#purpose is to carry a narrative that they are as soldiers ultimately supposed to be amoral pawns to be played as their govs see fit

[raymend]

Dear god i forget how media illiterate tumblr tags are. No venom snake is not a "Himbo" hes a war criminal. Just say you want to fuck him and go like its fine dude trust me you dont have to fandomize him by saying that he's kind and beefy and stupid like Dont lie

[rainsongmp3]

heaven as a bureaucracy is so fundamentally boring to me. angels are fundamentally inhuman, ethereal, incomprehensible being are you’re telling me that they work like a corporation?? corporations are a very human invention. it simply makes no sense for them to behave like one. also, if we’re talking about a God who has abandoned heaven, that makes the whole concept even more boring. they call God their Father, but act like he was their CEO?? no. God as an absent father is vastly more compelling. angels as a extremely fucked up celestial family is so very interesting. i want to know how daddy issues impacted a being of pure energy and light. i don’t care about how a CEO took an extended vacation. the CEO narrative is literally just ok the big boss is gone we just defer to the second in command until he comes back and we continue to function normally. the absent father narrative allows for nuanced and complex individuals. you get to examine how each angel deals with the void of a father and how this impacts their relationship with obedience, humanity, and faith.

in season 4 alone, we get zachariah, uriel, castiel, and anna who each have their own views and motivations. uriel sees God’s absence as proof that he never cared, never loved them (the angels or the humans) so he follows in lucifer’s footsteps. anna is doubtful and falls not because she has issues with The Absent Father, but because she doubts the chain of command without him. she wants love and emotion so she chooses to become human to find the things she was lacking as an angel. castiel has unwavering faith in The Absent Father throughout season 4. his doubt is in the chain of command and their purpose. but unlike anna, he doesn’t want to become human. he wants to watch over them and protect them as he believes his Father would’ve wanted. zachariah is so interesting in season 4 because he’s nothing like the other angels we’ve seen before. he doesn’t doubt. he doesn’t rebel. he arguably doesn’t even have faith. he doesn’t care that God is gone because that void leaves room for him. he puts michael into the Father/God position, but not out of faith or love. it’s out of an odd convergence of duty and lust of power.

in season 5, this becomes even more interesting because of the introduction of the archangels and cas’s continued rebellion. (i’m not going to get into how michael and lucifer are direct mirrors for sam and dean and how this correlates to the absent father parallels between God and john because that is an entirely separate deeply compelling topic.) michael is set forth as the good son, the good soldier who is entirely driven out of love and loyalty to a Father who abandoned him. he steps up to fill the void, but it’s not about power for him; it’s about duty. lucifer doesn’t experience The Absent Father, but his actions are all in direct response to his father. lucifer was the favorite. he had a real, close bond with God. according to him, he was cast out of heaven because he loved his father too much. it’s that rejection that drives him. he’s fundamentally a petulant child doing anything to get his daddy’s attention. his tantrums just involve a lot more bloodshed. gabriel, in my opinion, has the most interesting feelings about The Absent Father. gabriel loves his family very deeply and watches it be torn apart which just completely wrecks him. when lucifer falls, gabriel loses a brother who he still loves even if he hates his choices and actions. he loses a father presumably soon (for an angel) after that. (if jesus doesn’t exist in the supernatural universe at all, then it’s very possible that God leaves directly after lucifer falls. if jesus does exist, then God probably leaves very soon after jesus’s death and resurrection. but most likely, jesus exists in the supernatural universe, but he was never resurrected. this is another separate issue but it’s based on how salvation and sin is treated in the show. very compelling, but once again not what i’m supposed to be talking about.) all of this loss is so much for gabriel that he leaves. he does the exact same thing that was done to him. gabriel is an archangel. he’s powerful. he’s up there in all of this. and he leaves too. that is so interesting because it begs the question: did God do that too? gabriel runs away from responsibility and pretends that he just doesn’t like it, it’s not his style, but it’s really out of a very deep wound that never healed. he resents his Father for leaving and he resents that he’ll have to watch his brothers fight to the death and presumably pick a side. gabriel was the mediator who bailed. he runs always from his problems instead of dealing with them and ends up carrying all of his pain with him. he fills this up with sex and fun and booze and tricks and pretends to be happy. when he finally confronts his issues, he’s killed!! murdered by the brother he loves!! so maybe, abandoning your family is the only way to survive. we never get to see much of raphael’s views even though he’s a main antagonist in season 6. but we get a little of it in free to be you and me. out of all the archangels he’s the most removed from the idea of God. he truly believes that God is gone. he might be dead. he might not care. he might never come back. it doesn’t matter to raphael. God is gone so the archangels should be in charge and rule heaven and earth as they see fit. he wants the apocalypse, but not out of love or faith. for him, it’s just what should be done.

