#in case it wasn’t obvious: this is an anti-cop post

[science-bastard]

cops are classified as group 6 on the hierarchy of sentient species by the institutional animal care and use committee and thus are not subject to the same welfare standards as humans and other apes

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Reid Newtown

Published: Nov 27, 2023

I grew up attending integrated public schools in Atlanta. From the start, I was used to being in the minority: I’m white and my friends were almost all black or Hispanic, and when I was a freshman in high school, in 2010, I came out as a lesbian. Neither my race nor my sexual orientation mattered to my friends. One reason for that was dance and music and the belief that my friends and I shared that art can change people, give them purpose, communicate something beautiful and transformative.

I moved to New York City when I was 18, but the day after George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis, I was back in Atlanta visiting my parents, and I drove to my friend Sean’s house. He lived in a quiet, black suburb called Camp Creek filled with orderly, identical homes.

That night, I remember wanting to wrap my arms around my friends, to be there for them in what felt like this unbelievably dark moment. As the protests turned to riots closer to the heart of the city—just a few miles east of Camp Creek, near Centennial Olympic Park—Sean’s neighborhood stayed quiet.

But as soon as I stepped foot inside Sean’s house, I was greeted by the family dogs, and smelled the grill being fired up. There was a bowl of potato salad on the counter. Our mutual friend Khalil greeted me as if nothing was wrong, sweeping me off my feet into a familiar dance lift we’d done a thousand times. “Reidist!” he said.

Sean’s mom told me she was so glad I was safe, away from the neighborhoods being vandalized and, in some cases, set on fire. She shook her head as she prepared the hamburgers and hot dogs, as she always did in the summer. There were violent clashes all that night, and the mayor issued a 9 p.m. curfew, which meant, as usual, I would be sleeping over.

That night, all of our friends were there. There was a sense of deep-seated grief, and people wanted to be together, and they wanted to cry and hug and share stories. My friends—all black men in their early twenties—recalled run-ins they had had with the cops.

Being pulled over for no obvious reason while police dogs searched their car. Being roughed up. Being cuffed. Being called racist slurs. Being taken down to the station for questioning when they had done literally nothing. In the coming days and months, we donated to bail campaigns and posted a black square on our Instagrams. In June, we marched, and chanted, and we waved signs and demanded justice.

That summer, the world seemed upside down, violent, crazy. We wanted to make it right. What I couldn’t see then was that, far from making it right, we were on this spiral, and it was taking us somewhere dark: The world I had grown up in was being dismantled, and it was never coming back.

* * *

I grew up going to public schools just north of downtown. My kindergarten class resembled one of those stock diversity photos with one kid from every race sitting at a table together. I didn’t think twice about it. They were my friends.

I frequently had friends over at my house. My mom—everyone called her Mama Newt—hosted everyone no matter what they looked like or where they came from. No one left Mama Newt’s kitchen hungry.

[ Reid’s mother, “Mama Newt” ]

In middle school, the black kids started sitting with the black kids at lunch. The Hispanic kids with the Hispanic kids. The white kids with the white kids. I agonized over where to sit. All of my friends were at different tables.

I loved to dance, and I became captain of the step team. I was the only white girl on the team, and I stuck out, but the girls didn’t treat me any differently. There were jokes about how surprising it was that I had rhythm; we all laughed about it. Race was present, but it didn’t feel overbearing.

In high school, race and racial identity became more important, more talked about, inescapable. The dance studio was the only classroom that reflected the school’s diversity. Most other classes were de facto segregated based on students’ academic track.

The dance crew—we were like a sitcom. There was Sean, the music theater geek who was also a first-rate swimmer. Then there was Khalil, who was a firecracker gymnast and cheerleader—and hilarious. (People compared him to Kevin Hart.) Then there was Isaac, who was tall and lanky, a lacrosse player and preacher’s son. And then there was me. They called me “lil sis,” which I loved, maybe because I’d never had siblings. As an only child, my friends really felt like family.

[ From Left to Right: Sean, Khalil, Reid, Isaac, and Kwame ]

The studio was like a race-blind utopia, and it felt unreal, because it was: the moment you stepped out into the hallway, the intimacy and warmth gave way to a kind of unhappy, low-level tension.

Usually, that tension resided just beneath the surface. But not always.

I remember one day in 2011 there was supposed to be a big fight between the black, white, and Hispanic students. There had been an altercation a few days before between rival gangs, and it was near the end of the school year, when fights were more common, and someone started a rumor about a “race war.”

I stood in the middle of the courtyard and looked around at the various corners full of people siloing themselves into white, black, and brown factions. I had no idea which corner I belonged in. In the Hispanic section, I glimpsed Jessica Sanchez, who had taught me in the sixth grade how to throw a punch. I wondered what would happen if I had to punch Jessica Sanchez.

Luckily, security stopped it before it started, and everyone eventually returned to class as if nothing had happened.

The point is, the racial tension notwithstanding, we seemed to be moving in the right direction. Maybe I was blind. Maybe my whiteness made it impossible for me to see what was really going on in other people’s heads. I don’t know. I found my tribe wherever I found kindness and laughter. Wherever the bass was bumping, and people were dancing. The rest always seemed to work itself out.

* * *

In 2014, I moved to New York to go to Fordham University and the prestigious Ailey School of Dance. Alvin Ailey, who founded the school in 1969, was known for having said that “dance is for everybody” and “we are all human beings and color is not important.” I loved the power of art to transcend difference.

[ Reid and a fellow classmate at Ailey School of Dance ]

My high school sweetheart, a black woman I naively believed I would one day marry, started her freshman year at Harvard, where she immersed herself in the spoken-word poetry scene and acquired a new racial consciousness. I remember taking the five-hour bus from New York to Cambridge only to find myself sitting alone in her dorm, excluded from the party and poetry slam she’d gone to.

She said that she no longer felt safe being near me because I was white, that any physical affection I offered was me attempting to colonize her body.

Six months into college, she broke up with me.

At the time, I thought this was an anomaly—a sad derangement that came out of elite places like Harvard. I had no idea what was coming.

Dance distracted me from the hurt. My goal had been to make it to the professional Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater since I first saw Ailey’s Revelations performed at the old Fox Theatre, in Atlanta, and that feeling intensified after I attended Ailey’s Summer Intensive when I was 16—now that I was at the dance school I felt like I was on the cusp of getting in.

A hip injury put an end to that dream, but it didn’t really matter. I went on to dance professionally elsewhere—among other gigs, I spent three seasons as a dancer and stunt double on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel—graduated from Fordham in 2018, fell in love once again with an older, Bengali-American woman, got my own apartment in Queens, and moved my dog, Tiger, a Pekingese-poodle mix, from Atlanta to New York.

I also started to think beyond the narrow confines of a New York City progressive, which felt increasingly small and myopic. I read books like The Coddling of the American Mind and The Problem with Everything and The Rise of Victimhood Culture. I started to disagree, silently, with my friends.

Then, in early 2020, my girlfriend and I broke up, and Covid happened. I was furloughed from my day job as a technician at a physical therapy clinic, and my dance gig auditions came to a halt. I got depressed being all alone in my apartment, and I flew home to Atlanta to be with my family.

A few days after I got home, George Floyd was murdered.

Suddenly, I felt this thing I had never felt: people viewing and talking to each other through the lens of race. Yes, I know, that lens had always been there. But there had always been other people, ideas, forces to counteract that. Our impulse to divide had always been eclipsed by a more powerful desire to come together.

But now the fissures were opening up, and it was impossible to sew them together. I remembered being broken up with six years earlier by my critical-race-theory-poetry-slam girlfriend, and suddenly it seemed like millions of people were breaking up with each other, walling themselves off. When I showed up at Sean’s house that night, his mom’s familiar embrace almost made me cry. Between social distancing and racial siloing, physical affection had started to feel foreign. I leaned into her hug hard, and she had to steady herself to keep herself from falling backward.

When the lockdowns ended, I went back to New York, but I couldn’t stay for long. My mom had always had multiple sclerosis, but now it was getting worse. My parents were everything to me: They’d supported my dancing; they’d supported me when I came out. Now, my mother was struggling, and my dad, forced to juggle full-time work and full-time caregiving, was overwhelmed, drowning in responsibility. I had to go home, and I wanted to. 

At the time, I didn’t know you can’t ever really go home again.

* * *

By spring 2022, things were finally reopening, and we all wanted to go out and dance.

That night, at a club in midtown Atlanta, I was, as usual, the only white person. I was used to that, but this time it was different.

As I danced with my friends to classic southern hip-hop songs like “Knuck if You Buck” by Crime Mob, “It’s Goin’ Down” by Yung Dro, and “Walk it Out” by Outkast, I could feel the eyes around me searing into my back and head and legs and face. People pulled out their cameras and filmed me in disgust—as if I had two heads. They said things like: “Who does she think she is?” and “She shouldn’t be allowed here—I don’t care if she can dance.”

The worst part wasn’t how it made me feel, how out of place I felt in this world I had once thought of as an extension of home. The worst part was that the people in that room felt threatened by my being there. This seemed crazy to me, but it was undeniable. They genuinely felt unsafe and uncomfortable because of the color of my skin. They viewed me as an oppressor and a grifter looking to take—to appropriate—what wasn’t mine.

The world of dance, which had given me that precious language to communicate with anyone irrespective of who they were or where they came from, was fragmenting—consumed, like everything else, by our seemingly inescapable racialization and tribalization.

A few weeks later, I received an invitation to a party. At the top of the invitation bold letters stated:  “THIS IS AN ALL-BLACK EVENT.” I responded to the friend who sent it to me and asked if they meant to wear all-black clothes. She responded, “Nah, it’s for black people only, but you know you’re the exception.”

I did not attend.

The self-segregation was suffocating. The most meaningful art and friendships in my life had come out of piercing through racial boundaries. Expanding my horizons. Now, it seemed like those horizons were closing in on me, my friends, the wonderful, collaborative, fluid, undulating world of dance that had infused my life with so much meaning. It felt like something was being lost forever.

I know, I know—we’ve been in this moment for three years, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told that setting aside my race, my whiteness, is a privilege. Does that mean we shouldn’t aspire to live in a world in which we all set aside our immutable traits? That we shouldn’t try to see beyond race?

Which brings me to the most amazing woman I’ve ever known.

After a couple of years of dating as a gay woman in New York, I was feeling discouraged. Everyone I had gone out with was a hyper-political leftist. They always seemed to be in the middle of a rant. Every date gave me an uneasy feeling for fear of saying the wrong thing—my views on race, sex, gender, you name it, were not in lock-step with those of my fellow LGBT New Yorkers. On edge and worried I would never find my person, I had almost given up dating entirely.

Then I connected with Bianca. She’s an elite marathoner and the daughter of Cuban immigrants, and she’s perfect: measured, kind, curious. The only woman I’ve ever met who could convince me to run a 5K and the only one who’s made me rethink some of my opinions about politics, identity, life, and the world.

I like to believe we were always meant to be, but I also know I would never have arrived at this place were it not for the ups and downs of the last few years. Before the summer of 2020, it was easier to feel or think or exist outside our superficial differences. We didn’t talk about these things with the same frequency or intensity. There weren’t as many landmines. Now, it’s more important than ever to discuss our differences—while also trying to see beyond skin color and demand that we’re seen the same way.

A few months ago, I had a ring made for Bianca using the diamond from my late grandmother’s wedding ring. I haven’t proposed yet, but we’re thinking maybe a small wedding with family down the line. As for Sean, Khalil, and Isaac—they’re planning on being my three best men.

[ Reid and Bianca ]

==

"Critical theory is a universal solvent, and the problem with a universal solvent is finding a container that can hold them. Spill enough and dissolve society." -- James Lindsay

[thetrashsean]

“Why wasn’t Life is Strange 2 as popular as the first game?”

A lot of people like myself have wondered what exactly made Life is Strange 2 go so relatively unnoticed compared its predecessor, Life is Strange 1. And when you think about it, you may come up with the few obvious generic answers, such as the lack of Max and Chloe and just the original cast in general. However, I think there was a lot more at play here that prevented Life is Strange 2 from reaching the amount of success/popularity the first game had. So I want to take the time and break down what exactly happened to Life is Strange 2 and the things that hurt the game’s ability to really connect with the audience of LiS1.

Disclaimer: We do NOT know how well Life is Strange 2 was for Dontnod and if it was a success or not. No sales numbers have been given out to the public so there’s no way of knowing for sure how well the game did. What we do know is that LiS2 did not receive the same amount of attention/popularity as the first game. That can’t be denied, it simply didn’t. However, based on the fact that Dontnod have recently announced they are working on six new games at the moment and are now expanding their studio, even if LiS2 was a “flop” it doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect on them (most likely due to the success of Vampyr). Dontnod is going to be fine either way. Another thing I want to mention is that this is not a anti-LiS2 post and that I am a fan of the game. I’d consider myself a pretty big fan actually. I have my problems with the game of course and don’t agree with a lot of the writing decisions but I enjoyed the game very much overall. But for the sake of this post I will try to be as unbiased as possible, giving out only what I’ve observed when it comes to reactions from the fandom on different websites and forums. So with that all being said, let’s dive in to this.

Here I will be listing the many different reasons as to why Life is Strange 2 failed to reach the same amount of popularity as LiS1 or even BtS managed to achieve. This list isn’t in any particular order but some reasons are bigger/more important than others.

For some background, there was a lot of hype going into Life is Strange 2. The teaser trailer for it with the cop car trended at #2 on YouTube, a huge feat for the series. It generated immense amount of views and comments in a short period in time, completely surpassing Before the Storm’s announcement trailer in just a few weeks. So what exactly happened to all that hype? Where did everybody go? Well, let’s break everything down.

1. The lack of Max and Chloe: Yes I said that this list wouldn’t be in any particular order in terms of importance but I think it’s obvious this one is one of, if not the biggest reason as to why LiS2 failed to match LiS1’s popularity. When the protagonists Sean and Daniel were first revealed, the reception was pretty divisive. Specifically, a very vocal part of the community were baffled and disappointed at the lack of Max and Chloe present within the trailer and subsequently the game itself. This instantly turned off a lot of people from the game, as they couldn’t connect with the new characters or simply didn’t want to. At that point in the franchise Max and Chloe as well as the original cast from the first game had been the face of the series for almost three years. It’s understandable why it was hard for people to just…move on. To this day people are still asking for Max and Chloe to return. The Life is Strange subreddit is still dominated with Max and Chloe fanart. Whenever the social media accounts for Life is Strange post anything Max and Chloe related it gets way more attention compared to a post about Sean and Daniel. Whenever a post online goes viral about Life is Strange you can bet it’s most likely about Max and Chloe. Hell the only reason why episode 5 of Life is Strange 2 trended on Tumblr was because of the fucking picture of Max and Chloe. On the releas day of episode 5 of LiS2 the top post on the subreddit was the Max and Chloe picture. It was almost as if that one photo of them completely overshadowed the entire episode. Point is, Life is Strange 2 lost a lot of momentum the moment it was revealed Max and Chloe would not be present. Case closed, let’s move on.

2. The release schedule: Words cannot describe how frustrating the release schedule was for LiS2 when it came to it’s episodes. For those reading this who didn’t follow LiS2 until the game was finished, each episode took around 3-4 months to be released. This was because Dontnod bit off a bit more than they could chew with the road trip story in having to create new locations and character models from scratch. The reason why this wasn’t a problem for LiS1 was because Max was for the most part always in the same locations around the same characters (I’m pretty sure you roam around Chloe’s house like 4 times throughout the season), which made development a lot easier since the devs could just reuse a lot of the assets. Unfortunately, this wasn’t possible for LiS2 due to the nature of it’s story. The wait times between each episode made a lot of people leave the fandom due to loosing interest or simply forgetting about the game altogether. This also impacted youtubers/streamers as many of them either stopped coming back to play the new episodes or they’d not be as connected as they were in the previous episode due to the amount of time that had passed. One of the reasons why LiS1 gained so much popularity was because of youtubers/streamers and how they would bring in their audience and would pretty much make them fans of the series. With quite a handful of youtubers/streamers quitting LiS2, the game was not able to draw in as much of an audience as previous games did. This is how detreminetal the release schedule was for LiS2.

3. The marketing (or lack thereof): Square Enix really fucked up on this aspect. Due to the ridiculous wait times you would think Square Enix would try and advertise the game heavily when a new episode was about to be released, right? Well they didn’t. Not at all actually. Throughout the games release schedule from September 2018 up to December 2019, I had not seen a single ad for the game. Nothing on YouTube, nothing on reddit or any other websites, it was like Square Enix had completely forgotten about the game’s existence. Now don’t get me wrong, SE did do a few things with LiS2 like starting up the community series on their YouTube channel and also the dev updates that came after episode 1 (that stopped after episode 2 for some reason) but these went relatively unnoticed to people outside of the fandom and did pretty much nothing. I believe SE was trying to wait until the game was fully complete with all of it’s episodes released before actually marketing the game (and they DID start advertising the game after episode 5 came out) but that’s just WAAAY too long to go without any type of advertisement. I understand marketing teams have budgets and what not, but you’re telling me there was no way for SE to market each episode in anyway as they were about to be released? Seems a bit ridiculous, don’t you think?

4. The road trip story: I completely understand why Dontnod wanted to branch out and do something different with the story of Life is Strange 2 and I respect them for stepping out of their comfort zones. However, it can’t be denied that the road trip story where characters are cycled in and out as Sean and Daniel make their way to Mexico was a very…questionable decision. Seeing as how LiS1 was loved for it’s world filled with a reoccurring cast of characters that developed as the story went on, it’s really easy to understand why LiS2 was so off-putting for a lot of fans. It was off-putting for me, even. It just…wasn’t fun having to leave these truly interesting characters behind because the plot demanded it. This left a lot of characters feeling underdeveloped to many people and by the time you meet new characters you already know they’re most likely gonna be gone soon anyways, so it made it even harder to connect with them. Couple this with the fact that LiS2 lacked any type of mystery unlike LiS1, speculation and discussion fizzled out a few weeks after each episode was released. LiS1 kept people speculating and wondering about what would happen next, while LiS2 left a lot of people struggling to care.

5. Politics: Yeeeeaaaaah I think I had to put this somewhere on the list. While many of the people who tease and mock how LiS2 handled its political topics were most likely not fans of the series anyway (the type of people who called LiS1 “Life is Tumblr” and hate Chloe), I do think it’s important to realize that some people just don’t want politics in their games, period. I’ve seen people online come out and say that while they agreed with what the writers were saying when it came to the political topics, it overall still came off very forced and one-sided to them, lacking any type of nuance or subtlety. I could write an entire essay discussing if the politics in LiS2 were handled well and whatnot but this is not that post so I’ll just leave it at that.

6: Lack of a prominent female cast/wlw: This is a bit more tricky to talk about (for the record the person writing this is a black gay guy) but I will try and write about this the best way I can. For many women, specifically queer women, Life is Strange was a series they could expect representation from. Max, Chloe, Rachel, and Steph are all popular characters amongst the fandom and even other wlw ships such as Marshfield, Chasefield, Chaseprice, etc are popular. So when LiS2 was revealed to be about two (hispanic) males, the queer women within the community were understandably upset. It felt like DN were simply throwing away the community that for the most part made up the entire fandom. At the time I simply found the situation ridiculous and overblown as many people were dismissing Sean and Daniel as “generic straight males” (even though it turned out Sean was bisexual in the end) before really getting to know them. However, looking back I totally get why people were upset. A lot of the fanart/fanfiction that was made for the LiS series was mostly created by queer women, so when the franchise pretty much stopped giving them representation, they left in search of other media (like She-Ra, which honestly has better wlw rep anyway). LiS2 is also mostly male dominated in terms of its cast, and features no queer women as well, which is really disappointing in my opinion.

7. Price: This one is pretty simple. When Life is Strange 2 was first released the full season costed $40. This was a pretty big jump in comparison to LiS1’s $20 price tag (original price was $25 however) and BtS’s $16. Obviously people would be more skeptical about buying a sequel that is pretty much double the price of its predecessor and has completely new characters. With the pretty mixed reception from gaming communities I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of people saw the price and decided to either watch a playthrough or simply not check out the game at all. With the first episode now free the base price has been lowered to around $30-32 I believe so yeah.

8. Daniel Diaz: Some people just don’t like kids, and I wouldn’t be surprised if people grew easily frustrated with Daniel early on and once he got more irrational and bratty as the story progressed they just stopped playing altogether. Even if you do like kids, or at least don’t mind them like myself, Daniel can still be quite a pain.

9. Not having control of the powers: This one is honestly really disappointing and I know it was to a lot of other people as well. In LiS1 Max had the ability to rewind time and do certain scenarios and conversations over and that basically acted as the more interesting gameplay segments. In LiS2 Sean doesn’t have the power, his brother Daniel does. This leads to the gameplay feeling much more boring and mundane. There are also no interesting puzzles this time around, most likely because Dontnod didn’t know how to implement them without the rewind power so they just…didn’t even attempt to add any. The power itself, telekinesis, is also much less interesting compared to rewinding time, according to a lot of people.

SO YEAH that’s basically it for me. I know this probably came off a bit rambly/incoherent but I tried my best to be as clear as I possibly could. I don’t doubt there are other reasons at play as to why LiS2 failed to meet LiS1’s success (such as liscensed music not being quite as good as LiS1) but I think I hit the main points I believe were key reasons. And the thing is, there isn’t just one main reason why LiS2 didn’t do as well as LiS1. It’s overall very unfortunate so many things went wrong with it that ended up making people lose interest in it. I think the lack of Max and Chloe hurt the game the most right off the bat, but the other reasons just led it to do even worse. Oh well.

I hope any of the people who read this enjoyed it (it was a BITCH to write). I’ve been wanting to get my thoughts down about this for SO long but just never had the motivation/time but I finally did it!

Again, thanks for reading! If you have any disagreements or just thoughts in general don’t be afraid to reply or dm me about it and I’ll be sure to reply! Now back to reblogging Marco posts….

[streets-in-paradise]

Let’s talk about the amazingly on spot social commentary on The Boys

Warning: This post contains spoilers from Season 1 and the first three episodes of season 2 of The Boys 

Tags: @nehoymenyoy asked to be tagged. I don’t know if my tags are working well but if they don’t i will send you the link of the post. 

I decided to make this post because i finished all the avaliable episodes of the series two days ago and, having a long talk with my sister about this topic, i tought this is too awesome to not discuss it here. We are both studying in careers of the social field, i'm in sociology and she is in social work. We watched the show together and talking with her inspired my own ideas i would like to share here.

This show was a wonderfull surprise in terms of social commentary. I haven't watched one with such a great commentary since American Gods. In that case i was expecting some degree of progressive commentary because i had read the book previously and i was aware the source material had some, the one added for the series is even better and it was great, but it wasn't a shock to find it. For The Boys i haven't read the comics first and , even when i loved the show for lots of reasons, the amazing on spot social commentary was a hell of a surprise. I have been frustrated lately in terms of the messages in entertaiment products because, even when there is a lot of intention for part of the makers to make more progressive points in their stuff, everything becomes bland marketing to me most of the time. I remember that some years ago media used to came out unintentionally with some really cool progressive messages ( like, for example, " a bug's life" and its anti capitalist message). That stuff seemed soo genuine and today i feel that everytime a product targets my demographic in that sense what they deliver it's soo bland and fake that the progressive intention of the message gets lost in the absolutely obvious intention of selling something to me using my ideals as catch. Precisely this is an important point of critic in this show. I didn't expected at all to get a genuine feeling in the social commentary of a superhero show. I'm not saying that this means i think the makers believe in this (after all, it's amazon), what i praise here is how good they did it. In a time when most productions claim to have a social commentary behind to come out as cool but result in shallow fake bullshit this series has provided me with something that feels autentic. Like American Gods, what i feel the show is trying to tell me actually gets me.

