#i only made some b&w

[welcometogrouchland]

[ID in ALT] I've made posts before about Talia/Dick co-parenting Damian moments (will never happen but let me dream) and this came to me in a vision. Took me ages to finish for some reason 😭 and then even longer to post

[unproduciblesmackdown]

Lackadaisy Enrichment

[angelnumber27]

It’s so embarrassing and heartbreaking being in so much pain over losing someone while knowing they don’t give a fuck if you live or die. Your favorite person becoming a stranger is a special kind of hell.

[deus-ex-mona]

scrolled a little too far back on mogetwt and found pure gold:

[charliespringverse]

i think it should be possible to scream without making any noise or disturbing anyone or inviting any questions . just sometimes . as a treat .

[ieidolon]

now that i'm playing dragon age: veilguard i understand hbomberguy so much better. think i could probably do a 3.5 hours long video called "dragon age: the veilguard is FINE and here's why"

[wetslug]

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[ananke-xiii]

I’ve ended my post about Mary as a symbolic gift by saying that there wasn’t real space in the show for a Mary who was “not just a mom” but, truth be told, I think there wasn’t real space in the show for any character whose story wasn’t connected to Sam and Dean. As far as I’ve understood the show, the obsessive focus on Sam and Dean is both its main strength and its main weakness and I think that the finale showed it.

It’s not news that in SPN every side character who stops being useful to the plot dies. Or they die because their death is instrumental to the plot and/or the emotional arc of either Sam or Dean. Or both. This is true of every era and, I believe, it’s a rather foundational aspect of the show. This is the reason why, from a general narrative pov, I often compare the brothers to two cosmogonic forces because they are the ones creating their world which is THE world where everything and everyone depend on their story. There’s even an episode, “Weekend at Bobby’s”, where Sam and Dean sort of get called out because they only seem to care about themselves. Which isn’t true (well, more or less I'd argue, lol) but it is true that the show is exceedingly concerned with them and them alone. This extreme focus on the main character(s) is something that I haven’t found in any other show, to be quite frank with you.

Partial exceptions are Jody, Donna and the rest of the Wayward Sisters but that’s just because they wanted to use those characters for a spin-off. In reality we never know what happens to them after “Inherit the Earth”, what happens to Eileen, to AU!Bobby, to AU!Charlie, hell even to human Chuck. A good opportunity to show them one last time and tell us what happened to them would’ve been at Dean’s funeral. A funeral where nobody shows up. I know it was because of COVID restrictions but they still filmed and left that scene. So they wanted to tell us something with that, wanted us to see it. And we saw it, which I take as a way for the show to tell us that the story was really over and Dean’s death was final. I don’t want to go into the big “family is hell” vs “found family” debate but wherever you are on the two sides of the argument you kinda have to admit that it was very sad and quite cruel to show us that nobody attended Dean’s funeral.

The other exceptions are Crowley, Rowena and Castiel, three characters that have their own individual storylines that, to the surprise of no one, end when they get inextricably linked with that of the Winchesters. Crowley dies slowly and painfully of the Winchester Derangement Syndrome, whereas Rowena is revealed to be united with Sam in death. Her death. Castiel is the only character who escapes this narrative destiny right until 15x18 where he says that the reason he cared about the world was because of Dean. And then he also dies.

Perhaps the association between “worlds” and the “brothers” is at its most blatant in S13 where the Alternate Universe is a universe without Sam and Dean and, therefore, a boring universe, imo. And when I say “without Sam and Dean” I don’t mean in the sense that they were never born there but that they never even stepped foot there until, like, the last three episodes (and, by the way, they made them act like total dicks bossing around people in a war-zone.). This is not to say that, for example, Original Bobby (since I’ve mentioned him before) doesn’t have his own story, quite something else. This is to say that the vast majority of side characters in SPN have their own stories but their own stories only serve to “mirror and parallel” Sam and Dean’s. In other words, other characters’ stories are, apart from the above exceptions, always functional to the cosmogonic brothers. Case in point is that episode in S15 where Chuck eliminates all other worlds/drafts because what he cares about are “our” Sam and Dean. Sure, that was a jab at all the failed SPN spin-off but, again, this proves my point: people, much like Chuck, are interested in Sam and Dean and Sam and Dean alone (Big hello to those two Sam and Dean hopefully living a good life in Brazil, cheers! Or did Jack fix that as well? Who knows!).

The reason why Sam and Dean are absent in the Alternate Universe is not because they’re dead or were never supposed to be there but because Mary didn’t deal with Azazel. This interests me a lot because the cosmogonic aspect here is Mary’s choice: Mary is, de facto, a creator of worlds. Two to be precise but still, not bad. Now this would actually be an interesting spin-off, right? A series where Mary is one of the main characters and we get to focus on her? Oh wait, there is a spin-off about that. Or at least I think this is partly what “The Winchesters” is about because I haven’t watched it yet. It was, sadly, canceled and I don’t know why (these days they cancel shows according to the mood of the day apparently) but I’ll have to go with the current obscure ways of making profit in the media industry (as far as I know, people have no access to data to understand why certain decisions are made). This is, after all, the real world and in the real world god is profit and not a writer.