season 6 begins to move away from angels as a family and God is an absent father. it’s more political. heaven is engaged in a civil war while raphael and cas campaign for the ultimate political office. godstiel is very interesting in relation to God is an absent father. cas is put forth as a rebellious angel, yet he is also the most loyal to God’s intentions (love humans more than angels live Him). he originally wants nothing to do with power, but he eventually begrudgingly accepts it because he has faith in his beliefs and The Absent Father. then, absolute power corrupts absolutely. cas declares himself the New God. he demands the angels follow him and slaughters those who do not. he even takes it as far as to proclaim himself their Father. this character trajectory is influenced by cas’s views on fate vs free will, paranoia, and his relationship to God. this power hungry, possibly manic, walking blasphemy version of cas can’t exist without God as the absent father.

after season 6, we really lose the family dynamics feel of the angels. season 8 is espionage. season 9 is angel politics. the later seasons have heaven function as a bureaucracy with the occasional mention of the archangels as brothers. it’s also vastly more interesting for the angels as soldiers interpretation if they are also a very fucked up family. sibling order is taken literally and to the extreme. the older siblings command the younger siblings as superiors or commanders. the Father is sending his children off to fight wars in his name.

a lot of the nuance is lost in the bureaucratic heaven. it takes away from the complexity and otherworldliness that is supposedly inherent to angels.

[qqueenofhades]

If/when they make a Joe/Nicky prequel movie, what are some of the Dos and Don’ts for them, with regards to historical accuracy. Like, what do you think they should include, and what do you think they should avoid?

Oof. This is a GREAT question, and also designed to give me a chance to ramble on in a deeply, deeply self-indulgent fashion. That is now what will proceed to happen. Consider yourself warned. So if they were miraculously to be like “well that qqueenofhades person on tumblr seems like she knows what she’s talking about, let’s hire her to consult on this production!”, here are some of the things I would tell them.

First off, a question I have in fact asked my students when teaching the crusades in class is whether you could actually show the sack of Jerusalem on screen. Like... if you’re making a film about the First Crusade, what kind of choices are you going to make? What narrative viewpoint are you going to uphold throughout the story? Are you actually going to show a slaughter of Muslim and Jewish inhabitants that some chroniclers described as causing enough blood to reach up to the knees of horses? (Whether it actually did this is beside the point; the point is that the sack went far beyond the accepted conventions of warfare and struck everybody involved in it as particularly horrific.) Because when you’re making a film about the crusades, you are also making it by nature for a modern audience that has particular understandings of Christian/Muslim conflict, religious warfare and/or tolerance, the War on Terror, the modern clash over ISIS, Trump’s Muslim ban, and so forth. The list goes on and on. So you’re never making a straight, unbiased historical adaptation, even if you’re going off the text of primary sources. You’re still constructing it and presenting it in a deliberate and curated fashion, and you can bet that whichever way you come down, your audience will pick up on that.

Let’s take the most recent example of a high-profile crusades film: Kingdom of Heaven from 2005. I’ve written a book chapter on how the narrative choices of KoH, aside from its extensive fictionalization of its subject matter to start with, make it crystal clear that it is a film made by a well-meaning Western liberal filmmaker (Ridley Scott) four years after 9/11 and two years after the invasion of Iraq, when the sympathy from 9/11 was wearing off and everyone saw America/Great Britain and the Bush/Blair coalition overreaching itself in yet another arrogant imperial adventure into the Middle East. Depending on how old you are, you may or may not remember the fact that Bush explicitly called the War on Terror a “crusade” at the start, and then was quickly forced to walk it back once it alarmed his European allies (yes, back then, as bad as America was, it still did have those) with its intellectual baggage. They KNEW exactly what images and tropes they were invoking. It is also partly why medieval crusade studies EXPLODED in popularity after 9/11. Everyone recognized that these two things had something to do with each other, or they made the connection somehow. So anyone watching KoH in 2005 wasn’t really watching a crusades film (it is set in the late 1180s and dramatizes the surrender of Jerusalem to Saladin) so much as a fictional film about the crusades made for an audience explicitly IN 2005. I have TONS to say on this subject (indeed, if you want a copy of my book chapter, DM me and I’ll be happy to send it.)

