”m-m-more?” he stammered, obviously still confused as his eyes glanced down again into her bountiful cleavage.

Melissa giggled. “Haha yes, sweetie, more of me but also more of them,” she said, as she redirected his attention back to the tablet, opened up the images, “Look at all these girls that want to work for you…help you...be there for you...”

“Shanette, Katrina, Sammi,” she began, “Emily, Lexi, Bianca…”

His eyes goggled again at the barrage of women across the screen, all the legs, all the tits, all the hips. He had actually gradually started, in recent days, to allow himself to enjoy being surrounded by pretty employees. His business was suffering, the quality of care to his patients had plummeted, and his self-esteem had crumbled. This journey he was passively letting himself being taken on was - in more ways than one - sure to ruin him, but at least the view along the way was nice. Having his staff be made mostly of unqualified bimbettes, all high heels, lipstick and push-up bras, had its few perks.  But what she was suggesting, bringing in all these...so many...it was like...like...

It was like an army. A swarm.

He needed to say something. “M-Melissa, I, uh, have to admit,” he began, the worry on his face plain to see, “I’m a little scared...bringing in all these girls…”

Melissa had, as she’d been watching him look through the portfolios of all the new girls, slowly been getting even more aroused, picturing him surrounded by all this estrogen, drowning in it. But hearing him say it? She nearly groaned.

“Y-you’re...scared?” she asked, husky voice betraying her excitement, “Of hiring women? Girls that are too attractive?” As she spoke, she’d been unable to help herself, and had inched in closer to him, gently turned his head back to her, back towards her breasts. “You think they’ll be a...distraction?”

Dr. J was struck speechless again, for the moment, knowing he shouldn’t be ogling the tits of his Office Manager. But, he was encouraged by her, and urged to reply as he felt her massaging the nape of his neck. “Uhhh...well, it’s not that,” he managed, catching himself staring at the outline of what looked like a black bra under her blouse, ”but more like, uh..uh, like, it’s a lot. C-can we afford it?”

Smiling under the attention, his obvious dumbstruck awe, Melissa continued. “Remember the Lean In grant...it’s so much money. Supporting female-oriented business, supporting women, giving them jobs,” she explained, “ And the more we hire, the more we get. The ladies at Lean In are going to take care of it all for you…”

Oh, uh, yeah, right. He knew all this. “B-but...where will we put everybody?”

“Oh, sweetie, didn’t you hear?” she purred, “Construction on the expansion starts on Monday. I have the company all set up, plans are made….here, I put a picture of the blueprints on here too…”

”wait what?” he sputtered, suddenly even more confused, more agitated.

Omigod how delicious is this?? Melissa thought to herself, relishing the astonishment in his voice. She remembered her last conversation with Sheryl, on the Zoom call along with Abby and Wendy from Evolution. They were about to show him, in spades, what women were capable of. ”Sheryl said to go ahead with it,” she began, trying to keep her voice measured, not betray just how fucking sexy this was, “tenants from the other suites are gone, we’re going to have whole bottom floor…” She’d already pulled up the image of the blueprint, and started him scrolling through the mock-ups, the digital models, the drawings of the new wings. They were beautiful, really. “The practice is expanding,” she continued, “offices for the new providers…” She flipped through digital images of modern, sleek medical areas, new hallways, big conference rooms, all stunningly more sleek and state-of-the-art than his current office. “There’ll be a whole suite, separate desks, just for the Evolution Study…”

“oh my god…!” he finally blurted, seeing one last image, a huge, classically majestic statue of a woman, set in a fountain, looming over an enormous new atrium. A statue that looked - jesus christ is this a joke?? - all-too strikingly like Melissa. This had become too much for him, this was too overwhelming. His brain, his sense of ego, were becoming fried. He knew it, and so did she.

She turned his head back to her chest, watched his eyes go wide again as she pulled him closer, diverting him effectively away from what was upsetting him.

“Oh, I’m sorry…” Melissa purred, “my blouse is pretty see-through, isn't it?” She drew a deep breath, allowed him to stare again at her chest. ”...and you’re looking at my bra, aren’t you?”

”n-no, s-sorry, I…” he stammered, face flushing.

”shhhhh...here, you need more help…” she said.

“oh my god Melissa!!” Dr. J blurted, his voice louder, more emphatic than it had been all morning as he watched - in a swift, immediate motion, Melissa ripped open the snaps of her blouse, pulled it away, exposing her huge, newly-burgeoned chest.

“O shush…!” she laughed, tickled to amusement by his panicked consternation, dropping her blouse in a crumple behind herself, “You’ve seen me in my bikini, it’s the same thing.” She sat up straight, posed her shoulders, and let him stare at the huge breasts she’d grown. “My door is locked, it’s just you and me,” she assured him, her left hand finding its way back to its place behind his head, keeping his focus where she wanted it, “It’s okay, it’s alright. I know it helps…

The two sat there, for a long moment, with Melissa idly brushing fingers through his thick hair and allowing him to stare at her big, big breasts. She was supported heroically in a black satin bra that was huge but obviously still too small for her, and she watched as his eyes found the bulges of her that escaped the bottoms of her bra cups. He seemed helpless to do anything else but gape, and looked down into the flesh of it all. She was letting off just enough perfume now to relax him, help him settle his thoughts. By the end of this meeting, she wanted him to have come to terms with everythingl. She knew he was close.

”Looking at a woman’s breasts is just so relaxing, isn’t it?” she purred, indulging him with a voice she knew would be calming to him, “Helps you forget all your troubles…”

She was happy with his response, and knew she couldn’t expect much more. He’d nodded, grunted something affirmative.

Melissa giggled. The poor thing probably felt all of two inches tall right now. But she had eased him into a nice enough place, and - if he actually was two inches tall - they both knew where else she could ease him.

She knew the time was right, and pulled up the pictures of the applicants for him again. “Imagine, sweetie, if we had allllll these girls here for you, too,” she proposed, putting forward her picture of what she wanted the practice to be, “imagine all these girls, providing for you, taking care of what you need. imagine how you could relax then, with all of us around…”

“oh Jesus...Melissa,” he muttered, still lost in her cleavage.  He was disbelieving, incredulous on how far he’d let things go, how much he'd let her rise, how far he’d let himself sink. He was lost in her cleavage and felt helpless to pull himself out.

“You missed me yesterday, didn’t you?” she asked, giggling a bit and scuffing his hair.

He’ll do anything I want, she marveled.

I’ll do anything she wants, he realized.

”w-w-we’re hiring them all, aren’t we?” he asked, finally, resigned to his new fate.

”Mmhm,” she answered, and felt the world opening up for her...

================================================

Thank you loads to DragoonGTS for his renders. I've (awkwardly) photoshopped/faceswapped a few of them, but he did most all the heavy lifting for this post's imagery. Check out his Patreon and DeviantArt  and let's hope he'll be able to contribute more awesomeness in the future.

More images, more storylines, and more more more Melissa at my Patreon

[friendofhayley]

I’m back after my hiatus from fanfiction, to give y’all the best multifandom recs of the fics I read this month. Shoutout to all content creators who helped us live to see the close of this year. This fic includes 15 fics for Sterek, Larry, Winteriron, and Geraskier. The starred ones put me through heaven and hell *chef’s kiss*.

Sterek (Teen Wolf)

1. Six Letter Word for Romance by @troubleiwant | domestic kink - omg there’s only one bed - soft Derek - oblivious idiots in love - 6k

Stiles definitely starts off thinking it’s fucking hilarious that Derek-sourwolf-Hale does crosswords and cares about scuffs on his furniture.

But at a certain point, and he can’t pinpoint exactly when, “fully functional adult couple” somehow becomes a massive fetish of his. Derek in sweats and bare feet, nudging his glasses up his nose while he does the Sunday crossword? Unff. Derek filling out forms to get some renovations on his property approved? Oh God, yes. Derek putting away groceries and bitching that the corner store was out of the right type of Greek yogurt? Take me now, Stiles thinks, worrying at his lower lip with his teeth.

This can’t be normal.

2. *Dirty Little Secret* by @isthatbloodonhisshirt | Cora & Stiles bffs - no one can resist the Stilinski charm - celebrity Derek - human au - 91k

“Holy shit, this is a date!” he blurted out, turning back to Derek wide-eyed. “This is a date! You intended for this to be a date, this was supposed to be a date!” He figured if he said it enough times, maybe he would believe it, but so far, no dice.

Derek was scowling again—seriously, did he want wrinkles?—but he just reached into one of the bags and pulled out a burger, checking what was written on the foil in sharpie before handing it over to Stiles.

“Of course it’s a date, what did you think this was?”

3. Can You Feel A Whole New Part of Your World? by @isthatbloodonhisshirt | i genuinely don’t look at authors names i just click i am sorry for spamming you but you write too good - neighbors Sterek - emotionally mature Stiles - the ideal fluffy world you’d want to live in - 53k

Can you hear me singing in the shower?” Stiles blurted out, because he had to know, now. If one of his neighbours had slid that note under his door, then it meant Parrish as another neighbour could hear him, too! He had to know if this was all a huge joke and one person had walked by and overheard him and decided to fuck with him.

Parrish gave him a weird look at the question, but answered anyway, making Stiles’ plans to leave the country speed up in his mind.

“Of course I can. You’re actually not bad. Though you have been singing a lot of Frozen lately, getting kind of tired of the soundtrack.”

4. Theory of Overprotective Canines by @petals42 | derek can turn into wolf - oblivious Stiles - future fic - mutual pining - 11k

Stiles is totally looking forward to living alone in his super cool apartment off-campus. He is. He is also very excited to bike to school every day, ready to set up an awesome game room, and definitely over his crush on Derek Hale. Completely over it.

Or at least he is until Derek decides he's moving in with him. And then turns out to be the perfect roommate. And then starts attending all his classes. As a wolf.

This is not going according to plan.

Larry (One Direction)

5. **The Changer and the Changed** by @homosociallyyours | literally the best fic of all time i want to live in there - girl direction - NYC ‘70s au - trans Zayn - the girls are so lovely - 59k

It’s the spring of 1977 and Harry Styles has just moved to New York City after graduating college. She knows she’s a lesbian. She just needs to figure out how to meet other lesbians.

Louis Tomlinson works at a popular women’s bookstore in the Lower East Side, Womon’s Direction, where she spends her days reading feminist literature, writing poetry, exchanging friendly barbs with her boss Niall, and dreaming of finding someone to love.

When Harry and Louis meet, their connection is instantaneous. Slowly but surely, Louis welcomes Harry into her community of women. Stonewall veteran and old school butch Niall; Liam, a land dyke who’s moved to the city for love; and Zayn, a lesbian musician who’s been ostracized by a vocal part of women’s community for being trans, welcome Harry with open arms, ready to help her find her place in New York City’s bustling lesbian scene.

6. others i’ve seen might never be mean (but they would never do) by @cherrylouvol6 | aaaaaaaa it’s lesbian When Harry Met Sally !!! - rom com - girl direction - coming out and first times - really great sex - 20k

Louis sighs.

“Do you remember what I said to you the first time we met?”

“That I’m naive and neurotic and would be hard pressed to ever find someone who could put up with me?” Harry snaps.

7. some things fade (some never do) by @so-why-let-your-voice-be-tamed | aaaaaa this story took me apart and back together again just like Louis and Harry - urban fantasy au - second chances - exes to friends to lovers - hurt/comfort - 25k

Matching tattoos. He’d never thought he’d be the type for tattoos to begin with, let alone matching or magical ones, but once Harry had put the idea in his mind it had never quite managed to disappear. And it had made sense. With their relationship a long distance one, this was simply another way of feeling close to one another. Of knowing where the other was, how they felt. It had made so much sense.

Back then.