Before starting with the proper talk i want to dedicate a few línes to recommend a few scenes of the show i just mentioned. I was super dissapointed after finding out they will probably end up turning it into more bland fake bullshit for season 3 but, to anyone who likes well delivered social commentary, check on Orlando Jones's scenes as Anansi. He is my favourite character from the show and all his scenes are a blessing. 

I would also want to clarify that this post and the opinions displayed on it are from an anti capitalist, intersectional feminist and latin american perspective. I know the show is very american, the issues it discusses are most of the time worlwide but it has particularities of the american context so i will try to talk only of what i feel i know enough to have a word. I'm argentinian and we have our local versions of some of this problems but i will stay in the series territory trying to be as faithfull as i can to the american reality it gets inspiration from. Also, forgive me for any mistakes on my writing and expresions. English is not my native language. 

Superheros are modern mythology. How would this work in real life?

This is the basic premise of the show’s worldbuilding. The great thing is that this concept is not developed in an edgy, pretentious way. It is serious and painfully real because it’s not only a subversion of tropes, it says a lot of what superheros are to us as a modern times myth. In a superficial view, the world of The Boys feels like what the MCU could have become after the Sokovia accords if they would have been efficiently followed on a worldwide scale.

In that particular universe i use as reference, our superheros are noble and morally heroic individuals.State intervention is the factor threatening to corrupt their actions making them follow the interests of the system. The risk there, along with some very shady violations of human rights to powered people, is having superheros tied to something as unstable as political power. You can fear, for example, what a Trump-like president could do if he had power over the Avengers because, again, the heros are not corrupt, their line of command is. Now, if we strip away all the idealization we had putted on this bunch of powered persons and see them as what they truly are at the end of the day, people like everyone else. Why are we supposed to believe they are immune to corruption? If we also consider the phenomenon of strong privatization of security that has been growing worldwide . Wouldn’t they be more like security workers working for a private contractor? Less like heros and more like private military / security officers?  Now, this is what we are talking about. 

What feels so different from this show is that it assumes a surprisingly realistic point of view on a modern fantasy we are very used to consuming and still constructs a new power fantasy that empowers the viewer. I’ m saying this as an MCU fan, I had grown too comfortable with this optimistic fantasy and this twist from it is brilliant. To put some context on what i want to say here i will try to explain myself first on why i think that superhero fiction have this enormous popularity today and it has become such a huge thing in entertainment. Besides of the obvious reason of big companies producing big exciting action blockbusters for the genre, it’s curious to think on how much these stories gathered a lot of progressive audiences. In past decades action blockbusters didn’t felt progressive, today’s superhero blockbusters were embraced by progressive audiences and this was the start of a twist in general for the media. I think that there is a contextual social reason for this, not the only factor but one i feel is considerable. 

Late Stage Capitalism crushed us, we are so used to injustice and the control the system has over us is so big that we have slowly stopped dreaming of changing it ourselves. Instead, the fantasy of a superhuman who has the power we don’t have saving us from oppression feels really comforting. Captain America becoming such a huge icon in the middle of a time where extreme facism is rising again all over the world, for example. I don’t know much about his comic counterpart but, at least from what i see in the movies, Steve’s ideals feel to me like all those aspects from French Revolution’s  Enlightenment that capitalism dropped away once bourgeois defeated their feudal rivals and capitalism got consolidated, the freedom and equality that feudal lower classes fought for. Today, we feel too small to make a difference so we enjoy the fantasy of powerful persons leading the fight for us. Capitalism feels more unstoppable than ever, it is the only thing who seems strong to remain in a terribly chaotic world. The suffering this cruel system brings to this world is overwhelming, we feel only a miracle can save us now. This is what feeds the narrative of the superhero as modern myth and saviour of humanity.

The Boys tosses aside all our hopes and dreams, presenting us with the most realistic escenario. Superheros are not the miracle we are waiting for, they are humans like everyone else. They are not sacred entities existing beyond our societies, they are part of the system and they insert on it as part of the security industries. They can be corrupted and they work in corrupt institutions in benefit of the ruling class like every other security provider in capitalist societies. They become a new face of the security forces in constant tension with police and military because the myth of the superhero provides them with the public trust those other two forces lost. People lost their trust in cops but they trust sups because they are supposed to be this noble individuals mobilized by their personal feelings of injustice trying to make the world a better place … right? Police are the forces of the ruling class but superheros are supposed to be with us, or at least this is what common sense and propaganda claim, having our hopes as a base to work on. 

For someone so used to the typical superhero fantasy this felt like a slap on my face back to reality. It soo accurate , the system tends to capture any revolutionary input and turn it into profit. Even if the sups could had been a revolutionary factor at the beginning, the most likely thing to happen is for them to become a profitable industry. If we add to this what we already know of the actions of police and military in our real world we have a combo for disaster. The realistic twist is so fresh and painfully real, i can totally see this happening in real life if superheros were a thing. 

We have already introduced ourselves in the world of this story, let’s check on the first main character this series introduces to us. Hughie Campbell, a college age guy who works in an electronics store, lives with his dad and has the most boring average life you can imagine. This guy who is too afraid to ask his boss for a pay raise changes overnight when a superhero kills his girlfriend in front of him and the big corporation the asshole works for covers up the whole thing. The “average guy becomes a hero” trope is not new at all, but the use it has here feels fresh because it is not there only to feed the male geek power fantasy. Hughie is not a geeky average guy only so geeky average guys can identify with him in an action series full of geeky references,he is not there to be the nerdy guy from Robot Chicken. Hughie’s characterization makes a point for everyone. The smallest most unimportant person, the one who can't even stand up for themselves in everyday situations, can make a change. Remember Samwise Gamgee fighting Shelob in Lord of the Rings? Hughie killing Translucent gives me that vibe. If we consider the point i already stated about superheroes being there when we feel too small to fight back injustice, this is the exact opposite. This is a fantasy that gives us the power, makes us think in our own strengths. Hughie is standing up for himself for the first time in his life and he inspires us to fight for our rights. 

Pharmaceutical,Security and Entertainment industries and their business system : Superheros as lab rats,elite security forces and celebrities. 

This part of the post is the hardest to write and the most exquisite. There is so much to talk about about this system Vought shaped tying these three billionaire industries together. The first thing i want to mention, as a point to start, is Butcher’s ramble over the teddy bear with a camera inside in his meeting with Hughie. Perfect introduction for the character with a delightful moment of commentary. In our current societies people live in constant fear for hundreds of reasons. Fears over street crime had skyrocketed all over the world even when crime is not growing uniformly in every country and that accelerated the privatization of security, fears of parents over the strangers they leave they kids with when they are not home inspired products like the one mentioned in the series’s moment, fears on the effects of processed foods are an impulse for the diet industry and i could keep naming lots of other examples. Fears, and the emotional response they trigger , are the base of profitable businesses. 

I had been reading some authors that describe this stage of capitalism as an emotional one. Capitalism preached science and rationality during the past century but today its base of support is an emotional one. To excite the sensations of the people as consumers, to eliminate rational criticism, to push anti popular agendas through emotional excitement and mass hysteria. To cite another example that you can consider bounded to the series, Right Realism in Criminology is now almost common sense and there are people who keep asking for harsher punitive systems. This ideology, with the help of media panic, goes straight after their feelings and fears of being victims of violent crimes. Rational thinking is not the area of discussion, the base of the argument is on fear and pain. Fear of being potential victims, pain shared with the victims thinking in solutions that sound more like revenge than justice. 

Going back to my point, in the world of The Boys this type of punitivism seems to have succeeded even in a greater way than in our current world because it has superheros as backup. If real life harsh punitivism feeds on fear and a wish for social revenge, in this world it has the positive emotions supes inspire on people as a trust certificate for the persons who may not feel that way. They are loved and worshipped celebrities, their faces are everywhere, they have thousands of fans… who would see flaws in what they do? Can you imagine a world in which we worshipped cops and soldiers like we worship celebrities? This is it, people put their blind faith in them because most of them seem to be their fans. Even the people who are against brutality in the actions of security forces would end up trusting them because they are famous people. Our culture has taught us to make ourselves blind to the bullshit we see on the celebrities we love. Fans have a strong emotional attachment to their favourite celebs and this can turn into emotional manipulation in this context. If actors or singers in real life can have a fanbase that forgets to see them as human people how would these actual superhumans not end up being worshipped as gods? 

There has always been military propaganda in entertainment but this marriage between the industries through superheros is far more sinister than that. It makes you think about the unfair amount of credibility we put in celebrities. The plane crash scene of Homelander and Maeve it’s even more devastating looking at it from that perspective. Those persons had their full trust in them and they were safer with the terrorists. Can you imagine being a Homelander fan and dying there?  That’s horrible, the last thing you get in your life is the biggest disappointment ever from someone you trusted and stanned. 

 Speaking of Homelander, he is a right wing wet dream and one of the best villians i had ever seen, he makes me feel sick with how fucking despicable he is. His character is an excellent point to start the ramble on the third wheel of this corporate nightmare. Superheros are products of the pharmaceutical industry, injected with a drug since they were babies. In his particular case, he was raised like a lab rat and the series is realistic even in this detail. The lab rat kid with superpowers is another common trope that we see pretty often and here it also gets twisted. I’m thinking for example on Eleven from Stranger Things, she has been raised by abusive scientists who treated her as an experiment, yet she is this sweet kiddo who has a hard time socializing. Instead, Homelander is a monster without conscience or mercy and seems to be severely affected by his abnormal childhood. Brilliant, he is the ultimate product of this corporative triangle and depicts everything that's wrong with it. 

The cycle is pretty clear: drugs create them, they play their role in security and their media notoriety justifies their actions. As it is shown in season one,  the security aspect of the corporate complex represented mostly in Homelander’s actions craves to grow bigger and get supes into the military since, in the startpoint of the series, they only work with cops. Since the industry feeds on fear and Vought seems to have a monopoly in the production of powered persons there were no threats big enough to justify the intervention of superhumans in wars. Dismissing the importance of this monopoly for the company, Homelander suministrates the drug to terrorist groups in an attempt to create the first super villains. This is a perfect analogy of how the american war machine works. There is no way for terrorist groups from Third World countries to get access to sophisticated war technology without help from the ones who wield that power better than anyone. The first mentions of the supe terrorists reminded me of when i was in my course of worldwide history in college and i learned there how most of those famous names in middle eastern terrorism were actually friends with the CIA before at some point. Here in South America we have other history regarding the style of USA intervention, the Plan Condor dictatorships in the 70’s and early 80’s. I was just starting my career when I had a month of history classes about the Middle East and, being pretty ignorant on the matter, it shocked me the way in which the US villainized people they used to work with. I think the series makes a great point with this part of the plot because it hints something of this war mechanics. 

Gender politics of the series: a surprisingly complex approach on the topic of sexual assault ,a realistic critic to bland white feminism and the empty cashgrabbing ways in which mainstream media adapts feminist discourse.

This topic was even a bigger surprise for me. I wasn't expecting such an interesting approach of gender issues, mostly because this is the area in which media wannabe woke messages had become more dissapointing to me lately. Specially in a show about superheros, i wasn't expecting to get very interesting points.

I will start talking of the portrayals of sexual assault. We have two sexually assaulted characters in the series, Starlight and Becca. First, i think it is great that they didn't used the "rape as character development" trope. Actually, it's cool how they mock this conceptions. When Starlight saves a woman from being raped on the streets or when she makes a public statement about her sexual assault it's the people behind her, building her public image as a character, the ones who push that trope. In the first time their great character development idea is to sexualize her outfit, after the second event mentioned they literally push her sexual assault as development. I love how the public relationships team acts oftenly in a men writing women way, serving as mirror for the most common mistakes of writers on pop culture products when they write female characters.

Going back to my point, i like the effort they putted into portraying differences in both cases. Homelander is the typical portrayal of a rapist, a narcisistic monster without remorse, a deranged son of a bitch. The Deep is also a piece of shit, but of a different kind. There is a phrase that feminists of my country had popularized " los violadores son hijos sanos del patriarcado" ( it means, the rapists are healthy sons of the patriarchy. It tries to explain they are not crazy individuals who act outside societal circunstancies), the Deep reminded me of that.

He is not crazy, he is an insecure guy with a super fragile ego who abuses women for power. Insecurity on men under patriarchy tends to become bashing of women. This is not a black and white portrayal of a sex criminal, it is surprisingly complex. Of course,his actions were unexcusable. He will never repay what he did to Starlight and other women before her but he has chances of working on his issues and, eventually if he trully wants to get better, stop being the scumbag he is. He is not a deranged criminal whose only fate is to be neutralized for the safety of others.

I think this is important because, at least in my country, i had seen people using sex offenders as an example of why countries without death penalty should implement it. I don't support extreme autoritarian security measures and it makes me sick to hear that there are people claiming those as solutions in the name of women's safety. I like the approach they took to portray The Deep as the piece of shit he is but still showing the complexity of this issue instead of going for a more traditional dichotomic way.

Back to the mocking of mainstream media's attempts of adopting a feminist approach i mentioned, the season two got even better at this commentary on the "Strong Female Character" trope with the introduction of Stormfront. She is the literal embodiment of what shitty marketing says an empowered female character must be and has the biggest "I'm not like other girls" complex ever. That interaction she had with Starlight in "pink = bad, pants = cool" mood was super annoying and blaming her for the assault?? Freaking disgusting.

Honestly, i hated her soo much even before she showed her true colours completely. Stormfront represents everything i hate in Hollywood's feminism and the crappy meaningless messages it's pushing lately. She reminds me to all the fake "woke" advertisements i had seen on tv, like a Carefree (pads brand) advertisement that pissed me off last week because with the slogan " self trust is beauty" it portrayed girls who wear make up as fake and insecure.

Now, speaking of that particular scene of her killing Kimiko's brother. I felt literally sick, even sicker than in every Homelander scene. This bitch is worst than Homelander because at least he gathers a public that serves to his views. If you ever need to provide someone with a proof of why intersectionality in feminism matters use this racist bitch. Horryfying racism hidden behind the progressive mask of a bullshit privileged version of feminism, the thing i hate the most. She has a strong nazi terf vibe. I think she absolutely applies as mirror of critic to stuff like Rowling's terf nonsense. 

The introspective look this series has regarding the multiple issues on today’s attempts of gender approach on media entertainment surprised me. It’s everything i would had wished something to point out but nobody seemed to have the guts to make it happen because, as i already said, the current trend is what it’s being focus of critic here. 

I will end this now, i feel there is plenty of more stuff to talk about but this post is getting very long and, if i get more ideas i want to discuss, i can always make a second post. As i said before, this expresses my humble opinions and i’m open to hear different interpretations that can enrich my views. 

Thanks for reading this extra long ramble. 

[abusybuzzingbee]

Skin | Supernatural Season 1 Episode 6 Rewrite | Dean x Fem!Reader

A/N: this gif is SAUCY i should not find it as attractive as I do

Pairing: Dean Winchester x Fem!Reader

Major Characters: Dean Winchester, Reader, Sam Winchester

Warnings: canon level violence, language, Dean and the reader being assholes to each other TW: shifter calls the reader some pretty terrible things that may be triggering to some readers. if you tend to have self-deprecating thoughts, you may not want to read this episode. also, heavy topics mentioned in a fight between Dean and the reader

Word Count: 7,547

Summary: The boys and the reader head to St. Louis, Missouri when Sam gets an email about one of his college buddies. Tensions continue to rise between Dean and the reader following their dispute in Toledo, Ohio. 

Series Masterlist

Season 1 Masterlist

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Dean unbuckled his seatbelt and turned to face Sam. “Alright, I figure we’d hit Tucumcari by lunch, then head south, hit Bisbee by midnight.” 

Sam did not respond to him. 

“Sam wears women’s underwear.”

“I’ve been listenin’, I’m just busy,” Sam answered, never looking up from his phone as he scrolled through it.

“Busy doin’ what?”

“Reading e-mails.”

The older brother got out of the car and began to fill up the Impala’s gas tank. “E-mails from who?”

“From my friends at Stanford.”

“You’re kidding. You still keep in touch with your college buddies?”

“Why not?” Sam shrugged.

“Well, what exactly do you tell ‘em? You know, about where you’ve been, what you’ve been doin’?”

“I tell ‘em I’m on a road trip with my big brother. I tell ‘em I needed some time off after Jess.”

“Oh, so you lie to ‘em.”

You picked at your nails as you sat in the backseat. “What else is he supposed to do? Say, ‘Hey, I’m hunting ghosts’?”

“I get why he’s lying, I’m not tellin’ him to tell the truth.”

Sam looked over to Dean. “So, what am I supposed to do, just cut everybody out of my life?”

Dean shrugged.

“You’re serious?”

“Look, it sucks, but in a job like this, you can’t get close to people, period,” Dean answered.

“Oh, whatever.” You flopped back onto the leather seat.

"You’re kind of anti-social, you know that?” Sam told his brother.

“Yeah, yeah.” Dean shook his head.

The younger Winchester went back to his emails.

“God…” he trailed off.

“What?”

“In this e-mail from this girl, Rebecca Warren, one of those friends of mine.”

“Is she hot?”

You scoffed. “Really, Dean?”

“I went to school with her, and her brother, Zack,” Sam explained. “She says Zack’s been charged with murder. He’s been arrested for killing his girlfriend. Rebecca says he didn’t do it, but it sounds like the cops have a pretty good case.”

Dean paused. “Dude, what kind of people are you hangin’ out with?”

"No, man, I know Zack. He’s no killer.”

"Well, maybe you know Zack as well as he knows you.”

“They’re in St. Louis. We’re goin’.”

Dean leaned down into the passenger’s side window, chuckling, “Look, sorry ‘bout your buddy, okay? But this does not sound like our kind of problem.”

“It is our problem,” Sam argued. “They’re my friends.”

“St. Louis is four hundred miles behind us, guys.”

“So?” you questioned.

You and Dean exchanged annoyed looks before he got in the car and pulled away.

***

“Dude, this house belongs in the Hills,” you told Sam as you took in the large two-story house that sat on a beautifully manicured lawn. 

He chuckled at your comment. “This one’s no big deal compared to some of my other friends’ houses. You should’ve seen Jess’s parents’ house.”

You smiled faintly. “I bet it was beautiful.”

Sam nodded, mirroring your expression. He knocked on the wood of the large front door which opened to reveal a pretty girl with blonde hair.

“Oh my God, Sam!” she exclaimed.

“Well, if it isn’t little Becky,” he replied.

‘Little Becky?’ you thought.

“You know what you can do with that ‘little Becky’ crap,” she grinned. The two of them hugged.

“I got your e-mail,” he explained to her.

“I didn’t think that you would come here,” she said.

Dean took the opportunity to step in. “Dean. Older brother.” He extended his hand to her.

She shook it. “Hi.”

“Hi.”

“I’m (Y/N), I’m a family friend,” you said, effectively pulling her eyes away from Dean as you shook her hand. You were not about to watch him eye-fuck one of Sam’s friends.

“We’re here to help,” Sam told her. “Whatever we can do.”

“Come in.”

Becky led you three into the house.

“Nice place,” Dean commented as he looked around at the tall ceilings and seemingly expensive furniture.

“It’s my parents’. I was just crashing here for the long weekend when everything happened. I decided to take the semester off. I’m gonna stay until Zack’s free.”

“Where are your folks?”

“They live in Paris for half the year--” Becky replied.

‘Of course, they do. Wasps.’

“--so they’re on their way home now for the trial. Do you guys want a beer or something?” she asked as she led you into the kitchen.

The older Winchester smiled. “Hey--”

Sam cut him off. “No, thanks. So, tell us what happened.”

“Well, um, Zack came home, and he found Emily tied to a chair. And she was beaten up and bloody, and she wasn’t breathing.” Becky began to tear up. “So, he called 911, and the police—they showed up, and they arrested him. But, the thing is, the only way that Zack could’ve killed Emily is if he was in two places at the same time. The police—they have a video. It’s from the security tape from across the street. And it shows Zack coming home at 10:30. Now, Emily was killed just after that, but I swear, he was here with me, having a few beers until at least after midnight.”

“You know, maybe we could see the crime scene,” Sam suggested. “Zack’s house.”

“We could,” Dean agreed.

“Why? I mean, what could you do?”

“Well, me, not much. But Dean’s a cop.”

Dean laughed. “Detective, actually.”

‘Oh, great.’

“Really?” Becky’s eyes sparkled. “Where?”

“Bisbee, Arizona,” he lied."But I’m off-duty now.”

“You guys, it’s so nice to offer, but I just—I don’t know.”

Sam tried to convince her. “Bec, look, I know Zack didn’t do this. Now, we have to find a way to prove that he’s innocent.”

“Okay. I’m gonna go get the keys.” She walked away from you three down the hall. 

As soon as she was out of sight, Dean turned to his brother. “Oh, yeah, man, you’re a real straight shooter with your friends.”

“Look, Zack and Becky need our help,” Sam countered.

“I just don’t think this is our kind of problem.”

“Two places at once? We’ve looked into less.”

Dean still was not completely convinced.

“Sounds a little bit like our gig, Dean,” you pressed further.

He said nothing but looked defeated. 

You and Sam smiled at each other.

***

You and the boys stood next to Becky by the Impala. You stared out at the small, white house blocked off by yellow and black tape.

“You’re sure this is okay?” Becky asked Dean.

“Yeah. I am an officer of the law.” 

You rolled your eyes at Dean’s unconvincing tone. ‘Good grief.’ 

Dean led the way up to the house, ducking under the tape, followed by you and then Sam.

Despite how frequently you work jobs, the sight of a gruesome crime scene always made you sick to your stomach. 

Blood was splattered everywhere. It stained the newspapers on the coffee table, the knocked-over lamp in the corner of the living room, and the picture frame that hung tilted to the side.

“Bec, you wanna wait outside?” Sam asked her as she stood on the other side of the tape.

You looked over at the young woman. She had one arm wrapped around her stomach and one hand over her heart. The blonde steeled herself despite her obvious discomfort. “No, I wanna help.” 

“Tell us what else the police said,” Sam prompted.

“Well, there’s no sign of a break-in,” she started tearfully. “They say that Emily let her attacker in. The lawyers—they’re already talking about a plea bargain.” Becky looked around her, more tears rising to the surface as she did so. “Oh, God….”

“Look, Bec, if Zack didn’t do this, it means someone else did. Any idea who?”

The blonde shook her head, but then a look of remembrance crossed her face. “Um, there was something, about a week before. Somebody broke in here and stole some clothes—Zack’s clothes. The police—they don’t think it’s anything. I mean, we’re not that far from downtown. Sometimes people get robbed.” 

Sam and Dean walked away from you and Becky. The blonde followed after Dean as he went to the front door. Apparently, he was looking at the neighbor’s dog as you gathered from what Becky told him next.

“You know, that used to be the sweetest dog.” She looked over his shoulder at the barking animal.

“What happened?” he asked.

"He just changed.”

“Do you remember when he changed?”

“I guess around the time of the murder.”

Dean looked back at her before walking away. 

You went to the kitchen to meet Sam. He was looking at something posted to the fridge door.