Ridley Scott basically sets it up as the Christian and Muslim secular leaders themselves aren’t evil, it’s all the religious fanatics (who are all made Templars, including Guy de Lusignan, going back to the “evil Templar” trope started by Sir Walter Scott and which we are all so very familiar with from Dan Brown and company). Orlando Bloom’s character shares a name (Balian de Ibelin) but very little else with the eponymous real-life crusader baron. One thing Scott did do very well was casting an actual and well-respected Syrian actor (Ghassan Massoud) to play Saladin and depicting him in essential fidelity to the historical figure’s reputed traits of justice, fairness, and mercy (there’s some article by a journalist who watched the film in Beirut with a Muslim audience and they LOVED the KoH Saladin). I do give him props for this, rather than making the Evil Muslim into the stock antagonist. However, Orlando Bloom’s Balian is redeemed from the religious extremist violence of the Templars (shorthand for all genuinely religious crusaders) by essentially being an atheistic/agnostic secular humanist who wants everyone to get along. As I said, this is a film about the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq made three years after 9/11 more than anything else, and you can really see that.

That said, enough about KoH, back to this presumable Joe/Nicky backstory. You would obviously run into the fact that it’s SUPER difficult to make a film about the crusades without offending SOMEBODY. The urge to paint in broad strokes and make it all about the evil Westerners invading is one route, but it would weaken the moral complexity of the story and would probably make it come off as pandering to guilty white liberal consciences. Are we gonna touch on the many decades of proto-crusading ventures in Iberia, Sicily, North Africa, and other places, and how the eleventh century, especially under Pope Gregory VII, made it even thinkable for a Christian to be a holy warrior in the first place? (It was NOT normal beforehand.) How are we going to avoid the “lololol all religion sucks and makes people do crazy things” axe to grind favoured by So Very Smart (tm) internet atheists? Yes, we have to demonstrate the ultimate horror of the crusade and the flawed premises it was based on, but we can’t do that by just showing the dirty, religiously zealot medieval people doing that because they don’t know any better and are being cynically manipulated in God’s Name. In other words (and the original TOG film did this very well) we can’t position ourselves to laugh at or mock the crusader characters or feel confident in looking down on them for being Dumb Zealots. They have to be relatable enough that we realize we could BE (and in fact already ARE) them, and THEN you slide into the horror and what compels them to do those kinds of things, and THAT’S when it hits. Because take a look at the news. This is happening around us right now.

Obviously, as I was doing in my First Crusade chapter in DVLA, a lot of this also has to spend time centering the Muslim point of view, the way they reacted to the crusade, the ways in which Yusuf as an Isma’ili Shia Muslim (Kaysani is the name of a branch of Isma’ili Shi’ites, he has a definite historical context and family lineage, and hence is almost surely, as I wrote him, a Fatimid from Egypt) is likewise not just A Stock Muslim. In this case, obviously: Get actual Muslims on the set to advise about the details. Don’t make stupid and/or obvious mistakes. Don’t necessarily make the Muslims less faithful or less virtuous than the Christians (even if this is supposed to praise them as being “less fanatic” than those bad religious Catholics). Don’t tokenize or trivialize their reaction to something as horrific as the sack of Jerusalem, and don’t just use dead brown bodies as graphic visual porn for cheap emotional points. Likewise, it goes without saying, and I don’t think they would anyway, but OH MY GOD DON’T MAKE THIS INTO GAME OF THRONES GRIMDARK!!!! OH MY GOD!!! THERE IS BEAUTY AND THERE IS LIGHT AND THERE IS POETRY AND THAT’S WHY IT HURTS SO MUCH WHEN IT’S DESTROYED! AND THE CHOICES THAT PEOPLE MAKE TO DESTROY THOSE THINGS HAVE TO BE TERRIFYINGLY PLAUSIBLE AND FAMILIAR, BECAUSE OH MY GOD!!

