#idk maybe i need to radically take a step backwards first

[pardonmystardust]

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[prairiedust]

Gimme Shelter livewatch under the cut.... I was on my phone when I wrote it so apologies for the typos

“Patchwork Community Center: Care Given to All” with a huge, lurid heart. Hmmm.... patchwork having two meanings here.....

Pastor (?) has 2 Timothy 2:22 tattooed on his arm! “Flee the evil desires of youth and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.” (NIV) Are we looking at growth and found family in this episode?!?

Oh that’s the alleyway!

Hitting mythology themes— Connor is an Anglicized version of an Irish name— Conchobar mac Nessa is maybe the most famous bearer of the name, from Irish mythology— he’s the king who lusted after Deirdre and had her locked up until she came of age, which is probably neither here nor there as far as this poor Connor is concerned...

That thing has a big lurid heart on his overalls better run lol— Oh shit it’s an evil Teddy Ruxpin!!!! Thanks Davy Perez!!!!

That’s the thing animal control uses to manage aggressive animals??? Is this saying something about the Patchwork people?

And that’s it for the cold open.

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The uh, the mcfuckin what, the Camelot Palace Casino? Is this a tour of the legends of Ireland and Britain all of a sudden? What’s with hitting this theme so hard so fast?

Uh-oh the whole Highway to Heaven reference has me side-eyeing Dean’s suggestion for Cas snd Jack to leave the bunker... Dabb even “spoiled” that line in a tweet lol... in that show the cop and the angel got their (vague) assignments from the big guy.......

Oh SHIT “we’re standing in what I call ‘the trap zone’” Perez is coming for my whole life with this episode!!!! And they’re doing highkey “season one totally-normal Winchester investigation questions script” I love it!!!!

“Slasher flick” Oh we’re revisiting Mint Condition. This is fine.

AND TOMBSTONE THIS IS NOT FINE DAVY! We’re running the good times backwards what did I say about this being the flipside of Last Holiday!

H2H again but this time it’s sus... plus I’m with Zack, I totally want the cozy murder spinoff I imagined Adam and Michael doing plz

Oh the Cas and Jack dynamic here is so sweet.

Pastor just leaving his door open like there’s no such thing as a thief bless his heart. They must be torn up about Connor but Pastor was the last one to talk to him so he’s sus I don’t make the rules.

Oh no Red’s a THIEF!!! Who ever would have guessed. Okay I did NOT expect that jumpscare because of the way Connor’s murder primed me, that was masterfully done.

That’s vaguely an Ohio Star quilt square on the sign behind her except um I forget what that tilted square in the center turns it into? It’s chiming with something... I’ll have to look that up later.

“Divide and conquer” no never split up in a slasher movie that’s how you get murders use the buddy system!

Gonna stop a sec because I just realized that Zack is two-faced. The British dandy was an act. The killer is wearing a Cinderella mask. Ok I’m gonna make a prediction that Zack is actually the killer, a la the demon in Repo Man...

Okay there was definitely a beat after Dean said “Glad soneone’s taking charge” [ofHell] and the focus shifted to Sam. Hm.

“We’ve got to set her up for her own death” so meta, these writers are gonna shred us.

I love being shown how much Castiel has changed throughe Jack not understanding the Kool-Aid reference. And the cats line lol. That’s both amazing and poignant.

That’s a log cabin pattern in the cafeteria. Home. Makes me think back on other quilts we’ve seen this season and if “weaving” is the right metaphor for writing lol. I mean, the action of “patching” is synonymous with “mending” or even healing, but patchwork is also a craft with a long, long history in America (idk if quiltmaking is called patchwork everywhere) of taking a few often mismatched fabrics and cutting and sewing into something beautiful. There are generally two kinds of quilt tops— patterns, like we’ve seen so far in this season, which are carefully planned and involve precise measurements, and “crazy quilts” which also require skill but are often more freeform and piecemeal. But both aspire to be beautiful. That’s an interesting way to conceptualize a serial text... as both creating and mending....

That prayer was sweet and not at all what I was expecting.

I get the finger-cutting for Valerie (stealing=sticky fingers) but not for Connor? Tenuous connection still betw lying and writing? It’s evocative of Se7en but the killer seems to have the same MO for all the killings (I attended CSI for a while.)

Snow White is making me uneasy. Oh she’s the preacher’s daughter... we’ve seen that in early days, too.... oh.... oh....

It’s not the AV guy despite having seen all the AV equipment around Valerie. That’s too easy.