“Whatcha lookin’ at?” you asked the boy.

He gestured the picture in front of him. It was of himself, Zack, and Becky.

“You were really close to these guys, huh?” 

“Yeah,” he nodded sadly.

“I’m sorry you had to leave all this behind,” you stated.

He shook his head. “It’s okay.”

Dean walked up behind you and his younger brother. “So, the neighbor’s dog went psycho right around the time Zack’s girlfriend was killed.”

“Animals can have a sharp sense of the paranormal,” Sam noted.

“Yeah, maybe Fido saw somethin’,” Dean affirmed.

“So, you think maybe this is our kind of problem?”

No. Probably not. But we should look at the security tape, you know, just to make sure.”

“You just can’t admit when you’re wrong, huh?”

“Nope,” he grinned.

You rolled your eyes and shook your head.

Becky walked over to you. 

“So, the tape. The security footage—you think maybe your lawyers could get their hands on it, ‘cause I just don’t have that kind of jurisdiction,” Dean told her.

“I’ve already got it. I didn’t wanna say something in front of the cop,” she explained.

The older brother laughed.

“I stole it off the lawyer’s desk. I just had to see it for myself.”

“Right on,” you grinned.

***

Once you got back to Becky’s parents’ house, the four of you sat down to watch the security footage.

The screen showed the front of Zack’s house lit up in the dark night by the lights on either side of the door.

“Here he comes,” Becky said just as Zack appeared on screen.

Dean noted the timestamp. “22:04, that’s just after ten. You said time of death was about 10:30.”

“Our lawyers hired some kind of video expert. He says the tape’s authentic. It wasn’t tampered with.”

“Hey, Bec, can we take those beers now?” Sam questioned.

“Oh, sure,” she answered. She got up from the couch to go to the kitchen.

“Hey,” Sam stopped her. “Maybe some sandwiches, too?”

“What do you think this is, Hooters?” she joked with a grin. She left the room shortly after.

“I wish,” Dean chuckled. “What is it?”

“Check this out.” Sam rewound the tape and replayed it. One of the frames showed Zack looking right at the camera, but his eyes had an unnatural silver color to them.

“Well, maybe it’s just a camera flare,” Dean pointed out.

“That’s not like any camera flare I’ve ever seen. You know, a lot of cultures believe that a photograph can catch a glimpse of the soul,” Sam began.

“Right,” you affirmed. “Remember how that dog completely freaked? Maybe he could sense this was some sort of a dark double of Zack’s.”

“Like a Doppelganger,” Sam added.

“Yeah. It’d sure explain how he was two places at once.”

***

Despite how you and Dean were not verbally attacking each other constantly, the tension between the two of you was stronger than ever. He did not trust you, and you were still pissed at him for what he said to you. 

Back at the motel, you hoped a shower would help clear your mind. You turned the water on and began to sing to yourself. 

‘Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night and

Wouldn't you love to love her?’

You used to love listening to Fleetwood Mac with your mother. “Rihannon” was one of her favorite songs.

‘Takes to the sky like a bird in flight and

Who will be her lover?’

Both you and your mother had beautiful voices. The two of you loved to sing to one of her cassette tapes together. “Rihannon” was one of those songs that when you sang it with her it would make you feel genuine peace. With the life you led, moments of peace were few and far between. 

‘All your life you've never seen

A woman taken by the wind’

One of your favorite memories with your mother was riding in her beat-up station wagon on a highway in West Texas. The sun was just beginning to set, the windows were rolled down, and the wind whipped through your hair. The shadows of the dense trees on either side of the road made shapes appear on your face with patches of light shining through the holes in the shadows. You were sixteen at the time. The two of you took this rare moment alone to sing together, simply enjoying each other’s company. 

‘Would you stay if she promised you heaven?

Will you ever win?’

You scrubbed your scalp as you rinsed the soap out of your hair, closing your eyes in an attempt to bring yourself back to that day. 

‘She is like a cat in the dark and then

She is the darkness

She rules her life like a fine skylark and when

The sky is starless’

If you could have your mom back, for even just a moment, maybe you would be able to feel that same peace again. You would feel safe and protected. The day before her passing was the last time you felt truly at peace.

‘All your life you've never seen

A woman taken by the wind’

Tears clouded your vision and your throat constricted as you continued to sing. 

‘Would you stay if she promised you heaven?

Will you ever win?

Will you ever win?’

***

A loud knock on your door pulled you out of your deep sleep.

You jumped, grabbing for the gun you kept under your pillow. You cocked it, walked up to the door, and pressed the muzzle of the gun against it. You opened it with your opposite hand just a crack. To your surprise, it was Dean.

You slammed it back in his face.

“(Y/N), open the damn door,” he demanded unenthusiastically.

You did not, but put the safety back on your gun and threw it on your bed. “What do you want, asshole? It’s almost five in the morning.”

“Yeah, I’m aware of that. Look, I don’t wanna be up either. It was Sam’s idea,” he explained. 

You opened the door just a crack. “Okay, what does he want at almost five in the morning?”

“I don’t know, he just had a thought, I guess.” Despite the fact that you were asking completely fair questions, his tone showed he was clearly agitated. “Get dressed.”

***

“Alright, so what are we doin’ here at 5:30 in the morning?” Dean questioned. He leaned against the hood of the Impala which was parked outside of Zack��s house. 

“I realized something,” Sam stated. “The videotape shows the killer goin’ in, but not comin’ out.”

You walked over to the younger of the two brothers who was across the street from the car. “So, he came out the back door?” 

"Right. So, there should be a trail to follow. A trail the police would never pursue.”

“‘Cause they think the killer never left, and they caught Zack inside,” you added.

“I still don’t know what we’re doin’ here at 5:30 in the morning,” Dean grumbled.

Both you and Sam chose to ignore him as you looked around outside of the building. 

“Blood,” you noted as you looked at a smear on a wooden telephone pole. “Somebody came this way.”

“Yeah, but the trail ends. I don’t see anything over here,” he said before taking a sip of his coffee.

An ambulance blared its sirens as it sped down the street that separated you and Sam from Dean. 

You looked up at Sam, who exchanged a knowing look with Dean.

Dean drove the three of you over to where you assumed the ambulance was coming from. He parked a few houses down from a house that was surrounded by police cars. One policeman was covering the house with yellow and black tape.

You got out of the Impala, watching as a man in a suit was handcuffed and shoved into the back of a police car. 

Dean walked a few paces ahead of you, stopping next to one of the onlookers. She looked as if she had been going for a jog when she stumbled upon the crime scene, as her hair was tied back and she had an MP3 played secured to her arm.

“What happened?” he asked her.

“He tried to kill his wife. Tied her up and beat her,” she informed him.

Sam tore his attention away from the house and turned to the woman.“Really?” 

“I used to see him going to work in the morning. He’d wave, say ‘hello.’ He seemed like such a nice guy.” The young woman shook her head. 

You watched as the cop car with the supposed killer in it drove off. 

The three of you decided to stay at the scene of the crime to dig around. You and Sam walked around the back of the house, looking for any sort of a clue. Sam lifted the lid on one of the two blue garbage cans behind the house. 

“Why are you dumpster diving?” you asked Sam. “I don’t think the killer’s hiding in there.”

“Shut up,” he chuckled. “I don’t know, I’m just looking for... anything. I don’t really know what to look for.”

“Yeah, me neither,” you told him as the two of you walked around to the front of the house.

Dean came up behind Sam a moment later. “Hey.”

The two of you turned around.

“Remember when I said this wasn’t our kind of problem?”

“Uh-huh,” you nodded.

“Definitely our kind of problem.”

“What’d you find out?” Sam questioned.

“Well, I just talked to the patrolman who was first on the scene, heard this guy, Alex’s story. Apparently, the dude was driving home from a business trip when his wife was attacked,” he informed you.

“So, he was two places at once,” Sam affirmed.

“Exactly. Then he sees himself in the house, police think he’s a nutjob.”

“Two dark doubles attacking loved ones in exactly the same way.”

“Could be the same thing doin’ it, too.”

You thought for a second. “Shapeshifter?”

Dean shrugged.

“Dude, bear with me on this one. It’s something that can make itself look like anyone.”

“Yeah, I got that part,” he replied.

“Every culture in the world has shapeshifter lore. You know, legends of creatures who can transform themselves into animals or other men,” Sam added.

“Right. Skinwalkers, werewolves,” you continued.

“We’ve got two attacks within blocks of each other. I’m guessin’ we’ve got a shapeshifter prowlin’ the neighborhood,” the younger brother went on.

“Shapeshifters aren’t exactly known for flying--” you started as you headed off back behind the building, “--so I think it’s safe to say that I found a trail back there. Someone ran out the back of this building and headed off this way.” you pointed down the street.

“Just like your friend’s house,” Dean told Sam.

“Yeah. And, just like at Zack’s house, the trail suddenly ends. I mean, whatever it is just disappeared,” you noted.

“Well, there’s another way to go—down,” the older Winchester pointed out.

You looked down to where the trail ended to find a manhole. 

The three of you climbed down the ladder into the hole, looking around the dark cavern. 

“I bet this runs right by Zack’s house, too,” Sam commented. “The shapeshifter could be using the sewer system to get around.”

You went to take a step but stopped yourself when you looked at what you were about to walk into. You bent down, examining the pile of what appeared to be blood and skin. 

“Is this from his victims?” Sam asked as he, too, bent down.

You took out your pocketknife, picking up some of the skin with the end of the blade. “Gross.”

“You know, I just had a sick thought,” Dean piped up. “When the shapeshifter changes shape—maybe it sheds.”

You looked back to see Sam’s nose scrunch up further as he thought about what Dean had said. “That is sick.”

You shook the skin off of your knife, wiping it off on Dean’s jacket.

“Hey!” He swatted your arm away.

You snickered. 

“C’mon, you two,” Sam commanded with a groan as he made his way up the ladder. 

Sam and Dean followed close behind you as you headed to the car. You leaned on the side of it as Dean popped open the trunk. 

“Well, one thing I learned from Dad, is that no matter what kind of shapeshifter it is, there’s one sure way to kill it.”

“Silver bullet to the heart,” Sam nodded. A moment later, his phone rang. “This is Sam... We’re near Zack’s, we’re just checkin’ some things out...” He mouthed Becky’s name to you to let you know who was on the phone. His expression changed a moment later to one of confusion. “What are you talkin’ about?... Why would you do that?” Suddenly, he seemed irritated. “Bec—... We’re tryin’ to help... Bec, I’m sorry, but—” He was cut off when she hung up on him.

“What was that all about?” you asked. 

“She found out about Dean.”

“What, how he’s not a detective?”

“Yep.”

“I hate to say it, but that’s exactly what I’m talkin’ about,” Dean jumped in. “You lie to your friends because if they knew the real you, they’d be freaked. It’s just--it’d be easier if--”

Sam understood where his brother was going with his statement. "If I was like you.”

“Hey, man, like it or not, we are not like other people. But I’ll tell you one thing. This whole gig—it ain’t without perks.” He held up a gun with a smirk.

***

The three of you headed back down the manhole, walking down the cavernous hallway with flashlights and guns in hand. 

“I think we’re close to its lair,” you told Sam.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because there’s another puke-inducing pile next to your face,” you grinned.

“Oh, God!” he cried as he turned to see skin and blood on the pipe not two inches from his face.

Dean noticed a pile of clothes in the corner. “Looks like it’s lived here for a while.”

“Who knows how many murders he’s gotten away with?” Sam shook his head.

You heard a small splash in a puddle behind Dean. You whipped around and aimed your flashlight at the sound, seeing the shifter in the form of the businessman. 

“Dean!” Sam shouted.

He wheeled around only to get punched in the face by the shifter. Dean toppled to the ground as the shifter ran away from you and the boys. 

Sam shot after it a few times, but he missed. You tore down the corridor after it, not even once taking a look at Dean.  

“Get the son of a bitch!” Dean yelled after you.

“That’s the idea, jackass!” you called back. You watched as the shifter climbed out of the manhole you and the Winchesters had used to get into the sewers. You scrambled up the ladder as quickly as you could, popping out of the ground and gazing out into the dark night.

You could just barely see the shifter at this point. You followed where you thought you had seen him turn. You held your gun inside your jacket, eyes focused on the alleyway you saw the shifter turn into. You pressed your back against the brick wall of the shop on the right of the alley before turning into it. You shined your flashlight down the dark alley, walking into it a few paces. The all too familiar smell of coconuts and tobacco filled your nose. When the beam of light hit the wall of the building along the back of the alley, you turned around, only to see the shifter in the form of the businessman staring directly at you. Before you could so much as aim your gun at it, it hit you over the head. Your vision went completely dark.

***

You woke up to an unfamiliar sight. The shifter had taken you to his lair; a cold, damp, dimly lit room in what seemed to be a house. You groaned before attempting to stand up, only to get choked by a rope that had been secured around your neck and pulled back by ropes around your hands. The shifter had tied you to a wooden post. 

‘Brilliant,’ you thought.

You heard muffled voices behind you, one that sounded like it was Dean’s. 

“Dean?” you called.

“(Y/N), it’s not--” Sam shouted, but cut himself off with a groan. 

“Dean” walked over to you. 

“Hiya, sweetheart,” he smirked, leaning down to your eye level. He put a hand next to your head on the post. 

“Dean, the rope around my neck, it’s too tight,” you lied, struggling against the ropes. You pretended like your throat was constricted by making your voice strained. “Help me, please,” you begged.

The shapeshifter chuckled. “How stupid do you think I am?”

You dropped the act. “It was worth a shot,” you mumbled.

“You act like Dean-- I’m sorry, I-- would help you anyway,” he said as he walked away from you.

You looked up at him curiously.

He turned back to face you. “I’m so ready to leave your sorry ass in the dust,” the shifter laughed coldly. “All you’ve done since we met you is cause more trouble for us. I hope you’re tellin’ the truth about leaving the second we find Dad, ‘cause I don’t know how much longer I can put up with you. God, from your voice to your personality, you aggravate the livin’ crap outta me.” The shapeshifter leaned back down in front of your face, the two of you only inches away from one another. 

“You’re a burden, (Y/N). You’re exhausting to be around. I constantly have to keep my guard up around you. I can’t trust you, not after what happened in Toledo. How do I know you won’t turn on me and Sammy?”

Tears welled up in your eyes, but you kept them at bay. 

He turned away from you once more. “Sammy... that’s another thing. I hate how close the two of you have gotten. I mean, you roll up in your stolen car and immediately have him wrapped around your finger. He’s so ready to defend you against me. Maybe that’s why I hate you so much. You’ve replaced me. And sooner or later, you’re gonna take him away from me. Hell, everyone else in my life’s left, why wouldn’t he?”

The shifter took a deep breath, his frustrated expression leaving his face. He replaced it with a smug look as he continued on berating you. “Y’know, take your voice and personality away, Dean would definitely wanna fuck you. He thought you were hot the first time he met you. Then he actually got to know you, and, eh, things changed. But I’m sure he’d have tons of fun with Sam’s little friend Becky.” A wicked grin spread across his face. “I think I’ll go pay her a visit.”

With that, the shapeshifter disappeared.

You heard Sam mutter something, and then someone coughing. 

“That better be you, Sam, and not that freak of nature,” you heard Dean call from somewhere in the cavern. 

“Yeah, it’s me,” Sam confirmed.

You steeled yourself, trying to push the shifter’s hurtful words out of your mind. “Sam, that thing went to Becky’s carryin’ Dean’s face,” you informed him. 

“Well, he’s not stupid. He picked the handsome one,” he told Sam.  

“Shut up,” you groaned, trying to wiggle your way out of the ropes around your wrists. 

“Yeah, that’s the thing. He didn’t just look like you, he was you,” Sam continued. “Or he was becoming you.”

“What do you mean?” Dean asked.

“I don’t know, it was like he was downloading your thoughts and memories.”

“You mean, like the Vulcan mind-meld?”

“Yeah, somethin’ like that. I mean, maybe that’s why he doesn’t just kill us,” Sam suggested. 

You heard shuffling behind you, which you assumed was Dean walking over to Sam.

“Hey, jackass, you passed me up,” you yelled at Dean.

“I know,” he called back to you. He went back to his conversation with Sam. “Maybe he needs to keep us alive. Psychic connection.” 

“Hands,” Sam ordered Dean. “Yeah. Come on, we gotta go. He’s probably at Rebecca’s already.”

“I’m still stuck here!”

Sam came over to help you get the ropes undone. However, Dean could care less about the state you were in.

You found all of the guns the shapeshifter had stolen off of the three of you, and you tossed each of the guns to their respective owners. 

Sam boosted you up to a window high off the ground in the room you were in.  You climbed out, “Come on. We gotta find a phone, call the police.” Sam started to head down the street. 

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” Dean effectively stopped his brother. “You’re gonna put an APB out on me.”

“Sorry,” Sam grimaced.

“This way.” You took off down the street. The neighborhood you sprinted through was dark, the street lamps so scattered and dimly lit that you could hardly see your feet hit the pavement below you. As you came up on a block full of shops, you slowed your run to a walk as to not draw too much attention in the well-lit area. 

You almost headed past a shop with a bunch of televisions set to a news channel in the window, but you stopped when you heard what the reporter was relaying to the audience.

“An anonymous tip led police to a home in the Central West End, where a S.W.A.T team discovered a local woman bound and gagged. Her attacker, a white male, approximately twenty-four to thirty years of age, was discovered hiding in her home.”

A sketch of Dean appeared on the screen next to the reporter. 

“Man! That’s not even a good picture,” Dean piped up from next to you.

You looked around, making sure no one heard Dean’s loud exclamation and got suspicious.

“It’s good enough,” Sam muttered. He quickly walked past the shop to get back in the cover of night on the other side of the strip of stores.

“Man!” Dean grunted as he followed his brother.

“Hush, you big baby,” you snapped. 

Sam turned down an alley with you and his older brother falling behind. 

“Come on,” Sam urged the two of you quietly. “They said attempted murder. At least we know--”

Dean cut him off. “I didn’t kill her.”

“We’ll check with Rebecca in the morning, see if she’s all right.”

“Alright, but first I wanna find that handsome devil and kick the holy crap out of him.”

“Dean,” you started, “We have no weapons. No silver bullets.”

He stopped, turning to face you. "(Y/N), the guy’s walkin’ around with my face, okay, it’s a little personal. I wanna find him.”

“Okay. Where do we look?” You crossed your arms over your chest.

The older Winchester paused for a moment. “Well, we could start with the sewers.”

“We have no weapons, genius. He stole our guns, we need more.” 

“The car?” Sam offered.

You shrugged. “He probably drove it over to Rebecca’s.”

“The news said he fled on foot. I bet it’s still parked there.”

"The thought of him drivin’ my car,” Dean snarled.

Sam rolled his eyes. “Alright, come on.”

“It’s killin’ me,” the older brother whined.

“Let it go.”

***

As you walked up the street on the right side of Becky’s house, you noticed the silhouette of the car outlined by the dim light of the street lamp.

“Oh, there she is!” Dean exclaimed happily, the relief in his voice evident. “Finally, something went right tonight.”

A police car appeared around the corner and parked next to the Impala.  

“Oh, shit,” you muttered. You turned around, beginning to run away, but another cop car was parked across the street at the intersection you had come from.

This way, this way.” Dean headed toward a fence.

“You go. I’ll hold ‘em off,” Sam told you and his brother.

“What are you talking about? They’ll catch you,” the older Winchester said.

“Look, they can’t hold me. Just go, keep out of sight,” the brunet urged. “Meet me at Rebecca’s.”

“You got it, chief,” you called back.

 Dean was the first to hop the fence and you followed. You stumbled upon landing in the backyard of the house you happened upon.

The voice of a police officer broke through the silent night as you and Dean started off to the fence on the backside of the yard. “Don’t move! Keep your hands where I can see ‘em.”

You climbed over the fence into the backyard of another house and ran around the left side of it to head down the street the cop car was parked at the intersection of. The two of you stayed out of the glow of the lamp lights that lined either side of the road as you ran along. 

When you had gotten several blocks over from where you had that run-in with the cops, you and Dean stopped to catch your breath. You both sat down on the street corner, chests heaving. The older Winchester went to lay back, but you stopped him.

“Hey, stay sittin’ up,” you directed.

“What? Why?”

“You’re gonna pass out if you do.”

“Uh, okay.” He looked at you as if you did not know what you were talking about but still followed your orders. 

The two of you sat in silence for a minute. 

“So, what now?” you questioned. 

He shook his head. “The cops are probably still snoopin’ around Rebecca’s house. Can’t go get the car ‘til they’re cleared out.”

“Yeah, so, what now?” you asked again.

“I don’t know, man,” he grumbled annoyedly. “You got any ideas, Einstein?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t be asking you, dumbass,” you responded snippily. “What time is it?” 

“I don’t know. I don’t have a watch on me.”

“Great,” you sighed, standing up. You brushed your hands off on your pants and dusted the back of your jeans off. 

“Could go get some burgers,” Dean piped up from his seated position on the grass.

“Your brother just got arrested, and you’re a wanted man, but sure, let’s take you where everybody in the joint’s gonna be able to clearly see your face.”

“Jeez, calm down. It was just a suggestion.”

“Yeah, a dumb one.”

“What’s your deal, (Y/N)?” Dean stood up, and you turned to face him.

“My deal? What about yours?”

“I don’t have one! But you’ve clearly got a stick up your ass.”

You shook your head in frustration. “Dean, don’t lie to me. You have a deal. With me, specifically. The shifter told me all about it.” 

The young man tilted his head to the side in question. “What?”

“Yeah, he told me what you really think of me,” you continued. You took a step toward him with each sentence. “How much I annoy you. How much I exhaust you. How much of a burden I am to you.”

His face dropped out of its angry expression as he took a step back.

“He also told me how you think I’m gonna replace you in Sam’s eyes.” You laughed coldly. “Is that why you hate me so much? Because you’re so insecure about your relationship with Sam?”

The fact that Dean did not respond showed you that you were correct.

“I gotta be real with you, that’s pathetic.” You regretted what you said instantly.

The anger returned to his face. “Still think you don’t have a stick up your ass after you say something like that?”

“I’m sorry, I--”

“No. Just shut up.”

He walked off down the street.

Your frustration replaced your guilt in an instant. “Seriously? I say one thing that cuts slightly below surface-level insults and you get butthurt?”

Dean turned around. 

You walked up to him. “What I just told you was fucked up, sure. But it wasn’t half as bad as what you said to me back in Toledo. That I probably drove my family crazy enough that they'd kill themselves over it? Does that ring a bell?"

“What do you want me to say, (Y/N)?”

“I want you to apologize, for starters!” you shouted back. Your tone changed to dripping with sarcasm. “Now, I know that would require you to humble yourself and get past your superiority complex, so I understand how difficult that’s gonna be for you.”

“I’m sorry, okay!” he yelled, throwing his arms out to his sides. “And I’m sorry about what that shifter said to you.”

“Thank you!” You took a moment to collect yourself. “And I’m sorry, too.”

“Thanks.”

You looked around at the houses that surrounded you on either side of the road the two of you stood in the middle of. “Now that we probably woke up half the neighborhood, let’s bounce.”

Dean chuckled, walking down the street away from you. You caught up to him.

“I don’t know where you think you’re going, we haven’t exactly decided what we’re doing.”

“I’m goin’ back to Becky’s. The cops probably cleared out by now,” he replied.

‘Okay, way to fill me in on what the plan is,” you scoffed. 