Next, re: Nicolo. Evidently he is a priest or a former priest or something of the sort in the graphic novel, which becomes a bit of a problem if we want him to actually FIGHT in the crusades for important and/or shallow and/or OTP purposes. (I don’t know if they address this somehow or Greg Rucka is not a medieval historian or whatever, but never mind.) It was a Major Thing that priests could not carry weapons, at least and especially bladed weapons. (In the Bayeux Tapestry, we have Odo, the bishop of Bayeux, fighting at the battle of Hastings with a truncheon because he’s a clergyman and can’t have a sword). They were super not supposed to shed blood, and a broadsword (such as the type that Nicky has and carries and is clearly very familiar with) is a knight’s weapon, not a clergyman’s. The thing about priests was that they were not supposed to get their hands dirty with physical warfare; they could (and often did) accompany crusade armies, bishops were secular overlords and important landholders, monks and hermits and other religious preachers were obviously part of a religious expedition, and yes, occasionally some priests would break the rules and fight in battle. But this was an exception FAR more than the rule. So if we’re going by accuracy, we have Nicky as a priest who doesn’t actively fight and doesn’t have a sword, we have him as a rule-breaking priest with a sword (which would have to be addressed, and the Templars, who were basically armed monks, weren’t founded until 1119 so he can’t be one of those yet if this is still 1099) or we just skip the priest part and have him as a crusader with a sword like any other soldier. If he was in fact a priest, he also wouldn’t be up to the same standard of sending into battle. Boys, especially younger sons of the nobility, often entered the church at relatively early ages (12 or 13), where it was treated as a career, and hence they stopped training in arms. So if Nicky is actually out there fighting and/or getting killed by Yusuf several times for Important Purposes, he’s... almost surely not a priest.

Iirc, they’ve already changed a few things from the graphic novel (I haven’t read it, but this is what I’ve heard) so they can also tweak things to make a new backstory or a hybrid-new backstory in film-verse. So once we’ve done all the above, we still have to decide how to handle the actual sack of Jerusalem and massacre of its inhabitants, the balance between violence comparable to the original TOG film and stopping short of being exploitative (which I think they would do well), and the aftermath of that and the founding of the new Latin Christian kingdom. It would have to, as again the original film does very well, avoid prioritizing the usual players and viewpoints in these events, and dig into presenting the experiences of the marginalized and way in which ordinary people are brought to the point of doing these things. It doesn’t (and frankly shouldn’t) preach at us that U.S. Invasions Of The Middle East Are Bad (especially since obviously none of the characters/people/places/events here are American at all). And as I said already but bears repeating: my god, don’t even THINK about making it GOT and marketing it as Gritty Dramatic Medieval History, You Know It’s Real Because They’re Dirty, Violent, and Bigoted!

Also, a couple tags I saw pop up were things like “Period-Typical Racism” and “Period-Typical Homophobia” and mmm okay obviously yes there are these elements, but what exactly is “period typical?” Does it mean “using these terms just because you figure everyone was less tolerant back then?” We know that I, with my endless pages of meta on medieval queer history, would definitely side-eye any attempts to paint these things as Worse Than Us, and the setting alone would convey a sense of the conflict without having to add on gratuitous microaggressions. I basically think the film needs to be made exactly like the original: centering the gay/queer perspectives of marginalized people and people of color, resisting the urge for crass jokes at the expense of the identity of its characters, and approaching it with an awareness of the deep complexity and personal meaning of these things to people in terms of the historical moment we’re in, while not making a film that ONLY prizes our response and our current crises. Because if we’re thinking about these historical genealogies, the least we can do (although we so often aren’t) is to be honest.

Thanks! I LOVED this question.

[holyhellpod]

Holy Hell: 3. Metanarrativity: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship? aka the analysis no one asked for.

In this ep, we delve into authorship, narrative, fandom and narrative meaning. And somehow, as always, bring it back to Cas and Misha Collins.

(Note: the reason I didn’t talk about Billie’s authorship and library is because I completely forgot it existed until I watched season 13 “Advanced Thanatology” again, while waiting for this episode to upload. I’ll find a way to work her into later episodes tho!)

I had to upload it as a new podcast to Spotify so if you could just re-subscribe that would be great! Or listen to it at these other links.

Please listen to the bit at the beginning about monetisation and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to message me here.

Apple | Spotify | Google

Transcript under the cut!

Warnings: discussions of incest, date rape, rpf, war, 9/11, the bush administration, abuse, mental health, addiction, homelessness. Most of these are just one off comments, they’re not full discussions.

Meta-Textuality: Who’s the Deleuze and who’s the Guattari in your relationship?

In the third episode of Season 6, “The Third Man,” Balthazar says to Cas, “you tore up the whole script and burned the pages.” That is the fundamental idea the writers of the first five seasons were trying to sell us: whatever grand plan the biblical God had cooking up is worth nothing in face of the love these men have—for each other and the world. Sam, Bobby, Cas and Dean will go to any lengths to protect one another and keep people safe. What’s real? What’s worth saving? People are real. Families are worth saving. 

