#more of how even more toxic and violent he would've been if raised by that man

[julietasgf]

idk if this is an unpopular opinion, but I think coriolanus would've been SO much worse than he already is if the snows never had their downfall

[aikoiya]

DP HC - Dash After High School

I like the idea that once Dash doesn't get a scholarship & his parents learn about his bullying tendencies, his parents (or at least his mother) send him to boot camp & he ends up with some talent for being a medic.

In my mind, Dash's father is a pillar of true masculine toxicity & very obviously homophobic.

Like, I feel that the terms are overly-used these days & has lost some of its meaning, but I do feel like there are certain traits of men that can be toxic if they don't learn balance, just like how I think there are certain female traits that can be toxic too.

Like, for men, there's aggressive & violent when they need to be & that's just part of being a man, it can even be a good thing in certain situations. Then, there's being overly aggressive & violent when there's no need for it or in a situation where it's not appropriate or where he's being legitimately abusive. Like, literally just because they're angry or wanna hurt someone. (I mean, if a couple guys get into a fistfight, then afterwards they laugh about it & go get a drink together, no harm done, then that's fine. Sometimes, that's just how guys interact.) Then there's overly stubborn & a refusal to be wrong & the need for others to be subservient. Those are the sorts of things that are toxic, but they aren't innately male-centric characteristics & are toxic no matter who acts that way.

Luckily, I haven't met many men around me who exemplify this sort of thing.

As for homophobia, again, there's a difference between not agreeing with someone's lifestyle, yet still supporting their right to choose how they live... & outright hating homosexuality & treating such individuals as something less than human.

Dash's dad is the latter.

I also see him as the type who'd use "quit [insert verb here] like a girl" in ways that aren't in jest.

I see Dash's mom & dad being abusive in different ways, the mom, Freida, being more negligent with the dad, Harvey, being more verbally abusive, loud, & demanding. Not necessarily physically violent, though it did happen once or twice. Once to his wife & once to Dash himself. But both times, there'd been this sort of... haunted expression on his dad's face afterwards. Like he was seeing a ghost... Interestingly, he never struck out in anger at either of them again even though there were a number of times when he seemed to raise his hand or fist high with a face like thunder. Though he never followed through, his hand or fist always shaking before he'd instead punch a wall or slam his fist down on a table the stomp out of the room. (Because, I hate 1-dimensional characters. I need almost everyone to have some sort of redeeming aspect to them.)

However, even though he never really struck Dash (after the first time, anyway), he did push Dash to be "the best" in ways that are honestly a detriment to him.

So, when Freida & Harv finally got a divorce, Dash's mom saw some of the makings of the man she married through Dash's bullying & decided that she couldn't handle it.

So, she sent him to boot camp which straightened his ass out quick & in a hurry!

He later chose to apply to the military & even later became a field medic.

He becomes a much better person because of this, his experience with teams helping him a little bit, though basic training was, like, even worse than football training could ever be, & even though he & his mom aren't on good terms, he's thankful that she put him through that even though it was for her own self-interests. Being from a town where ghosts attack at all hours also tends to help with one's reaction time.

Once he retires from the military, he goes back to school & becomes a full-fledged doctor. A surgeon specifically & he does pretty damn well.

Thing is, had his parents not gotten divorce, he would've become what he did in TUE. A fat, washed up loser.

He's also married with kids. He's bi, but he ultimately decided that he wanted a wife & kids of his own blood more than he ever could a man, so he chose to seek out women once he realized that. It's in that moment that he realized that while he was bisexual, he was also heteroromantic & felt no true romantic connection to any of the men he'd dated before.

He'd always found that odd, but now he understood.

Ultimately, he's happy &, at the 10 year reunion, he made sure to apologize to all the guys he bullied back then. Including Fenton.

They're decent friends now. Still razz & bitch at & insult & prank each other, but there's no heat to it anymore & even when they do fight, Danny fights back now &, as mentioned above, they tend to laugh about it before going off to get beers together afterwards.

Just dude shit.