8. we can take the long way home by @eleadore | i usually don’t rec my porn but there’s so much feels in this one - canon-divergent - kink discovery - friends to lovers - this was written in 2015 as a future fic but it felt like it was taking place now so good job - 27k

“Fertile,” Louis says, and then laughs because it sounds stupid to say out loud. He hasn’t ever really thought of himself in those terms. Baby-making terms. It’s just one of those things his body can do, like exercise, or go without tea. Doesn’t mean he will.

Winteriron (MCU)

9. **Dig No Graves** by @missaphelion | Tony finds out about his parents right after winter soldier au - Tony Stark has a heart - Bucky heals with bots and lots of sugar - slow burn - 142k

"I'm here to kill you, Terminator," Tony said slowly, "does that compute?"

The soldier looked up at him with wide blue eyes and no expression. "Okay."

Tony froze. "Okay," he echoed. "I tell you I came here to kill you and your response is 'okay'?"

10. A Rifling Matter by Penndragon27 | Winter Soldier has such a big crush on Tony’s weapons, he escapes Hydra au - identity porn - pining Bucky - fluff and angst - Winter Soldier is a fanboy and it’s cute - 37k

All the Asset knows is fighting, killing.

He also knows a good weapon when he sees one and Stark Industries... they make some great weapons.

11. *Winter is Coming (aka Fifty First Avengers Dates)* by @tisfan & @everyworldneedslove | enemies to friends to lovers to 50 first dates - pining Bucky - Tony gets amnesia - no Steve bashing but he’s a little bit of an ass - mental health issues - 109k

Bucky Barnes is still mostly The Asset, and he's pretty sure Hydra is going to come back for him soon, so in the meantime he's just going to keep an eye on the Avengers for them. But then Clint spotted him hiding in the shadows, so Tony came out and dragged Bucky back to the Tower, threw him in the shower, and fed him cheeseburgers.

Now The Asset is having anomalous feelings. In his pants.

Geraskier (The Witcher)

12. *no reason to run* by @yoursummerfrost | different meeting au - only one bed but camping - cursed Jaskier - soft Geralt!!!! - poly negotiations - 61k

"You'll change your mind one day," says the innkeep. "The road can't love you back."

What a strange way to flatten something so beautiful, Jaskier thinks. What a small way to love.

13. *He Fell into a Faerie Ring* by @geraltnoises | Jaskier gets bardnapped after the fight au - non-human Jaskier - soft Geralt - Jaskier encourages people to be kind and becomes a god - emotionally mature Geralt - 57k

Traders are a gossiping sort. If there was a scandal within the noble houses of Posada, you’d hear about it in Cretegor by the end of the week. So, the quick spread of a rumor about a little village in the Kestrel Mountain range was not at all surprising. What was surprising was the story that the traders wove. They said that Luibhtorrach, a sad, ghost of a farming town, had miraculously become a hub for trade, as if overnight. Their lands unbelievably fertile and brimming with crop. Even stranger, each and every one of Luibhtorrach’s people professed that their good fortune was the work of a mysterious beast they’d claimed as their personal deity. Most recent news foretold of their plans to throw a midsummer festival celebrating this newfound god. In preparation, silken blue banners were erected in every corner of the town, each bearing the symbol of their new patron: A delicate dandelion wrapping around a golden sun.

14. Barking Up the Wrong Tree by KHansen | 5+1 things - I’m worried about Geralt’s skills - non-human Jaskier - monsterfucker Geralt - crack treated seriously - 11k

Geralt is 100% certain that Jaskier is a vampire.

He's 100% proven wrong.

15. Bardic Idyll by Lisztful | fake relationship - Geralt is soft and oblivious - pining - fluff and angst - Jaskier you can’t show your emotions mainly through song! - 13k

Jaskier is certain he can win the Continent's annual bardic competition, but he needs to be accompanied by a dashing romantic companion in order to enter. Enter Geralt, who is definitely, for sure, only interested in the free food, and not at all in staring lovingly into Jaskier's eyes.

[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/

[lilacmoon83]

Clarity

Also on Fanfiction.net and A03

Chapter 15: Sparks Fly, Pt 2

Snow cuddled against him, as they turned the corner and walked along Main street with his arm slung firmly around her.

"Cold?" he asked, with a chuckle.

"The winters here are just about as miserable as they were back home. But I guess cursing us to a place with sunny beaches would have been too pleasant," Snow mentioned. He chuckled and kissed her hair.

"I'll keep you warm," he promised. She smiled up at him.

"You always do," she said, as they were so absorbed by each other that they almost didn't see Kathryn barreling toward them.

"Oh…Kathryn," she said. The other woman glared at her.

"Well, I should congratulate you on the success of your article," the blonde said, as she held up a copy of the Storybrooke Mirror.

"My article? I didn't write that," Mary Margaret refuted.

"Oh no...but do you really expect me to believe that it wasn't you that fed these lies to this reporter!" Kathryn hissed.

"She didn't...we don't even know who this August person is," David insisted.

"Then why did he write these things!? You were my husband! I didn't make it up!" she shouted. He sighed.

"Maybe not, but for a really long time, I was gone and you didn't seem to give me a second thought. Did Regina tell you that she knew I was in the hospital the whole time?" David questioned. He knew that they couldn't really tell her that the marriage was exactly fake since that didn't mesh with her curse memories. But pointing out certain anomalies would bring other things into question.

"N...no, she didn't. She said she just found out you were there when you woke up," Kathryn said.

"But that can't be true. She was listed as my emergency contact and would have been notified the moment I was in whatever accident that I was in," David replied. Mary Margaret caught onto what he was trying to do.

"That's right...and the hospital had you listed as John Doe. That doesn't make any sense if you had an emergency contact. Regina would have been able to identify you," she recalled. This made Kathryn recoil in confusion. Everything they said made a lot of sense.

"But why would Regina hide you from everyone, especially me?" she asked.

"I don't know...but I don't think she's your friend like you think. Besides, do you really want to be with someone that can't love you the way you deserve?" he asked. Kathryn swallowed thickly and shook her head.

"Of course not...and I know we were just going through the motions," she admitted.

"You'll find someone," Mary Margaret assured her.

"That's easy for you to say," Kathryn grumbled.

"It is, but I happen to know someone at the school that's perfect for you. He's the gym class teacher," Mary Margaret said.

"I don't need dating advice from you!" Kathryn replied, as she stormed off.

"Well...that went well," he muttered, as they continued along the street.

"It was so nice of Regina to plant it into her head that I must have influenced the reporter to write that article," Mary Margaret said sarcastically. He scoffed.

"Yeah, we probably should have anticipated that, but why did you tell her that she should meet the gym teacher?" he asked curiously. She smiled coyly.

"Because Jim the gym teacher is really Frederick, her true husband," she replied and he smiled.

"Sneaky…I like it," he said, as they arrived at the Storybrooke Mirror's building. They knocked on the office door and unsurprisingly, Sidney Glass answered.

"Well...if it isn't Storybrooke's favorite adulterers," he said.

"Watch it or you'll find out how good my right cross is," David warned.

"What can I do for you and the fair Miss Blanchard?" Glass asked and David studied him with scrutiny. He seemed familiar, but he couldn't place who he might have been back in their land.

"We're looking for August W. Booth...he wrote an article in your newspaper," David said.

"We'd just like to talk to him," Mary Margaret added.

"Well...that makes three of us. You see, Mr. Booth neither works here nor had authorization to put that article in my paper," Sidney explained.

"Then why did you print it?" Mary Margaret asked.

"Isn't it obvious? This man broke into my office and placed his article in my paper without my knowledge or approval," Sidney replied.

"You must be in hot water with Mayorzilla then," David joked. He had heard Emma call her that in an offhand remark and decided that it was a fitting description if he had ever heard one.

"Laugh now, if you must, but I'll be printing a retraction to the article and then the town will go back to believing the truth about you both. You the cheater and her the tramp," Sidney said, which caused David to put his hand around the other man's neck and push him back against the door.

"If you hurt me...I'll make sure you're thrown in jail!" Sidney warned nervously.

"David...he's not worth it. He's a worm," Mary Margaret urged, as she touched his arm. David released him and backed away, as he attempted to collect himself.

"The waters have been muddied now and the truth always comes out, trust me. The town isn't so eager to believe anything reported by you anymore," David warned, as he took her hand and they continued on their way. As they walked by the alley, they didn't see the man standing there listening to the whole conversation.

Now that August knew they were looking for him, he would have to be careful to avoid them. They were clearly awake and he didn't want to be the one to tell them the truth about the wardrobe and who he really was.

"You two look cold...how about some cocoas?" Granny called, as she happened to be outside at the moment they walked by.

"Really?" Mary Margaret asked.

"I thought our kind wasn't welcome?" David asked and she nudged him.

"I see where Emma gets her lack of tact now," she murmured.

"Do you want the cocoa or not, chisel chin?" Granny asked shortly. Mary Margaret smiled.

"We'd love some," she said, as they followed Granny inside.

~*~

The gavel slammed down, as the Judge brought the hearing to order and they were seated. The Bayliff announced the docket number and the Judge looked over the documents in front of him.

"How do we know this guy isn't in Regina's pocket?" Emma whispered to Gold.

"That's actually a really good question," Neal agreed.

"I will be very convincing and he is more afraid of me than he is of her," Gold assured him.

"What did you do to him?" Neal questioned.

"Here...nothing yet. But I know things about him he'd rather not have made public," Gold replied vaguely.

"Wonderful…" Neal drawled.

"Who cares if it gets us visitation," Emma said and Neal conceded to that point with a nod.

"We're here today to discuss the visitation right of the biological parents of Henry Mills. I will hear opening arguments now," the Judge said, as Albert Spencer got to his feet and buttoned the front of his suit coat.

"Albert Spencer for the defendant, Mayor Regina Mills, Your Honor," he said, as he approached the bench.

"For the last ten years of Henry Mills' life, my client has raised her son and quite admirably so. She has been there for everything. The sleepless nights, the diapers, the nightmares, and all the ups and downs that come with often grueling duties of a parent. Now that the boy is older, the birth parents have come out of the woodwork to demand him back. To rip him from the woman that raised him would be a grave error in judgement, I believe. The birth parents are unstable and both have criminal backgrounds. It is my position that Regina Mills remain the sole custodian of Henry Mills," Spencer said, as he took his seat.

"Mr. Gold for the plaintiff, Your Honor," Gold said, as he rose from his seat.

"While we can agree that Regina Mills has raised young Henry from birth and provided him with all the material necessities he wants, she has not been exemplary when it comes to the boy's mental health," Gold said, which made Regina seethe.

"I have witnesses willing to submit testimony that they have heard the Mayor call her own son crazy for his very vivid imagination. The boy's own psychiatrist can testify that Mayor Mills' language alone could be very harmful to the boy. So much so that they boy sought out his own birth mother on his own," Gold continued.

"And while both Mr. Cassidy and Ms. Swan have made mistakes in their past, they were barely adults and have since turned their lives around. The boy wants them in his life and his opinion should be considered in this," Gold stated.

"Objection, Your Honor. That boy is a minor and it is not the practice of the courts to allow minors to make decisions concerning their well being themselves," Spencer objected.

"I believe I said that his feelings should be considered; not the sole basis of this case," Gold clarified, but the Judge put his hand up.

"As this is not the actual custody hearing, I believe this is a very simple decision," the Judge stated.

"I have reviewed the case, including comments from Dr. Hopper, who has stated that he has noticed a positive change in the minor in question since the resurfacing of his birth parents," he stated.

"Until we convene on the matter of custody, I am going to grant visitation rights to the birth parents. Every other weekend and two weeknights," he said.

"Your Honor...this is an outrage!" Spencer objected.