“A saint is a sinner who keeps trying-“ no scroll back, the important part was “we all have to take care of each other.” That’s a theme in the series.

She’s all in pink....

dean and amara on the same wavelength about food lol

Ha ha inversion of “oh you’re a fan of religion? name all seven gods then.”

Castiel’s testimony just wrecked me.

“Members serve the gift of food” hmmm the signs in this episode are tip-top

Gonna just watch for a while.

Oh crap “each is a finger” oh it’s about the sins of the father— No Cas no, you’ve fallen for the misdirection!

Oh okay good, Chuck’s not done snuffing worlds. That had me REALLY WORKED UP ha ha because Amara has no reason to lie right?

That was a really good conversation.... and implying that Former Death bent the truth...

Oh fuck I’m gonna cry “I wanted younto see that your mother was just a person” YES! DISMANTLE THIS MYTHOLOGY AMARA!!! Name it!

THE MYTH THAT YOU’D HELD ON TO FOR SO LONG did they just— THEY DID

rigging the game— ftfoh with the casino metaphors already we know the house always wins except when it doesn’t

Lying, lying, lying,

Do we even know Snow White’s name yet? And why was Connor a liar? Because I think we can make a guess at this point.... ah ha ha her name is sylvia— “forest spirit” she’s Mrs Butters— and she’s after hypocrites— but the killing isn’t supernatural, just churchy?

Oh shit SHE IS A DEAN MIRROR IF SHE STABS JACK I’LL FLIP A DAMN TABLE

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prairiedust.exe has encountered an error and must be restarted

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Okay so “Dad” steps in and stops Sylvia’s attack on Jack...

Why is that Zack? What????

“I’ve been lying to you” oh here we go

Oh it would be death #3, remember what Dabb said about threes a long time ago, two attempts that are unsuccessful and one that satisfies the parameters— but no he’s a jack :((((

I have to stop watching for a while.

Okay I finished it. Holy cats do I have some Thoughts about this episode.

What I loved: Revisiting Dean’s anger, BUT the parental mirror here (in retrospect, at least for me) was a John mirror-- all the mothers (exc for Rowena) in this episode are dead. And Pastor Joe didn’t apparently embrace his wife’s faith until she had died, and then his vision was radically different than his wife’s was-- much like John’s reasons for becoming a hunter were vastly different from Mary’s... but much like “patching” this subtext was possibly even more “healing” than having John back in the 300th ep... This was... looking at a child’s anger when they’re in the middle of their own family mythology. Am I implying that Dean’s anger is immaturity? Eh, it’s... unripeness. I have an old meta in my drafts about the heroine’s journey and why Mary’s story conformed to it while feeling totally unfulfilling in her actual character arc and I’m so glad I sat down and examined that rather than finish it. I have a lot I want to say about Cas’ testimony too, but that has to sit a while. ALSO also, Cas has already thrown away his shot by making the Empty deal, right?....

LANGUAGE! Cas saying “I found myself lost” is a bonkers sentence, right? It’s like when people say someone “turned up missing”-- AND it does not have the same meaning as “I realized I was lost”-- you get a double whammy of the connotation “to search for.” I loved loved loved how language was such a big deal in Last Holiday and then again here, I need to rewatch while paying closer attention to Sylvia and things she says... but these two were sister episodes in so many ways, that when I said there was a “lack of narrative mirrors” in Last Holiday, that’s only because the lens for that kind of reading is Gimme Shelter. That is not the first time spn has played with a “coin” or paired structure-- I think the first time I noticed it was Fan Fiction/Ask Jeeves but I was a transfer student from another fandom at the time lol. But of course, we get a huge truth bomb at the end of the episode, and again that splashy cymbal all over lying...

What I got wrong-- Zack wasn’t the killer but he’s fishy as hell-- he stole Sylvia! Is this part of Rowena’s “people generally end up where they deserve to be” except she’s built in an express lane? “Do you need a driver” is that his actual job now? Taking unripe souls to Hell Orientation? What’s up with him being there... the other shoe did not drop. So there is a third episode out there somewhere where this might get wrapped up? The conversation between Dean and Cas can easily be something that happens offscreen, and I don’t think that it would be the first time we miss an “important” conversation, especially since we know roughly what will be said and how it will wrap up-- it’s an “open text” of a sort. Maybe a fanfiction gap lol, I can’t wait for the codas.