DP Character HC Masterlist

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

So I watched 10.09 recently, and it has that part where Dean tells a story about him basically being almost roofied as a teen, but somehow it ends up framed as the funny joke and yet another proof that John "did what he could", and I kind of hate this? And it's the same episode in which MoC!Dean killed guys that kidnapped and tried to rape Claire, and you'd think writers would've addressed the parallels and acknowledge that Dean could've been triggered by this situation. 1/2

2/2 But in the end, it's never addressed, and the whole situation is framed as the proof that Dean is evil now. And I'm not even sure what I am trying to say, but with that being the show's approach back in s10, I'm not surprised about the finale anymore. Guess we should've known?

That’s an excellent angle to look at the issue because the Mark of Cain arc is a clear example of how people with different experiences will see the same thing in wildly different ways. There’s this phase of season 10 where everyone is like “oh no Dean is Getting Worse” and when you look at what Dean is doing... you actually go “...good for him”.

Let’s give Caesar what belongs to Caesar. It’s not “the writers” in this case, it’s Dabb. Plenty of other writers don’t fall into this John apologism thing. Just look at how the episode before Lebanon, written by Buckner and Ross Leming, says that sometimes John would temporarily kick Dean out because he was “pissed at him” despite Dean always taking his side to mantain the peace. It almost seems like a statement to sprinkle some salt given what Dabb does in Lebanon, you know? Maybe not, but there is a tension between “John was shitty” writers and “John did his best” writers.

In hindsight, we gave Dabb too much of the benefit of the doubt. We were like, weeell, that’s supposed to be way the characters perceive the truth, which is distorted by the trauma... But now it’s obvious that he truly believed in the John-did-his-best version. He brought him back and got Mary back with him. No matter what happened to the finale, the network didn’t print those pictures of John and Mary to hang on Sam’s wall. He never took Dean’s abuse seriously and it shows.

The “anedocte” of Dean getting drugged and “saved” by John from being raped is obviously there to parallel him with Claire. Which works! It’s so weird because it’s like. You are soooo close to getting the point. Younger Dean was assaulted just like this teenage girl is assaulted and Dean saves her... but apparently John yelling at those people is a good way of dealing with the issue, while murdering child traffickers is an overraction thus bad.

That’s the problem, isn’t it? That Dean’s murder spree is framed as an overreaction. Sam is like “tell me you had to do this! tell me it was you or them!” - the answer to which (by the narrative) is obviously no, it wasn’t self defense, he just killed them because he could. He just murdered those men for no reason except he felt like being murdery. And the audience is supposed to be like “oh no! Dean is murdery for no reason except for murderiness! That’s bad!”.

But it’s a power fantasy, isn’t it? Going on a murder spree on rapists and traffickers. I bet any people who’s been violated like that has fantasized of doing the exact thing Dean does here. Killing them all.

Dean had the physical strength and skill to kill them all, why shouldn’t he kill them? (I mean, in real life I’m against private justice because I’m a fan of the state of law, but the Supernatural universe obviously works on different principles than the state of law. Again, it’s a fictional narrative that plays out as a fantasy for the audience, so.)

So what was Dabb’s intention? I’m afraid it’s the worst one. “John Winchester’s not going to win any Number One Dad awards, you know? But, you know, damn if he wasn’t there when we needed him”. What the fuck, Dabb? It’s been established since season 1 that John WASN’T there when they needed him. Which... I’m afraid... leads us to the Cas-Claire plot in the episode. Cas has fucked off with Jimmy’s body leaving Claire on her own. Parallels how John wasn’t going to win wny Number One Dad awards. But! Cas is there when Claire Really Needs Him i.e. when she’s about to be raped by older men. Parallels how John was there when Dean Really Needed Him i.e. when he was about to be raped by older men.

I think the point is to say, Cas kinda sucked because he took Claire’s dad away but hey! He’s actually a good figure for Claire because he gets there in time to prevent her from being raped. Just like (ew) John kinda sucked as a father because hunting and stuff, but hey! He’s actually a good figure for Dean because he got there in time to prevent him from being raped.