"Save it for the custody trial, Counselor. The visitation is only until trial and will be re-evaluated upon the outcome of the trial. But considering the birth father did not even know that he had a son, which could have changed whether or not his son was even adopted, I cannot in good conscience deny him the chance to know his son. The same goes for Ms. Swan, as she was clearly under duress at the time of his birth. Whether they are fit or not will or will not be proven in the custody hearing," the Judge ruled, as he slammed the gavel down. By now, Regina was fuming and if looks could kill, they would have surely all been dead.

"If you think this is going to go your way...then you're sadly mistaken," Regina growled, as she stormed out.

"Thanks...papa," Neal said, as he shocked Gold by giving him a gentle hug, which he reciprocated.

"You know that I would do anything for you...and Henry now," he replied. Neal nodded. He was still struggling with his feelings toward his father, but this had definitely made him reconsider his decision to keep him at arms length.

"Yeah...thanks. I owe you another one I guess," Emma said.

"This one is on the house, Ms. Swan," Gold replied.

"We should go see if we can get the kid and go to Granny's to celebrate. We can invite your parents too," Neal said, as they exited the courtroom.

"Will you stop calling them that?" Emma asked.

"How long are you going to keep denying what you know is true?" he replied.

"Neal…" she said.

"No…I'm serious. You have a gift for knowing when people are lying. I am from a place called the Enchanted Forest. My Dad is Rumpelstiltskin...also known as the Dark One. I escaped through a portal and landed in this world in the 1800's, London, to be specific. Then I got carried off to Neverland by Peter Pan's shadow…" he continued.

"Do you know how insane you sound?" she interjected.

"Yes...but am I lying?" he asked. She scoffed and walked off, but he persisted.

"I got rescued by none other than Captain Hook from the water, only for him to later sell me out to Peter Pan himself. Then I spent two hundred years in trying to escape that hell hole, only to finally succeed and find myself in the Land Without Magic again, America this time, in 1997. Then I met you just a few years later…" he continued, as Gold followed them, listening intently.

"Why does it matter to you so much if I believe or accept them as my parents, which they're not?" Emma asked, as they stopped on the street.

"Because I know how much you always wanted to find them and how much you wanted answers. Both are now staring you in the face and you're running away again," he accused.

"Screw you...Henry is the only thing keeping me here and you know it," Emma replied.

"Nope...now you're lying. You care about Mary Margaret and even David," he insisted.

"Enough! I don't give a damn about them and if it's all true, then why should I?" she shouted, as they were now just outside the diner.

"You've seen the book. You saw that nursery they made...for you. Parents that don't want their kid don't do that, Emma and you know it," Neal said, as neither of them noticed David and Mary Margaret coming out of the diner.

"Why do you care so much!?" Emma cried in exasperation.

"Because I know the truth! You were cheated out of having them and they were cheated out of having you! First, because of the curse...but ultimately, because of a lie told by people that were supposed to be their friends!" he said.

"What?" Mary Margaret asked and he suddenly realized they were there...

[pip-n-flinx]

Among Us

So this is going to get long, this is going to get personal, this is going to be about prejudice and race and self-serving bad-faith arguments and flawed rhetoric. And for all of these reasons I’m going to leave the rest of this under the cut.

As a few of my friends will know, earlier this week I was delivered an ultimatum from my landlord/roommate. He disguised it well, telling me he was ‘concerned for my mental health’ that my ‘negativity was dragging the whole house down’ and that I was simply too filthy to live with. I won’t pretend I’m a neat freak, and I can honestly say that I have taken some pains to clean more since, to his surprise and delight, though its particularly hard to take coming from him.

“You’re always so down. It’s making you lazy and thin skinned” You know its funny you should say that, now specifically, because I’ve actually been on the up and up this last week and you didn’t mention this at all in January when I was actually at my worst, or February when I was afraid I was going to have to quit my job, or back during the holiday season when retail work was breaking my back... Only now do you think to check in on me?

“You left a pair of gloves, a letter, and a small wooden trinket on the table!” Indeed I have, as you have left your pair of gloves, well over 21 letters, and regularly set your packages on this same table, including today two packages to be returned to amazon. I didn’t realize I didn’t get to use the table the same way you do.

“You don’t do dishes! except that you did this week, which is cool I guess but still!” You do realize that I actually hand-wash every dish I use within 24 hours of using it, right? And that often the dishes you come to me bitching that I never cleaned are in fact your fiances, yes? Ok good, next question.

“You’re always complaining about work. I don’t mind that you vent, but its all you talk about anymore!” I have either lost or walked away from 4 jobs in this last year, and that has not been easy, or fun. I have worked essential retail jobs the entire pandemic thus far. Additionally, in the months leading up to you storming out of your 75k a year salaried sales job, I had told you to leave it because I could see that it was killing you. You got so fed up with the job that for 4-5 months before you left your grandma-paid-off-my-second-mortgage capitalism-knows-best-pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps-ass spent more time playing valorant and league of legends on the clock than doing actual work. Need I remind you that every time I stepped into your office, or simply stepped upstairs to get ready for work, you would complain about how awful your managers were, or how shitty someone had been to you over the phone? DID I EVER BELITTLE YOU FOR ANY OF THESE THINGS????

The real kicker was that the spark, the moment that started this (at least for him) was me trying to explain why racism and ‘cultural supremecy’ was bad. I had brought to him something I thought we could both agree on, that we could both laugh at. I brought him a series of tweets about how problematic Van Gogh was for studying and imitating traditional japanese painting techniques. He took this, and immediately turned into a piece of the culture wars. Now, I agree, this is an egregious example of trying to ‘cancel’ someone. How cancelling a long dead artist who couldn’t sell his art while he was alive is important is beyond my comprehension, its not as though the market value of these comes up very often, and almost no-one will ever have a chance to buy or reject a Van Gogh. But to him this was emblematic of ‘liberals’ cancelling Seuss and Rowling.

He even went so far as to say that Van Gogh probably ‘did it better’ than the artists he was studying/imitating. Now, this is a huge red-flag to me because this is straight out of the Nazi playbook. This is William Shenker, proposing a theory of music to proof ‘German cultural superiority.’ This, if you will pardon my language, is the real culture war: trying to supplant other cultures art and history with western figures and events.

Now, for those of you who don’t know who I’m talking about, this man is sexist. He doesn’t believe women are equal, complains about women’s sports, and rejects a woman’s right to choose. This man is a transphobe, questioning the logic of ‘safe-spaces’ and allowing people to change their pronouns. This man is a Trump supporter, and voted for him twice. And all of these things I found out years after we became friends. I have in the past contemplated what it would take to cut him out of my life wholesale. Despite our wealth of shared experience and our shared interests, we’ve been drifting apart as he drifts further and further to the right. And he has been drifting. He’s parroted more bad-faith arguments from Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson in the last 6 months then he ever did when I first moved in with him.

I have been trying to push back, especially when he says the quiet parts out loud. I try to let him know that it is not acceptable to say he would rather an unarmed black man die that risk that a police officer might be injured. When he compares the people in control of Seuss’ intellectual property and works choose to stop printing less than 6% of his published works to the book burnings in Mao’s china. When he says that its more important to protect teacher from students trolling them by changing their pronouns than it is to protect trans or NB kids. When he espouses his belief that trans and NB kids are ‘just mentally ill.’ Whenever he says any of this shit, I have pushed back. I have tried to halt, or at least slow, his descent towards eugenics and white supremacy and fascism.

It has been to no avail.

And to be honest its exhausting. I wanted to believe that he would trust me, not just to be a moral and thoughtful person, but to be educated and informed on these issues. We went to school together, spent countless hours solving homework and trying to crack games together. If I don’t know the answer to his questions immediately, he often jokes ‘C’mon, you’re supposed to know everything!” and has frequently told me that I’m selling myself short.

But apparently all that trust and all that respect goes out the window when I challenge him. Suddenly I’m ‘overly negative’ or ‘too sensitive’ or he’ll ‘need to look into that, but...’

And the thing is, he is capable of great acts of kindness. He offered to rent me a room in his completely paid-off house, no mortgage at all, simply because he could see living at home was killing my mental health. He offered me 50-75% off of market rate. He buys gifts all the time, has landed tenants job interviews, set people back on their feet, and refused to press charges for several major financial loses he’s taken on the determination that it would do more harm to the defendant than he could ever recoup from it.

But he does not extend this kindness, this generous soul, to everyone. And lately, his circle grows smaller, and his kindess has waned, and it’s been so devastating to see him slip further and further towards his own worst impulses.

I know there will be people who think I should have cut him out of my life years ago, who can’t believe we never talked enough to know that he voted for Trump in 2016. I think back then he was genuinely ashamed, or at least guilty, about that vote. Now? It’s almost a matter of pride for him. I can’t tell you the number of times in the last 4 months that he’s told me that Biden “couldn’t possibly” be as “great” a President as Trump.

And he hides behind this “praise them when they do good, cuff them when they do bad” line and I used to take comfort in it but now... Now it’s clear that it was just a front or excuse for liking these abhorrent people.

I’ve had a couple of hard conversations with some of our mutual friends about what this means for me, and how I interract with the whole group of friends as a whole, in the last 3 days. None of our mutual friends seem to take any of these things as seriously as I do, with my oldest friend even telling me that he ‘can’t imagine’ breaking a friendship off over politics.... I know I know, the caucasity of it all, yes ha ha. And it does make me genuinely worried that I’ll wind up losing the 5-6 close friends that I actually rely on these days over this horrible sonuvabitch. But all this personal venting aside, there’s something bigger here I want to address:

I sat down this evening to watch Last Week Tonight and I was struck by this piece about Tucker Carlson, because while I knew some of what was said on his show, he is remarkably confident for a man who spouts the quiet parts of racism/sexism/homophobia on TV. I have a hard time imaging a more blatantly racist thing to do then declare that a woman who suggested ‘dismantling systems of oppression wherever they are found’ wants to dismantle the American system...

And I have to say, we should go back to punching Nazis. I want these fuckers afraid. I want them to crawl back to the furthest reaches of the internet, relegated to be laughed at for their bigotry by pundits of every political ideology. I want their vile vitriol hidden away where it doesn’t embolden others. I want them to know that they are out of line, out of touch, out of time. I want them to feel ashamed, like the relics of a bygone and worse era that they are, and for them to quietly fade to an ignominious death. I’m tired of seeing them on National News. I’m tired of Pewdiepie’s channel and influence refusing to die despite all the horrible things he’s said and done. I’m tired of Ben Shapiro spouting off about a woman’s place and rights, as if he has any fucking authority on the matter. I just want these people to lose their platforms and their followers. And for me the fact that they haven’t yet is so incredibly discouraging.

I know I didn’t offer any answers here I’m just tired of being alone with this defeated attitude and I guess I needed to get this off my chest as I try to disentangle myself from the losing battle of trying to save a friend from alt-right radicalization.

[societalstore-blog]

Societal.co Quick Start Guide

Let’s start with the basics. What is Societal?

Societal.co is a sever that hosts Mastodon a microblogging platform akin to others you may have seen, such as Twitter, but instead of being centralised it is a federated network which operates in a similar way to email.

There are lots of servers hosting Mastodon around the world. Like email wherever you sign up you know you’ll be able to email people on other servers so long as you know their address.

The word “instance” is often used as a synonym of a server. So Societal.co is a Mastodon instance.

This means there’s no big uncaring company running it all, no shareholders, no central control, none of the targeted advertising we’re all fed up with, just a bunch of people sharing the things they want to share with each other.

Where do I sign up?

The first thing you have to do is sign up at Societal.co. This is an extra step compared to sites like Twitter or Tumblr, but isn’t as difficult as it may seem.

Like with email, your identity is hosted by Societal.co. So for example, if someone wanted to mention you who was from a another server they can type @nico@Societal.co in their post.

You have the ability to view all public local posts that have been made by people on your server in the so-called “local timeline”.

The word “fediverse” (federated universe) refers to the network of all Mastodon servers and other projects, users of which are able to talk to each other seamlessly.