Also, the fingers thing being Sylvia’s father’s favorite analogy is where she got her MO, something that I definitely didn’t see, although it fits right in with her father’s slightly pithy character. I think it’s interesting again how we’re playing with threes and fours. Three fingers got cut off but it was apparent that Valerie (valorious one) wouldn’t die until finger #4.... Jack really seems to be our last hope.

[themyskira]

Wonder Woman: Earth One, Vol 2 - Part 1

I’m going to break this into a few parts, because it turned out I had a bit to say. I’ll start with my overall impressions, then dive into the spoilery recap.

General thoughts: Next verse, same as the first.

Grant Morrison purports to want to explore Marston’s ideas, but he’s more interested in the kooky, kinky trappings than the sentiment behind them.

Marston was radical and progressive in his time. Writing in the 1940s, he told his readers that women were men’s equals — and even superiors! — in every way. He told young girls there was no limit to what they could do. His stories promoted love over hatred, peace over violence, rehabilitation over retribution.

If Morrison had taken that bold sentiment and reimagined it through a lens of modern society and feminism in 2018, he might have had a compelling story to tell. Instead, he takes Marston’s ideas as he understands them and transplants them wholesale into a time in which they’re no longer radical and progressive, but rather backward and out-of-step with modern intersectional feminism, and then proceeds to ask such deep, incisive questions as “yes but realistically could we actually replace all world governments with a matriarchy?????”

He never truly deconstructs any of Marston’s ideas, just parrots phrases like “submission to loving authority” a lot and raises questions without ever making a decent attempt at answering them. To be fair, part of the problem is that he’s simply trying to do too much at once: juggling parallel stories in Themyscira and Man’s World, an interrogation of the Amazons’ philosophies and the introduction of three new antagonists and the tensions they cause, all within a limited page count, Morrison is unable to devote the necessary time to properly developing any of them. It’s no wonder the result is so half-baked.

But hey, just throw in a bunch of vagina planes and a dusting of kink and watch as everyone crows over how subversive he is.

Yannick Paquette’s artwork is still beautiful. His page layouts are still dynamic and expressive, and his character designs are still lovely. Diana in particular gets a variety of very cool outfits, including a beautiful modest costume for a trip to the Middle East.

But he still can’t shake his tendency towards drawing women’s bodies in weirdly-contorted poses with bizarre pornfaces. Wonder Woman shouldn’t look like she’s orgasming as she’s leaping into battle, ffs.

Oh, and the series is still being edited by noted serial sexual harasser Eddie Berganza. HASHTAG FEMINISM!

Let’s get into the recap.

Content warning for some skeevy mind control content and general discussion of the gender essentialist, body-shaming, TERFy attitudes of Morrison’s Amazons.

The story opens with a flashback to 1942, with Paula von Gunther leading a Nazi invasion of Themyscira, and god I’m already so tired.

idk, I mean, I get that Nazis were a major Golden Age antagonist, and Morrison is harking back to that. But there’s a broader historical and cultural context to consider. Cartoonish Nazi villains in patriotic WWII-era American comics carried very different associations than they do in 2018, in the midst of a presidency steeped in white supremacy and hate speech, on the eve of a midterm election in which a record number of neo-Nazis are standing for office, at a time when hate groups are surging, when migrant children are being separated from their families and held in detention camps— just. Not a time when I want to be reading about cartoonish super-Nazis, personally.

And I don’t really see why they necessarily need to be this story? The battle serves to illustrate how Amazons combat and… “rehabilitate”… their adversaries. Paula ultimately serves as a plot device. Couldn’t that maybe have been achieved without Nazis?

Anyway, Paula announces that she is claiming the island for the Third Reich, and Hippolyta is like “lol no”.

Okay, that part I like. Evil army storms the island, backed by guns and warships, surround a half-dozen barely-armed women… who all but roll their eyes. ‘Pfft, children. Fine, if you want to play this game…’ And the evil army can only gape in bewilderment as the women proceed to take them apart in minutes.

But this is where it gets weird.

The Amazons fire a purple ray at all of the Nazis, which… makes them all drop their weapons and start screaming “YES!” orgasmically?

Hippolyta tells Paula that the soldiers “will be taken to the Space Transformer. They will be transported to Aphrodite’s world where Queen Desira and her butterfly-winged Venus Girls wait to purge them of their need for conflict. They will be taught to submit to loving authority. They will learn to embrace peace and obedience. They will be as happy as men can be.”