The centrality of Mary’s choice in S13 is not part of the original story that, on the contrary, was based on the notion that everything was predetermined and the struggle of our main characters was exactly this: will they or won’t they be able to exercise free will? However S13 reframes the original story because now what is deemed to be relevant is whether or not Mary is just a mother or… “not just a mom”. To use an image that’s become dear to me, the main weight put on one scale was still imagined motherhood: Mary as a character could only compare&contrast against that, against herself (as originally conceived by the narrative) and how she had imagined herself to be. She is therefore never fully free from being Sam and Dean’s mother because she’s never fully free from her own imagined motherhood. Which means she’s never fully free from her Special Heaven where she’s fake-happy with two fake-babies in a fake-perfect house and with who must be a fictional, imagined version of John. Which means that she’s not complete.

I mean, I'm surely not the only one who sees the illogicality here: Mary represents a myth about motherhood and safety and this myth takes the form of a nuclear family living in suburbia with the infamous white picket fence. Okay. She comes back to life to debunk this myth and we see that she's actually very different from how she was portrayed because she's adventurous and wild and taciturn but also leader-like, cold and secretly very sweet. Again, okay. But then she dies and we're told she's complete but we're also told (we don't see it, we're told) she's in a Special Heaven with John which, by the way, sounds very suspisciously close to Heaven's Prison. Fine, alright, okay! BUT THEN what is Mary's heaven (and, later on, everybody's heaven)? A myth about family and safety in the form of a nuclear family living in a sort of overexposed country-side. Like, what???

As I see it, what was needed to deconstruct Mary’s myth was for her to come to terms not only with the fact that her sacrifice was made in vain because there’s (apparently) no escape from the hunting world, but that she had deceived herself. For example, she might have discovered that she kinda doesn’t like leading the imagined life she used to dream about or perhaps her dream was always tainted in real life by what happened with Azazel so she never felt safe anyway, thus removing the one thing she ever wanted by getting out of the huntig world. I could go on and on but what I want to say is that it’s not enough, for me at least, to know that Mary likes to fuck and used to feed her children store-bought meals. This is cool but accessory. Do not show me the conflicted emotions of a character re: her past choices by giving me a WORLD where that character doesn’t make said choice (and therefore feels better about it). Let me see her as she realizes she was also going after a myth, let me see her as she realizes that the man she loved went basically half-mad with grief after her death, let me see her as she realizes how sorrowful her sons’ lives have been. Let me see her interact and generally be around the main characters/focus of the show.

As I’ve said, she couldn’t be free from her own myth because the narrative still needed her for Dean to be free from his own myth. To be honest I think it was a very cool idea and the two things could’ve been done together (I think it’s clear by now that I feel sorry for Mary as a character but that doesn’t mean that debunking the image of a parent isn’t a cool concept to write about). However, it totally was a retcon because S11 Amara, as much as I adore her, didn’t have the experience nor the emotional tools to understand such a deep human concept. She understood that humans need to experience/feel unconditional love and that this love can take the form of parental love from a time when humans are babies that need to be nurtured and cared for. So she saw a picture of Dean and Mary and, by virtue of her bond with Dean, she thought: oh now I get it! And she was right!!! But, like, human relationships are OF COURSE more intricate than this and there’s no way she could’ve understood all this in S11. If she had really understood it she would’ve never brought back a person just for another person to learn a lesson.

This ultimately also proves my point: Mary couldn’t be anything else than a mother in the show because the show itself is focused on Sam and Dean and everybody else depend on them to stay or not in their story. Mine is not necessarily a criticism, on the contrary, the show strikes a real chord with the mythical parent vs real one. But it didn’t let us see it because they decided that bringing back Mary just for her to be a mom would be awful. And they were correct! but, again, you can’t just bring back a central character like her and then spend the rest of THREE seasons writing her OUT of her sons’ story just for her to re-appear on time for her scheduled appointment with the fridge.

But they couldn’t do it because to have Mary back as a real fucking person would have meant, at some inevitable point in time, for the show to have her and her sons sit down and seriously talk about what the fuck happened since her death. To talk about John, to talk about the abuse, to talk about the demon blood, Hell, the Cage, the mark of Cain and, oh by the way we killed grandpa! Which means the show would have had to directly deal with trauma and they clearly didn’t want to go there. Only parallels and mirrors, mirrors and parallels. Mary never left that fridge.

[sylphwing]

hm. i do not like chilshi 🤔

[semiotomatics]

think i found a fake georgia o'keeffe painting lol

[mcneyhoney]

(:

[unproduciblesmackdown]

has happened plenty around iconis goings on but what an all-timer

[masatos-wig]

like this guy.the star

(based on this post by artwheat)

[spaciebabie]

Spacie I will be honest I knew we were mutuals for quite a while but I always thought it was more in a respective: hey there neighbor

Or a: your a mutual of a mutual so imma just hang or even just a: respectable nod between two strangers

because I didn't want to push anything

Until I saw the tags of something you reblogged from me and I literally was just like: YOU LIKE ME??? YOU SEE ME AS A FRIEND???? IMMA CRY RIGHT HERE RIGHT NOW-

WAAA?? OF COURSE I DO BITTY XD YOU GOOBER

[placeinthisworld]

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[bleakfortune]

lalala la la lal ala la u dont have to read this your decision heed the warning tag