#mary stuff

[shallowseeker]

I know, I know. "She was only perfect after she died," and it's a tempting view: a stereotypical "man causing trouble in the marriage."

But consider: what if the majority of the marital discord came from Mary herself--stepping out to "tie up loose ends," or "to send a message to another hunter about one little hunt," then not being able to explain her absences. (She'd rather John think she's stepping out on him than...hunting.)

"I need time to think," John says over the phone. "What's there to think about?" she says, shutting him down, pressuring him with her trump card: her kids. "You've got two boys at home."

[shallowrambles]

mary read john’s journal and….and then leaned into the hunting life

i think when she saw that even john was dragged into it…broken by it

she accepted there was no escape so she might as well kill everything so the boys won’t have to

get rid of all the danger

all of it

[questions-from-d87]

In the hunger games what would the outcome be for everyone?

thank you @javierghost21 and @heyoitseragon for explaining the hunger games to me lmao

district 1 (jewlery and luxury items): requiem blackwood

district 2 (masonry and weapons): phoebe brookes

district 3 (electronics): melody brookes

district 4 (fishing): theodore cross

district 5 (electricity): tobias brookes

district 6 (transportation): onyx jackson

district 7 (lumber) - javier garcia-webster

district 8 (textiles) - adeline emile

district 9 (grain production) - marianna cross

district 10 (livestock) - nikolai kuznetsov

district 11 (agriculture) - cirice xiong

district 12 (coal mining) - daisy jackson

requiem and phoebe would live the longest fs

[shallowstories]

AU Earth was Mary Winchester's Purgatory. It was war. She was useful and full of purpose for the first time since her Resurrection.

That's why she wanted to stay.

///

(This time, Dean's the one who gives up, who gives into despair and completely checks out of life: hopeless and in pain and without faith and believing in nothing. And Sam's the one who keeps looking.)

[divorcetual]

I am actually so serious I think it really messes with a childs creativity and joy to tell them to never make a mary sue OC. Like that unbridaled form of joy where you make a self insert OC who super cool and everyone loves them and they have every superpower in the world SHOULD be something a kid makes, it nourishes their ability to create things for fun and not be stifled by "oh but what if my character is too overpowered and cringey...". whatever

[questions-from-d87]

mary and theo!!

Which oc is in a platonic / queerplatonic marriage (or otherwise officiated or long term committed partnership, if marriage is not applicable to your setting)?

[coneyislandbaby66]

[marisashinx]

Azul is on to something here...

[candyje11yfish]

[wip] shooting star frye!!! i Looove spacey stuff!!!!

[cloudmancy]

burn the incense of our innocence and in a sense we thrive

[boromirswife]

Boromir + concern for the Hobbits

[shallowseeker]

My hot take is that little Dean's memory of his parents fighting and his dad moving out for a couple of days is... kind of a nothing burger.

At the very least, it's not a smoking gun indicating a big, bad, ABUSIVE/IMPERFECT marriage at that point. It wasn't even indicative of Mary somehow"RELYING on little Dean."

First: All marriages are imperfect. We argue over the difficulties of life—painful disruptions to life's daily rhythms, especially for a child.

Second: This marriage's imperfection is part of what makes it more believable to me. I'd be more suspicious of a Cupid-coded, neverending limerance.

This looks... well, this doesn't look that bad, to be honest. In terms of "dangerous" domestic disputes, this doesn't even rank, or ring alarm bells.

So John moved out for a few days. Big deal.

We don't even know if Sam and Dean's assumption that it's mostly John's fault is the correct one.

///

I mean, sure. Thematically, it's got a strong, perhaps retroactive(?) throughline. And Sam latches onto this theme with gusto:

"Wow, you've been cleaning up dad's messes for longer than I thought!"

Sam that is a four-year-old displaying normal anxiety over a relatively normal situation.

Mary is not "Relying (TM)" on little Dean in this scene either, btw. She's feeding him a sandwich. She's giving Dean a hug because he overheard the argument and is upset and anxious about it. Like any kid would be.

Little Dean's not "cleaning up Dad's messes" here either, regardless of what Sam knows came after in their lives.