It’s pretty yucky. Literally NOBODY wanted a parallel between Cas and John. But he made one. And he made one to absolve Cas from the guilt he carried for what he did to Claire (Claire’s mother is a mother so who fucking cares about her. She’s basically a Blurry Wife(TM), she’s only a tool for Claire’s arc, Cas apparently only cares about the harm he did the child, not the wife, for some reason.) and to absolve Cas from his guilt it absolves John too. Don’t worry, being a parent is hard. You often screw up. But you can *looks at smudged writing on hand* prevent the kid from being raped by predatory adults and everything’s fine now.

It’s not really important if the child suffered hunger or whatever, the only important thing is that they don’t get raped, because that’s bad, everything else is just a little detail.

All Dabb got with that scene was to paint Sam as extremely unsympathetic because he’s no longer a child, he’s a full adult now and still thinks of that episode at the CBGB as a funny story. That’s not a good look. It almost makes you think that the writer himself saw it as a funny story. Lol teenage boy biting more than he can chew. But then why the Claire parallel? The Claire scene onviously is not supposed to be anything but horrific. I'll give Dabb the benefit of the doubt on this specific thing.

It’s weird, yes, because Dabb wrote Dark Side of the Moon where he establishes that John was a bad husband/father even before tragedy hit the family. But apparently that’s the “not going to win any Number One Dad awards” part, I suppose? I guess he intended to write John as this flawed, ~complex~ figure who was imperfect but still brave and whatever blah blah did his best blah blah. I’m all for flawed complicated characters but a horrible father is a horrible father. A rose by any other name... parental abuse is still parental abuse even if the poor guy was complicated and traumatized and did what he thought he had to do to prepare his sons for a violent world.

Also, the story frames Dean’s escapade as a teenager being stupid. “You know what he got for that? Me whining about how much he embarrassed me. Me telling him that I hated him. But then he stopped and turned around looked at me and said, Son, you don’t like me? That’s fine. It’s not my job to be liked.” “It’s my job to raise you right.” This seems straight from a novel about teenagers doing something stupid that they’re too young to realize that their parents are right to be against them doing. But this isn’t just... a parent walking into a bar to stop their child to drink alcohol. Dean literally describes feeling sick from something that was inside the alcohol.

Sure, it makes sense that he’d lash out to John because of the shame and shock. But the scene is... off. Are we supposed to see this as a typical teenage mistake? Are we supposed to read it as something as horrific as what happened to Claire, literally sold into rape? Or, worse, are we supposed to see what happened to Claire as a teenage mistake, ah silly teenager, blindly trusting shady people, no wonder you end up in a situation where you’d get raped if a father figure didn’t sweep in and save you. I hope that wasn’t the intent.

To get back to Dean’s Mark-of-Cain violence, the writers clearly didn’t intend it to come from the Darkness up to a certain point. It was supposed to an arc about your own inner darkness (consider the Charlie episode, a couple episodes later). Then they came up with the idea of The(TM) Darkness, the suppressed cosmic feminine. While it caused a bit of dissonance in the subtext, it doesn’t really change Dean’s narrative, because his inner darkness is the trauma, and his trauma is inherebtly tied to the “feminine” i.e. the parts of him that don’t fit seamlessly into the scheme of toxic masculinity values. That the violence that comes from the Mark of Cain comes from Dean himself and that’s it, or is connected to the Darkness, it doesn’t change what it means for Dean. Dean and Amara have parallel histories, the feminine principle locked away, the trauma the anger stems from.

In 10x09 we’re still in the Before The (TM) Darkness era, before the suppressed cosmic feminine. The Mark of Cain arc is still about... well, Cain. But the shift is the signal that someone looked at Dean’s arc and said... you know what? “Lucifer gave me this curse so now I’m demonic and murdery” is meh. “Toxic masculinity suppresses the feminine and it creates trauma which rage and violence comes from” is more interesting. I don’t know whose idea it was, but it was a good idea, and surely the idea came from seeing how Dean’s MoC narrative was unfolding.