Knowing your server

Take a moment to check out the rules of Societal.co and make sure they are compatible with how you want to be tooting.

Posts on Societal.co are called “toots”, because that’s the sound an elephant makes.

Under the sign up form you will see a link to the rules page. It is likewise linked from the “Learn more” button under “Administered by”; on other pages, the rules are linked in the footer as simply “About”. You could also just enter the correct URL into the address bar of your browser directly as it always follows a format like https://Societal.co/about/more.

The rules page also tells you who the owner/administrator of the server is. Most servers set you up following the admin when you sign up, kind of like a modern take on MySpace Tom. This is great, it means you know who to ask if you run into problems and you can receive server-specific announcements (like when the software is being upgraded) and in general it’s great to know who runs the server you’re on.

Admins are super friendly people who are usually running the server out of their own pocket so it’s good to get to know them like you would a landlord. Many accept donations to cover the running costs and if you’re able to contribute then it’s always appreciated.

Username and Password

Head to the homepage of your server and choose your username and password in the sign up form. You’ll need an email address to register, which you will be asked to confirm before being able to log in.

Next thing to do is upload your profile picture, give the settings page a good once-over (and do come back to it when you’ve been on Societal.co a week or so just to make any tweaks that might help your experience) and get ready to introduce yourself.

Some interesting settings worth checking are: two-factor authentication to improve your account’s security; GIF autoplay which is turned off by default; the language you intend to post in; and the languages you prefer seeing when viewing the local, federated, and hashtag timelines (by default, you see all languages).

Hashtags are a really important thing on Societal.co. In fact, they are the only part of the content of toots that is searchable. So if you want to be found by people who are looking for toots about photography it’s best to include #photography.

For multiple word hashtags, please use camel case #LikeThisGoodHashtag instead of #likethisbadhashtag for accessibility reasons.

So for your first toot, a great idea is to post a short #introduction giving some information about yourself and what your interests are and what you’ll be talking about on Societal.co. That’s also a great hashtag to search, you’ll find lots of other people new to the network and many will care about the things you do.

A quick tour of the web interface

Mastodon hosted on Societal.co offers many apps, both for mobile phones and for the browser; you are not locked into using the standard interface.

The standard Mastodon interface has multiple columns rather than a single feed. You can move or remove these at your leisure.

Home is all the toots in chronological order of the people you’re following. It includes the toots of people on your server and on other servers, all that matters is that it’s people you follow. Some people like to disable boosts in this column so they just see what their follows themselves say. That option is there if you click the settings button on the top right of the column.

“Boost” (as in “signal boost” or “rocket boost”) is a synonym of “reblog” or “retweet” in Societal.co

Notifications does what it says on the tin. Again, this is across the fediverse. The settings button (top right) has a range of options for this column. You may want to turn off the “boop” sound, for example.

Local timeline is the live feed of all the toots of people on your server. On many servers, particularly smaller ones and ones focused on a particular topic, this is where the magic happens. It feels like a town square or Slack chatroom. You can reply to people from there and it’s a great place to meet people.

The federated timeline is a view of all the public toots your servers knows about from across the whole network (including local ones). The most common reason that something appears in the federated timeline is that someone from your server follows the author of that toot. This column moves fast, and can often be pretty wild. I enjoy setting that column to show only toots with media, hiding boosts, then seeing a constant stream of daft selfies, hot memes, and funky art.

You can also pin a column for a hashtag you’re interested in – just search for that hashtag and then in the column settings choose “pin” and done.

Using content warnings

One of the best features on Societal.co is that button that says “CW” where you write your toots. Clicking that adds a content warning field where you can put information about what the toot contains (eg. mental health, politics, lewd talk, nudity) so that people don’t have to see content they wish to avoid, for whatever reason. Of course, it’s also great for show or book spoilers.

A common convention is to put +, -, or ~ in a content warning to signify if the contents are broadly positive, negative, or mixed respectively.

My advice is simple: if you’re not sure whether a toot needs a CW or not, give it a CW. People really appreciate it and it doesn’t do any harm to be too cautious and too respectful of others.

You can also use a CW to summarise a long post. Some use it for joke punchlines. Maybe you’ll think of other uses for it. Have fun.

[fursasaida]

This is a horrific story. I am going to write a little something here about bare life, necroresistance, prisons, and camps, but I will try to offer some general context first. I haven’t included any graphic details here, but I will be discussing suicide, self-harm, hunger strikes, and force-feeding. The link describes this man’s burns in some detail.

The article doesn’t go into a lot of contextual detail, but Australia has held asylum-seekers on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea for the last several years. (There is a very good rundown here from @theauspolchronicles.) This is to make it easier to avoid admitting them to Australia or granting them any kind of access to legal protections and services (as is generally the aim of remote detention). The conditions there have been dire for a long time. Suicide attempts among prisoners are nothing new; there was a rash of them just after Australia’s last election. Behrouz Boochani, who wrote an award-winning book from within the camp (he could not, however, receive the award, since he would have had to be allowed to enter Australia), described it this way:

Boochani says some people in the camps report being physically abused by the guards, but that's not what he's referring to when he writes about the "systematic torture" he has witnessed and been subjected to.

"When I say torture ... mainly I mean, you know, the humiliation," he said.

"When a system [treats] you in a way to take your identity, take your humanity and reduce you to just a number and take your individuality, I think it is a big torture."

People in the camps don't know why they're being detained, how long they will be there, or even where they will end up if they ever leave, he said.

"They are treating you like a terrorist, like a criminal, while you are only a simple person like other people around the world," he said.

"One of the main questions that the people in Manus Island ask — and it is my question for years and years — that what is my crime? What is my crime?"

What is really striking about the criminal prosecution of this particular man (who has not been named) is how it so clearly shows the logic of bare life vs. necroresistance. Bare life is a term coined by Agamben to describe the state of being of people held in concentration camps (broadly defined); rather than being the kind of life that governments justify themselves as protecting, nourishing, and serving, they are held in a state of aliveness, life without value or meaning. (The point here isn’t that people in this circumstance lose the ability to make meaning of their lives in their own minds, but that they are classified in this way. The long tradition of prison and concentration camp writing--of which Bouchani is a recent example--shows this.) Bare life can be killed, but it can’t be sacrificed.

Prisoners in this kind of circumstance have material control over one thing only: their bodies. This is why hunger strikes, self-harm, and suicide are common forms of resistance in these situations. (Some of you may recall the rounds of hunger strikes and force feedings at Guantanamo Bay. The same is now reportedly happening under ICE in Texas.) Banu Bargu, in her book Starve and Immolate, calls this “necroresistance.” To put it very simply, she means by this that since bare life is reduced to aliveness, devalued or meaningless life, people can resist only by turning to the means of death; they cannot make appeals based on anything that serves the notion of “the good life,” i.e., the future of their children, morality, equality, flourishment, or any of the appeals generally made by activists under “normal” circumstances. All one can do in this situation is assert one’s control over one’s own status as alive or dead, and one’s own body. And the only way to do that in such tightly controlled circumstances is through self-harm of one sort or another. This is, in essence, an attempt to restore meaning and value to one’s physical life by producing one’s death as sacrifice rather than termination.

In this case, the man who attempted suicide had been seeking medical care (it’s not clear to me if this was mental or physical care, or both) and had been denied. After the fire, he was taken for treatment to the very clinic that had refused him. As his roommate said to the press,

“They said he’s under the treatment now so don’t allow [me] to come inside … I said, ‘Can you explain why you guys giving him treatment now, where were you before [when] he was asking you for treatment’.”

The reason he can get care now where he couldn’t before is, repellently, very simple. Bare life merits care only when it risks death. This is because such a death would successfully call into question the detaining authority’s absolute control over whether bare life lives or dies; the point is not necessarily to kill but to exercise authority over life and death. Thus bare life can also be understood as a state of “not allowed to die.” Similarly, the prisoners at Guantanamo and now in Texas were force fed because their hunger strikes were/are an attempt not only to call attention from the outside world but to assert control over their own bodies in defiance of the authority of detainment. Dying in this way is always an attempt at meaning, at asserting the ability to make meaning; this is one reason why, for example, some of the Turkish hunger strikers Bargu studied continued to fast until they died even after being released from prison.

That this man will now be criminally charged for his act is a kind of escalation of the confrontation between camp and prison systems and necroresistance. Suicide is a crime in Papua New Guinea (many countries have similar laws on the books, but these are not necessarily enforced). This man is not the first prisoner to face criminal charges for attempting suicide (though I’m not aware of similar criminalization of necroresistance in prisons/detention facilities elsewhere), but the fact that Australia’s remote prison is located in a place where suicide is actively prosecuted makes the prisoners’ status as bare life even starker. Not only are they locked up under miserable conditions that would make anyone contemplate suicide; not only are they disallowed to exercise control over the very last aspect of their beings, their bodily life; but on top of this, acts of necroresistance are not only punished within the prison through violent “care” (such as force feeding or carceral hospitalization), but criminalized from outside, by the state more generally. (There is a whole question to pursue here about jurisdiction and the state of exception, but I’ll leave it alone for now.) The absurdity is remarkable. Imagine being sentenced to a year in prison because you tried to kill yourself after six years of imprisonment with no end in sight. Imagine potentially being sentenced to seven more on top of that for arson. You didn’t expect to get out anyway, except maybe by dying; can you imagine receiving such a sentence?

The head of Manus police had two things to say that struck me:

Yapu said it was “frustrating” that this was the fourth deliberately lit fire at the accommodation blocks.

“Those buildings cost government a lot of money to build to accommodate the refugees and non-refugees and they should look after them until such time they leave PNG and resettle in the third country,” said Yapu.

This underlines the fact that bare life has no value. Its end is to be prevented only to preserve the authority and interests of the state (including avoiding negative international attention; avoiding the conversion of ongoing, ignored detention into a more visible event of death). The physical plant of the prison and its cost to the state is, of course, of greater concern than the well-being of detainees; if anything, the latter is a contradiction in terms (“well-being” is not something available to bare life).

Responding to an article about the mental health crisis, Yapu wrote on Facebook last month: “What more can our police officers do?”

“Attempts (sic) suicides, self-harm are beyond our control and part of system of depression related to long-term offshore detention, unknown future and families living away from them and result to severe mental illness.”

On one level, it’s true that the Manus police do not control the situation; they did not create it. It results from an agreement between the governments of Papua New Guinea and Australia. But it is really notable to me how suicide and self-harm are described here as simultaneously “out of our control” and the result of long-term detention. The system of detention is not a natural, unchangeable law. It can be done away with. In this sense, the problem is  within the control (or at least, the capacity to act and affect) of anyone involved in maintaining that system. What this simultaneous denial and assignment of causality suggests to me is that the statement really says this: the fact that detention causes self-harm is out of police control. Prevention is not possible. The problem cannot be managed or minimized, only responded to. This is precisely why Bargu terms such acts necro-resistance; they exceed detention’s logics of pacification, control, management, and “process.” (That the facilities on Manus are still referred to sometimes as places for “processing” is a sick joke about on par with the notion of sentencing someone who is already indefinitely imprisoned to a prison sentence.)

Because of all this, the framing of “depression” for this man or anyone like him is totally inappropriate. This is not to deny his emotions or the very obvious fact that indefinite detention makes people unhappy. It is to refuse these reactions’ production as medical conditions whose location is inside prisoners’ minds or hearts. “Depression” connotes medical pathology. It is discussed, generally, in terms of neurotransmitters, medication, and a mysteriousness of cause, even though this is, actually, rarely the case. My point here is that the way we talk about mental illness these days serves to pathologize individuals instead of their circumstances, and while I object to that in all cases, it is especially ridiculous and craven in reference to Manus, to Gitmo, to ICE facilities, to Gaza, to anywhere that can be classified as a camp. If this man has depression, it is not coming from inside his brain. It is coming from the walls he tried to burn along with himself. It is coming from Australia. To re-classify necroresistance as acts of mental illness is to join the authorities of detention in denying meaning and value to bare life.