This seems to be a retroactive narrative Sam is stamping onto this memory, the same way Sam seems to(?) stamp his anxieties about "impurity," "demon blood," and "being a freak/monster" onto his own past memories, trying to make sense of his "feeling like an outsider."

//

Anyhoo. Clearly, this was a small speed bump in John and Mary's marriage, not a wreck. John and Mary seem to have come to an understanding on their own.

It wasn't even that long of a separation, "only for a few days."

It wasn't the end of the world. It just FELT like the end of the world to a little kid.

///

If anything, this is a window into little Dean's sensitivity to others' emotions, even from a very early age.

Kindness and empathy are wonderful traits.

But it's this big heart that will set Dean up for pain. Because his good nature will be taken advantage of by John later.

[shallowrambles]

Going anon because this is a sensitive subject in fandom and I don't want to offend anyone.

I'm don't 100% agree but you inspired me to take a closer look at the Blood Brother ep. I've never seen it analyzed like that, and although your words bothered me, I think you had some good points. I don't think the fandom idealization of Benny is as bad as the fandom version of Sam, but your argument that similar forces are at work for both of them is really compelling.

I never really cared about Andrea, but everything you said has given me pause, but I think you might be right and the illusion in The Werther Project is a lot closer to the actual Benny we see on screen.

I love your take on Andrea, and I'm with you that it might've have been cooler and more of an unexpected twist to see her in purgatory instead during season 15! I love your brain!

Happy to give you something to ponder, then! It's sometimes fun to entertain the shadow selves of characters, and I think the treatment of Andrea Kormos toes the line of darkness and nihilism in a way that is often overlooked. :-)

TBF, I think all soldier-coded characters struggle with this. Michael, Dean, Cas, Mary, AU Charlie and others...struggle with this pretty often. It's not unique to his character per se. It's that old soldier-coded derealization. I feel like it's especially strong/most pronounced in the in child-raised soldiers, ones who've been raised/created to fight (Dean, Mary, Cas, Jack, etc).

///

But anyway, I like this angle because it compels me, not because I dislike any of the soldier-coded characters. After all, it's a bit unflattering to be a soldier, fighter, warrior, (cop, hunter, military, angel, etc etc etc) in the first place!

But the idealization of Benny feeds into the strange imho idealization of Purgatory, that "pure" is somehow a positive thing when it's applied to Dean-Cas (it almost-never is in SPN, and I don't think it is here either). I think the whole existence of Purgatory is a nod to the worst selves of the soldiers, that black-and-white mentality and "rigid code" that both Dean and Cas tend to fall into...as well as suicidality and checking out of the complexity of "civilian" life.

When Benny says he doesn't "fit" and he's no good here, he's embodying the soldier who goes back. It's alluded to with, "The guy who got out and then came back. Like an idiot." It's got a name: "The Back There Paradox."

Deployments, and especially combat deployments, were a place where we knew how to use the skills we had developed. What we did was significant...Life could be very simple while deployed; get up, do your job... Sure, it got boring and repetitive, but we knew how to do stuff and we knew where things were. It was familiar."

We see this too with Dark Kaia in season 14-15: " At least over there, I understood things -- the world, my place in it."

What I'm saying is that soldier-coded characters' rigid adherence to "rules" can be just as neurotic as Sam's moral relativism spirals. (Cas is super fascinating because he embodies both tendencies!)

Purgatory represents "unthinking war," where there's 24/7, 360-degree combat. It's the horrific bloodlust that many soldiers are often too ashamed to admit they're addicted to, what is often quoted as: should "stay overseas, unsaid." It's the secret shame veterans won't readily admit to but many understand and know all too well.

Dean even shows signs of this in his fantasy world in AU Michael's bar, with the fame he crows about here (14x10, Nihilism):

DEAN: What you got? PAMELA: (wiping Deans face) Worst part of working here is having to clean up the blood after some pissed-off monster busts in to kill you. DEAN: (smirking) Well, what can I say? I'm famous.