Dean’s MoC narrative was unfolding in a certain way, in fact, because of a pretty simple reason. There’s a fundamental tension in Dean’s MoC arc. We want him to go murdery, but it’s also our main character, so we don’t want him to do really horrible things because he still needs to be relatable. The audience cannot hate him, so he must NOT do something entirely unforgivable. He still needs to be somewhat relatable, even when demonic or demonic-adjacent.

So he goes on a murder spree... but it’s rapists and child traffickers. He’s demon, but he kills a misogynistic dude that wanted his wife dead for cheating on him. He’s a demon, but beats up dudes that harass women. He does a slaughter, but they’re nazi. He’s off the deep end, but works a case of kidnapped and abused young women...

Speaking of which. 10x23, written by Jeremy Carver. Dean works a case where a girl was killed while dressed scantily and Dean makes some slut-shaming remarks, and we’re supposed to think “whoa Dean, that’s bad”. But later he confronts the girl’s father and what does he say?

I’m just doing my job, Mr. McKinley.

By suggesting my daughter was a slut?

I’ll admit that thought crossed my mind. Then I came here, and I smelled the deceit and the beatings and the shame that pervade this home.

You shut your face right now.

And you know what? I don’t blame Rose anymore. No wonder she put on that skank outfit and went out there looking for validation, right into the arms of the monster that killed her.

Back then the episode was super controversial and everyone hated the case because of the apparent slut-shaming but I loved it! Because it’s not about the girl. It’s about Dean. Dean doesn’t think that a girl gets killed because she dresses in a miniskirt so it’s her fault. Dean is projecting on himself and he’s not actually victim blaming the girl, he’s victim blaming himself. And when he absolves the girl by putting the blame on the father... well, subtextually he’s absolving himself by putting the blame on his father. On the deceit and the beatings and the shame that pervaded his own home. He’s textually not ready to absolve himself, of course, he summons Death to ask him to kill him later, but subtextually he’s on the right path.

Rose McKinley basically did the same mistake Dean did at the CBGB when he trusted some older people who offered him drinks and the same mistake Claire did when she trusted a man who sold her for money because he offered him a place and stability. She trusted the wrong people (in this case, vampires, which adds the whole subtext of vampires and sexuality) who took advantage of her. Except Rose had no one to save her. (Her friend, Crystal, gets rescued by Dean, even if he causes the other hunter Rudy to die in the process.)

Carver’s writing is pretty brutal. The girl made that mistake because was abused at home, so she was desperate for validation and that desperation drove her into the wrong hands. (Rose even has a brother who blames himself for bringing her sister to her future murderers, destructive sibling relationship check.) It doesn’t actually even matter if Dean guessed right about Rose’s family situation, because what matters is what it tells us about Dean. He basically relates to a dead abused girl. Actually all through the season Dean is paralleled to “skanks” “sluts” and sex workers. Obviously this happens kinda all through the show, the whole “the business is based on absent fathers” thing happened much earlier in the story, so it’s not new. But s10 draws a picture of female suffering - abuse, manipulation and death. Season 10 was difficult to go through. In hindsight, it was probably on purpose because it was supposed to be darkest hour of the feminine. Summed with some good old fashioned misogyny, but hey.

The Carver era was wonky but Carver wanted to free the feminine. (I believe that Mary’s comeback, while written by Dabb because of the showrunner shift, was planned before the showrunner shift.) We thought the Dabb era wanted the same, with Mary choosing life and Amara being independent and so on, but it evidently wasn’t the case. Not a single woman arrives at end of the story. It’s hardly ~Bucklemming or ~the network or ~covid because it starts before the very end.

I’m not saying that dead sluts are more feminist than living women, but if the women die or disappear anyway (and they did) I’d rather have an exploration of trauma than nothing. And I definitely prefer a dead slut narrative that calls out parental abuse than a narrative where women live but abuse gets the you-did-your-best treatment.

Whoops! I digressed! But feel free to ask for any clarification or send me any observation or thought.