“I didn’t realize I had to share every little bit of my thought process with you,” Dean clapped back.

“Well, it’s kinda helpful to know what you’re thinkin’ when we’re working together,” you told him.

“Whatever,” Dean brushed you off. “Why does it bug you, anyway? That’s such a stupid thing to fight with me about.”

“I don’t know,” you confessed. “Your face is just annoying.”

“Gee, thanks,” he retorted dryly. 

As you approached the car, you noticed the sun had begun to rise.

“I guess that answers the ‘what time is it’ question,” you noted. “It’s probably somewhere around five in the mornin’.”

Dean popped open the trunk, shrugging on the navy blue canvas jacket he found on top of the gun compartment. You grabbed your duffel bag out of the trunk before Dean opened the hollowed-out bottom of the trunk. 

You grabbed more silver bullets out of your bag and loaded them into your gun as Dean filtered through the weapons in his trunk.

“Doesn’t look like the shifter took anything,” he told you.

“Alright, to the sewers.” You headed up to the passenger’s seat after haphazardly throwing your bag over Dean’s head back into the trunk.

“Watch it!” Dean scolded. “You almost knocked me out!”

“But I didn’t,” you smirked, ducking down into the front seat. 

***

You and Dean pointed your flashlights and guns around the sewer as you walked down the corridor together. 

You walked into a chamber filled with candles and chains hanging from the ceiling. You aimed your flashlight at the ground, noticing many piles of shed skin and blood all over the floor. You even noticed a few teeth and fingernails near the pile.

“I’m gonna be sick,” you grimaced, looking up at Dean.

“(Y/N)?” you heard a muffled voice call from the far right corner of the chamber.

“Bec?” you responded, rushing over to a curled up figure covered by a tarp. You pulled the cover off to reveal a disheveled Rebecca, her hands and feet bound with rope.

“Thank God,” she sighed when she saw your face as you began to untie her. The blonde’s face was red, and tears had dried on her face. 

Dean came over to the two of you, coming up behind you. “What happened?” 

Rebecca started crying again as she spoke. “I was walking home, and everything just went white. Someone hit me over the head, and I wound up here just in time to see that thing turn into me. I don’t know, how is that even possible?”

“It’s okay, you’re okay now,” you coaxed her as you finished untying her binds.

“Come on. Can you walk?” Dean asked as he helped Becky stand up. 

She nodded.

“Okay, we’ve gotta hurry. Sam went to see you.”

***

You jumped out of the car before it had even stopped rolling into the half-circle shaped driveway, rushing into Rebecca’s house behind Dean.

You held your gun out in front of you, Dean doing the same and yelling “Hey!” as he entered the living room. 

You saw the shifter in the form of Dean jump off of Sam, whom he had previously been strangling. Dean shot the shifter in the chest twice, and it dropped to the ground dead. 

You ran over to Sam. “Hey! Hey, are you okay?” you questioned as he slowly sat up, grasping at his neck. 

The younger brother groaned, nodding in response. 

You blew out a puff of air. Rebecca came running over, crouching down to yours and Sam’s level, looking him over. 

You looked back at Dean and watched as he ripped the necklace he always wore from around the shapeshifter’s neck. He looked over at you, giving you a knowing nod. His jaw was clenched, and his eyebrows were furrowed. 

You stood up, leaving Sam and Rebecca on the floor while you walked over to Dean. His eyes followed your face as you got closer to him 

“So, what are you gonna do with... you?” you chortled, trying to make light of the situation. 

He scoffed at you. “I guess have Becky call the cops once we get the hell outta dodge.”

“Sounds good,” you nodded, glancing down at the shifter. Your movements tensed as you remembered the awful things he said to you. Things that had apparently been on Dean’s mind; the reasons why he hated you. Despite the fact that Dean had apologized, you were still hurt. 

“You okay?” Sam asked you when he walked up behind you. 

You turned around to face him, noticing Dean had left his crouched position next to the shapeshifter.

“Yeah,” you lied, “I’m good.”

He gave you a knowing look with a tilt of his head.

You smiled half-heartedly. “We’ll talk about it later.”

***

You and Dean were packing up the car while Sam said his goodbyes to Rebecca. You looked on as the two friends shared a hug. When they pulled away, the blonde waved to you and Dean. You smiled at her, waving back. 

“So, what about your friend, Zack?” Dean asked as soon as Sam walked up to the car. 

“Cops are blamin’ this Dean Winchester guy for Emily’s murder,” Sam smirked. “They found the murder weapon in the guy’s lair, Zack’s clothes stained with her blood. Now they’re thinking maybe the surveillance tape was tampered with. Yeah, Becca says Zack will be released soon.” 

Dean rolled his eyes before he got into the car, leaving you and Sam chuckling to yourselves. 

***

Dean broke the silence in the car that you three had been enjoying the entirety of the ride up until that point. “Sorry, man.”

You looked away from the trees that flew by outside of the Impala’s window over to Dean.

“About what?” Sam inquired.

“I really wish things could be different, you know? I wish you could just be….Joe College.”

“No, that’s okay. You know, the truth is, even at Stanford, deep down, I never really fit in.”

“Well, that’s ‘cause you’re a freak,” Dean quipped.

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Well, I’m a freak, too. I’m right there with ya, all the way.”

“Yeah, I know you are,” the younger brother laughed.

“Aw, isn’t this sweet,” you piped up from the backseat.

“Shut up, (Y/N),” Dean responded, making you snicker. He paused. "You know, I gotta say—I’m sorry I’m gonna miss it.” 

Sam turned his head to his brother. “Miss what?” 

"How many chances am I gonna have to see my own funeral?”

You snorted, curling up against the window while the car went quiet again. The shapeshifter’s words swirled around in your mind, causing the corners of your lips to turn down. 

Were you really a burden to Dean? Or was the shapeshifter just saying that to get under your skin? 

‘I mean, he never denied feeling that way when we were fighting,’ you reminded yourself. You huffed, crossing your arms. 

‘I’ll talk to Sam about it next time we stop,’ you told yourself. You closed your eyes and decided napping was a better idea than being in your own head at the moment. 

One final thought made its way into your head before you could suppress it. 

‘He can’t really think that badly of me... could he?’

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[onisiondrama]

PART 17 - videos #32 & 33

(Click here for video mirrors) - These are not my words or thoughts, I’m just summarizing what Greg / James is saying in his videos. Apologies for any offensive language or comments that may appear. - I am not repeating stories anymore and will replace these stories with brackets describing what he’s talking about. If you don’t know these stories you’re going to have to go back and read previous parts or watch his previous videos.

it’s time

- Someone on Discord said they wish Sarah would just tell the truth. Greg tells Sarah if she has a strong case, present it instead of taking things out of context. No fake screen shots, no bad acting, no faking anything. Just present what happened. [She went crazy after he dumped her, wants to ruin his life, no wand, he was creeped out by her, Aladdin was very good, didn’t want to make out] He wishes Sarah would come out and talk about [Sarah trashed Billie and Ayalla for years, Ayalla wanted to sleep with her, Sarah was kicked out for misunderstanding a joke, suicide threat, all because she was rejected, she’s imbalanced.] - Greg says it would make sense if she told it like it is instead of changing her story. [She says she had love for Kai, then says Kai is a monster] He wishes Sarah would admit she knew she wasn’t supposed to have photos and didn’t send them. Greg and Kai don’t know what Sarah is talking about with the photos. - Says he knows Regina is incapable of being honest. How could someone try to make it all about them when they’re not even involved? He doesn’t remember even talking to Regina and now Regina’s part of the Hansen team. A conflict of interest. - Sarah should come out and tell the truth instead of spending tens of thousands on a lawyer to find out in court he and Kai have hordes of documentation. He would love to share that with you guys but now his Patreon, Younow, and another social platform are gone because he posted a positive text and forgot to crop out the top. You bound his hands. If he shows any proof, you guys will report it as doxing and he will lose even more of his stuff. They have 5 years of texts on their computer and in the cloud. - He tells Sarah this is over. He finally told his side and has all the documents to back it up. If she wanted to take it to court, he’d gladly show the judge the evidence. The judge is used to seeing frauds like her. People who are malicious and vindictive all because someone broke up with them. [Sarah is mentally unstable, sells prescription drugs, illegal drug use, attempted marry someone for money for their green card.] He tells her these are serious crimes and he wishes she would acknowledge who she really is and admit she’s totally screwed now that the truth came out. - There’s no way Sarah is feeling good about herself right now. When Greg was a child he took a little toy car from a library and the guilt ate him up. It still bothers him to this day. When he was very young, he tried to walk out with a smoothie he didn’t pay for because he friend did the same and he was following him. The person behind the register asked if he was going to pay for that. Greg is humiliated to this day about it. He can’t imagine how Sarah would feel knowing Kai literally hates her. Kai has never felt more betrayed by another human being in his entire life. As Greg understands it, there is no one Kai is more disappointed with and feeling a victim of than Sarah. He talks to Sarah and says he doesn’t know how she could live with herself knowing that after saying she had so much love for Kai. She doesn’t understand how much damage she did to Kai. - [Greg compares Sarah saying she sexually extorted them as a joke to Greg going into a store and pointing a fake gun. They give him money and he walks out with it, then he says it’s just a joke.] Says calling it a joke doesn’t apply because he walked out with the money. She admitted she did it when she said it was a joke. [NDA / extortion story] By Washington state standard that’s a crime.  - Greg says he would love to prove his point to a judge. He’s obviously very articulate. She knows he has all their texts and the video where she says Kai is innocent. She can blow money on a lawyer if she wants. If she has any cognitive competence, she’d know what he’s saying is true and it’s over. He tells her she should have moved on instead of trying to ruin people’s lives because she couldn’t take rejection. She wasted Chris Hansen’s time and embarrassed him. Eventually Hansen might admit what a joke this is. She’s wasted the time of the millions of people that watched the streams and believed her bullshit. It’s time to fess up.

why

- On twitter someone asked why Greg called the cops on Chris Hansen when Greg invited him to an interview. Greg says that’s a stupid misinformed question. - Greg points out he’s not wearing his black rubber ring because it broke. Kai got him a new one so you’ll see him wear it soon. - Says imagine you met someone on discord and invited them to Skype sometime to interview them. All the profits will go to charity. They respond through Mike Morse. Mike Morse says no, but you can go on their show and you don’t know where the money’s gong. Their show is called “to fuck you over.” It’s not called “to prove someone innocent” or “to see what the truth is.” The sole purpose of the show is to catch predators. Why would someone be dumb enough to go on a show like that and expect it to be fair and balanced? - Where is all the donation money going that these “victims” [hand quotes] are generating for Hasen? [Chris Hansen financial issues.] - The show has an obvious bias. The title of the show and the leading questions show how biased they are. - He also didn’t want to go on the show to generate money to pay of Hansen’s debts. Greg says Hansen bought another boat. - Greg says he asked for the legal information from them so he could talk to lawyers about slander and that didn’t work out so he asked Hansen to be on his livestream for charity. Vince called him a predator in an email, so why would he work with them? - Mike Morse said Hansen won’t go on Greg’s show for charity. Greg guesses Hansen doesn’t care about charity and would rather make money for himself. [Mike Morse allegations] Greg says no one’s ever taken him to court for groping because he doesn’t grope people. - Imagine if someone who you met on discord who you had legal problems with because they slandered you showed up to your house. Flew across the country, showed up to your house, and knocked on your door with 6 other dudes. 7 dudes total and your family’s inside. This dude didn’t tell you he was going to show up to your house, he admits in a video you didn’t know he was coming, you didn’t invite him to your house, then he acts like he was invited because he doesn’t want to go to jail for ignoring no trespassing signs. If Hansen said he was invited, it was a lie. He says the 6 dudes stayed up the road because they thought they weren’t breaking the law, but they were withing 50 feet of the no trespassing signs. They knew they weren’t supposed to be there.  - Hansen is known for letting pedos escape because he doesn’t know entrapment laws, for hopefully catching predators at some point, and for getting that guy to kill himself and getting sued for $100,000,000 and losing the lawsuit and his career. You just need to stop being a sheeple and do some research to find out Hansen is corrupt. You think the world is black and white, heroes and villains. Heroes are just people who hurt people and feel good about themselves. Villains know they’re evil and don’t care. Heroes are people that go to Iraq to kill a bunch of people and feel good about it. - Obviously the world is not black and white. Obviously with all the articles and court documents, Hansen is corrupt as fuck. If Hansen wanted to claim slander, he would have to take it up with the news because Greg is just passing news articles. - Greg says Vince was there too when Hansen showed up. After, Vince wrote Greg and email, “the least you could do is offer us coffee.” Greg says they showed up to his house, his family was there, he had to call the cops. The cops told Greg they waited until they all left. They also told him to file an anti harassment protection order, which is what Greg said in court under oath. [Greg sarcastically acts surprised all his stories are lining up.] Outrage culture. You guys are the worst.

[blumenct]

i guess no one from that community can see me here lol so here’s some fun stuff about a streamer that i’ve experienced the past year

so i started following the former vinesauce streamer j*****i_m**e a little over a year ago and subbed a bit after. person i found amusing and played things that appealed to me. joined the discord community and made friends and became a regular myself.

and you know, white 30-something new yorker, nothing standout or marginal about him. had a funny voice and was crude but like that was the appeal. being vinesauce-derivative is also a plus. very shitposty atmosphere it was nice. he attracted a lot of stick-in-the-mud types though, which was really super bizarre for said shitposty atmosphere. a big lgbtq crowd though. pretty wide age demo too.

anyway, little discomfort things happen over time. i recall a thing happening during stream that got chat to chant “eat the rich” and he didn’t like that because he “doesn’t advocate violence.” which for any thinking person is offputting. and possibly the worst timing of all, right at the peak of the george floyd protests he was playing sonic adventure 2, which involved a sequence where you’re chased by police. cue the acab’s and blm’s and whatnot in chat by people who were already heated. he said he didn’t want any of that because he had family who were cops. so at this point i’m like okay, yikes, i need to prepare to distance.

not long after was a stream where the topic of the military recruitment twitch crap came up. lots of disgruntled anti-military sentiment in chat of course, because again, this dude attracts a lot of marginalized people for an audience, and again he wasn’t having it. family and all that. this reached levels of hypocrisy when the topic switched to those high school army recruiters which he revealed he didn’t know was “serious” and didn’t believe was something they could do. people were quick to point out that, yes, they recruit children.

so as you can imagine it was a very “no politics” sort of environment, except the kind that plays so centrist it allows harmful rhetoric. classic.

the streamer in question was also weirdly bad with technology. he left the discord in the hands of his mods, very rarely appearing to speak in the server. maybe a dozen messages a month if you’re lucky enough to see them. normal interactions on twitter but he just could not bother to understand discord.

around that time one of the community regulars stopped showing up because she was 16, which everyone knew, and the streamers realizes he needs to enforce age policy. thing is, she was a very important part of the community, often running these streams from behind the scenes by helping with guides and emulations and junk. girl less than half his age being an important player like that felt scummy. she’s apparently got no hard feelings but wanted him to apologize for something, i have no idea. her being black and outspoken about blm makes it feel more and more not okay.

the streamer at one point made an announcement that there was some “creep” stuff going on that he was trying to prevent. there’s no way of knowing who precisely was involved but as of recent events having people air grievances it may have been her. allegedly part of the reason this lady was barred from the community was very intentionally the streamer distancing himself from the situation.

so this all culminates in something a couple days ago. the server has a /all ping announcing a new rule, that voice chat and streaming on the server is no longer allowed. and this really riled people up. the final say was that it was very difficult to moderate people streaming, was reasonable, but it was kind of ass we couldn’t have jackbox or among us sessions in our own community anymore.

but this REALLY riled people up. you had lurkers and new people coming out of the woodwork to defend the decision, but a lot of more regular people used this as an opportunity to complain about the community as a whole. this included a couple people mentioning how they barely watched the content on twitch or youtube. some of them weren’t even huge fans anymore, but they enjoyed the community and the friends they made.

so from on high comes the streamer and

he didn’t like that.

a complete failure to comprehend why anyone would want to stick around even if they didn’t like him. the tone was alarming and people were bothered by it and it riled everyone up more. someone posted a big paragraph mentioning stuff i’ve said above, cited them as bigoted behavior and cherry-picking political topics to allow. another doubled down saying that they weren’t into the content, and mysteriously they vanished from the server. a mod assured us they left on their own but minutes later the streamer confirms they were banned. again this was alarming.

and the thing was, despite my discontent with the situation, i was sitting on the fringes and shitposting about it in tried and true fashion. i felt attacked and was afraid to say anything damning, but i realized, i wasn’t totally participating in the discussion? these were other people completely independently feeling these things and venting. it made me see that i wasn’t crazy.

now i have a few friends i met through the community who had left a while back, so i also knew these problems existed in many forms. stuff regarding transphobia and obvious hypocrisies.

so the streamer and mods say that if anyone is spreading shit and bad worth of mouth to report it so they can get banned. the word “purge” is used. people i’ve never seen post on the discord applaud it and others are uncomfortable. i saw a couple announce themselves leaving and another couple disappearing. i received messages from friends who wanted to be in contact in case anything happened, and i dm’d a couple myself.

this morning you can feel it’s a bit tense because the people posting are different. there’s still discussion of the streamer being a stressed and anxious guy and his yelling at people is just how he interacts. i make a dry comment about most 35-year old men seeking therapy instead which i don’t believe anyone liked but hey. later this evening i found i’m banned from the server, like 6 hours after saying that or anything at all. gives you the impression they’re laboring over these ban decisions or it’s a more sweeping purge.

so, good riddance i guess. i was figuring out how best to leave, maybe tell anyone who wants to talk that they can approach me, but that won’t happen. i’m glad i got the few like-minded people i have because they’re good people. sometimes expressing solidarity can open doors you wouldn’t normally come to, and i’m happy some members of the community felt they could come to me.

yeah i would avoid the stream and its community if possible because i don’t see it improving, just sweeping potentially dangerous problems under the rug.

by some incredible circumstance i don’t think anyone involved in that community, friend or foe, interacts with my tumblr to any degree. i’m mainly looking to vent so i knew i could vomit out paragraphs here. if by chance you are part of that community and find this, well, i’d prefer you bring it up with me if this affects you at all. i am not doing this as a confrontation or call-out which is why i censor his name so heavily but leave it open. it’s a posthumous thing. a journal entry even.

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

Punisher 2099 #1 Thoughts

This issue far and away blows every other one in this event thus far out of the water!Remember when I criticized the rebooting of the 2099 line on principle.

Remember how I said it was asinine to redo the 2099 line with a 2019 lens of the future?

Well I’ll have to admit to being somewhat wrong about that.

Its still insulting and dumb to reboot the line. And there is still precious little about 2019’s vision of the future that’d be all that different to 1992’s. Or at least if you were trying to still be similar to the latter’s vision.

Buuuuuuuut…whilst those things are still broadly dumb this issue makes excellent use of them. And does so in a way that almost  justifies this direct.

  Lonnie Nadler & Zac Thompson (who I’ve never heard of before this issue) have truly EMBRACED the sci-fi nature of this event and the mission statement of it to reboot and update this vision of the future.

  In this issue they present not just a new spin on Punisher 2099, but a wholesale new spin on the Punisher, at least from my own limited experience with the character.

  The original Punisher 2099 (Jake Gallows) is an important part of this story, but he is not the main character, rather that’s new character Hector Tago.

  At first glance you might think that we’re in a similar situation to F4 2099 wherein the title character is in fact not the main character, but thats not the case here.

  Hector IS the Punisher of this title.

  This is something of a mixed bag, especially if you liked the original Punisher 2099.

  On principle you aren’t going to like such a change, let alone rebooting Jake’s characterization. In all honesty at face value the story could’ve worked just as effectively had Jake been the lead character and someone else (Hector or another original character) filled his role  in the narrative. That also would’ve cut closer to the original character.

  On the other hand though...how many people honestly even liked the original Punisher 2099?

  Seriously, I’ve read it and seen multiple reviews of it and it comes up as unimpressive. It was really just ANOTHER Punisher book amidst the sea of them in the 1990s. What made things worse is that Jake Gallows wasn’t all that distinctive from Frank Castle. Whilst Miguel O’Hara zigged where Peter Parker zagged, Jake Gallows functionally simply wore a different outfit with more high tech equipment and had baseball bat.

  When you look at a lot of the best 2099 reinventions of classic characters they always take something intrinsic to the character’s power set, costume and name and take it in a different direction. Case in point, Cap 2099 does from a free single white male into a sort of enslaved married Hispanic female (who’s RIPPED). Black Widow 2099 is literally a black woman who eats her lovers post-coital. In fact a fair few of the 2099 reinventions of characters operated by taking characters’ names and powers more literally.

  Punisher 2099 wasn’t initially approached that way. But Hector Tago, the NEW Punisher 2099 absolutely was.

  A major theme of this story, perhaps THE major theme, is punishment.

Jake Gallows in his mind is punishing the Thorites for his family’s deaths.

Davis Dunn is punished for crimes he didn’t commit.

Everyone punishes each other via a form of social media (we’ll get back to that), Kenji Wallace being the most obvious example.

And Hector punishes Gallows, but more importantly he punishes HIMSELF!

He views being the punisher as a form of atonement for the sins he committed as part of the authorities, and he is seemingly committed now to fighting the system.

This is almost the polar opposite of Frank Castle isn’t it?

Frank was a man who believed in the system, but felt it wasn’t harsh enough. His objections to it were not so much that it hurt citizens but rather that it didn’t go far enough in protecting them by curtailing criminal elements. Thus when those criminal elements took his family away from him, he resolved to punish them and by extension ALL criminals.

The fact that Hector is in most respects on the opposite end of the spectrum from Frank makes the Gallows in truth all to perfect an antagonist. Due to being so similar to the original Punisher, Gallows on a meta level represents the typical depiction of the Punisher and thus through on the page contrast with Hector more clearly emphasises where Hector zigs where Frank/Jake zagged.

The one thing Hector and Frank do share though is their absolute commitment to their respective missions. For both men, becoming the Punisher was a rebirth and they lived for their missions. One of the best scenes of the comic is when Hector metaphorically burns his old life down. He’s not Hector anymore. He is simply the Punisher!

I pray for the original 2099 line to be restored but if there was some way to fold Hector back into it, that’d be just perfect!

The ONLY thing that doesn’t really work with his character is the fact that there was zero justification for him to adorn himself in the skull outfit. It kind of came out of nowhere and he does it simply because it’s a Punisher book and that’s just expected.

There are other great aspects to the book too.

As I said up top, the title embraces the sci-fi nature of the event and the mission statement of re-evaluating the 2099 from a 2019 perspective vs. a 1992 perspective.

Whilst that’s mostly pointless this book makes it work by zeroing in on several elements that were either not around in 1992 or at least not as talked about:

·       The prevalence of surveillance technology, including facial recognition technology (speculative science fiction in 1992, actual science reality in 2019). This was achieved through the IRIS drones among other security cameras

·       Deep fake technology (see above). This was conveyed through the alterations of the IRIS’s allegedly objective recordings. Its particularly dangerous as its used as propaganda by the authorities.

·       Police corruption and brutality, especially towards marginalized groups (definitely a thing in 1992, but the current zeitgeist in the 2010s is distinctly anti-cop). Literally everything the Public Eye do (especially regarding the Thorites), they reminded me of the Street Judges from Judge Dredd. I might be somewhat misreading the metaphor though because the Thorites aren’t exactly innocent, but one shouldn’t judge them as a monolith I suppose.