We should also keep in mind that while necroresistance is much more common in formal prisons and concentration camps, it is not limited to those places. Agamben theorized the camp not simply in itself but as the unique product and structuring logic of modern society. Thus when Mohamed Bouazizi self-immolated in Tunisia, kicking off the Arab Spring, he was resisting the conditions that made it impossible for him to make a living--he could get no legal work and was criminalized and prosecuted for selling fruit illegally to survive. He was refusing a system that said he should be alive but disallowed any conditions for that life to be more than bare. We might ask ourselves what it was that Arnav Gupta and an unnamed wheelchair user were refusing when they attempted self-immolation outside the White House in May and April, respectively. We might refuse an explanation that deals in mental illness.

[dontcallmejules]

Made this a while ago and never posted it... Meet Zui.

What is their full name?

Zui. That's it.

In detail describe how they look

5'11, slender, slight athletic build yet considered on the waifish side. Dusky, smooth complexion with gray tones.  Erratic, un-combable, silver-white hair that stands out in a crowd, hence the hood.

How old are they?

Mid to late twenties? Age unknown.

What clothes do they like to wear?

Black/gray/purple muted tones. Suede. Things that hide in a crowd and make no sound.

Any piercings? 

A lot.

Do they have any other jewelry they wear?

Necklace coils in pure silver. A favorite stolen item from foreign royalty visiting Vesuvia.

Any tattoos? No

What do they smell like?

Clove, ash, and vanilla.

What are their four trinkets? Questionably stained dagger. Half empty whiskey bottle. Wanted poster that looks nothing like her. A pouch full of stolen trinkets.

GOVERNMENT MANDATED FERSONA No.

What kind of magic are they good at? Illusion/invisibility. Control of localized wind bursts and whirlwinds. Some healing magic comes in handy.

What kind of magic are they bad at? Love and happiness spells, earth magic, accurate tarot readings.

Of the four, six or seven magical elements which are the most connected to? Four: fire, air water earth. six: fire, air, water, wood, earth, metal. Seven: fire, air, water, wood, earth, metal, aither. Air

What does their gateway look like prior to their memory loss?  What does it look like afterward? A dark, lonely, narrow collection of alleys in an unnamed city.  Calm with a light drizzle of rain.  Zui hasn't seen it since after the memory loss so she wouldn't know what it looks like post-memory loss.

Do they have a familiar? If they do. What type of animal is it? What is it’s name? Is it still around after they lost their memory? A minuscule, snow gray rat named Rat. He's still around after the memory loss although she doesn't know he's her familiar. Zui goes days without seeing Rat. When he's around he likes to stick close by and prefers naps in the base of her hood. He's much older than a rat should be and, although she's seen him injured or possibly killed numerous times, Rat always returns unscathed.  

Have they ever cursed someone? Cursed their names, yes. Physically harmed them, yes. However, cursed magic has consequences not worth dealing with.

How do they handle those headaches/migraines? Drinking. Sex. More drinking.

What tarot card do they connect the most with? The Moon, Upright: unconscious, illusions, intuition.

Where were they born? She doesn't know. Assumes somewhere in the slums of Vesuvia.

What is their favorite color? Plum purple.

What is their least favorite color? Orange. Yellow. Anything bright and offensively cheerful.

What were they like as a child? Quiet, fast, smart. She learned how to pickpocket to survive.

What were their parents like? Parents?

Do they have any siblings? If the answer is yes how many? Probably, who knows.

Do they have any other relatives they are close with? Doesn't know any relatives and really isn't close to anyone anyway.

What are they afraid of? Showing weakness. Growing attached to another person. The majority of her own emotions.

What do they identify as? She/Her

Do they have any allergies? Nothing so far... except stupidity.

Do they have any other medical problems? Headaches, insomnia, night terrors, sleepwalking, and memory loss, obviously.

What about mental health issues? Distrust of anyone. Promiscuous. Alcoholic.

What’s their personal hygiene regimen like? Near religious. Prefers to bathe in streams with scented soaps and herbs she carries on her person at all times unless there's a high-quality spa available... then she's all over that.

Favorite rock or gemstone? Amethyst, granite, the crooked cobblestones of Vesuvia.

Favorite tree? The weeping willows that line streams outside of Vesuvia with their wispy, ground-sweeping branches and long, slender leaves. Great for afternoon naps.

Favorite type of weather? Overcast and either cool, damp, or both.

Least favorite type of weather? Dry summer heat.

What is their favorite season? (remember winter is summer and spring is fall) Whenever the weather is mild and the sun not beating down.

How many languages could they speak before the memory loss? How many do they currently speak? Understands one yet can't speak it. Speaks some important phrases of another. Speaks fluent Vesuvian.

Do they sing or play any instruments? She sings quietly to herself. What do they tend to joke about? Dark sense of humor. Or sarcasm. Both. After a stressful day, how do they relax? A drink, someone attractive to sleep with, a long, quiet bath. Guilty pleasures? Everything. Idiosyncrasies? Will silently appear next to you. Whether by magic or practiced stalking of the city streets. One minute she's absent, the next, looming over you.  Her height and slightly disconcerting presence make this alarming to some. How do they act when they first meet someone new? Hesitant, guarded, quiet besides bad jokes. How quickly do they warm up to them? Slowly. Very slowly. Unless they click, then too fast. In what order would they prioritize Love, fame, money, power, and knowledge? Knowledge, money, power, love, fame. List four or more things they love to do Drink, get a full night's rest, wander through Vesuvia's bustling markets, fuck. List four or more things they hate to do Pay any form of a bill. Attend parties. Small talk. Kiss ass. List five or more things they have said that sum up who they are "Ah, I see... you're an idiot." "I would love it if you bought me a drink." "How do I know I can trust you?" "You certainly take yourself very seriously..." "Go away." How do they react to (both verbal and physical) conflict? Verbal: Stern, silent. Off-putting smile.  A very sharp tongue and no qualms. Physical: Fast, sleek, uses magic to avoid injuries let alone contact at all. Terrible to fight as you can never get a shot in. Disarms first then threatens until the offender gives up.  If her adversary doesn't give up, they get hurt.  If the injury is serious, they get fed to the palace eels.

What kind of bad habits do they have? All of them. Just list the seven deadly sins, well, besides gluttony.  Never quite got the hang of that one. What kind of character faults do they have? All of them, or at least she feels she does. Swears, does not fit into social standards, steals to survive, uses sex as a tool and a weapon, vain, prideful. What’s their best trait in their opinion? Stubborn and strong-willed. Entirely resilient in all situations.  Fearless. What do they think of their appearance? Vanity is a large part of her life. She uses looks to her advantage in all situations. How do they interact with people in a position of authority? Is mindful of authority to the point they'd rather not get killed for pissing off the wrong courtesan. Otherwise completely ignores authority and social statuses to a fault. Who did they look up to as a kid? The older, more skilled child thieves on the streets. She also saw their flaws and learned from their mistakes. How do they interact with kids? She doesn't. Do they want kids of their own someday? She doesn't. Are they religious? If so what god/goddess or gods/goddesses do they worship? She is still waiting to see a sign of actual "higher" life. What do they think the meaning of life is? There is none. What would they want their last words to be? Hopefully nothing foolish. What do they want to do before they die? Live a full life. What/how do they want to be remembered for after they die? She doesn't expect to. How do they express affection? Protective to a fault. If it's romantic affection she can be fairly obsessive and will tail them around the city to learn their routine. Super attentive and great gift giver. However, she gets bored easily and may ghost at the drop of a hat. What do they normally eat for breakfast? Whatever is fresh on the market to snatch that day. Unless in a mood, then liquor. Do they like spicy food? If it's free. Favorite fruit and or vegetable? The ones that "roll off" the cart and accidentally make their way into her bag. Do they like sweets? Easy to pocket, so of course. Do they drink alcohol? Do fish swim? If they do, what do they act like when they are drunk? Tipsy: calm, relaxed. Drunk: flirtatious and more aggressive. Dead drunk: fights whoever is near or just naps it off. How do they take their tea/coffee? Spiked. What food would they refuse to eat? Anything rotten or dirty. Brings back too many memories of childhood. Is there anything they eat that most people would find unappealing? Eel, snake, anything charred to a crisp and served on a stick is fair game. When going on the road what food could they not live without? Bread and dried meat travel well. What meal gives them a sense of nostalgia? Fresh berries, a favorite as a kid and easy to pluck off the bushes outside the city. What do they do when no one’s around? Wander aimlessly, enjoying the silence. Check her bags to see what loot has been recently acquired. How would they react if a prized possession got stolen? Vengeful. She would retrieve the item at all costs and take as much of the thieves possessions as possible for their foolish actions. Depending on the item, she may take more than just their belongings. What’s the first thing they would buy if they won the lottery? Liquor. A new, more inconspicuous bag or two. A few nights in one of Vesuvia's luxury spas... or luxury brothel. What would their favorite modern invention be? Air conditioning and running water. In a new unfamiliar place, what do they do? Properly assess the situation. Learn the layout of her surroundings and the patterns of the residents. Proceed with caution. Someone just threatened them what do they do? Depends on the person, the threat, and the situation. Usually, just smile. A rather well rich looking woman just dropped her purse and didn’t notice. What do they do? Enjoy the free dinner, expensive liquor, and additional purchases made with whatever gold and jewelry are in the bag. Plant the empty, stolen bag on an enemy. Watch what happens next while eating free snacks. What’s the worst thing someone has said to them? "I know you actually care." What is the strangest thing they’ve ever come across? She once stumbling upon Count Lucio in one of Vesuvia's worse-off brothels enjoying a harem of filthy whores representing all shapes, sizes, sexes, and creeds... all wearing only goat masks and braying like barnyard animals.  The Count invited Zui to join. She did not. Luckily this memory is currently lost. Let's hope it stays that way. Someone just stole food from them what do they do? Retrieve the food. If the thief ate it, still retrieve the food out of principal and dispose of the critically wounded offender with the palace's handy, dandy eels. They meet a man at a crossroads. The man says they can have everything they’ve ever wanted. What happens next? Seduce the man. Take everything he has. Leave him drunk and pantsless in a field nearby. As a child what would they say they wanted to be as an adult?  ie. When I grow up I’m going to be _______ Never filthy and shoeless again. What’s their D&D alignment? Chaotic Neutral. What is the stupidest thing they’ve ever done? Fell in love. Made friends. Things that can get you in trouble. Have they ever got in trouble with the law or been arrested? Illusion magic comes in handy... so no, not yet. Do they know how to win a fight? Always. Are they good at hand to hand combat? Quick and skilled at disarming/subduing foes. Have they ever stolen something? Is this a joke question? Have they ever killed someone? No, but those eels certainly have. What/who do they find disgusting? Brown-nosers. Family life. Status. Body odor. What upsets them the most? Being exposed as having human feelings. Body odor. What anime character would they be? What is Anime? What Disney character would they be? What is Disney? What monster would they be? Humans are monsters enough. What mythological figure would they be? The invisible kind. List three songs that you associate with them. "World in My Eyes" Depeche Mode / "Rid Of Me" PJ Harvey / "IOU" Wolfsheim The more adult round What kind of gift would they be the happiest about receiving from a lover? The lover naked, possibly holding a fresh bottle of bourbon. Are they an easy lay? Nothing is ever easy with them. If it appears easy, she's probably stolen all your items and left before you could blink. Major turn-ons. Sarcasm, a sharp wit, intelligence, clean and well-manicured individuals who smell amazing. Major turn offs Crude comments, arrogance, bad hygiene, vile body odors. Erogenous zones? Wouldn't you like to know? Who are they romantically interested in? This Julian fellow who seems to be conveniently wherever she is. The Countess also comes to mind.  Plus there's this woodsman type although she’s currently forgotten his name. How do they interact with someone they're romantically interested in? Sly jokes, inappropriate comments at appropriate times, a lot of bodily contact. Where do they like to be kissed? Everywhere and anywhere. Do they like cuddling? She likes touching in general so- Big spoon or little spoon? Big spoon. What traits do they look for in a lover? Fast whit, sharp tongue, does not restrict her, reliable, generous. How many past relationships have they had? If one-night-stands count, too many. If they don't, not enough. How many people have they had sex with? Enough to know what she likes and really, really doesn't. Giving or receiving? Yes, please. Top, bottom or verse? Top, usually. Sub dom or switch? Never a sub.