///

"Being exposed to the adrenaline and the fame associated with being a soldier creates a dangerous addiction. Many veterans that deployed to combat come back to the states and chase the high that they felt on the battlefield." x

///

The unusual thing with Dean and Cas, is that they each recognize the nihilistic soldier in each other...ranging at times from joyful nihilism to the suicidal sorrow that's all wrapped up with identity-as-soldier-"weapon" and seeing combat far too often. (THIS is the subtext that attracts so many veterans.)

But the thing that's different for them is that they're crazed to get each other out. Underlined in two separate throughlines in season 8 and 15.

This is a little bit echoed in Alt Mary and Alt John, who also want to get each other out of hunting in SPNwin. That's what attracted Mary to John initially, that he was a soldier with a big heart even though he'd seen The Horrors.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is. I have a soft spot for the soldier who try, have tried, and are trying to get out. Even when they fail, like Benny did.

///

Anyway, soldiers are "loyal dogs." We see Dean referred to as a dog as late as season 15, when Lucifer calls him old "faithful," (like a dog) in one of Chuck's alternate endings. They're also "fish" (out of water). Bait. Bombs. Hammers. Blunt instruments.

They struggle with feeling perpetually dislocated when they're away from combat.

That’s where the, “I’m not sure what’s real” primarily stems from.

[questions-from-d87]

Do any of them have earrings :3

requiem has double pierced lobes, an industrial in one ear and a helix in the other

melody has pierced lobes

phoebe has double pierced lobes and helixes in both ears

tobi has double pierced lobes

adeline wants her ears pierced but doesnt have any piercings

kiki has pierced lobes

javier has pierced lobes

theo wanted piercings but never got any

onyx doesn't have any piercings

mary had pierced lobes

daisy got her ears pierced as a kid but never wore earrings

[cassianandfenrysaremyboyos]

Honestly so hot of Rogue to bridal carry Gambit

[questions-from-d87]

- requiem was the first to be made specifically for this universe, he was kind of created on a whim and was super different originally. he was like a single father who was targeted by the king for his fear of death

- javier was made so requiem had a target, pretty much. im trying to give him a solid identity beyond that but hes probably the least fleshed out in terms of backstory so far

- kiki is the oldest in terms of creation in general, since she was actually made for another story. i made her up when i was young as a ghost story, and her being a popular ghost story in the town that she lived in is kind of a nod to that. i put her in tomodachi life when i was younger as like. a tall teenage bitter goth but i realized that wasn't who i wanted her to be when i decided to put her into the story

- i kind of lose track of the order of creation here but i believe the next to be made was melody. originally requiem was on his own in d87 but i realized that wasn't the story i wanted to tell so i decided to figure out a couple other characters to put in

- phoebe was made in order to create a larger cast and to provide backstory for both herself and melody

- tobi originally wasn't related to melody and phoebe at all, they were just kind of an idea that popped into my head that i liked. fun fact, his clothes are heavily inspired by jeff and tony's school uniforms in earthbound

- adeline was the last messenger to be created, i really like to explore the concept of pressure and high expectations from family and from oneself (and i wanted to give someone a cool ballet outfit) so adeline was born. it was a fairly recent decision to make her officially transfem but i feel like it adds to her story

- mary was the first member of the 50's squad to be created and has changed quite a bit since her original concept. she was inspired by the song killer queen bc i was listening to it and came up with the idea for "shotgun mary". im considering using that name as an in universe nickname for her due to her bold personality

- theodore was a guardian before he was a human in terms of creation. his human form (as well as onyx's) was made well after his guardian form. the idea for theo just kind of popped into my head one time and i thought it would be interesting to have a less human-looking character in d87 aside from the king

- onyx was made originally for theo to have someone to relate to. his human form and the details of his backstory were fleshed out later. it was a fairly recent decision to make he and theodore's backstories connected by making daisy mary's girlfriend but i feel like it adds a little depth and complexity to the relationship and provides reason for theo and onyx to be so close

- daisy was i believe the most recent character to be made. she was made originally mostly to give onyx's backstory a little flavor but i decided to flesh her out a little more because i don't really like to have characters that only exist for the sake of the plot

Why did you create your OC?