[lilyliveredlittlerichboy]

woke up angry at my ex again & kinda wishing I'd been as abusive and violent and anger-management-issues as they said I was lol,

(they said this about me pulling them by the wrist for 0.5 seconds 1 time, and also yelling at them when i lost my cool maybe two or three times, )

when really what i should have done was push him down the stairs and destroy his fucking phone, and THEN he would've had something to cry about

Idk I raised my voice at a guy I'd never met before yesterday cus I was NOT just gonna stand there and let a Ukip voter lecture me about racism 🤡 (ik he's a ukip voter cus my client told me, this was at work, my client is a poc and very much enjoyed the show when i schooled this guy, anyway there should be background checks on carers to make sure no disabled poc has to deal with racist carers but that's another matter entirely) Anyway it turns out that even old white men know how to shut up if you yell/growl NNNOOOOOO at them loudly enough, and I swear I wouldn't have had the backbone to stand up to this guy just a few months ago, and I definitely didn't when I was with my ex cus he deliberately kept me small and meek and compliant as much as he possibly could,

and maybe now that my anger and aggression are actually, finally manifesting in ways that are useful and can be productive,

I mean I wouldn't really go within 10ft (or 10 miles) of my ex these days cus I'd clock him as a toxic and probably narcy person, and someone I do Not want to be in a relationship with, but anyway he really thinks I was angry back then 😂, sweet summer child

I wasn't angry really, not the way I am now. I was just trapped and cornered and desperate, I was having all of my boundaries trampled every single day and he still wanted to tell me what I could or couldn't do with my new partner, a year+ after we broke up.

I was just in fight or flight mode. And my reactions were freeze or fawn more than anything and very, very occasionally he drew out the fight and then used that to claim I was abusing him. Lol

Ok yeah Covid meant we had to stay living together for much longer than was healthy but also I was perfectly ready to be civil and just not let it descend into the absolute shit show it became. it's not my fault that he had no interest whatsoever in being civil. it's not my fault he made me feel dread and anxiety 24/7 in his last 6 months here. it's not my fault he literally set things up for me to HAVE TO overhear him chatting shit about me and my friends on the phone to his new partner - which he was doing, also, like 24/7, and especially if I wanted to go to sleep and did not want vitriol from the room next door to permeate my dreams. I told him many times that this wasn't ok. He did it to our flatmates too. After being told it was a dick move and really upsetting, he doubled down and did it even more, now in flavours of Extra Loud and Extra Obnoxious. he was literally rapping (B A D L Y) about me being abusive outside of my room in the middle of the night on more than one occasion. which of these people sound more abusive to you? the one in their room, minding their business, escaping to their flatmates room for safety, escaping to work, escaping to the park to hang out with their new partner for the first time in 3 weeks at the start of the pandemic,

or the one outside the room at any and all hours of the day, on the phone constantly, Loudly speaking and singing and rapping about how the other one is abusive?

even if the one who's being sung about has lost their temper with the singing one in the past? on less than a handful of occasions?

Anyway I doubt my ex realises I'm back on tumblr otherwise I'd be fending off anons about how I'm "using my public platform to smear him" like when i vented on twitter to my 60 followers, never mentioning him by name lol. totally different from the callout post he put on his Facebook to his 3000+ friends of which we had more than 100 in common 🙃

anyway it's angry hours and if given the chance, I would definitely push him down a flight of stairs, so it's probably best for him to stay away from me forever.

[116t98]

I completely agree with everything here.

I personally believe there was a lot of tampering/meddling that happened behind-the-scenes, which is why the final season feels more like a Frankenstein's monster of the original season 8 than an actual/proper season in its own right (there are in-depth analyses about this, written by Team Purple Lion; they're interesting reads, even if you don't believe them). But even so, it still boggles my mind how anyone thought showing this kind of relationship the way that they did, in a kid's show, no less, was okay.

Like OP, Allura wasn't my favourite character in the show, but I get more and more upset whenever I really think of how poorly her character was ultimately treated. I would've loved to root for a character like her, but frankly, the way she was written made her character out to be... confused at best, and kinda bitchy at worst.