[jdumblr]

I don't know if this will qualify in your realm of ask and you can ignore if it doesn't. So here goes my ask. Some were saying that Jensen's tbt IG posting of him and Danneel (the November 2nd one) was actually done by her on his IG. What are you thoughts on the subject? Especially since she responded so quickly after he posted the picture.

Dear Anon,

Thank you for your question. I indeed wanted to talk aboutthis subject, as I don’t think most people understood what Jensen and D didwith that post and comment. See, in order to understand the reason behind what they did, I will have to go back a week before that. Please, bear with me.

Timeline of J2 Slander — Reasons & Damage Control

Wed, Oct 26th  — Supernatural Episode 2

The episode causes a major rift in Fandom. And by Fandom Imean The Only Fandom that exists: Sam & Dean fans. Never in all my 12 yearsof being a SPN fan have I ever seen such uproar; so many people screaming theirdissatisfaction with storyline, character erasure, character being dumbed down to jumpstart the spin-off.  However,instead of uniting for a common complain, what we saw were BiBros, SamStans,DeanStans fighting each other. Nobody was happy. That was the episode that broke fandom.

Sat, Oct 28th,NOLA Con — D at the Vendor’s Area

D sets up a Family Business Beer Co stand and sells merch at the vendor’s area.Fans line up to talk to her. Some TinHats are attackedfor wanting to meet her, and Hets and Hellers team up to bully them. Here’ssomething you need to understand about Hellers: they love the wives because intheir twisted logic, the wives invalidate TinHats/J2 and anything that could upsetus is game for them. Raise your hand you whose TinHat tweet/post was neverbashed by a minion.

Eventually, things evolve to an attempt to starta witch hunt.

Sun, Oct 29th,NOLA Con — J2 Panels

During the J2 Gold Panel, a questionabout pick up lines prompts a joke that the entire fandom had heard from J2before and no one had ever batted an eye (timestamp: 20:21).

In the Afternoon Panel, J2 are asked whatlead roles in SPN, other than Sam & Dean, they’d choose to play.

What follows is the longest M*sha/C*stiel shade ever thrownby Jared and Jensen, individually or combined—see for yourself those 3 fullminutes (timestamp: 10:12 to 13:02):

Once again, I’ve never seen J2 throw such enormous shade, Iguess it speaks volumes about how fed up they are with M*isha. You can see in thevideo the immediate reaction from Hellers booing Jared, who started the shade.

Now think with me: who’s the one Hellers most want out ofthe way because of their nonexistent ship? Jared. The two situations have onething in common: Jared. He was the one to mention the chloroform joke, and hewas the one to initiate and continue the M*sha/C*stiel shade. Now tell mewho Hellers were most pissed at? Jared.

You think I’m exaggerating?  Here’s some foodfor thought.

Mon, Oct 31st— pseudo-article trashing J2

A wannabe author from a blog where literally anyone could bea part of, makes an unabashedly Heller post, accusing J2 of making a rapistjoke. To back up their allegations that “fandom was dragging J2” theyunsurprisingly add caps of D*estiel accounts. No agenda at all, as you can see.

[Let’s go back to the Sunday events for a minute. J2 bashedM*sha, Jared was the one starting the shade, Jared is the one they hate, Jaredwas the who told the chloroform joke this time around. Now tell me if thatwasn’t the reason behind that “article”?]

J2 fans lash on the blog’s account for tweeting the “article” and thetweet get deleted, but not the article.

Side note: Jaredattends 1 or 2 Halloween parties in Vancouver and takes pictureswith half the town’s population. Curiously enough, he was alone, no costume anddressed as if he had been dining outand decided to drop by. Oh, wait…

Tue, Nov 1st— T*een V*gue reposts article

What could have well been stopped by CW/J2’s reps on Monday, gets the unexpected and undeserved traction: a bigger, more accredited,teen-oriented website reposts the pseudo-article. No facts were checked, no oneapproached J2 for a statement and guess what? The same H*ellers’ caps werepresent; it was a mere copy of the previous article.

The damage is done and more websites publish the same storywith slight variations but none of them favors or approaches J2 for a statement.The articles get reposted outside of the US.

The slander shocks J2 Shippers, TinHats and Hets who,unexpectedly, unite in at least three hashtags to show their love and supportfor Jared & Jensen:

#IStandWithJ2

#ISupportJaredandJensen

#ILoveJ2Because

J2 Fans flood the websites that posted the slander with commentspointing out all the good things the Js have done for fans, Mental HealthAwareness, charities, etc. During these 48h of slander, I didn’t seeone single website or accredited institution show their support for J2, exceptfor Attitudesin Reverse.

Not a single peep from J2 co-stars, production, nothingexcept for the one you’d least expect: Mart Pellegrino posts a simple andhonest tweetpraising J2:

J2 Fans retweet and thank him for being the onlycast member/peer who dared support J2. It seems that the only ones mature enough to be honest and recognize that Supernatural only is what it is becauseof J2, are Mark Pellegrino and Mark Sheppard.

Nov 2nd —J2 issue a statement

Reps for both Jared and Jensen issue combined statementsaffirming they do not condone rape and the subject apparently dies down.

J2 Fans speculate whether this incident will cause Jared andJensen to share less on Con panels. Some even fear the possibility the boysmight eventually cut down the number of Cons.

Jensen post a pictureof him and D

Contrary to what Jensen had been doing until now, he poststwo different caps, one for his IGAccount and another slightly different one on Twitterwith an added “❤ u”:

The picture is apparently cozy, once they’re sorta hugging. However,some point out how weird the picture is with her half smile and peace sign, andhis closed off face. Does that scream couple to you?  …

As you well pointed out, Anon, D quickly replieswith more information about the #tbt picture: they were at Cabo, they were meeting the parents andthey’ve been together for 11 years and going strong. 

Eleven years?? Come again? Oh, wait, she’s justdoing her job, I mean, Jensen was the one who started that 11 years story,precisely in Oct 26th 2007, at an interview he gave for TV Guidetitled UpClose with Supernatural’s Jensen Ackles: Part 2:

So, one year before that 2007 interview, when they filmed TenInch Hero. How convenient.

Check out the whole story at Anna’s blog.

How interesting that he managed to “hide” his one-yearrelationship from anyone, right?

The funny thing is that apart from that statement he rarely,if ever, mentioned the amount of years they've been together. The only time that comes to mind was at Kelly & Ryan.

Well, Anon, all this ridiculously long post to conclude thatJensen and D were only using social media to take the focus off of the eventsfrom the previous days. Did you see how many RTs/Likes both his posts had?

Twitter: 4.5K RTs/ 36K Likes

IG: 632K Likes/ 3,905 comments(as of today)

Did you see the hets and Hellers swooning over their love?

Jensen did what had to be done to change the focus and giveFandom something else to talk about. BUT much like his mentor Kim Manners wouldsay, ‘give them what they want in a way they don’t expect.’ Jensen did postsomething for PR purposes but on his owns terms. Just look at his face on thepicture he chose to represent how much he loves D.

Bonus: Jensen low key liked Mark’s tweet.

[alivelyfancy]

“And we call this wall Ernest Hemingway’s life and wives,” the guide said, gesturing to a wall of photos.

It was on our tour of the Ernest Hemingway House in Key West last December that I learned in great detail about the author’s philandering ways and his four wives. His first wife, Hadley Richardson, had introduced him to the woman he would leave her for, Pauline Pfieffer, who was one of her friends! The guide joked that his final wife, Mary Walsh, lasted because she didn’t introduce him to any of her friends!

The wall of Hemingway’s life and wives. The five photos closest to the black candelabras are Hemingway in the center and his wives. Clockwise: Hadley Richards (top left, 1st wife), Pauline Pfeiffer (2nd wife), Mary Welch (4th wife), and Martha Gellhorn (3rd wife). I can’t remember what the top or bottom photos on the far right are, but the middle one is of Hemingway’s sons holding Snow White, the first 6-toed cat at the house.

I have read several of Hemingway’s books, but confess I didn’t really know too much about the man’s life. The house we were visiting in Key West was purchased by Pauline Pfeiffer (wife #2)’s uncle. The time spent in Key West was the most prolific period for Hemingway; he completed about 70% of his work in the house.

Long before COVID-19, Hemingway was setting the trend for working from home. He had a cat walk built from his bedroom to his writing studio, which was located on the top floor a carriage house behind the main house. He spent most mornings writing and then if he had written enough would spend the afternoons fishing, sailing with friends, and drinking at the bars.

Most of Hemingway’s works were based on his experiences as a Red Cross worker and a foreign correspondent, as well as his travels. For example, his time spent fishing and sailing in Key West inspired The Old Man and the Sea while his 10-week safari inspired “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

Inside Hemingway’s writing studio.

The outside of Hemingway’s writing studio

The house boasts the largest swimming pool in Key West, which cost $20,000 back in the 1930s! The area was once Hemingway’s boxing arena, but upon discovering that Hemingway was having an affair with fellow war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, Pfeiffer (wife #2) commissioned the pool as pay back. Hemingway was certainly surprised when he returned home from Europe.

The pool at the Ernest Hemingway home in Key West

The house has 59 polydactyl (six-toed) cats that freely roam the property. The first six-toed cat was named Snow White and was given to Hemingway by a sailor. In those days sailors kept polydactyl cats on ships because they were believed to bring good luck. All the cats have names, are fed by the staff, and have regular vet visits. After living a long and happy life lounging in the sun they are buried in the cat cemetery on the property. On our tour we met Daisy Buchanan who naps on Hemingway’s bed every day at the same time.

Daisy Buchanan lives a life of luxury.

Thinking About Hemingway’s Life

I thoroughly enjoyed the tour of Hemingway’s house because I love history, but I grew a bit disenchanted upon learning more about Hemingway’s personal life. I found his morals to be somewhat lacking. It made me question if being unbalanced is what it takes to be great. Do you have to be so focused at excelling in one are of life that you neglect all other aspects of life? Did Hemingway’s character and questionable morals contribute to him being a great writer? I don’t know.

Sadly, Hemingway had bipolar disorder and while living in Idaho sought treatment from the Mayo Clinic. Back then they called it manic depression and the treatment was electroshock therapy which, instead of helping him, fried his brain and erased his memories. Unable to write, Hemingway became depressed and ultimately took his own life in 1961. What a sad ending to a talented, complicated, and colorful life. The human mind is astonishingly complex and I can’t help but wonder if his life would have ended differently if he had been born a few decades later. Perhaps yes, perhaps no. In terms of mental health we’ve come so far, but still have so much progress to make.

If you’re ever visiting the Keys, I highly recommend you stop by the Hemingway House to learn more about the author, history, and perhaps a bit more about yourself.

This fountain was built by Asa Tift, a famous salvage in Key West and the original builder of the Ernest Hemingway House.

Photo credits: Feature photo by R Boed via Flickr CC BY 2.0,  all other photos by A Lively Fancy

This trip was taken in 2019. Hopefully we’ll all be traveling again soon!

The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in #KeyWest, Florida "And we call this wall Ernest Hemingway's life and wives," the guide said, gesturing to a wall of photos.