·       Greater exposure of homosexual people, trans people and social activists (again a thing in 1992, but very much not as talked about as it is now). Wallace’s character. The comic book presents him as a man in a same sex relationship and it’s no big deal. He then transformed for lack of a better word into a robot, a robot who literally preaches to the crowds about the ills of society. He’s wiped out by the police. What’s most interesting is that not only is being in a gay relationship no big deal but Wallace’s transformation was motivated BY wanting to reconcile with his lover.  

·       Social media and how it’s empowered the court of public opinion. Everyone gets rated by everyone else on social media and you can find yourself essentially exiled as a result.

·       Arguably dangerous prescription drugs, though I don’t know enough about that to really touch the topic.

·       Artificial intelligence, though this is very lightly part of the story, more a background fact rather than something really explored

·       The erosion of objectivity in favour of efficiency

For starters, whilst the text boxes doling out exposition about how technology and prison system work were interesting...maybe show instead of tell? This is a visual medium, showing is actually a lot easier than telling us.·       The Conan 2099 comic had a warning about mature content even though that amounted to Conan cutting some people up. Maybe that does warrant a mature content warning, but you know if so then maybe this comic with it’s literal tree made from corpses should get one too? Just be consistent is all.

One more sort of positive I’ve going to give out, this was the first issue that made the Alpha story seem relevant.

In the Alpha story you SEE stuff that either sets up directly events for this comic or thematically sets it up by establishing the Public Eye’s conflicts with the Thorites. The only downside is that the tease for Jake Gallows, in particular him being Punisher 2099, was false advertising.

Also, if this story was deliberately written with the intention of subverting your expectations by making Hector the Punisher instead then it failed. Because it was obvious from the moment Hector became the character we were following.

Over all I’d HIGHLY recommend checking this book out. Small problems aside it slapped hard!

[shewasanamericangirl]

screamin bout zi-o 36

i had fun doing this last week, so let’s make another screencap post! of course, i said that, and then it took several days to upload all the pictures because tumblr just stops fucking working sometimes. anyhoo! it’s yuko kitajima roast hour. image-heavy and spoiler-heavy, naturally.

so ginga blew everyone up and they ran away to a sewer it seems.

honestly that theory makes as much sense as anything else on this booty ass fuckin’ kamen rider show

i was just like...he isn’t

but then he was

swartz: she could step on me in those red pumps and i’d say Thank You

hora: i regret so much right now

uhr: *shonen anime character walking down the street pose*

then over quartzer plays and im starting to feel a little lost because i don’t get to hear about the episode according to woz’s book? hello??

yuko’s still out gettin her spa treatments and shit, god only knows how she got the money for all that, and somehow she never crosses paths with the cops or anyone who recognizes her from the news?? uh

honestly yeah?? a queen deserves to look GOOD. her theme music is eerily sexy, i need an mp3 of it right now

don’t get me wrong, im well aware that swartz is being a suck-up to try and get yuko to help with his plan to seize ginga’s power, but damn im kinda shipping swartz with yuko now too...i mean, he WAS looking at her while doing the sexy ice cream thing last week. what flavor ice cream would yuko be? black cherry chip maybe?

(headcanon: woz tries apple pie ice cream and declares it a crime against both apple pie and ice cream alike--but he still eats the whole coneful)

hora and uhr get ZA WARUDO’D down the stairs by swartz

we were all uhr right here

yeaaaaaah she just doesn’t want to fight ginga

tsukuyomi’s a mood. someone put a band-aid on geiz’s forehead pls

ok woz i get that if you’re looking for a despotic ruler to follow that yuko is likely a better bet than sougo, but you’re missing an important detail: if yuko actually had a shot at becoming queen of everything, she’d already have one of you in tow, and you would most likely hate each other.

...majou means “demon queen” in this case, not “witch”, right?

aaaaaand this...is the moment when yuko started making me very uncomfortable. the way she responds: “yes...i do remember. it’s you.”

and sougo’s face just lights up--my guy, she could so easily be lying. she didn’t say one thing about the band-aid or the playground or anything that’d indicate she’s actually sougo’s crush.

like...if not for the fact that sougo had such a crush on the seifuku girl, it wouldn’t be all that major a memory. it likely wasn’t for the girl in question--just a happy sunny day cheering up a lonely little boy. a beautiful memory, yes...but memories fade.

can someone please explain to me why woz’s characterization is all over the place in kiva arc? are you pro-yuko or anti-yuko, woz? i don’t understand what’s going through his pretty head at all honestly. he gets pretty taciturn in the scenes he’s not inhaling pie, but then at times he seems to think yuko’s cool aaaaaagh i don’t know

junichiro: meowing, just wanted an excuse to cook lots of food

sougo: “yay, uncle’s cooking!”

woz: [deadpan monotone] “yaaaaaaay uncle’s cooking...”

ive had enough of this evil bitch honestly but when she points it’s still Good Shit

ridiculous move name, but also an awesome move name

and turning to stone to heal up while the sun’s clouded over? very cool

denied

i noped so hard at this part. like...i really do feel protective of sougo. yuko doesn’t give a damn about him, she just doesn’t want him to get in her way.

nope. no. nuh uh. you two step away from each other right now.

YOU CANNOT MAKE BABIES WITH AN IDIOT FETUS

ok but in all seriousness, do you want time jackers? because, im calling it now, letting oma zi-o go in raw is how you get time jackers.

yeah im pretty sure miho would’ve kept at it if she’d lived, and yuko...shes not gonna listen to sougo

thank you for the much needed reality check furry man

so she’s a...fu-joshi? 👀

☝☝☝

yuko wears such fabulous shoes

was anyone surprised at this point that yuko was the real killer? i sure wasn’t. not after all the obvious lies.

i love her leitmotif. i need it. where do i download

SHE DIDN’T PROMISE SHIT

hey kids! it’s time for *mashes play button* la-la-la lies! yeah, tell me that you love me! la-la-la-lies! look deep into my eyes! la-la-la-lies! say there’s no one else above me! i’m the king of fools, cuz baby, you’re the queen of actually very hurtful and manipulative lies!

that’s such bullshit

now im the last person to be like “don’t play the dead mommy card”--i practically keep that card in the hello kitty wallet my dead mommy gave me. but i bet you yuko’s mom is just fine (aside from living with the trauma of knowing her daughter’s a murderer and pathological liar).

sougo,,,,,pls

thank you tsukuyomi. god sougo really needs a chaperone with yuko around, he’s way too dumb and thirsty.

GUESS WHO’S BACK. BACK AGAIN. fortunately, it seems swartz and woz have been just standing there watching him for the duration of the rain shower.

lest we forget (because i didn’t screencap it), when zi-o took the brunt of ginga’s attack earlier, it sent him flying. now, that’s a human body, which has some ability to absorb force because it’s mostly pretty soft and fluid. yuko’s manhole cover almost completely absorbed this blast--she barely shifted her weight on impact. is it just that she’s THAT ripped? 

then The Boys rider kick ginga to oblivion. rip ginga, you didn’t have a personality or a character arc, we never even saw you un-transformed--you were just a cool looking plot device with pretty attacks. but for that much, we appreciate you!

swartz looks so pleased with himself. he must not have watched the preview for this episode.

YOINK! gotta love how swartz doesn’t look surprised so much as puzzled.

sure am glad kurowoz took his other self’s advice and kept an eye on swartz

i love it so much how woz just has these magic scarf powers and it needs no explanation? hell, he can fly and time travel and make people fall asleep and he’s super strong too, with no explanation? and he’s the comic relief? ALSO HE’S REALLY HOT? woz is a being to behold honestly

speaking of super strong and really hot, yuko is KILLING IT in that gown. i mean...i guess that’s the intention. killing it. cuz she’s a homicidal maniac. haha.

she’s so good at pointing. yuko could be a prosecutor in shuichi kitaoka: ace attorney. (FUND IT)

yuko throws her manhole cover at the boys (rude!) and next we see geiz holding it. a shame we don’t get to see him snatch it out of midair. or did woz catch it and just hand it to him? we may never know.

zi-o. listen to geiz, zi-o. use the fucking watch. just use the watch, zi-o. you seriously plan on just letting another kiva go on a killing spree? do you not get by now what she’s capable of?

thank goodness zi-o has his retainers to make wise decisions so he doesn’t have to.

please note the placement of mars on ginga woz’s suit. very important.

I Love You

lmao

WHERE IS YOUR MANHOLE COVER NOW

my favorite character gets a beautiful rainbow final attack. i feel so blessed.

i mean...protecting all mankind would probably include protecting them from people like yuko. just sayin.

is it bad of me that my immediate thought right then was “at least woz’s attack wasn’t what did her in.”

this shot, especially in the context of the church, definitely gave me pieta vibes--albeit reversed somewhat.

weirdly enough, woz does an outro instead of an intro this episode.

at this point while watching, i said to shylax “you know what this calls for? pie!” but before i could finish--

--PIE! cmon sougo, it’s time to gobble up your feelings!

fucking woz, i swear, you have pie in your mouth and pie in your right hand and pie on your FACE and when your overlord expresses how miserable he is you just go for his uneaten pie with your empty hand.

...is it normal to eat pie like this in japan? because the only times i’ve seen americans make this much of a mess eating pie is when they’re toddlers.

oh hey, what do you know? looks like sougo’s first love wasn’t a violent crazy person after all. she also wasn’t yuko.

sougo’s just an idiot who will mistake any older woman who rubs him on the chin and calls him cute for his sailor girl.

previews!

i blame joshua kiryu

how eloquently this one line sums up not only kamen rider zi-o but kamen rider decade as well. that’s it, that’s the show. that’s the clusterfuck we will inevitably get whenever toei decides to make a kamen rider crossover.

LOOK AT THIS! TSUKUYOMI REMEMBERED SOMETHING! who is she smiling at? is it her dad? is that swartz behind her?! omg baby tsukuyomi is so CUTE!

“a team”. uh huh. is that what the youth are calling it these days? cuz when i was a wee lass, i believe they called it “fucking”.

so what have we learned this week?

very little about ginga

sougo does not remember faces all that well

before sougo dates ANYONE that person should be fully vetted by junichiro, geiz, tsukuyomi, and woz because CLEARLY HE CANNOT SAFELY CHOOSE A PARTNER FOR HIMSELF

i still really like yuko as a character, if not as a person. same as i enjoy junji ito manga, but would be very upset if most of it happened in real life.

swartz loves a woman who can kick his ass

what the fuck are manhole covers in this world

i can’t wait for baby tsukuyomi flashbacks! that, and more tsukasa.

[antifainternational]

Whats the best practice for carrying personal items to an action? Like phones and wallets? Maybe a pros and cons list?

Whew - so much to say on this topic!  If you’re going to an action, you need to read up on security practices.  Anti Fascist Network has a great list of resources to read & access here. We think you should probably bring some form of gov’t. ID so if you’re nicked, the cops don’t have an excuse to hold you even longer while they identify you.  But this doesn’t always apply or make sense (e.g. for actions where delaying the cops by not revealing identities is part of the tactics).  We’d recommend not bringing your phone or shelling out a few bucks to bring a burner phone that you’ve taken precautions to not connect to your person.  That phone shouldn’t have contacts listed under real names, etc.  If you do bring a phone keep it on lock - we know of cases where the cops or the fash got a hold of someone’s phone that wasn’t locked and then had all their contacts, photos, text & voice messages, access to their social media accounts, etc.  Not good!  Also remember that the cops could be using technology to intercept calls & texts.  Basically, never communicate anything on a phone that you wouldn’t say in public.  Hopes & Fears has a nice article on stuff you might want to consider as well. It’s not really ever a good idea to take photos of your side/the good guys at actions although there should be obvious reasons why you might want photos/video of the bad guys.  Certainly never take pics of undisguised folks on your side without permission and certainly never post them publicly on social media, etc.  Any other tips anyone care to offer?

[the-cardboard-constructionist]

Some thoughts on high school, serial killers, and addiction:

Warning: this post contains mentions of dead bodies, rape, and general serial killer things. It is also approximately 5k long and is like 50% a discussion on Dahmer and 50% a discussion of my own personal inner demons so like read at your own risk? also contains entitled white guys 

Over the weekend, I went back home to visit an old friend, and she was telling me about the book My Friend Dahmer, and since she conveniently had it there, I went ahead and read it. It was a very interesting read, and I must admit, I did not know nearly enough about Jeffrey Dahmer before, even though I probably should have. (We also read his entire wikipedia, and let me tell you those two cops who were in his apartment with the dead body, and did not notice it are the two most incompetent police officers in the whole damn world and I just can’t believe they got their jobs back.) 

But then we got to talking about the idea of whether or not he could have been saved. The author of the book seems to think that until the moment he killed his first victim (the hitchhiker), there was still a chance for him. A chance to not be a serial killer (but probably not a chance to be a normal and happy person). My friend thought that this was not the case. That maybe there had been a chance when he was younger, before he started to fantasize about the idea of having sex with a body that was unable to move (and yes, that phrasing is intentional). But once it got to the point where the fantasies were haunting him, there was no hope. 

I disagree further. I think there was always a chance for him to change, but not all that high of a likelihood, not due to any inherent qualities he possessed but due to the combination of who he was, and the world around him. I think that the chance grew smaller and smaller as time went on, but until he started his second set of murders (as in, his second documented murder, not the hitchhiker), there was still a chance. 

He had a goal. He had something he craved, and he very obviously, did not want to kill people. I know that sounds very silly to say, given that he is a serial killer with 17 claimed bodies to his name, but if you look at the details of his murders you can see that death was not what he was aiming for. He was a sick, sick man who did absolutely horrible things, but he’s a very interesting case because he went through extreme lengths to try to prevent his victims from dying. Now granted, this was mostly so that he could rape them while they were unconscious which tbh was his goal. But he didn’t want to kill them. And he did express guilt over it at some point. Which is interesting. 

I personally believe that he was suffering from several different mental illnesses, and at least one personality disorder (I’m more inclined to go with Borderline over Antisocial, but he does fit the criteria for either one. I’m also inclined to believe that at the end of the day, Borderline and Antisocial are just two expressions for a very very similar thing, depending on the socialization of the person involved. Which is a topic for another day.) I also believe that for both BPD and Anti-Social, it is absolutely something that can be treated far more than many people in the field accept. Most accept treatments for BPD, but much less so for Anti-Social. At least, once it develops from Conduct Disorder to Anti-Social. I believe that it is treatable, most of the time. It just requires the right methods and the tools, and I don’t have all those tools yet, I’m in the process of doing as much research as I can into the subject. It’s a personal project I have, in the hopes of helping a child who is close to me. But I think that with the right intervention, the right support, the right tools to be able to deal with his fantasies and the ability to cope with what they were, and what that meant for him, he could have led a more functional life where he didn’t you know, kill and rape men. I don’t think it could have happened in his situation, but if it had been in another time, another place, I think it could have been prevented. Unfortunately, so many people around him didn’t seem to notice what was going around when it should have been so so obvious. 

The book discusses his childhood, and the perceptions of him by his friends. Or rather, his classmates, because most of them weren’t really his friends. They were his school friends. The people he sometimes spent time with at school, but wasn’t invited to hang out with outside of school. And they noticed something was off. They noticed the awkward manner, but dismissed it. Which is fair. Every high school has a few creepy kids, and from what I gather, he wasn’t even the creepiest one there. They noticed the drinking, when it came to that. 

But his teachers? When they were asked years later, they noticed nothing. They didn’t notice that he was literally drunk all the time for his entire senior year. Not even when he sat in class and smelled of alcohol. Now sure, some of that may be self preservation on their part. Who wants to be the adult to admit they noticed something was off, but didn’t do anything about it? Because that was the time when intervention would have been great. But also... Honestly, I think a lot of them didn’t notice. There were many of them that could have reached out to him, to find out what was going on with his home life because obviously something was wrong. And that responsibility is not on the other kids, because they’re kids. It’s not their job to prevent their creepy sort-of friend from being drunk all the time. 

And this is a trend that continues for his whole life. In the army, his drinking was a problem enough that they discharged him from the army. But the fact that he was raping people wasn’t. 

In fact, I must say, there were a lot of overlooked rapes before he finally killed someone. Like a lot. He got fines for it, and minor jail time many many times, but was ultimately let go each time. Like, it was a clear behavioral pattern. He was on the sex offender registry. He very often admitted to his crimes. His first story was usually the truth. But they often willfully chose to believe the lies that came second. 

And those two cops that gave him back the child he had kidnapped and drugged after telling the two women who reported the boy’s story to them to shut up, and then went up to the apartment where the dead body was and didn’t notice. 

There was a lot of looking the other way. A lot of times he could have been stopped before he really started (and I know he had started 9 years earlier with the hitch hiker, but I honestly think that was pure impulse and he didn’t entirely mean to do it. It didn’t keep the whole thing going).

And given what we hear from his classmates about noticing that he was weird, even before the drinking. That he wasn’t normal, like the rest of them. (Although admittedly, that one other creep was pretty creepy as well.) But I think there are so many missed chances to prevent the whole damn thing. 

So we got to talking. Did we have a kid in our high school that if someone told us one of our classmate had become a serial killer, that we would jump to right away? At first, we couldn’t think of anyone. (and to be fair, the author of the book didn’t actually guess Dahmer right away, he guessed the other creep first). 

So we got out the year book, and we spent several hours deliberating on this. As we often do for things of this nature. And we came to several conclusions. The most obvious one (which I do admit, took us awhile to come to), was of course the three boy that had plotted to blow up the high school in our freshman year. I didn’t know any of them personally, as two of them were older than us, and well, there were 853 kids in our class and it was only a few months into the school year so I didn’t know the one that was in our class. However, school shootings/attacks are quite different from serial murder. It did make us think though about the stories we heard after the attack was discovered and prevented (they were planning for 3 years into the future, and were dumbasses that made a Myspace page about it), about things people had heard them say. Things that were funny at the time, but creepy in retrospect. Like the time one of them had been fooling around in class with other kids, and when someone hit him with something (I don’t know what, I heard this story like third hand), he turned around and stabbed them with it. (The kid was okay, it wasn’t something very sharp.) Then laughed it off. 

The second obvious answer was the actual literal serial killer who had been employed at our school. He had been a janitor there, but that was years before we went to the school. He killed many prostitutes and much like Dahmer, kept the bodies in his house. I’ve been informed by the world’s dumbest health teacher that he was a very nice person. But we dismissed him because he didn’t answer the actual question, he just happened to be a serial killer in the area. But we never knew him. That was years before we went there. 

Then we came to an impasse. Kids we actually knew. Kids who weren’t kicked out three months into freshman year. And we came to several different potentials. 

1) A boy in my history class who always seemed to have his hands down his pants every single fucking time I looked over, he wasn’t the brightest of kids and his handwriting was awful, but tbh, I don’t know much else about him Probably hasn’t killed anyone. No idea what he’s doing now. But creepy just the same. 

2) a boy who I will call M, who I didn’t know all that well, but my friend did. He’s an interesting person, who forms weird social connections, but not well. At some point after graduation, he made friends with my step-mom which was weird as fuck, but I am relatively sure he hasn’t killed anyone, and probably won’t. But he does give off a weird vibe, and if someone told me he had killed someone, I don’t think I’d be shocked. 

and lastly, 3) My friend, who I will call P for the purposes of this. (I’d like to state right now that I don’t actually think P is a serial killer, and I am relatively sure that he hasn’t killed anyone. It’s just a behavior set I could see developing into him, and warning signs that exist.) I didn’t entirely notice it at the time, but I don’t think he actually had any friends other than me. And tbh, I’ll be friends with literally everyone so I don’t really count there (except that I do). There were a few people he seemed like superficial friends with, but I got the vibe they didn’t really like him. Which is fair. He was absolutely annoying, and like the picture of a nerdy white entitled male who also happens to be socially awkward. He was a writer, which is largely why I was friends with him. We would write together, and discuss stories. His were always about a girl, who I’ll call A for the purposes of this. She was a real girl, who went to our school, although I’ve never met her and honestly I don’t even know her last name to look her up. I don’t think I want to, at this point. He had a crush on her, and he’d written her a poem which I’m sure he intended to come off as sweet, but he’s socially awkward and had never talked to her before, and from what I know she isn’t the world’s politest person, and well... she thought it was creepy. And told him so. And then reported him to the administration, who probably didn’t need to be involved. So he was bitter. He was so fucking bitter. He had decided that all cheerleaders were evil because this one girl thought he was creepy (Being me, I spent many hours in vain trying to convince him otherwise because Paula Abdul was a cheerleader and obviously, she isn’t evil. He didn’t really care). His stories were filled with it. And they always involved her. Usually in a relationship that grew from annoyance and dislike to something far more romantic. They weren’t well written stories, which is what I fixated on at the time. They were not at all well written, and they were weird and creepy and there were just so many of them. The incident had happened at least a year earlier, and the girl was no longer in any of his classes, and still in the year I was friends with him, he wrote at least four novel length stories about her. (Although to be fair, at some point, they stopped really being about her, they became about a fictionalized version of her, which isn’t entirely less creepy.) He had never had a real girlfriend, or even a not-real one, and spent most of his non-writing time complaining about this fact. It was annoying. Really annoying. But tbh, my senior year was filled with entitled nerds whining at me that they had no girlfriends to the point where I point blank asked all of them: “All you ever talk about is wanting a girlfriend. What the fuck are you going to talk to her about when you get one?” P never gave me a good answer to that. As far as I know, he still hasn’t had a girlfriend, but I haven’t talked to him much after graduation. 

Now, most of our friendship was talk of writing, and me arguing with him about things like cheerleaders being evil, even though I knew it was entirely in vain. But not all of it was. Just being an entitled white boy doesn’t make you serial killer material. But stalking behaviors contribute much to that. And boy, oh boy, did he have them. And I’m sorry to say that I think I made that problem far worse than it would have been otherwise. There was this teacher at my school, and if anyone is actually reading this far into my post, you may have heard me refer to her before. Especially if you were here in the early days of my blogs. The Demon. Long story short, she taught English, was absolutely adorable, and I was convinced for a brief while that she was actually the demon from Paranormal Activity, because goddam, they’ve got the sam damn name, age, and face. I’d like to state for the record right here and now that my English teacher was not actually a demon, and she is a very nice lady and does in no way deserve her place in this story. But if P was obsessed with A, I was obsessed with the demon (I’m not giving away her name on the internet, so we’re just calling her the demon for this). It was bad. It was really bad. It was a different sort of obsession that his obsession with A, though. It was not one that came from a place of entitlement. He thought he was entitled to a girlfriend, entitled to a girl who wouldn’t call him creepy. I in no way believed that I was at all entitled to the demon. She was a human being with her own life, and I was not to be a part of it. But that didn’t mean the thoughts weren’t there. And it didn’t mean the actions weren’t either. It was never anything that would be harmful to her, because I would never want to do that. But I wrote far more stories about her than he ever wrote about A. I wrote stories of her being a demon and eating students. I wrote stories of her not being a demon and doing many inappropriate things with other teachers. I wrote stories about her and a young student (hello self insert 15 year old me). I wrote so many different ones. SO MANY. Hell, I turned a story about her in for a grade (and perhaps my Creative Writing teacher should have been concerned about that). I failed a math class because I was busy staring across the hallway into her classroom, and watching her. I organized my route to class so that it would go by her classroom the most amount of times possible, to chance a glimpse. I wrote several novels devoted entirely to her, to different potentials of her. I spent most Tuesdays after school sitting outside of her classroom, with P, pretending we were doing things for our writing club that was right across the hall (I mean, we were also doing that), and I involved P in it. He was a part of all of this, and a very willing part. There have been times where I convinced myself that perhaps I made him do it all, but I honestly don’t think I did. I think he wanted to be a part of it. He enjoyed passing notes to me in the hall, with what she had been wearing that day scribbled down. He enjoyed the fact that we kept track of her every move, looking for signs that she was actually there to snap people’s necks and steal their babies (whoops, spoilers for Paranormal Activity 2, hope you’ve all seen it by now). And maybe that was our surface reason, but it wasn’t the only reason. Objectively, she was hot. Everyone agreed that she was hot. Even the gay guys agreed that she was hot. Is still hot. I thought she was incredibly attractive, and after awhile, it stopped being about demon things. I doubt it was ever about the demon part for P. But it got to the level where it was entirely out of control. I did many things I regret (again, nothing that actually involved her in any way. I very intentionally kept it all away from her.), and I lost people I really fucking loved over it. I lost people that I wish I hadn’t lost, but I didn’t see why it was wrong then. Because we weren’t doing anything to hurt her (other than entirely invade her privacy). I was caught up in the whole thing, and it took losing one of the most important people to me to get me to stop it. And even then... it was slow going. It was like I was caught up in the whole thing and I just... couldn’t stop. Not even when I wanted to. P didn’t help. He saw nothing wrong with it, and he had no one to lose over it, so what was one more of my ex’s that thought he was creepy? He didn’t care. He still passed me notes, and told me what she was wearing, and when he found out something new about her. And even in the grip of losing something so important to me, I couldn’t stop myself. I don’t know why I couldn’t stop myself, but I couldn’t. It shouldn’t have been like that. But it took actual effort to reroute myself so that I didn’t go by her classroom. To stop scribbling in the margins what she was doing when I saw her. What she was wearing. Who she was talking to. What song she was singing under her breath. 