Paula attacks Hippolyta, rips off her magic girdle and heaves a great boulder over her head— wait, were we supposed to know that Paula had superpowers? That seems like something that should have been flagged.

She effortlessly takes down the Amazons who rush to the queen’s defence and takes a moment to cackle villainously. “Behold the pride of Germany! The ultimate daughter of the thousand-year-empire of Adolf Hitler!” To which Hippolyta— okay, I like this part, too.

Hippolyta calmly gets to her feet and puts Paula in a stranglehold. “We are the Amazons of myth, my dear! I am Queen Hippolyta eternal.” She swiftly and efficiently brings Paula to her knees.

But, welp, never mind, it’s about to get fucking creepy again.

Hippolyta forces Paula into “the Venus Girdle”, a device that “charges every body cell with vitalising currents and harmonises the brain, encouraging obedience.”

Paula: Let me go! What is that? What are you doing? Hippolyta: The Venus Girdle? It charges every body cell with vitalising currents and harmonises the brain, encouraging obedience. A dainty thing, is it not? Paula: I won’t— I won’t— You can’t control me— you can’t— can’t make me— make me... oh… make me…

Paula: nmmuhhh… What’s happening? My Nazi ideals— slipping away— they— they don’t make any sense now… I— I thought— I thought— I was strong. What’s wrong with me? I’m so weak— I must be weak to wish to serve weak, cruel men— like— like Herr Hitler— I— I— Hippolyta: If you truly long to be a slave to the ideas of others, well… we can find a loving mistress to help you explore your desires in a healthier context. Paula: Yes. Yes! My queen— [sob] —how can you ever forgive me? How wise of you to know— to know this is all I ever wanted! Hippolyta: Devote yourself to me by following the Amazon Code. Go with out sweet Mala to Improvement Island. There you will come to know yourself until the Venus Girdle is no longer required.

Paula: But all I want is to serve you, my queen! I love you! Please don’t turn your back on me!

Basically, Hippolyta forcibly uses a mind-altering device on Paula that alters her brain chemistry to make her placid, compliant and suggestible, then immediately washes her hands of her.

So… let’s talk about this, because I think it strikes at the heart of the problems with Wonder Woman: Earth One.

Queen Desira, the Venus Girls, magnetic golden Venus Girdles that “harmonise the brain” — all these things are drawn from Golden Age Wondy comics cowritten by Marston and his collaborator Joye Kelly. Marston played with mind control a lot in his stories, and not all of it came from the bad guys.

Morrison’s bold, subversive approach to these story elements is to export them wholesale into the present day and force us to feel uncomfortable about them.

In other words, he’s taking some of the weirder and more fucked up story elements from a collection of comics that are widely agreed to be very weird, and then plonking it before your readers and asking, ‘hey guys, have you ever considered… that this might be weird and fucked up???’

There’s nothing clever or insightful about that. And there’s certainly nothing groundbreaking about a cis white male writer imagining a fictitious feminist dystopia where women strip away men’s free will.

Like, if you really want to be subversive with Marston’s Wonder Woman, how about you start by hiring a woman to write it? Why not see what this iconic feminist hero conceived by a cis white man in the 1940s and written almost exclusively by cis white men for over 75 years might look like if she were reimagined and reinterpreted by LGBTI women, by women of colour? By the women left out of those original comics?

That would be subversive. Morrison is just being a smartarse.

So yeah, Hippolyta turns her back on the helpless, brainwashed, lovesick Paula and walks over to Diana, who’s defied her mother’s orders and run down from the palace to get a glimpse of the action. She’s full of questions; Hippolyta brushes them off with the usual (for Morrison’s Amazons) ‘men are shit’ line.

There’s a moment where Paula and Diana meet eyes from across the beach, and each asks, “who is she?” Diana is simply curious; Paula is instantly lovestruck.

Paula: That girl… the image of my queen.

This looks like foreshadowing, but spoilers: it goes absolutely nowhere.

Sidenote: If the Amazons deal with invaders by brainwashing them, why did they want to kill Steve Trevor in Volume One?

Cut to present-day America, where a room of faceless men discuss the threat posed by the Amazons and their superior technology, which they assume extends to deadly weaponry. The only in they have with the Amazons is Wonder Woman, and to get through her defences they’ve called in “an expert in female psychology”, aka a misogynistic monster.

Doctor Psycho: Gentlemen. She may be strong and tough and smart and beautiful… but she’s just a woman. I never met one I couldn’t break.

Oh, goody.