[womenofcolor15]

Pastor Jamal Bryant Postpones COVID-19 Testing Following Backlash For Charging The Community

Pastor Jamal Bryant has postponed a drive-thru CODID-19 testing event following backlash for charging for the (usually free) tests! More inside…

  Pastor Jamal Bryant is getting blasted on social media amid the Coronavirus pandemic. Pastor Bryant’s megachurch – New Birth Baptist Church in Lithonia, GA – posted on social media that they were providing COVID-19 testing to minorities. According to the flyer, 1,000 people would be able to stop by their drive-thru testing site to get tested for the deadly virus. However, it would cost them!

The church was offering to test 1,000 people for $150 and would charge $25 for the assessment, which is a grand total of $150,000.

Most testing sites offer the service for free.

The event was originally scheduled for April 4th and 5th , but was recently postponed due to Governor Brian Kemp's “shelter in place order,” according to the church’s official Instagram account.

"To remain compliant with Governor Brian Kemp's executive order, which is being signed today and goes into effect on Friday, New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and various medical partners will postpone the COVID-19 testing scheduled for this weekend," the caption read in the postponement announcement. "We look forward to coordinating with our local and state officials to support flattening the curve in Georgia and helping to heal our nation and our world from this global pandemic."

The COVID-19 testing prices had folks sounding off on social media, calling the church a "disgrace" and "disgusting" while accusing Pastor Bryant of capitalizing on a pandemic. Below are a few tweets:

  DISGUSTING:

Atlanta’s church New Birth & its pastor Jamal Bryant are TRASH for teaming up with a medical center to CHARGE people for Coronavirus testing.

This church brings in millions per year, they should offer free test for the community! Period! @JamalHBryant @NewBirthMBC pic.twitter.com/7WoiGQtEip

— Jerome Trammel (@MrJeromeTrammel) April 2, 2020

    New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, led by this mega-church “pastor” named Jamal Bryant, canceled a two-day drive-thru event at the church where up to 1,000 people would have been tested for COVID-19 for a fee of $150 each. $150 x 1,000 = $150,000. Capitalizing on a pandemic? pic.twitter.com/bgHgu3S97F

— Sammy Potter (@sammy_maga1) April 5, 2020

    Jamal Bryant’s church is charging people for COVID-19 testing. Disgraceful. Reimbursement through insurance? A joke. pic.twitter.com/2v6ltJxzg1

— Dean Big Sister AlmighTY (@theelectwoman08) April 2, 2020

    Hey @jamalhbryant I’m here in atl, and i see your church postponed the covid19 testing due to the Gov’s stay-at-home order. Question- weren't these tests donated? If so, why would you charge the community $125 for it? If i got details wrong pls feel free to clear up. pic.twitter.com/QP51md2kmJ

— Rebel Scum (@awkward_duck) April 2, 2020

    Jamal Bryant has always been trash why he was the perfect replacement for that ex evil pastor. Got a new devil https://t.co/jW584RN2th

— Mamba Mentality (@LethalSaint_) April 2, 2020

  One Twitter user questioned if the COVID-19 tests were real:

  Jamal Bryant is a slimy snake oil salesman I wouldn't put it past him to be selling fake COVID tests

— Brian D. (@freshxdesign) April 2, 2020

  If you haven't heard, scammers have been setting up drive-up testing sites with fake tests.

MSN reports:

"The pandemic is dangerous enough without wrongdoers seeking to profit from public panic, and this sort of conduct cannot be tolerated," Attorney General William Barr said in a memo to federal prosecutors across the country last month, urging a crackdown on a constellation of schemes targeting the public.

Authorities in Kentucky have been investigating drive-up testing sites promising same-day results for $250. A Texas-based website was offering a coronavirus "vaccine" until authorities won a restraining order against its operators. In Virginia, telephone scammers, posing as local hospital representatives, warned residents of possible virus exposure and sought to lure them to sham test sites.

As part of the federal effort, the Justice Department has directed all 94 U.S. attorneys to appoint a coordinator for all virus-fraud cases in their districts, raising the prospect that those who threatened or attempted to spread the virus could be charged with federal terrorism offenses because the virus could be classified as a biological agent.

"Capitalizing on this crisis to reap illicit profits or otherwise preying on Americans is reprehensible and will not be tolerated," Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen said in a separate memo to federal prosecutors last week.

  As for New Birth's COVID-19 testing, Dr. Tisha Rowe - founder of RoweDocs - told CBS46 that the church was NOT trying to profit from the event.

"No one is profiting from this project not myself, not New Birth, not the lab," said Dr. Rowe. "When we order labs, we have to pay for supplies, we have to pay the person who draws your lab. If you cannot afford $150 to get tested, the next best option is to go to the health department," said Dr. Rowe.

Dr. Rowe also said New Birth is now actively seeking grants to help with costs and some insurance companies may provide reimbursements.

On a positive note, Pastor Bryant and New Birth have been offering free food for people in need:

          View this post on Instagram

                  We had church today @newbirthmbc ! No singing! No preaching ...just serving! This #coronavirus crisis is giving our congregation an opportunity to model the message of Christ. This is just the beginning ..... don’t forget to worship with us online Sunday newbirth.org

A post shared by jamalhbryant (@jamalhbryant) on Mar 28, 2020 at 9:39am PDT

            View this post on Instagram

                  I was elated to serve with @newbirthmbc for the 3rd Saturday in a row in blessing 1000 people in #atlanta who are struggling with food insecurity! When you understand community you don’t act like it’s charity. Today we performed service and tomorrow we are engaged in online worship 930amEST newbirth.org or on @facebookapp #newbirthatlanta as well as @praise1025 and @wsbtv at 11am! You got no reason to miss

A post shared by jamalhbryant (@jamalhbryant) on Apr 4, 2020 at 4:27pm PDT

            View this post on Instagram

                  We thank God for everyone who came out to volunteer and service the community. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ What an honor it was on today to be a blessing to those who came to pick up free groceries. Over the past 3 weeks, weekly we’ve been blessed to fed over a 1,000 our King’s Table and provide drive thru prayer for those in need. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ The King’s Table will be open again on Saturday, April 11th from 10AM-2PM. If you would like to donate you can go to www.newbirth.org, drop off non perishables at the receptacles or thekingstable@newbirth.org to volunteer. ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀ #newbirthnow #jamalbryant #newbirthcathedral #kingstable

A post shared by New Birth MBC (@newbirthmbc) on Apr 4, 2020 at 6:38pm PDT

      Photo: New Birth's IG

[Read More ...] source http://theybf.com/2020/04/06/pastor-jamal-bryant-postpones-covid-19-testing-following-backlash-for-charging-the-commun

[mybookplacenet]

Featured Post: Living on the Edge: How to Fight and Win the Battle for Your Mind and Heart by Gary Roe

"About Living on the Edge: How to Fight and Win the Battle for Your Mind and Heart: "Living on the Edge is simple, smart, easy-to-read, and practical. No one is beyond repair. Anyone can heal. Everyone can make a difference. These are the messages we all need to hear." - Paul Casale, Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Marriage & Family Therapist We're all living on the edge. Life is tough. Bad things happen. To us. To those we love and care about. We wonder what's coming next. We're scared, anxious, angry, and sad. We try, but never feel good enough, smart enough, or attractive enough. We wear masks. We try to fit in. We live lies. We're on a downward spiral. Maybe you're on a downward spiral. You've felt this. Perhaps you're feeling it now. There's a fierce battle going on in your mind. Your heart is at stake. This is a battle you must win. It's time to expose the lies and embrace the truth. It's time to become who you really are. For more than 30 years, multiple award-winning author, speaker, and grief counselor Gary Roe has been helping teens and adults heal from past wounds, discover who they are, and live with passion and purpose. With more than a dozen books and 600 articles in print, he has become a trusted, inspirational voice to thousands of wounded hearts. "Life is about overcoming," Gary frequently says. Let him help you face your battles, beginning with this book. In Living on the Edge, you'll learn... * Why you struggle with feelings of sadness, worthlessness, or hopelessness at times. * How your struggles come from lies you've been fed and embraced along the way. * How to identify the specific lies tripping you up and keeping you stuck. * How to begin to replace these lies with the truth. * How to deal with self-harming or suicidal thoughts that can derail your life. * Where to go from here to become the Difference Maker you were meant to be. It's time to move from walking on the edge of a cliff to living on the edge of your seat. There is much to look forward to. More than you realize. The battle is raging. You can win it. Begin today... Targeted Age Group: 16 and over Written by: Gary Roe Buy the ebook: Buy the Book On Amazon Buy the Print Book: Buy the Book On Amazon Author Bio: Gary’s story began with a childhood of mixed messages and sexual abuse. This was followed by other losses and numerous grief experiences. Ultimately, a painful past led Gary into a life of helping wounded people heal and grow. A former college minister, missionary in Japan, entrepreneur in Hawaii, and pastor in Texas and Washington, he now serves as a writer, speaker, chaplain, and grief counselor with Hospice Brazos Valley in Bryan, Texas. Gary is the author of a dozen books, including the newly released Difference Maker Series (Living on the Edge: How to Fight and Win the Battle for Your Mind and Heart and Difference Maker: Overcoming Adversity and Turning Pain into Purpose, Every Day) and the award-winning bestsellers Shattered: Surviving the Loss of a Child, Teen Grief: Caring for the Grieving Teenage Heart, and Heartbroken: Healing from the Loss of a Spouse. Gary has won two national book awards and his books have been honored as national book award finalists seven times. He has been featured on Focus on the Family, Dr. Laura, Thrive Global, Belief Net, the Christian Broadcasting Network, Wellness, Bustle, The Family Educator, the Family Bookmark, Professor’s House, and other major media. Gary has over 700 articles in print. Recipient of the Diane Duncam Award for Excellence in Hospice Care, Gary is a popular keynote, conference, and seminar speaker at a wide variety of venues. He founded and coordinates The Suicide Prevention Project and is part of the Brazos Valley Coalition on Suicide Prevention. He is a member of the Texas Authors Association, the American Institute of Healthcare Professionals, and the American Academy of Grief Counseling. Gary loves being a husband and father. He has seven adopted children, including three daughters from Colombia. He enjoys hockey, corny jokes, good puns, and colorful Hawaiian shirts. Gary and his wife Jen and family live in Texas. Follow the author on social media: Learn more about the writer. Visit the Author's Website Facebook Fan Page Twitter Read the full article

[skepticraven]

Does Trump have Narcissistic Personality Disorder?

In my opinion, yes, yes. A thousand times, yes. However I want to be clear about something before going any further. I am not a psychiatrist. This is entirely my opinion BUT there are a number of doctors who agree with me such as Harvard psychoanalyst Lance Dodes, psychiatrist Dr. Robert Jay Lifton; and   professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University  Dr. John Gartner; and many more. I also don’t want anyone to be under the impression that because Donald Trump seems to be the world’s clearest cut case of NPD (Narcissistic Personality Disorder), that this somehow absolves him of responsibility for his actions. It doesn’t. He is not legally insane- even if his actions often seem irrational to most of us. Narcissistic Personality disorder is in the  DSM–5 (a.k.a. the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Fifth Edition) and it is technically a mental illness. HOWEVER, there is a significant and distinct difference between narcissistic personality disorder and other types of mental illnesses like Schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorder. First, let’s get a general definition of what personality disorders are and aren’t.

Psychology Today defines personality disorders as: “deeply ingrained ways of thinking and behaving that are inflexible and generally lead to impaired relationships with others.” Mental health professionals formally recognize 10 personality disorders that fall into three clusters.  Cluster A includes the ddd or eccentric disorders. Cluster B includes the dramatic or erratic disorders.  (Narcissistic Personality Disorder falls in Cluster B). And Cluster C which includes Anxious or fearful disorders.”