There was one day, maybe a month after I lost everything, that I realized I was never going to be able to actually move on if I didn’t stop cold turkey. And I did. For awhile. I hate to say it was all for a date with a cute girl that never even happened. And it just kept sneaking back. Hell, it has literally been 8 years since I developed that obsession, and honestly, it’s still here. It’s on a back burner, and I make a conscious effort to keep it away, but it’s still here. Hell, I ended up spending most of last year writing about it even. 

And so I got to thinking, if I say that P is creepy and entirely likely to become a serial killer because of behaviors that he showed in high school, what the hell does that say about me?

Am I any better just because I have no sense of entitlement? 

Now of course, I am in no way a serial killer, and I have no desire to kill anyone, and I’m not just saying that or anything lol. I don’t like hurting people. 

But all the things that made him a good candidate, make me one just the same. Creepy obsessions that turned into writing. Sexual writing. Overlapping into other areas of my life. Stalking behaviors. I knew everything about her. Still do. Hell, I still have her fucking license plate memorized, and it’s not going away no matter how many times I try to forget it. And not only that, I have something I don’t remember ever seeing in him, I have violence. I spend a lot of time and effort making sure it does not show it’s head anymore, but when I was a kid I was so impulsively violent all the time. I almost clawed my best friend’s eyes out once, because she didn’t want to watch me dance (it was very fucking stupid, and I was like 8). I didn’t understand a lot empathy as a child, it had to be taught to me. And it was very successfully taught to me. I am now empathetic to a fault. Which is why I always end up being friends to creeps like P, because I get where he’s coming from. And I didn’t realize how much of a problem entitled white nerds were back in high school. To me, then, they were just friends. 

But the more I think about it, the more I think the one out of our high school class that showed the most warning signs for a thing like this... was me. Stalking behavior. Obsessions. Impulsivity. A history of violence. An abnormal relationship with the concept of empathy. The inability to realize how my actions could effect people. A lack of knowledge about when is and isn’t the time to turn in stories that are honestly just porn very clearly about my teachers (spoilers: it is literally never the right time, why the hell did I do that?). A technically broke home (but really, it was the best case senerio out of a divorce). A history of diagnosed mental illnesses and behavioral problems at school to the point where I was actually kicked out of kindergarten. 

But the thing is... I didn’t have those things all at once. But I can see the path now. If my parents weren’t as amazing as they were, and hadn’t been able to afford to, and be willing to get me the treatment and care I needed when I got kicked out of kindergarten, my life would be different. They sent me to a residential program at Yale, and got me stabilized on meds that I am still on today, mostly for ADHD. They worked with me, got me a therapist and a psyciatrist. They fought the school to get me any resources I need. They taught me how to not only resist impulses, but to not have them at all. Or rather, to channel them into helpful impulses. To the point where by the time I was in high school, and the whole obsession started, I was barely symptomatic for my ADHD at all. I was still violent, but not at the level of clawing out anyone’s eyeballs. Just far too many playful punches, far too often. 

But if they hadn’t? If those symptoms had festered, and my parents hadn’t been able to get me into such a good program and on a stable set of meds, where would I be? If I had still be having those sort of impulses when the obsession started? If life hadn’t worked out just perfectly for me... would I have been that kind of person? Would I be that kid? Would I be the kid voted most likely to be a serial killer? Probably. Hell, would I have gotten to the part where I could have killed someone? I can see a path forming for that. I wouldn’t have done it on purpose, of course, but honestly, I don’t think Jeffery Dahmer meant to kill his first victim either. 

(Again, not saying I would kill anyone. I wouldn’t. I have no desires to. But if life had been different, maybe I would have.)

But the more I think about this all, the more I see how much I’ve grown. I’m very rarely violent now. I still sometimes slip. I always will. But the less often, the better. It’s been 2 weeks, 4 days since I have last hit someone, and I honestly didn’t meant to that time. I just meant to knock off a hat. Before that, it had been months, if not years. Long enough, that I stopped keeping track of it. Long enough, that I trust myself not to now. 

It’s been years since I last saw the demon. I cut off communication with P after high school ended because without her, we had nothing to talk about. And I didn’t want to be about that anymore. i wanted to move on. 

And I’ll be entirely honest here, I’d like to say that I’m fully over it, that I haven’t thought about the whole thing in years. But that would be lying, and I told myself when I quit the first time, that I wasn’t going to lie about this. I don’t know how something like a person you don’t talk to can be so hard to quit, but honestly, it feels like a weird sort of addiction to me. I know that human beings are not addictive substances, but that’s what it feels like. it’s enough to convince me not to do anything actually addictive. It took me over a year after high school to get myself to stop reflexively going to her facebook page. It took me over two years to stop thinking of her every single time that I saw a woman with sunglasses on her head, or heard a country song. It took so damn long for me to stop writing about her. And honestly? I haven’t stopped. I wrote a story to close that Era in my writing only last year, finished it only 5 months ago. And there’s still another out there, that I won’t finish for years down the line. And maybe then, it’ll finally be over. 

But it’s not now. And that means that I need to keep working on myself, working every day to not slip into who I used to be. To have empathy and understanding for the people around me, and to continue to teach it to the children. To think creatively, and focus my attentions on things that won’t hurt people. To catch myself when I find myself starting to think about her. Or worse, starting to spiral with the same sort of idealology for someone else. And that does happen sometimes. I’ve been good about catching it so far, but it’s there lurking in my brain. It’s a part of me, even though it’s a part I’ve put in it’s own little time out corner. 

Because I have to work to be better. To be a better person, to atone for the things that I’ve done. 

And I guess when it comes down to it, that’s what makes me different. The choice to see the hurt the actions I’ve caused and do something about it. Not to hurt, because to be honest, she’s so damn oblivious that she never even noticed. But to those around me at the time. Like the ex I lost because of it. And to P, because there were things he didn’t do before I taught them to him. Like follow around women in a creepy manner. I had no idea at the time what that kind of sense of entitlement and that behavior can lead to. I was very naive. And if he ever does turn out to be a serial killer, or even a rapist, I know that I will feel the guilt of the things I taught him. And I know that’s why I can’t risk going into the spiral of it again, even though I know that it never actually hurt her. It’s the choice to evaluate my own past actions, and stop the harmful ones from happening again. To make a conscious effort to be a better person every single day, even when I’m tired. Even when it’s exhausting. Even when I’m sitting here being sad and repeatedly listening to Demi Lovator’s “Sober” It’s tempting at times, but in the immortal words of Taylor Swift: “Now that I’m clean, I’m never gonna risk it.”

tldr: I’m probably not going to be a serial killer, and neither is my creepy friend from high school, and also, I read a book about Jeffrey Dahmer

I doubt anyone actually reads this. It’s very long and a weird mix of personal and random facts about Jeffrey Dahmer. Also a note on the mood of the weekend as we were discussing who in our class would be a serial killer: we were also dressing up American Girl Dolls at the same time. because that’s just what we do. talk about serial killers while we play with dolls. 

[readingsrantsrambles]

An Alternative to Police That Police Can Get Behind

In Eugene, Oregon, a successful crisis-response program has reduced the footprint of law enforcement—and maybe even the likelihood of police violence.

By Rowan Moore Gerety

The Atlantic - December 28, 2020

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/12/cahoots-program-may-reduce-likelihood-of-police-violence/617477/

Photographs by Ricardo Nagaoka

Should American cities defund their police departments? The question has been asked continually—with varying degrees of hope, fear, anger, confusion, and cynicism—since the killing of George Floyd on Memorial Day. It hung over the November election: on the right, as a caricature in attack ads (call 911, get a recording) and on the left as a litmus test separating the incrementalists from the abolitionists. “Defund the police” has sparked polarized debate, in part, because it conveys just one half of an equation, describing what is to be taken away, not what might replace it. Earlier this month, former President Barack Obama called it a “snappy slogan” that risks alienating more people than it will win over to the cause of criminal-justice reform.

Yet the defund idea cannot simply be dismissed. Its backers argue that armed agents of the state are called upon to address too many of society’s problems—problems that can’t be solved at the end of a service weapon. And continued cases of police violence in response to calls for help have provided regular reminders of what can go wrong as a result.

In September, for example, new details came to light about the death of a man in Rochester, New York, which police officials had initially described as a drug overdose. Two months before Floyd’s death, Joe Prude had called 911 because his brother Daniel was acting erratically. Body-cam footage obtained by the family’s attorney revealed that the officers who responded to the call placed a mesh hood over Daniel’s head and held him to the ground until he stopped moving. He died a week later from “complications of asphyxia in the setting of physical restraint,” according to the medical examiner. Joe Prude had called 911 to help his brother in the midst of a mental-health crisis. “I didn’t call them to come help my brother die,” he has said.

A few weeks after a video showing Daniel Prude’s asphyxiation was made public, police in Salt Lake City posted body-cam footage that captured the moments before the shooting of a 13-year-old autistic boy. The boy’s mother had called 911 seeking help getting him to the hospital. While she waited outside, a trio of officers prepared to approach the home. One of them hesitated. “If it’s a psych problem and [the mother] is out of the house, I don’t see why we should even approach, in my opinion,” she said. “I’m not about to get in a shooting because [the boy] is upset.” Despite these misgivings, the officers pursued the distressed 13-year-old into an alley and shot him multiple times, leaving him, his family has said, with injuries to his intestines, bladder, shoulder, and both ankles.

Neither these catastrophic outcomes nor the misgivings of police themselves have produced an answer to the obvious question: How should society handle these kinds of incidents? If not law enforcement, who should intervene?

One possible answer comes from Eugene, Oregon, a leafy college town of 172,000 that feels half that size. For more than 30 years, Eugene has been home to Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets, or CAHOOTS, an initiative designed to help the city’s most vulnerable citizens in ways the police cannot. In Eugene, if you dial 911 because your brother or son is having a mental-health or drug-related episode, the call is likely to get a response from CAHOOTS, whose staff of unarmed outreach workers and medics is trained in crisis intervention and de-escalation. Operated by a community health clinic and funded through the police department, CAHOOTS accounts for just 2 percent of the department’s $66 million annual budget.

When I visited Eugene one week this summer, city-council members in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Houston, and Durham, North Carolina, had recently held CAHOOTS up as a model for how to shift the work of emergency response from police to a different kind of public servant. CAHOOTS had 310 outstanding requests for information from communities around the country.

A pilot program modeled in part on CAHOOTS recently began in San Francisco, and others will start soon in Oakland, California, and Portland, Oregon. Even the federal government has expressed interest. In August, Oregon’s senior senator, Ron Wyden, introduced the CAHOOTS Act, which would offer Medicaid funds for programs that send unarmed first responders to intervene in addiction and behavioral-health crises. “It’s long past time to reimagine policing in ways that reduce violence and structural racism,” he said, calling CAHOOTS a “proven model” to do just that. A police-funded program that costs $1 out of every $50 Eugene spends on cops hardly qualifies as defunding the police. But it may be the closest thing the United States has to an example of whom you might call instead.

In 1968, Dennis Ekanger was a University of Oregon graduate student finishing up an internship as a counselor for families with children facing charges in the state’s juvenile-justice system when he started to get calls in the middle of the night. Through his work in court, word had spread that “I knew something about substance-abuse problems,” Ekanger told me recently. Anxious mothers were arriving at his doorstep desperate for help but afraid to go to the authorities. It was a turbulent time in Eugene, with anti-war protests on the University of Oregon campus and a counterculture that spilled over into the surrounding neighborhoods in the form of tie-dye, pot smoke, and psychedelic drugs.

The following year, Ekanger and another student in the university’s counseling-psychology program, Frank Lemons, met with a prominent Eugene doctor who agreed to help them mount a more organized response by recruiting local health-care providers to volunteer their time. Ekanger went to San Francisco to visit a new community health clinic in Haight-Ashbury that had pioneered such a model, offering free medical treatment to anyone who walked in. Back in Oregon, Ekanger and Lemons each put up $250 and signed a lease on a dilapidated two-story Victorian near downtown.

The White Bird Clinic opened its doors a few days later, with a mission to provide free treatment when possible and to connect patients to existing services when it wasn’t. But the city’s established institutions didn’t yet have a clue how to deal with people on psychedelic drugs. Teenagers who showed up in the emergency room on LSD were prescribed antipsychotic medications. Unruly patients got passed to the police and ended up having their bad trips in jail.

The forerunner to CAHOOTS was an ad hoc mobile crisis-response team called the “bummer squad” (for “bum trip”), formed in White Bird’s first year for callers to the clinic’s crisis line who were unable or unwilling to come in. The bummer squad responded in pairs in whatever vehicle was available. For a while, that was a 1950 Ford Sunbeam bread truck that did double duty as the home of its owner, Tod Schneider, who’d dropped out of college on the East Coast to drive out to Eugene.

It didn’t take long for the bummer squad to start showing up at some of the same incidents that drew a response from Eugene police. One day in the late 1970s, Schneider answered a call from a mother concerned about her son. “Mom, I think I made a mistake,” he’d told her. “I took some PCP, and I’m feeling weird.” Schneider showed up to the family’s home to find the teenager in “full psychotic PCP condition.” As Schneider got out of the truck, the boy came running out of a neighboring house naked and bloody, and tackled him. Another neighbor called the police, thinking they were witnessing an assault. “So police came out and figured out what was going on—they talked to me a little bit, and they just left,” Schneider told me. “The police realized … they didn’t know what to do with these people that was productive.”

White Bird continued its volunteer-run mobile crisis service—and its informal collaboration with the police—into the early 1980s. Bummer-squad volunteers periodically gave role-playing training to the police department, and some beat officers grew to appreciate Eugene’s peculiar grassroots crisis-response network.

In the late ’80s, Eugene was struggling to respond to a trio of convergent issues that still plague the city more than 30 years later: mental illness, homelessness, and substance abuse. Police in Eugene were caught in a cycle of arresting the same people over and over for violations such as drinking in public parks and sleeping where they weren’t allowed to.

“The police hated it; we were doing absolutely nothing for public safety, we were tangling up the courts, and we were spending a horrendous amount of money,” Mike Gleason, who was the city manager at the time, recalled. Gleason convened a roundtable with Eugene’s social-service providers, offering city funding for programs that could break the logjam. A local detox facility made plans to launch a sobering center where people could dry out or sleep it off. White Bird and the police department began a dialogue about a mobile crisis service that could be dispatched through the 911 system.

White Bird and the police were not a natural pairing. To the city’s establishment types, White Bird staffers were “extreme counterculture people.” Standing by as the bummer squad defused a bad trip was one thing; giving the team police radios was quite another. White Bird’s clinic coordinator at the time, Bob Dritz, wore a uniform of jeans and a T-shirt; for meetings with city officials, he’d occasionally add a rumpled corduroy jacket. With his defiantly disheveled appearance, Dritz seemed to be declaring, in the words of one colleague, “Look, I’m different from you people, and you have to listen to me.” White Bird staff members worried that working with the police would erode their credibility, and maybe even lead to arrests of the very people they were trying to help. But in the space of a couple of months, Dritz and a counterpart at the police department drafted the outlines of a partnership. The acronym Dritz landed on was an ironic nod to the discomfort of working openly with the cops.

Things were slow at first. Jim Hill, the police lieutenant who oversaw CAHOOTS at the police department, recalls sitting at his desk listening to dispatch traffic on the radio. “I would literally have to call dispatch and say, ‘How come you didn’t send CAHOOTS to that?’ And they go, ‘Oh, yeah, okay.’” Before long, though, CAHOOTS was in high demand.

CAHOOTS teams work in 12-hour shifts, mostly responding without the police. Each van is staffed by a medic (usually an EMT or a nurse) and a crisis worker, typically someone with a background in mental-health support or street outreach, who takes the lead in conversation and de-escalation. Most people at White Bird make $18 an hour (it’s a “nonhierarchical” organization; internal decisions are made by consensus), and some have day jobs elsewhere.

One Tuesday night this summer, the medic driving the van was Chelsea Swift. Swift grew up in Connecticut and, like White Bird’s co-founder a generation before her, was introduced to harm-reduction work in Haight-Ashbury, where she sold Doc Martens to the punks who staffed the neighborhood needle-exchange program. Swift’s childhood had been marked by her mother’s struggle with opiate addiction and mental illness. She never thought she’d be a first responder, or could be. She was too queer, too radical. “I don’t fit into that culture,” she told me. And yet, she said, “I am so good at this job I never would have wanted.”

Around 6 p.m., Swift and her partner, a crisis worker named Simone Tessler, drove to assist an officer responding to a disorderly-subject call in the Whiteaker, a central-Eugene neighborhood with a lively street life, even in pandemic times. When we arrived, a military veteran in his 20s was standing with the officer on the corner, wearing a backpack, a toothbrush tucked behind his ear. The man said he’d worked in restaurants in Seattle until the coronavirus hit, then moved to Eugene to stay with his girlfriend.

That day, he’d worked his first shift at a fast-food restaurant. Soon after he got home, a sheriff’s deputy working for the county court knocked on the door to serve him a restraining order stemming from an earlier dispute with his girlfriend. He did not take the news well. The deputy called for police backup, and when it arrived, the man agreed to walk a block away to wait for CAHOOTS and figure out his next move. He had to stay 200 feet away from the place where he’d been living, and he couldn’t drive. “I been drinking a bit, and—I’m not gonna lie—I want to keep drinking,” he said. He needed somewhere to stay, and a way to move his car to a place where he could safely leave it overnight with his stuff in the back.

Swift and the officer talked logistics while Tessler leaned against the wall beside the man and chatted with him. She told him that she’d worked in restaurants before joining CAHOOTS.

The Eugene Mission, the city’s largest homeless shelter, had an available spot, the officer explained, thumbs tucked inside the shoulder straps of his duty vest. You can show up drunk if you commit to staying for 14 days and agree not to use alcohol or drugs while you’re there.

The man hesitated, thinking through other options. He had enough cash for a motel room, as long as it didn’t require a big deposit. The officer prepared to leave so CAHOOTS could take over. Swift, Tessler, and the veteran took out their phones and began looking up budget motels along a nearby strip, settling on one with a military discount and a low cash deposit.

“Do you know how to drive stick?” the man asked. Tessler and Swift exchanged blank looks, then continued to spitball. Did the man have AAA? Was another CAHOOTS unit free to help? I felt a lump rising in my throat. I’d wanted to keep my reporterly distance, but I was also a person watching a trivial problem stand in the way as calls stacked up at the dispatch center. I drove the car three blocks to the motel with Swift in the front seat.

“So much of what people call CAHOOTS for is just ordinary favors,” she said. “We’re professional people who do this every day, but what was that? We were helping him make phone calls and move his car.”

A couple of hours later, CAHOOTS received a call from a sprawling apartment complex on the north side of town. Tessler and Swift showed up just as the last hint of blue drained from the sky. The call had come from a concerned mother who lived in Portland, 100 miles away from her 23-year-old daughter; she believed that her daughter was suicidal. The young woman’s grandmother, who lived nearby, stood in the parking lot and gave Tessler and Swift a synopsis: Her granddaughter was bipolar, with borderline personality disorder. She’d run away at 17 after her diagnosis, and never seemed to fully accept it, traveling across the West with a series of boyfriends, sleeping in encampments. She’d been back in Eugene for a few months now, the longest the family had ever gotten her to stay.

Tessler walked around the corner and knocked. “It’s CAHOOTS.” No answer.

“Can you come and talk to us for a minute?”

The door was unlocked from the inside and left slightly ajar.

The apartment was dark. A tiny Chihuahua mix barked frantically. A tearful voice called out from the bedroom, “I just want a hug. Are you going to take me away?”

Tessler crouched down in the bedroom doorway. “I’m not gonna take you anywhere you don’t want to go.”

“I’m really sorry I’ve caused all this,” the young woman said, sitting up.

Swift grabbed a handful of kibble from a bowl on the floor to quiet the dog. “My family tries to put me away a lot,” the young woman explained. Breathing fast between sobs, she seemed both overwhelmed by grief and adrenaline and primed to answer questions she’d come to expect in the midst of a crisis.

Unprompted, she told the CAHOOTS team her full name, letter by letter. “I know my Social Security number, and I know I’m a harm to myself and others.” She took a deep breath. “I’m just feeling really sad and alone, and I don’t know how I got here.”

Tessler turned on a light, and Swift went out to the parking lot to summon the young woman’s grandmother.

“Nana! Nana!” The young woman dissolved into her embrace.

Swift surveyed the bathroom scene that had prompted the call. An open pack of cigarettes lay on the wet floor along with a belt and an electrical cord. There was a straw in a bottle of gin on the edge of the tub, a six-pack on the toilet, and half a dozen pill bottles strewn across the bathroom sink and countertop. Swift unfolded a soggy piece of paper marked “Patient Safety Plan Contract” that identified seeing San Francisco as the one thing the young woman wanted to do before she died.

As Swift took her vitals, the young woman’s tearful reunion with her grandmother continued. “I love your blue eyes, Nana,” she said.

“I love your brown ones.”

CAHOOTS brought her to the emergency room, and she was discharged less than 24 hours later.

On my first morning in Eugene, I spent a couple of hours in Scobert Gardens, a pocket-size park on a residential block not far from the Mission. Many of the park’s visitors are part of Eugene’s unhoused population, which accounts for about 60 percent of CAHOOTS calls. Everyone I met in Scobert Gardens had a CAHOOTS story. One man had woken up shivering on the grass before dawn, after the park’s sprinklers had soaked him through; CAHOOTS gave him dry clothes and a ride to the hospital to make sure he didn’t have hypothermia. A woman had received first aid after getting a spider bite on her face while sleeping on the ground. Another man hadn’t had a place to stay since he got out of prison more than a year ago. When he had a stroke in the park earlier this summer, a friend called CAHOOTS. “If you go with the ambulance, it will cost you big money, so a lot of people go the CAHOOTS route,” the man explained.