Cut to a cute splash page of Diana playing baseball. She gets a lot of great outfits in this book.

She’s also clearly making an impact in Man’s World; her face is plastered across every magazine, and people flock to hear her speak.

A Q&A sessions serves as a thinly-veiled opportunity for Morrison to answer some of the criticisms of the first book. His response leaves something to be desired.

“Amazon training can make any of you into a Wonder Woman,” says Diana. We teach a system of physical and psychological health and vitality. The grace and beauty of Aphrodite, the skill and wisdom of Athena.”

Woman: What about Wonder trans women? Is there room for people like me in your utopia? Diana: There’s room for everyone. The Amazon Code was evolved by women over thousands of years and outlines a progressive, pacifist way of living and thinking that anyone can follow.

I’m sorry, but that’s a fucking bullshit answer. It’s a weak, superficial gesture towards inclusiveness that conspicuously fails to express any real support or solidarity.

And depressingly, this is 100% in-character for Earth One Diana, because Morrison’s Amazons? are absolutely TERFs. As with the mind control content, Morrison has exported Marston’s 1940s binaristic gender essentialism unchanged into the 21st century in order to ask searing questions like ‘hey but what if??? the idea that women are genetically more suited to ruling??? is simplistic and flawed?????’ But the most he’ll engage with the genuinely insidious implications around the exclusion of trans and nonbinary people is a smiling noncommittal, ‘Are trans people welcome? My friend, everyone is welcome! No further questions!’

Morrison’s Wonder Woman displays a profound disregard of context. He ignores not only the cultural, historical and individual contexts that shaped the original 1940s Wonder Woman, but also the contexts of the time in which he’s currently writing and the cultural space that Wondy has come to inhabit today as a feminist and LGBT icon.

Removed from context, Morrison is simply taking a hero who traditionally hails from an advanced utopian society, taking another look at the views that society actually espouses, and reframing her as a well-meaning but naive hero from an advanced but deeply flawed and unsettling society.

In context, he’s doing exactly what Brian Azzarello did in turning the Amazons into murderous man-hating monsters, just with more kink and vagina planes.

Woman 2: Umm, there’s a lot of stuff on social media about how you dress provocatively and promote an unrealistic body type, which is basically setting a bad example for women. I mean, the stuff you do is amazing and all, it’s just… does any of the criticism bother you? Diana: I don’t think there’s any such thing as an ‘unrealistic’ body shape. My own body is the result of diet, exercise and… um… sophisticated genetic engineering. Otherwise, I dress as I please.

Volume One made it clear that all Amazons have the physique of supermodels, and when they encounter the diverse body types of the women in our world, they are disgusted and respond with body-shaming insults. Here, Diana again avoids voicing any actual support (she doesn’t say that all women’s bodies are beautiful and valid, she suggests that her body type is not unrealistic), while also throwing out eugenics as a reason for the lack of body diversity among the Amazons. Oh good, I was hoping we’d get more Nazi parallels!

Finally, a militant white feminist stands up and observes that if the Amazons are capable of half of what Diana says they are, then they could dismantle the patriarchy overnight — so why is Diana wasting time giving philosophy lectures? “You can control people’s minds with that lasso of yours. Like you did with that dude on TV— so why can’t you put a lasso ‘round the whole world?”

Afterwards, talking to Beth Candy, Diana’s like, ‘gosh, Beth, I’ve never seriously thought about world domination before, but maybe it is time to consider stripping all mortals of their free will, dismantling all nations and compelling everybody on the planet to bow down before Amazonia.’

Then Diana gets on her mental radio and calls her mother, confessing her doubts about her mission.

It was around this point in the book that the Amazons’ dialogue began to grate on me. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was at first. Every line read like a ceremonious pronouncement. They used antiquated syntax and words, like “whole systems … must o’erturned be” and “she did, without due caution, this, her island home, depart!”. Even Diana would become infected with it whenever she was speaking to them. It felt like they weren’t so much conversing as they were reciting… 

...verse… 

oh my god, that motherfucker.

Surely he hadn’t.

I scanned the dialogue again. I double-checked it.

He had.

Grant Morrison, that obscenely pretentious wanker, wrote all of the Amazons’ dialogue in dactylic hexameter.

For fuck’s sake.

After finishing her call with Diana, Hippolyta learns that somebody has vandalised one of the temples with the symbol of “a backward-turning sun”, i.e. a swastika. Unseen by everybody, Paula breaks into Hippolyta’s palace.