One might say that narcissistic personality disorder is essentially just an abnormal personality. Like with all personalities, biological factors as well as environment and early life experiences form who a person becomes. People with narcissistic personality disorder just possess personalities that are so outside the norm, and so problematic (for the individual and/or for society) that it has been identified as a mental disorder. With mental illnesses like Bipolar Disorder, the primary treatment is medication to treat that chemical imbalance. You could counsel someone with Bipolar Disorder to the ends of the earth, but unless you treat the imbalance with medication, you won’t get much of anywhere. In many cases, if the Bipolar patient find the right meds, it will generally control all or most symptoms. (It can be a struggle finding that right mix though since its essentially trial-and-error). With Narcissistic Personality Disorder, the primary treatment is psychotherapy. Occasionally meds can be used to treat underlying anxiety or depression but no pill can achieve a total 180 degree turn on personality traits that become ingrained over a person’s lifetime. You can’t re-route a narcissists worldview and patterns of interaction with a pill. That would take therapy. Unfortunately NPD has a low recovery rate because it takes someone who is truly willing to heed the perceptions of other people and someone who highly motivated to change narcissistic behaviors. As I go into some of the signs of NPD and how Trump displays them, you will begin to see why most narcissists lack the willingness and motivation to recover. 

Symptoms:

1) People with NPD have an inflated sense of their own importance and so CLEARLY does Trump. For example, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Donald Trump claimed he had the largest inauguration crowd in history. He also incorrectly claimed that he had and I quote, “the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan." The reality is that almost every President since Ronald Reagan  won more electoral college votes than Donald Trump. 

2) People with NPD have a deep need for admiration. Trump went on a “thank you tour” after winning the election and has continued to campaign after inauguration. (See video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAQnXnQQCCI) Why is he doing these things? Trump wants, no needs, to be surrounded by his base who will scream and cheer and stroke his ego. 

3) People with NPD lack of empathy for others. A good example of this would be when Trump belittled the parents of a deceased Muslim-American soldier (Captain Humayun Khan). Trump lacks the ability to imagine the pain of losing a child in service to this country. Its the same reason he made that “I prefer people who weren’t captured” remark about John McCain. He has no ability to empathize with someone who spent nearly six years in a North Vietnamese prison. Even if you disagree with someone politically, an empathetic person would still show respect and gratitude for American heroes. This next example speaks both Trump’s need for admiration and his lack of empathy: Trump’s strangely chipper attitude about Hurricane Harvey’s devastation. When speaking to some supporters at a firehouse in Corpus Christi, Trump just couldn’t help himself and he exclaimed, "What a crowd, what a turnout." And if anyone else made this next comment, I’d think nothing of it but since it was Trump? Houston, we have a problem. Trump said in tweets, “ HISTORIC rainfall in Houston, and all over Texas. Floods are unprecedented, and more rain coming... Going to a Cabinet Meeting at 11:00 A.M. on #Harvey. Even experts have said they've never seen one like this!....  Wow - Now experts are calling #Harvey a once in 500 year flood!.... Many people are now saying that this is the worst storm/hurricane they have ever seen.” See the problem is Trump is so transparent and I know where this was going before it went there. Of course Trump would ramble about this was the biggest and the best flood because everything with him is automatically the biggest, record breaking thing that ever happened and he is going to turn this around to talk about how awesome he and his team are. And he does exactly that, “ Great coordination between agencies at all levels of government. Continuing rains and flash floods are being dealt with. Thousands rescued.....  Wonderful coordination between Federal, State and Local Governments in the Great State of Texas - TEAMWORK! Record setting rainfall. “  (；一_一) Harvey is just another episode of the Trump show. Everything somehow is about Trump and his sheer tremendousness at (fill in the blank).

4) People with NPD have a mask of ultra-confidence but behind the mask lies a fragile self-esteem that's vulnerable to the slightest criticism. For example, Trump sued Bill Maher over a joke. Maher got fed up with Trump constantly harping on the Obama birtherism nonsense, so Maher said Trump needs to prove that he isn’t the byproduct of his mother and orangutan. Then Trump threatened to sue The Onion (which in case you don’t know is probably the most famous satirical newspaper currently in print) which published a fake opinion piece pretending to be authored by Trump. It was titled, “When You’re Feeling Low, Just Remember I’ll Be Dead in About 15 or 20 Years.” Trump is the definition of a snowflake.

5) Narcissists are preoccupied with fantasies of success, power, or beauty. His obsession with success and power seem pretty clear. If you haven’t picked up on that, you have been living under a rock. His obsession with beauty is fascinating since its definitely not directed inwards. He seems immune to the reality of his own laughable appearance. However, Trump is obsessed surrounding himself with beautiful women. So obsessed that he keeps replacing his romantic partners will the younger model. Back when George Bush Sr. was President, Trump literally told Esquire magazine: "You know, it doesn't really matter what they (meaning the media) write, as long as you've got a young and beautiful piece of ass." And he isn’t just obsessed with his romantic partner’s level of attractiveness. Its everyone around him as well, including his daughters. When Tiffany was 2, Trump made this terrifyingly creepy comment  “I think that she’s got a lot of Marla. She’s really a beautiful baby. She’s got Marla’s legs. We don’t know whether or not she’s got this part (referring to her chest) yet but time will tell.” He held his hands in front of his chest to represent breasts when he said that. During an interview with Howard Stern in 2003, Trump said this about his then 22-year-old daughter Ivanka: "You know who's one of the great beauties of the world, according to everybody? And I helped create her. Ivanka. My daughter, Ivanka. She's 6 feet tall, she's got the best body. She made a lot money as a model—a tremendous amount."  Three years later on a separate visit to the Howard Stern Show, Trump referred to Ivanka as “voluptuous.” That same year on The View, Trump said this about Ivanka, “If Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.” Honestly, who talks about their daughter like that? Trump has carried this vanity straight into the white house. He has often referred to members of his team as coming from "central casting." Its well know that Chris Christie’s weight had a lot to do with the fact that he was not offered a position in Trump’s cabinet.

6) People with NPD are entitled, meaning they believe themselves  to be inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment. A good example of this Trump’s 5th military deferment for bone spurs. (He’d received 4 prior deferments for being in college. As tough as he talks, you’d think he’d be itching to go fight for his country). Trump had a perfect bill of health less than two years prior to these supposed bone spurs being used as an excuse to dodge the draft. That previous physical did not disqualify him for service as we can tell from his 1-A classification in July 1968. But this new physical that supposedly turned up bone spurs conveniently placed him squarely at the bottom of any call-up list, meaning he would only be drafted if there were some of complete and total military catastrophe. Funny, how those bone spurs didn’t impede Trump’s ability to play baseball, tennis and squash in college? He had only just recently graduated when he got the bone spurs deferment so there is weeks- maybe a couple months tops- in between his athletic college activities and this bone spur deferment. (；一_一) Politifact reports, “ Trump failed to mention his medical deferment when he told ABC News on July 19, 2015, that he was never drafted because the draft lottery went into effect and his birthday came with a high number.” Wrong. He got an extremely high number because of a medical deferment. Fun fact, only 5 percent of people with spurs have any pain at all. It would’ve been an extremely rare case to be debilitated by a spur at age 22.” And even more rare, to miraculously recover so quickly and completely- after the war ended of course- not that we ever saw any actually evidence of physical disability. Since people started bringing this up, Trump has magically remembered the bone spurs... sort of. Except, he couldn’t remember which foot or if it was both... Come on. Unless you are an idiot, you know Trump had his daddy pay of a doctor to make up an excuse to get him out of the draft. Then on top of, Trump has the audacity to say John McCain isn’t a war hero and insult the parents of a dead muslim-American soldier who did fight for this country. That ladies and gentleman, is called entitlement. 

7) Narcissists takes advantage of others to reach his or her own goals. Trump has a long, long history of not paying contractors and other employees- lots of them. To quote USA Today, “ During the Atlantic City casino boom in the 1980s, Philadelphia cabinet-builder Edward Friel Jr. landed a contract to build the bases for slot machines, registration desks, bars and other cabinets at Harrah's at Trump Plaza. They finished their work in 1984 and submitted its final bill to the general contractor for the Trump Organization. Edward’s son, Paul, who was the firm’s accountant, still remembers the amount of that bill more than 30 years later: $83,600. The reason: the money never came. A USA TODAY NETWORK analysis found Trump has been involved in more than 3,500 lawsuits over the past 3 decades — and a large number of those involve ordinary Americans, like the Friels, who say Trump or his companies have refused to pay them. At least 60 lawsuits, not including the hundreds of liens, judgments, and other government filings  who have accused Trump and his businesses of failing to pay them. Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others.Trump’s companies have also been cited for 24 violations of the Fair Labor Standards Act since 2005 for failing to pay overtime or minimum wage, according to U.S. Department of Labor data. That includes 21 citations against the defunct Trump Plaza in Atlantic City and three against the also out-of-business Trump Mortgage LLC in New York. There were  more than 200 mechanic’s liens — filed by contractors and employees against Trump, his companies or his properties claiming they were owed money for their work. The liens range from a $75,000 claim by a Plainview, N.Y. air conditioning and heating company to a $1 million claim from the president of a New York City real estate banking firm. “ If you’d like to read the full USA Today article: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/06/09/donald-trump-unpaid-bills-republican-president-laswuits/85297274/

8) Narcissists apologize extremely rarely and if they do apologize, it’s for self serving reasons, rather than out of remorse. About as close to an apology as Trump has gotten is after the Access Hollywood tapes leaked but it was half assed, at best. He mostly just deflected by bringing up Bill Clinton’s misdeeds and complaining about how long ago this conversation occurred. He tossed in an “I said it, I regret it. I pledge to be a better man tomorrow.” and then didn’t change his attitude towards women an iota. The Access Hollywood tape came out on October 7, 2016 and he issued that bullshit apology the same day. Then 5 days later, after Natasha Stoynoff came out to accuse Trump of doing exactly what he said he does in that video (also known as sexual assault), Trump responds by insinuating she isn’t attractive enough for him to bother assaulting her. Because all innocent people say that.... (See video of Trump’s “deeply remorseful” behavior: www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-sexual-assault_us_57ffc493e4b0162c043aa2a3

9) Narcissists often have unreasonable expectations of favorable treatment. For example, when Trump asked James Comey to pledge his loyalty,  "lift the cloud" around him and his administration involving Russia, and essentially wanted Trump to let Flynn go. Same thing when Trump got upset at Jeff Sessions recusing himself in a situation he was ethically obligated to do so. Trump expects people to not do their job and not abide by the law and ethical guidelines- for him. 

10) Many narcissists care little about rules and boundaries so they may engage in behaviors that others find morally objectionable. An example of Trump’s objectionable business decisions, was creating Trump University which engaged in a variety of illegal business practices, ranging from false claims to racketeering. Trump was obviously eventually sued for that, as he should be. The plaintiffs alleged that they paid up to $35,000 in tuition for very little in return. Trump has agreed to pay $25 million to settle lawsuits after claiming he’d never settle because he was “innocent.” The settlement includes a $1 million penalty paid to New York state for violating the state’s education laws by calling the program a “university” despite offering no degrees or traditional education. The worst part is, business settlements are fully tax deductible. An example of an objectionable personal choice was pardoning Sheriff Joe  Arpaio, a man who violated the civil rights of Americans but having his officers actively target anyone who “looked hispanic” including people who hadn’t done so much as a a traffic violation which violates the equal protection clause of the constitution and the 4th amendment which protects against unreasonable search and seizure. Then Arpaio ignored a judge’s order to cease those violations. He also did things like, making male prisoners wear pink underwear and housing them in an outdoor tent city in the Arizona desert where it got so hot that the inmates’ shoes melted. Why did Trump do it? He’d say because Arpaio battled illegal immigration but the truth is, its because Arpaio stroked Trump’s ego by supporting him during the election. Due process goes out the window because he was nice to Trump.  (；一_一)

This person is mentally unfit to lead. Trump has no business with his finger on the nuclear launch code.