Earlier this year, Barry Friedman, a law professor at NYU, posted a working paper on policing that highlighted the mismatch between police training and the jobs officers are called on to do—not just law enforcer, but first responder, mediator, and social worker. Reducing the number of instances in which police are called to assist Eugene’s unhoused population reduces the number of calls for which their skill set is a poor match. But if the goal is eliminating unnecessary use of force, helping people without housing is hardly sufficient.

In a 2015 analysis of citizen-police interactions, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that traffic stops accounted for the majority of police-initiated contact: 25 million people reported traffic stops, versus 5.5 million people who reported other kinds of contact. And police are regularly involved in incidents that escalate partly because of a failure to consider mental-health issues. In October, Walter Wallace Jr.’s family members and a neighbor called 911 because he was arguing with his parents; according to the family’s attorney, Wallace had bipolar disorder. Two Philadelphia police officers arrived, found Wallace with a knife, and fatally shot him, despite his mother’s attempts to intercede. (Police and district-attorney investigations are ongoing, and no arrests have been made.) Near Eugene, police in the neighboring city of Springfield in March 2019 killed Stacy Kenny, who had schizophrenia, in an incident that began with a possible parking violation. None of the officers involved was criminally charged, though a lawsuit brought by the Kenny family resulted in the largest police settlement in Oregon history. Springfield also committed to overhauling police-department policy and oversight practices around use of force.

In July 2015, police responded to the home of Ayisha Elliott, a race and equity trainer and the host of a podcast called Black Girl From Eugene. Elliott’s 19-year-old son had been experiencing a mental-health crisis, she told me, which was the result of a traumatic brain injury. At 2:43 a.m., Elliott called Eugene’s nonemergency number and asked for CAHOOTS, not realizing that the service ran only until 3 a.m. In a subsequent call, to 911, Elliott’s ex-husband indicated that Elliott was in danger; authorities say it was this second call that led dispatchers to send police to the scene. Elliott greeted the officers on the front porch, and explained that she needed help getting her son to the hospital. Instead, in an incident that escalated over the course of 15 minutes, her son became agitated and began to yell. Elliott attempted to shield him from officers as they ordered her to stand back. Police say her son charged as they tried to separate him from his mother. Her son was punched in the face and tased. Elliott herself was pulled to the ground, resulting in a concussion, she said. She was arrested for interfering with a police officer. (She was released the following morning.) She and her son sued the city of Eugene as well as individual police officers in federal court, for excessive use of force and racial discrimination, among other claims; the court found against the plaintiffs on all counts. Elliott told me the experience didn’t change her view of the police so much as confirm it. “I realized that it didn’t matter who I was; I’m still Black.”

Together with the fatal police shooting that year of a veteran who had PTSD, the incident helped focus public attention on Eugene’s response to mental-health crises. In its next annual budget, the city included $225,000 to make CAHOOTS a 24/7 service for the first time. (Both the mayor’s office and the police department say the increase in funding was not related to a specific incident.)

Yet CAHOOTS is still limited by the rules that govern its role in crisis response. Its teams are not permitted to respond when there’s “any indication of violence or weapons,” or to handle calls involving “a crime, a potentially hostile person, a potentially dangerous situation … or an emergency medical problem.”

Many 911 calls unfold in the gray area at the limits of CAHOOTS’s scope of work; in Eugene, the same dispatch system handles both emergency and nonemergency calls, in part because so many callers fail to grasp the distinction. One call I went on with Swift and Tessler was to check on the welfare of a young man with face tattoos who was reportedly acting strangely on the University of Oregon campus. The fire department and the police had been out to see him, without incident, but also without resolution: The man was still there, unsettling passersby, who kept calling him in as a potential threat to himself and others.

By the time CAHOOTS arrived, the man was lying on the grass with a small burning pile of latex gloves next to his head. When Swift jumped out of the van, alarmed, he sat halfway up and poked at the fire with a kitchen knife, then lay back down. Had the cops been called again, I thought, the incident might have played out differently, and landed in the next day’s paper: “A young man setting objects on fire was shot after brandishing a knife.” But that’s not how it went. Swift grabbed the knife, threw it well out of reach, and began talking to him.

At 11 a.m. on a Friday, I met Jennifer Peckels, one of the few cops in Eugene who walk their beat, to tag along as she patrolled a quadrant of restaurants and curbside gardens downtown. Born and raised in Eugene, Peckels is now in her fifth year on the force. Many of her interactions downtown are with a core group of people experiencing homelessness, mental-health crises, and addiction, or some combination thereof.

Across the street from the library, Peckels recognized a woman who was sitting on a bench, crying inconsolably. When Peckels approached her, the woman explained in breathless bursts that her daughter’s surrogate parents were telling lies about her. She feared she might never see her daughter again. Over the radio, Peckels called in the woman’s location to dispatch. “CAHOOTS will come help you—they gotta help the fire department, then they gotta help a suicidal subject, and then they’ll come. You’re on the list.”

“I’m suicidal,” the woman said.

“Do you have any means to hurt yourself?” Peckels asked.

The woman explained that she was afraid she would start drinking again. She began to slap herself in the face. “I’m tired of Eugene,” she said, gesturing across the street at a statue of Rosa Parks seated on a pair of bronze bus seats. “I got threatened to be arrested for sitting next to Rosa Parks, and I said ‘Fuck the police.’ I haven’t done anything wrong here except be loud and drink in public!”

“You know, when I get upset, I do this breathing exercise,” Peckels suggested.

Together, they inhaled for four seconds, then held their breath. The woman closed her eyes and, by the exhale, appeared calmer for the first time. “You’re on the list,” Peckels repeated. The woman wanted to know when CAHOOTS was coming, but Peckels had no way of knowing. We continued walking.

The most common complaint about CAHOOTS you’ll hear in Eugene is that its response times are too slow. Last year, across roughly 15,000 calls in the city, the average time between receipt of a call and the arrival of a CAHOOTS team was an hour and 56 minutes, compared with an hour and 11 minutes across 46,000 calls for the police department. Having more CAHOOTS units on the street could serve to reduce Eugene Police Department response times as well, by freeing up officers to do what Peckels called “police work.” She said it’s not uncommon for reports of even very serious crimes that are no longer in progress—such as rapes or burglaries—to sit in the dispatch queue for hours while officers race to work through a backlog of calls.

White Bird and the EPD are trying to come to an agreement about the best way to quantify CAHOOTS’s contributions. CAHOOTS has circulated its own estimate, saying it responds to 17 percent of all calls handled by dispatchers. Yet the police department contends that most of those calls wouldn’t have gotten a police response to begin with, because many of the requests that CAHOOTS receives—to check on a person who seems heavily intoxicated, or for transport to a medical appointment—aren’t really “police calls.” According to the police department’s analysis, the true diversion rate is between 5 and 8 percent. Which number is the “right” one to evaluate CAHOOTS’s contributions to the city?

I asked Eugene’s chief of police, Chris Skinner, about the prospect of increasing CAHOOTS’s capacity to respond to calls. He told me he thinks of the benefit to the police as a question of probability: “The less time I put police officers in conflicts with people, the less of the time those conflicts go bad.” That, in a sense, is the same argument made by activists who have mentioned alternatives such as CAHOOTS in their demands to shrink the footprint of policing nationwide.

Before the coronavirus pandemic hit, Eugene voters approved a payroll tax projected to bring in $23 million a year for 126 community-safety positions. Originally, two-thirds of that money was slated to pay for positions in the police department; as several police officials I spoke with pointed out, Oregon has among the lowest number of police officers per capita of any state in the country. Now, in response to Black Lives Matter protests, Mayor Lucy Vinis told me, the city council is consulting with community organizations to revise that plan. “Until this challenge around ‘Defund the police,’” Vinis said, “I don’t think that the police department ever really looked at CAHOOTS as depriving them of funds: It was really excellent service for a very low price.”

Anecdotally, at least, Eugene’s citizens have come to appreciate the CAHOOTS approach to crisis response, perhaps too keenly. CAHOOTS exists in a society where many feel that the risk of police violence outweighs the potential benefit of calling 911, and where an encounter with EMS can wreck a household’s finances. Last December, a CAHOOTS team showed up to a fatal drug overdose hours after the victim’s friend had called in for help. The caller had avoided language that would have brought a faster police or EMS response.

Brenton Gicker, who has worked for CAHOOTS for 12 years and as an emergency-room nurse for the past five, told me that callers have sometimes omitted key details to bypass police. “They’ll say, ‘My friend is bipolar; he’s in a manic episode. I’d like CAHOOTS to talk to them.’ And we show up, and they’ve set the kitchen on fire, or they’re running around naked, stabbing holes in the wall.”

CAHOOTS has undoubtedly saved lives in Eugene. The question for cities hoping to emulate its success is how its approach might be adapted and scaled up. Eugene is a small, homogenous city (its population is 83 percent white). The proud hippie culture that helped give birth to the White Bird Clinic, the bummer squad, and eventually CAHOOTS continues to thrive there. The city supports a robust network of homeless shelters, crisis centers, and mental-health and drug-treatment providers that have a long history of working with CAHOOTS, which makes it easier to connect people in need with services that can help. Los Angeles has 23 times as many people as Eugene, living in dozens of far-flung neighborhoods, each with its own landscape of language, history, and social services. In October, L.A.’s city council voted unanimously to develop a CAHOOTS-like program of unarmed crisis responders. It will face different challenges.

When the pandemic struck, it revealed just how reliant CAHOOTS is on the city’s safety net—and just how fragile that net is, even in progressive Eugene. CAHOOTS was the rare social-service provider in the city that was able to carry on its regular operations. The Buckley Center closed its sobering program; the Eugene Mission continued to serve residents but closed the door to new arrivals for months; social-service agencies asked their caseworkers to work from home, which made it harder to help clients who don’t have stable addresses, schedules, or cellphones.

For a stretch, measures taken to stop the spread of the virus among Eugene’s poorest residents made up for the absence of some of the usual services. Federal CARES Act funding enabled Lane County to open a new 250-bed homeless shelter in buildings on its fairgrounds. To Gicker, the new shelter was a revelation. “This is the first time ever in my CAHOOTS experience where I can take somebody somewhere to sleep with no questions asked: They don’t have to be a battered woman; they don’t have to be experiencing a mental-health crisis; they don’t have to be ill or injured. I don’t have to sell it in some way.”

The CARES Act money ran out in June, however, and the fairground shelter closed. CAHOOTS was back to having very few places to take people in need of a bed. Similar bottlenecks exist for inpatient drug treatment and mental-health facilities. Eugene might have more social services than some American cities, but it’s still an American city. If it can’t manage the cries for help, how will larger, more diverse cities that lack Eugene’s long-standing interagency collaborations or progressive attitudes fare? In rural areas, gaps in service are even more pronounced. Earlier this year, officials from another jurisdiction called White Bird’s director of consulting, Tim Black, to announce with excitement that they’d received funding to “bring CAHOOTS here” in a matter of months. Black replied, “Where are you going to bring someone if not to the hospital or the jail?”

Around 5 p.m. on a Wednesday, I was halfway through the day shift with another CAHOOTS team, Tatanka Maker and Brian Troutz, when it was called to a parking lot just south of Washington Jefferson Park. A woman in her 50s stood at the lot’s edge, surrounded by a swirl of trash. She was barefoot and had a sheath of plastic wrapped around her midriff. This was someone the CAHOOTS team had known for years.

An employee of a nearby aquarium shop had made the call to CAHOOTS, and Maker approached him to get a sense of the situation. “She’s been trespassing since nine,” the employee said.

“I’m packing up,” the woman replied. She picked up armfuls of newspaper and takeout containers, then dropped them just as quickly, as though she’d spotted something else in the pile that she’d been looking for.

“That’s not an option any longer,” Maker said, addressing the woman by her first name. “You can pack one bag of important stuff, and then we’ll take off.”

“Where are we going?” the woman asked.

“Somewhere else,” Maker said.

Troutz brought a clean garbage bag from the van. Maker began guessing what she might want to put inside: “Do you want this sleeping bag?”

Imploring her to cooperate, Maker said she could bring a second garbage bag along too.

“If you don’t come to the van right now, they’re gonna take you to jail and throw it out,” Maker said. But the woman was stuck in another world.

“Can I focus on getting this done?” she asked, annoyed.

At last, Maker and Troutz succeeded in leading the woman to the van. They’d avoided an arrest, but it was a temporary victory. The woman had only just gotten out of jail. Before that, she’d been in and out of the state mental hospital for years. Space constraints, insurance issues, and time limits on residential programs all contributed to the difficulty of finding a place where she could receive long-term mental-health services and drug treatment.

Lacking a better option, Maker and Troutz opted to take her to White Bird. The clinic was closed, but a large shaded parking lot sits behind it.

“This is one of those cases where there is no perfect place to take her, but it’s better to take her out of the part of town where she’s been causing some trouble,” Maker said. The van stopped, and the woman got out and took a seat on a discarded couch in the parking lot.

“You know those orange cones they put on the highway?” Maker said when we got back in the van to head to the next call. “Last summer, there was a day that she spent 10 hours meticulously climbing up the embankment, grabbing them, and throwing them over the edge.” The police, the fire department, and CAHOOTS had all responded multiple times, she said. “We ended up bringing her to White Bird that day too.”

This article is part of our project “The Cycle,” which is supported by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge.

[wirewitchviolet]

Isolation

You don’t want to read this post, it’s just me wallowing in self-pity.

I’m not presently suicidal. If I were suicidal, I’d be ineligible for a lot of trans related things, and more importantly, I just left the house for the weekend, so my cat is being extra clingy and reminding me how much it would be upset if I ever left and didn’t come back.

I have, however, completely given up any hope of ever being happy, or feeling safe, or having a job, or someone I can trust, or not bringing pain and misery to the people I do care about.

Looking back over the archives of this blog, I see a post from a year and a half ago which oddly enough, I also titled Isolation. Reading back over that, it’s pretty informative about what I’m dealing with tonight, and I’m at a point where I can fill some of those blanks in from that.

There is some guy named Gabe who leads some little clique (sometimes referred to as “the tankies” or “the anime communists”) whose collective hobby is making up ridiculous rumors about trans people, spreading them to people with a weird willingness to tear down “fake progressives,” and continuing to stalk and harass targets for years afterward and targeting anyone else who comes to their defense. Recently someone wrote a nice article explaining that whole mess, and I think, lately, they’re enough of a known quantity it minimizes the harm they can do.

At the time they targeted me, this little group was untouchable. When people talked about them at all, it was always in guarded whispers and vague references with the implication that powerful people defended them, and I was personally urged never to speak about them by Zoe Quinn. At the time that had me particularly horrified about how powerful they apparently were because Zoe wouldn’t say that about any other hate group, and my personal opinion of Zoe was entirely too high for the thought to ever cross my mind that Zoe might be one of the “powerful people” defending them.

I absolutely panicked at the time, partly because the attack itself was quite effective, with hundreds if not thousands of people in my professional and hobby circles hearing some vague third hand account that I was bad news and should be blocked, which is how it always goes with this group. The actual accusations are patently ridiculous in context- someone gets painted as a violent anti-feminist for muttering about TERFs, or islamophobic for saying Trump’s nazi ties concern them more than hypothetical hawkishness from other candidates. In my case, it was some ridiculous story where I’m a racist cop from Brazil using coded phrases to attack some random woman I’d never heard of. Those full versions though get truncated down when they start spreading. “She’s anti-feminist.” “She’s islamophobic.” “She’s racist.” And the rumors are spread amongst people with no close connection to the target, generally.

What mainly concerned me at the time though was Zoe Quinn’s reaction when I found myself getting blackballed left and right and asked for advice. Lots of “I have friends on both sides of this,” and “I don’t want to get involved.” In hindsight, the obvious meaning here is “I don’t want to alienate my troll friends by defending you against their obviously baseless slander” which is pretty inexcusable from the public face of an organization whose mission statement was helping people deal with exactly that sort of attack. From my viewpoint at the time though, it was so much worse. My impression was that there was some version of the absurd rumor floating around about me having it out for some random woman and spearheading attacks on her was so convincing that my most trusted friend and confidant at the time not only believed it, but was too scared of me lashing out to even discuss it.

That lead to me attempting suicide on multiple occasions, particularly as Zoe encouraged more mutual friends not to talk to me, shut me out of my only support network at the time, and made it overtly clear I wasn't entitled to so much as a sympathetic ear when I was later targeted by Jesse Singal and Randi Harper when they came out as deeply transphobic.

I didn't even start to piece together the more mundane version of things until early this year, when my routine private conversations with other people driven to the brink of suicide by mass harassment campaigns showed me how many other people I know were terrified that Zoe had completely cut them off on asking for help dealing with attacks from the same nasty little clique, all of whom had also been downright worshipful of Zoe to the point where Zoe not believing them made them feel like nobody would.

I've finally mostly come to terms with all that. Someone I thought was a really good friend I could always trust wasn't. OK. And a ton of people I've never even talked to think I'm some kind of monster because some creeps spread ridiculous rumors, and people always forget the specifics when they here someone's a bad person but that they heard it tends to stick, so no matter how much those people get exposed discredited it won't matter for their victims. OK. People always say though that these sorts of things help you work out who your real friends are though, because they stick with you. But that isn't true.

Recently I wrote something touching on some of this. I really didn't want to. I was fine with working out who else got hurt the way I did and helping them cope quietly, and not publicly expose any ugliness. But then Zoe went and publicly posted something about hanging out with her super great friend Randi Harper, and a couple dozen people suddenly see the person who gaslit them into suicide attempts by pretending mass harassment campaigns weren't happening and disappearing from their lives, publicly endorsing someone who actively attacked them and took out a damn hit from reddit nazis, so people started saying things about it, and getting discredited, and getting attacked. And since these are all severely marginalized people whose lives were destroyed by all of this, and nobody believes them, I stood up and laid the cards out on some of what I've been carrying around for the last two years. And more people I didn't realize had been hurt like this came out of the woodwork to thank me for letting them know they weren't the only ones suffering like this, so I think that was the right call, but obviously a ton of other people didn't want to learn about this and walked out of my life.

And so did people who already knew all this. In that earlier blog post from a year and a half ago, I mentioned a point when "I was considering suicide, and only two people in the entire world bothered to say anything." One of those two people is someone I was extremely close to. We'd talk about serious dark stuff in their life, we've both talked each other off ledges, they personally witnessed a lot of what left me such a mess, and they were the only person to even attempt to pick up some of the pieces and clear the air about ridicious rumors about me. Less than an hour after I posted that storify, they severed all ties with me, blocking me in everything we'd ever used to talk, all without a single word. Other people who'd heard what I'd been through at the time, just without the names, and offered support, turned on me viciously once they had names. A friend without any onnection to anyone else involved just bowed out of my life because I suddenly didn't seem like someone to be associating with.

Then a professional bigot highlighted the whole thing and spun it as some new ridiculous attack, and more people let me know they hated me, and when I finally thought it was over, I went somewhere public, and ran into people I hadn't talked to, who made it clear they don't like me, and I came home to more sudden wordless blocks, and comments about not being welcome places. It never stops and any time I try to speak up it only ever gets worse. Nobody believes me, even when I can prove I'm telling the truth. It's better for everyone to denounce me than risk hurting the reputation of people who have wronged me I guess, and even at the best of times I don't know if I've ever even really had a fairweather friend. There's people who say consoling things when I'm losing it, but I can count on one hand how many times anyone has ever just spontaneously asked me to come see a movie, or paid me a visit, or introduced to their other friends, or just checked up on me since it had been a while.

And when there is someone who seems to kind of like me, I can't ever trust it, because people I thought were the best friends I'd ever had have stabbed me in the back without a second thought, and my own parents don't even like me. All I really have is this cat who's sitting on my lap licking tears off me, and I don't think there's anything I can do that will ever change that.

[fanfic-from-a-67-impala]

A Supernatural x Reader Story Chapter Twenty-Six: Man’s Best Friend With Benefits, Part One

Word count: 3979

(You can also read it on Wattpad here)

Master Post

The crisp nighttime atmosphere, laced with the scent of gasoline, is cut with the warm air of the convenience store thermostat when someone opens the door, setting off the jingling of the bell.

"Nice car," a familiar voice calls as you eject the nozzle of the gas pump from the back of your Marquis.

"If you and your brother are going to drag me out to St. Louis," you tell Dean, "this had better be a damn good case."

Halfway to the bunker from the Idaho farm, the boys called you and told you that a friend of theirs needed help.

Dean holds a six-pack in one hand and a plastic bag in the other, smirking at your comment. "We checked in a couple blocks over," he informs you, "and we'll call James in the morning."

"And James is a cop?"

"Yeah. Helped us out a case a while back," he reflects. "Guy saved our lives."

"Good enough for me," you say, opening your car door. "I'll follow."

The Impala leads you into the empty parking lot of the Sleepy Lodge motel. You have barely stepped out of the car, though, when Sam rushes out of one of the doors.

"Hey!" he greets his brother, closing the door behind him. "Uh, you found (Y/N). That's great."

"Yeah," Dean says, advancing toward the room, meeting Sam's obvious stalling with a questioning tone.

"Okay, okay, okay – before you get pissed off," Sam pleads, holding his hands out to stop him, "look, I-I just want you to know this isn't my fault. She just showed up at the door, okay? Didn't track in any mud, just wanted her belly scratched. I-I figured, maybe she could stay the night and we'd try to find her a home tomorrow?"

He turns the knob of the door and pushes it open, not taking his guilty eyes off of his brother.

You peek over Dean's shoulder to see a pair of long, bronze-colored legs with black heels at the feet laying across the nearest bed, one crossed over the other. Stepping closer, you see the rest of the woman, in a form-fitting black dress with a red collar around her neck and a seductive smirk on her rosy lips.

"She can stay the night," Dean voices what you are both thinking.

Sam looks almost confused at Dean's reaction and cranes his neck backwards, only to snap back toward you and Dean, alarmed.

"Two seconds ago, she was a dog," he says, pulling out a knife and storming through the doorway. "All right, who the hell are you?"

"Not a shapeshifter," she assures him, as if she has experience with skeptical hunters, "so you can stash the blade. I'm a familiar."

"A what?" Dean interjects, setting the beer and the bag on the table while you close the door behind you.

"A companion to a witch," Sam says, his voice tense as he pockets the knife, "some witches. Split their time between human and animal form."

You barely stop yourself from groaning at the mention of witches, remembering how difficult they are to beat.

"I get a more accurate read on people in my other persona," she explains, swinging her legs off the edge of the bed. "Approaching guys in a motel room like this – well, it gets complicated."

"And why do you need to get a read on these guys?" you hiss, walking up behind Dean, narrowing your eyes at her.

She looks you up and down, studying you, and a smirk makes its way back to her lips, as if she knows you.

"My name's Portia," she says. "I belong to James Frampton."

You give Dean a wide-eyed glance, questioning why he didn't tell you this friend who saved their lives is a witch, but he raises his eyebrows in surprise at her.

"No," he says, "no, no. See, that– that doesn't work for us, 'cause that would mean that our buddy James is a witch."

"Wow," she drawls, sarcasm lining her voice, "you're quick."

He stares at her, unamused. "James is a freaking witch?"

"He wasn't when you met him," she says, "but that last case you worked on with him..."