Like, why was she cold towards Keith after they found out about his Galra heritage? I understand her being untrusting of the Blade, but Keith? One of the people she's spent a considerable amount of time with, and who's done absolutely nothing to suggest he's evil, or loyal to anyone/anything other than Voltron and their mission? We haven't seen any evidence that her prejudice against the Galra is based on them simply being born Galra (nature), instead of the fact they were all born and raised in a society that values violence and power (nurture), yet that's what her interactions with Keith seem to suggest. Why would they seemingly base her prejudice on nature instead of nurture? I mean, everyone else in the universe? Sure, that makes sense. But Allura? Who knew Zarkon before he was corrupted, and possibly had Galran friends? Her prejudice really should've just been based on the Galra's nurture (i.e. "they were all raised to be violent, bloodthirsty monsters; that's horrific and sad, but there's nothing I can do to help/save them since they'll never let go of what they were taught to believe their entire lives, so I have no choice but to assume the worst of all Galra I come across").

Moving on to her relationship with Lance, OP covered everything that's wrong with it as a relationship, so there's no reason to reiterate what they said. There were so many ways to handle their relationship, yet the show settled for a once-sided romance that did nothing but make Allura out to be an irresponsible person, negligent girlfriend, and bad friend, all while completely ignoring the groundwork they laid out for Lance to become more self-confident and realize what he deserved and what he was worthy of.

How else could the relationship have been handled? Well...

They could've kept everything about their relationship the same, as long as the show acknowledged how toxic their relationship is, and showed how it should be properly resolved (hint: it's through confronting the reality of their relationship, Lance realizing how unfairly he's being treated and that he deserves better, Allura acknowledging that she un/knowingly used him and that what she did was wrong, and finding the best way to fix things so their friendship not only stays intact, but improves. No, "trying again" wouldn't work).

They avoid the romance entirely. Yes, they can let Lance harbor a crush that grows into something more, that's fine. But, when Allura chooses to pursue Lotor, have Lance learn to accept that she'll never return his feelings; once he does this, he can work on getting over Allura, while still being a good, supportive friend to her.

They actually show evidence of Allura slowly reciprocating Lance's advances: in s1-s2, she's annoyed; in s3-s4, she's amused; in s5-s6, she's visibly conflicted (she's into Lotor, but the thought of Lance loving her actually makes her question her feelings for the prince); and in s7, she's enamored by Lance's devotion to her as he helps her deal with her feelings about Lotor and his betrayal. This way, her blushing at Lance, and their subsequent romance, makes sense.

They do the same thing as #3, but Allura realizes that even though she got used to his flirting, and even found it amusing, she never really fell in love with Lance; her "feelings" for him in s7 weren't really for him, but rather for him supporting her when she needed it most. So, once they realize their relationship isn't working, they break up. ((think of that episode of iCarly where Freddie jeopardized his life to save Carly, and Carly convinced herself she loved him when she actually just loved that he saved her life))

They do the same thing as #3, but this time Allura and Lance break up amicably; not because of unfair treatment, or misguided feelings, but b/c they simply just don't mesh as a couple, and that's okay.

I think it's tragic that a show with so much potential to be great (and this show definitely has that potential; many of the interesting in-depth theories I've read are based on the information given to us by the show), yet it suffers from all these flaws that ultimately drag it down. Allura had the potential to be a really great and inspirational character, but the poor writing ultimately ruined her, which is just tragic. I hope that when Voltron is inevitably rebooted again in the future, the creators and writers will take these flaws into consideration, and do the characters and their relationships justice.

Why did it take me so long to post this, you ask? Because it’s three pages long. This is a literal essay! lol I think I covered everything I wanted to, and I DO think it is important – especially because I am not the only one who is still upset about this.

I’d love to hear if you agree with me – or why you don’t. If you ship Allurance, that is fine. This is just my personal take on it.

Side note: No comic update until next week. I’ve been working on stuff every day for about three weeks straight and I need a bit of a break! lol