This show plugs free will as the most important thing a person, angel, demon or otherwise can have. The fact of the matter is that Dean was always going to fight against the status quo, Sam was always going to go his own way, and Bobby was always going to do his best for his boys. The only uncertainty in the entire narrative is Cas. He was never meant to rebel. He was never meant to fall from Heaven. He was supposed to fall in line, be a good soldier, and help bring on the apocalypse, but Cas was the first agent of free will in the show’s timeline. Sam followed Lucifer, Dean followed Michael, and John gave himself up for the sins of his children, at once both a God and Jesus figure. But Cas wasn’t modelled off anyone else. He is original. There are definitely some parallels to Ruby, but I would argue those are largely unintentional. Cas broke the mold. 

That’s to say nothing of the impact he’s had on the fanbase, and the show itself, which would not have reached 15 seasons and be able to end the way they wanted it to without Cas and Misha Collins. His back must be breaking from carrying the entire show. 

But what the holy hell are we doing here today? Not just talking about Cas. We’re talking about metanarrativity: as I define it, and for purposes of this episode, the story within a story, and the act of storytelling. We’re going to go through a select few episodes which I think exemplify the best of what this show has to offer in terms of framing the narrative. We’ll talk about characters like Chuck and Becky and the baby dykes in season 10. And most importantly we’ll talk about the audience’s role, our role, in the reciprocal relationship of storytelling. After all, a tv show is nothing without the viewer.

I was in fact introduced to the concept of metanarrativity by Supernatural, so the fact that I’m revisiting it six years after I finished my degree to talk about the show is one of life’s little jokes.

 I’m brushing off my degree and bringing out the big guns (aka literary theorists) to examine this concept. This will be yet another piece of analysis that would’ve gone well in my English Lit degree, but I’ll try not to make it dry as dog shit. 

First off, I’m going to argue that the relationship between the creators of Supernatural and the fans has always been a dialogue, albeit with a power imbalance. Throughout the series, even before explicitly metanarrative episodes like season 10 “Fan Fiction” and season 4 “the monster at the end of this book,” the creators have always engaged in conversations with the fans through the show. This includes but is not limited to fan conventions, where the creators have actual, live conversations with the fans. Misha Collins admitted at a con that he’d read fanfiction of Cas while he was filming season 4, but it’s pretty clear even from the first season that the creators, at the very least Eric Kripke, were engaging with fans. The show aired around the same time as Twitter and Tumblr were created, both of which opened up new passageways for fans to interact with each other, and for Twitter and Facebook especially, new passageways for fans to interact with creators and celebrities.

But being the creators, they have ultimate control over what is written, filmed and aired, while we can only speculate and make our own transformative interpretations. But at least since s4, they have engaged in meta narrative construction that at once speaks to fans as well as expands the universe in fun and creative ways. My favourite episodes are the ones where we see the Winchesters through the lens of other characters, such as the season 3 episode “Jus In Bello,” in which Sam and Dean are arrested by Victor Henriksen, and the season 7 episode “Slash Fiction” in which Dean and Sam’s dopplegangers rob banks and kill a bunch of people, loathe as I am to admit that season 7 had an effect on any part of me except my upchuck reflex. My second favourite episodes are the meta episodes, and for this episode of Holy Hell, we’ll be discussing a few: The French Mistake, he Monster at the end of this book, the real ghostbusters, Fan Fiction, Metafiction, and Don’t Call Me Shurley. I’ll also discuss Becky more broadly, because, like, of course I’ll be discussing Becky, she died for our sins. 

Let’s take it back. The Monster At The End Of This Book — written by Julie Siege and Nancy Weiner and directed by Mike Rohl. Inarguably one of the better episodes in the first five seasons. Not only is Cas in it, looking so beautiful, but Sam gets something to do, thank god, and it introduces the character of Chuck, who becomes a source of comic relief over the next two seasons. The episode starts with Chuck Shurley, pen named Carver Edlund after my besties, having a vision while passed out drunk. He dreams of Sam and Dean larping as Feds and finding a series of books based on their lives that Chuck has written. They eventually track Chuck down, interrogate him, and realise that he’s a prophet of the lord, tasked with writing the Winchester Gospels. The B plot is Sam plotting to kill Lilith while Dean fails to get them out of the town to escape her. The C plot is Dean and Cas having a moment that strengthens their friendship and leads further into Cas’s eventual disobedience for Dean. Like the movie Disobedience. Exactly like the movie Disobedience. Cas definitely spits in Dean’s mouth, it’s kinda gross to be honest. Maybe I’m just not allo enough to appreciate art. 