"Lunatic alchemist," Sam notes. "It was nasty."

"James wanted to learn more about that world," she explains, rising from the bed. "Black arts, witchcraft. It became the center of his life."

"Wait," Dean holds out a hand to stop her, "so, you're telling me that James, the cop, became a witch because of us?"

She only narrows her eyes at him. "You don't like dogs, do you?"

"Wait. So, James isn't a cop anymore?" Sam asks, saving Dean from giving an answer he doesn't seem to have.

"Sure he is," she says. "Homicide detective. His new powers make his work even better."

"Then what does he need from us?" Sam says.

"Something's been happening to him," she admits, a sort of desperation in her voice you only get when you really love someone. "It started with excruciating headaches, screaming sounds in his ears, horrible nightmares. Unable to sleep or think. He can't work. It– it's like he's having a breakdown. Maybe you can find a way to help him?"

Dean meets her plea with a light scoff. "Well, here's the thing," he says. "Uh, witches – not real fans."

She pauses, tilting her head and furrowing her brows. "And yet you're sleeping with one?"

A silence makes its way through the room as you and Sam shoot confused glances at Dean, who looks equally perplexed. You turn back to Portia to find that she is looking at you, and you remember the knowing gaze she gave you earlier.

"S– uh..." you stumble. "What?"

"You're not sleeping with him?" she questions.

"What?" you repeat, sounding more irritable than you intended. "N-not that. The witch thing."

"You are a witch, aren't you?" she says, more like a statement than a question. "A natural one?"

"That– that's not possible. I..." you stammer, trying to find some sort of defense. "I hate witches."

Her dark brown eyes lower to glare at you.

"Um– sorry," you say. "But I do. Wouldn't I have... known?"

"Look," she says. "All I'm saying is that you've got the makings."

"'The makings'?"

"Some Hell in your soul," she says.

In the corner of your eye, Dean takes a slow step away from you, but you only stare at her, searching for some kind of tell saying she is lying, or mistaken, or anything but completely sure. You don't find it.

"Natural witches have a certain quality to them," she continues. "Something demonic, but not."

Hearing her words, you feel your world implode, like a glass shattering on the tile floor.

Your head reels with the possibility, thinking she can't be right. But you remember that night in Louisiana with Benny – how Martin's blade flew out of his hands – and even how those doors slid open last night before you even got the chance to touch them. You thought it could have been because you were becoming a demon, and the wind could have opened those doors, but now it becomes clear what it really was.

A witch. When a demon pulls a soul out of Hell, it becomes a witch. You became a witch.

The rest of the room is looking to you, but you find it difficult to move, to get your vocal chords to make sound. It's not until your lungs are screaming that you remember to breathe.

• • • • • • • • • • • •

A light tapping on glass jolts you awake. Your computer rests on your lap, the screen having long gone dark. The sun begins to rise past your steering wheel in the distance, cutting through the darkness of the night.

You scanned pages upon pages of any information you could find on witches until well past the lights from the room's windows switched off. You already knew the only information that seemed remotely reliable from years spent reading through Bobby's library and helping with the cases passing hunters brought around, and later, from hunting them yourself.

Outside, Sam hunches over to peer through your window. A shiver makes its way through your body as you set your computer on the passenger seat and push the door open, wrapping your jacket more tightly around your chest, and rub your cold hands together, countering the chilly morning air.

"Are you okay?" Sam asks, sleep still on his voice, like he just woke up as well.

"Yeah, just..." you close the door and gesture to the dark sky, "enjoying the lighting."

"I, uh," he starts, "meant about what Portia said."

"I'm good," you say, a little too quickly.

He cocks his head down at you in a questioning way. "Really?" he retorts.

You lean against the door and he leans next to you, forearm resting behind you on the hood of the car. "I'm processing," you say, fingers tracing your anti-possession necklace.

"Well, you know," he says, "Dean and I are here. Always."

You can't help but let out a light scoff, and avoid his eyes.

He steps in front of you now, into your view. "You don't think, after everything we've been through, we would stand by you through this?" he says, his voice pained.

"I know you would," you say. "You would. I'm saying you shouldn't."

"But, (Y/N)," he pleads, "if what she said is true, you won't be a demon. You'll still have a conscience. It doesn't have to be this awful thing."

"I'd still be a freaking witch, Sam," you hiss, opening the door again. "Okay? That is reason enough to –"

"To what?" he challenges. "To lock you up? To kill you?"

"Yes," you snap, and climb into the car, ending the conversation.

An hour and a drive around town later, the rising sun has turned the sky a bright greyish blue and you carry a holder with three paper coffee cups up to the door of the room.

"– this is (Y/N) we're talking about, man," Sam's voice pierces the door.

"All I'm saying is that we've been putting a lot of faith in these things," you hear Dean say now, "and sooner or later it's going to come back and bite us in the ass."

"She's not a thing, she's our friend, Dean," Sam exclaims. "Our family. And if anyone deserves the benefit of the doubt –"

You open the door, cutting him off. "Hey," you greet, holding up the coffee. "God, I hope this gas station coffee is stronger than that beer they sell."

They each drop the bag they pack to grab a cup and take a sip.

"Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news..." Dean says, grimacing into his cup before throwing back another swig. "So, we heading out or what?"

"With everything going on, uh, I was thinking maybe I'd sit this one out," you say to your drink. "Stick to the research, work on that witch-killing spell of Bobby's. If it's all the same to you guys."

"(Y/N), you don't have to –" Sam begins.

"Sounds like a plan," Dean cuts him off, swinging the bag over his shoulder. It clanks with the sound of metal. Iron, probably.

You swallow another bitter sip. "Great."

• • • • • • • • • • • •

The grocery list takes you all over town, from an occult shop to a plant nursery to three different butcher shops.

By the time you stumble back into the room, the Impala has been parked outside and Sam stares at his computer screen from one of the beds while Dean studies Bobby's journal.

You empty the glass jars and candles onto the table next to him.

"That chicken feet?" Dean asks, pointing to the paper bag in your arm. "Refrigerate that crap."

You meet his suggestion with a questioning gaze.

"Trust me," he says with the face of a man who has seen the failures of warm chicken feet.

You do as he says, walking the bag over to the fridge with a laugh you can't suppress. "So, what do we know?"

"It was like Portia said – James has been having dreams," Dean says. "He's walking down the street, gives someone the killer tracheotomy, wakes up in his bed. Except he says that he checked with the police station, and it turns out the people he saw in these dreams were killed in real life."

"And looks like he was right," Sam says from behind the screen, glancing up at you and Dean. "I've been looking at the crime scene reports, and they are exactly the same as James told us – vics, dates, location. The most recent one was a blind man, just like he said."

"In other words, it's not looking good," you comment.

"Also, I looked into his record on the force," Sam adds. "He went from rookie detective to lieutenant basically overnight, and in the last four years, his solve rate's been right at about one hundred percent."

"Of course," Dean muses. "He's got the booga-booga on his side. Speaking of which –" he casts a wary, more serious eye in your direction "– you sure you're good to handle this stuff?"

You follow his gaze down to the table, scattered with supplies and the spell ingredients – bones and blood and herbs. It all looks very... witch-y. His suspicion tells you all you need to know about where he stands on this, but you fight the instinct to argue.

"No," you say. "But that's why I'm laying low on this one."

"Right," he mumbles, not letting you glance away. "I just want you to know, this is nothing personal."

Except it is, you want to say, or you would have already pulled that trigger.

"I know that," you say instead, brushing it off. "So, what are we thinking? Is James our guy?"

"He might be," Sam says, walking toward the bathroom, where a suit hangs on the door frame. "The other day, he found one of his shirts in his trash can – bloody. I'm going to run it down to the police station and see if the blood matches the vic's."

"And if it does?" you ask.

Since last night, when Portia told you about James, this feeling, more of a hunch, pokes at the back of your mind. You recognize it as the same feeling that you had about Benny's innocence months ago. You thought – hoped – the intuition was the result of having hunted for so long, but it seems now that it might be part of this newfound position of yours, telling you James is innocent as well.

But the situation with Benny was different. Now, more than ever, you need to remain impartial. Vouching for James would destroy any hope of that, especially with the boys watching your every move.

Sam unfastens the last button of his shirt and shrugs it off, reaching for the plain white one on the hanger. "I guess we'll have everything we need to know."

• • • • • • • • • • • •

By nightfall, Dean has gone out to places unknown, leaving you and Sam alone, sitting at opposite ends of the table in the dim light of a single lamp, letting the weight of this morning's argument loom over the both of you like a dark cloud.

From over your computer screen, you fixate on him, his hazel eyes flitting from left to right, reflecting the glow of his own screen.

With everything going on, you only now realize how pale and shaky he looks, how exhausted, as he runs his fingers through his hair.

"How are you feeling?" you cut through the silence.

His surprised eyes meet your concerned ones, not sure how to respond.

"That trial," you clarify, "it seemed intense."

He lets out a short, bitter laugh. "You sound like Dean," he remarks, eyes travelling back to his computer.

"This isn't some run-of-the-mill hunt, Sam," you insist. "We're worried about you."

"I'm f–"

He cuts himself off and narrows his eyes at his screen.

"What?" you say, lowering your voice.

He turns his laptop so that the screen faces you, displaying an email, which you skim through.

When you look back up at him, he already has his phone to his ear.

"Where are you?" he says to Dean. "Listen, we just got the lab work back from the blood on James' shirt. Exact match to victim number three... Yeah."

You open the jars still resting on the table in front of you, each holding a different ingredient for the spell, while Sam grabs the paper sack from the refrigerator, holding it as far from himself as possible while he pulls out the bag of chicken feet.

"Here," you hum, holding your hand out for the bag.

He hands it to you, gratefully, and continues with the blood, pouring it from the jar into a glass bottle. You pull out a chicken foot, willing yourself to ignore the cold, slimy skin with bones and nails extruding from its gelatinous exterior, and slide one after another through the mouth of the bottle.

The two of you work side by side, reaching over each other's arms and working around each other's bodies until the bottle is finished, topped with a cloth overhanging from the lip.

Through the tension, it occurs to you how much you miss working with him, having this synchronicity with someone who knows your every move, who you can trust, after weeks of hunting alone.

"Need a ride?" you ask.

"Dean's picking me up," he says, then pauses to turn the bottle over in his hands, contemplating, and looks up at you. "Unless you wanted to come along. You were always better at incantations, and we could use the backup."

You are already shaking your head. "Sam –"

"All right, all right," he concedes, as if he knew the outcome before he asked the question, but still can't hide the faintest hint of disappointment.

Headlights flood through the window, illuminating the room, before the horn blares.

"Sam," you say again, your voice having lost its edge this time.

His hand is on the doorknob, but he meets your eyes.

You know the boys have killed much worse with much less. But sending them anywhere is a risk, especially when a witch is involved. You can't bear the thought of something happening to them, but to leave things this way with Sam...

"Be careful." You offer a soft gaze, and he returns it, sensing the same gravity of the situation.

He nods. "Stay safe."

The door closes behind him and you recall the anxiety you felt before you started hunting, working on cases with the boys and watching them go out to fight whatever monster it turned out to be, worrying each time that this would be the one that took them out.

The crackling of the gravel under tires fades away with the headlights, leaving you to stand in the darkness, eyeing the door and holding your breath until it should open again.

• • • • • • • • • • • •

The mid-morning sun pierces through your eyelids and you turn your head against it before shooting up from the bed, realizing you drifted off. You are only able to process the sun shining through the window, and the empty room.

Your stomach knots, and you realize what woke you – a buzzing sound on the table. You scramble across the room to pick it up.

"Dean?" you breathe. "Where are you? What's wrong?"

"Change of plans," he says. "Turns out there might be another witch messing with James' mind. We're at his place now."

You slump against the table, sighing in relief, feeling your heartbeat slow to a normal pace.

"Listen, this is getting more complicated than we thought," he continues. "Can you bring Bobby's journal here?"

You glance at the book resting behind the spell ingredients. "Sure."

"I'll text you the address," he says.

The short drive to the large suburban house clears the drowsiness from your system. You pull up behind the Impala and knock on the door with numbers matching the address on your phone screen, leather-bound journal under your arm.

Portia lets you in, leading you down a hall and into a bedroom, where Sam and Dean speak in hushed voices over a man laid out across the bed, chained to the frame.

"Hey," Dean greets, then gestures between you and the man. "(Y/N), James."

"Ah," James muses, "the witch."

You draw back from his words in surprise at the title, arms crossed over your chest as if you are the one restrained and exposed.

Sam clears his throat, breaking the silence that has fallen over the room. "James has a contact in the city who might know something, so Dean and Portia are going to meet him," he informs you. "I'm going down to the police station to see if anything turns up."

Portia says nothing, but her eyes are wide in hope as she takes James' hand in hers.

"We need you to sort through Bobby's info," Dean says, "see if there's anything in there about some kind of witch-y mind control, or if you've ever come across anything like it."

"You got it," you nod.

Portia leans down to place a kiss on James' lips, and the boys shuffle to follow her out the door. When Dean passes you, you see him sidestep in the other direction, almost imperceptibly. By the time you glance up at him for some explanation on his face, he has turned away.

He probably doesn't realize he does it, the slightest, unconscious motion; only pure reflex. But it strikes you across the chest. The feeling inside of you that you are this dirty, dangerous thing – like a pile of broken glass – swells to fill your stomach and the very tips of your fingers, every corner of your body.

You swallow back the glass and feel it slice into your throat, along with a twinge of guilt as you wonder if he had this exact feeling after you got out of Hell, remembering when you jumped away at the slightest of his movements.

"So," you say once the room has cleared, "there's another witch involved?"

"Portia seems to think so," James says, his voice doubtful.

Her hopeful, maybe even desperate expression flashes in your mind, reminding you of Sam's pained hazel eyes looking into yours the previous morning.

"Thinks so, or wants to think so?" Your voice is bitter, though a gut feeling tells you she is right to think him blameless.

"She's convinced herself that I'm innocent," he says.

"And what do you think?" You lean against the wall behind you, arms still crossed over your chest.

"I think I want to do the right thing," he says, "whatever that will mean."

You pause, thinking again of Sam, and how many shades of grey define the right thing.

"I understand you don't have the highest opinion of us witches," he changes the subject now.

"Yeah?" you mutter. "What gives you that idea?"

"She tells me you didn't know what you are," he says. "How was that?"

You shift your weight from one foot to the other. "It's a long story."

"And I have so many better things I could be doing," he remarks, gesturing to the chains binding his wrists and ankles.

"All right," you chuckle. "Cliff notes – a demon pulled my soul out of Hell, and part of the place caught a ride with it. Or, that's the working theory, anyway."

"Whoo," he whistles. "That's intense. And you still plan on hunting after you start practicing magic?"

"I'm not practicing magic," you say, quickly.

"But you're –"

"A hunter," you insist, your voice rigid, defensive. "Everything else can take a number."

He studies you with dark eyes, and seems to understand. You need to do the right thing, too, whatever that will mean.

[augmentedampharos]

also last night I couldn’t sleep cause I was thinking about anti-semitism that I’ve experienced and had a realization about one of my experiences

I was in middle school (or early high school idr) and went to a friend’s birthday party. I didn’t know most of the people there.

Anyway people are just chatting and someone suddenly starts talking about “their weird Jewish neighbor” (honestly I don’t recall any of it I just kind of froze and panicked I don’t even know what was “weird” but they were making fun of one of our holidays).

Another friend (not the birthday girl) said, “hey, {augmentedampharos} is Jewish.”

And then everyone apologized and we talked about something else.

At the time, I was...grateful for that. In retrospect, what the fuck. That’s not what you do to stop that sort of thing. It put me on the spot. I felt humiliated even further. You don’t call attention to the person. You say something like, “stop making fun of Jews asshat” or more realistically, “it’s not okay to mock other people for their culture.” You don’t call out the person who is being made fun of. I know, we were middle schoolers, but somehow I only realized this now. I dunno. It all hurts sometimes. I was just so embarrassed and humiliated about my failure to stand up for myself and my religion.

In contrast, sophomore year of high school I had friends who defended me, and looking back now I should have valued them more than I did.

We had a “World History” course where every Friday we would bring in articles about what was going on in the world that piqued our interest to discuss. Not every article was discussed. I remember that week there had been an incident at an elementary school where some kids decided it was, “Punch a Jew Day”. Kids. Decided this. That’s horribly fucked up. I think I neglected to bring that article in because I found it upsetting.

Well, someone else in the class brought it in, and brought it up, saying how it was, “hilarious”. And to some degree, I get it. It’s so absurd sounding that you think it’s funny. I get it, I do. But the thing is, it’s not funny, and I think for most of you the reasons why are obvious, but I’ll enumerate some of them anyway. Where did these kids learn this? Where did these kids get these ideas? From their parents. What does that mean? Anti-semitism is alive and well (which is obvious in this day and age but as a naive child I wanted to believe it wasn’t). Teaching hate starts at a young age.

Anyway, I don’t really remember what I did at this time. The methods for participating in the discussion I think involved throwing a thing to the next person to speak. I don’t remember the order, but a Muslim friend of mine and a Mormon friend of mine both spoke, and immediately shut that shit down. They didn’t make the mistake my other friend did. They explained that it wasn’t funny, and that it was awful. And then the class moved on.

So uh, where was the teacher in all of that? I don’t know. I remember telling my parents I don’t know why she didn’t say anything. I think sometimes she didn’t pay attention during these discussions, but on the other hand that’s giving her a cop-out. She should have said something, and she should have been paying attention, or else what was the point of having these conversations in class. Why didn’t she say anything? I think I’ve forgiven her (much as I’ve forgiven everyone in these stories, even myself for not speaking up), but I will never forget. Almost every teacher that could have stood up for me and for Judaism did not. What’s the lesson there, teach?

As an aside, because of the way my Mormon friend stood up for me and the respect I had for him, I have always felt terrible about the way that Mormons are kind of “fair game” for mocking their religion. There’s even an entire play devoted to that. I feel really guilty making fun of Mormonism and so I don’t. But it seems to me like almost everyone thinks it’s okay to make fun of them. Maybe I’m missing something, but I dunno...I know how I feel when my religion is mocked, although there’s some additional cultural context and baggage there.

I might as well finish this post with the last major incident from high school. This was senior year, and unfortunately the things that happened at the beginning of the year impacted the rest of it.

I had a teacher for AP Calculus BC. I’d had him for AB. He was fairly well-liked, although I can say I was never that fond of him. He liked to tease people and overly praise those of us in the class who did really well (myself, my Mormon friend, and two others from my friend group). For those of us who were religious, I felt that his “teasing” really went after us. I don’t remember the kind of jokes he made to my Mormon friend, but frankly I felt that they were too much. I also felt the jokes made at me were too much.

The worst and final straw happened very early that year (mind you, with the entirety of having this teacher for junior year behind me as well). I observe Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur. Those are the MOST IMPORTANT HOLIDAYS in Judaism. I missed school for it. That’s what I do. It is important. It means a lot to me.

I came back from Yom Kippur, and this asshat of a shitbag teacher says to me, “did you have a good time fighting terrorists/palestinians in Israel while you were gone?” or something to that effect. Frankly, I was too horrified and upset to really remember what he said, or what I did. I think I said something like, “I wasn’t doing that”. No one stood up for me. Here’s the thing - no one stood up to this teacher. Ever. At least, as far as I know. It’s possible people talked to him privately, like I did, but...he was intimidating. And like all teachers in my high school, he was temperamental and could probably ruin your grade in the class if you pissed him off.

After talking to my parents, I made with him privately before school. There had been some incidents in Seattle that were clearly anti-semitic. I used those as a springboard to gently criticize his behavior. Criticize is way too strong a word here. I said something like, “hey, there’s been a lot of anti-semitism in Seattle lately {mentions incidents} so while I know you don’t mean any harm I’d appreciate if you didn’t make jokes like that anymore”. He agreed, and I left sweating bullets but hopeful.

He ignored me the rest of the year. He continued to praise other people, but even when I did as well or better, said nothing. True to his word, he didn’t make jokes about me or my religion anymore, which was good. But being ignored was in some ways just as bad.

And everyone loved this teacher, or at least pretended to love him. I really don’t fucking know why. I mean, I do, cause I liked him at first, but with any sort of critical eye he was awful. I didn’t really have anyone (except my parents) to talk to about it. And I knew the year after my brother would have him as a teacher, and I worried about that.

It really has stuck with me. Was it a case of “you have no sense of humor so I’ll just ignore you” or a case of, “fuck I could lose my job over this better just ignore here”? It doesn’t really matter to me what it was. The outcome was the same. This was the hardest to forgive, in some respects, but I think I have. 

Oh, and the real ringer, is that in my yearbook (which I still asked him to sign for some reason, idk) he wrote an apologize for not acknowledging my accomplishments. He knew was he was doing, enough to apologize for it. He knew that what he did was wrong. But an apology when you will never see me again is too late. I can’t take it seriously.

The experiences we have matter. One bad teacher, a good friend or two, they matter. Anti-semitism is alive and well. I am often afraid. And sometimes I remember these things, and I weep. Nothing will ever change the raw emotions I felt from having my identity mocked, especially from those in a position of power over me.

[ooc-but-stylish]

liquidheartbeats:

@ooc-but-stylish

It wasn’t a wrong assumption. “Any” universe would include all of them. The OP wouldn’t have had to clarify if she had said “any point in time” from the start. But she didn’t. She said, “any universe,” which would then make our Barry responsible for the actions of Barry’s from other worlds.

She then clarified, and I accepted that.

That said, if you’re going to lecture me about assumptions, please lecture yourself as well. You’re assuming that I think Savitar didn’t originate from the E-1 timeline, or am trying to defend that. It’s pretty obvious that he did, though there still is much to be explained.

I never said Savitar wasn’t from the current timeline. .

As I said, this isn’t about shipping. My comment and subsequent comment was about placing the actions of all on one person, which isn’t fair. Point Blank.

You can’t say it’s not about shipping. @foreverfelicityqueen literally tagged their post in the first place with “Anti Westallen”. It addressed the illogical focus the story has on Iris West being with a man who we just learned is capable of murdering her because it makes him more powerful. The plot up until this point, even beyond this point thanks to the sizzle reel, has been casting him in a favorable light and still trying to pass the two off as “meant to be”. It is about shipping.

“Any” doesn’t mean “All”. “All” means “all”. “Any” could be “one or greater”. That this storyline is happening at any point in a timeline of Earth-1 fits that. And you still haven’t dared address the fact that your idea of “holding a character responsible for their alternate self’s actions” doesn’t cover the part where the characters you mentioned as your example didn’t have inclinations for being evil. Caitlin’s case in season 3 has the Killer Frost form take on, and be addressed like, an entirely different personality from who she is as Caitlin Snow. Caitlin would rather have died than become Killer Frost. Cisco would rather lose his hands than ever use them to kill a loved one. Otherwise, Caitlin was no closer to becoming Killer Frost pre-Flashpoint than Cisco was in becoming Reverb, Joe becoming a lounge singer, Oliver suddenly dying and his father coming back from the dead to turn into Green Arrow, or Iris being a cop, meanwhile Savitar exists as a natural progression of the character we’ve been following for three seasons, as an exaggeration of all of the worst traits he’s displayed so far, and he hasn’t at all expressed the idea that he’d rather sacrifice himself than hurt the people he loves. Always putting himself before other people, again, because he thinks he’s exempt from terrible consequences arising from his actions. Iris still deserves better than a man capable of killing her.