When Eric Kripke was showrunner of the first five seasons of Supernatural,  he conceptualised the character of Chuck. Kripke as the author-god introduced the character of the author-prophet who would later become in Jeremy Carver’s showrun seasons the biblical God. Judith May Fathallah writes in “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural” that Kripke writes himself both into and out of the text, ending his era with Chuck winking at the camera, saying, “nothing really ends,” and disappearing. Kripke stayed on as producer, continuing to write episodes through Sera Gamble’s era, and was even inserted in text in the season 6 episode “The French Mistake”. So nothing really does end, not Kripke’s grip on the show he created, not even the show itself, which fans have jokingly referred to as continuing into its 16th season. Except we’re not joking. It will die when all of us are dead, when there is no one left to remember it. According to W R Fisher, humans are homo narrans, natural storytellers. The Supernatural fandom is telling a fidelitous narrative, one which matches our own beliefs, values and experiences instead of that of canon. Instead of, at Fathallah says, “the Greek tradition, that we should struggle to do the right thing simply because it is right, though we will suffer and be punished anyway,” the fans have created an ending for the characters that satisfies each and every one of our desires, because we each create our own endings. It’s better because we get to share them with each other, in the tradition of campfire stories, each telling our own version and building upon the others. If that’s not the epitome of mythmaking then I don’t know. It’s just great. Dean and Cas are married, Eileen and Sam are married, Jack is sometimes a baby who Claire and Kaia are forced to babysit, Jody and Donna are gonna get hitched soon. It’s season 17, time for many weddings, and Kevin Tran is alive. Kripke, you have no control over this anymore, you crusty hag. 

Chuck is introduced as someone with power, but not influence over the story, only how the story is told through the medium of the novels. It’s basically a very badly written, non authorised biography, and Charlie reading literally every book and referencing things she should have no knowledge of is so damn creepy and funny. At first Chuck is surprised by his characters coming to life, despite having written it already, and when shown the intimidating array of weapons in Baby’s trunk he gets real scared. Which is the appropriate response for a skinny 5-foot-8 white guy in a bathrobe who writes terrible fantasy novels for a living. 

As far as I can remember, this is the first explicitly metanarrative episode in the series, or at least the first one with in world consequences. It builds upon the lore of Christianity, angels, and God, while teasing what’s to come. Chuck and Sam have a conversation about how the rest of the season is going to play out, and Sam comes away with the impression that he’ll go down with the ship. They touch on Sam’s addiction to demon blood, which Chuck admits he didn’t write into the books, because in the world of supernatural, addiction should be demonised ha ha at every opportunity, except for Dean’s alcoholism which is cool and manly and should never be analysed as an unhealthy trauma coping mechanism. 

Chuck is mostly impotent in the story of Sam and Dean, but his very presence presents an element of good luck that turns quickly into a force of antagonism in the series four finale, “Lucifer Rising”, when the archangel Raphael who defeats Lilith in this episode also kills Cas in the finale. It’s Cas’s quick thinking and Dean’s quick doing that resolve the episode and save them from Lilith, once again proving that free will is the greatest force in the universe. Cas is already tearing up pages and burning scripts. The fandom does the same, acting as gods of their own making in taking canon and transforming it into fan art. The fans aren’t impotent like Chuck, but neither do we have sway over the story in the way that Cas and Dean do. Sam isn’t interested in changing the story in the same way—he wants to kill Lilith and save the world, but in doing so continues the story in the way it was always supposed to go, the way the angels and the demons and even God wanted him to. 

Neither of them are author-gods in the way that God is. We find out later that Chuck is in fact the real biblical god, and he engineers everything. The one thing he doesn’t engineer, however, is Castiel, and I’ll get to that in a minute.

The Real Ghostbusters

Season 5’s “The real ghostbusters,” written by Nancy Weiner and Erik Kripke, and directed by James L Conway, situates the Winchesters at a fan convention for the Supernatural books. While there, they are confronted by a slew of fans cosplaying as Sam, Dean, Bobby, the scarecrow, Azazel, and more. They happen to stumble upon a case, in the midst of the game where the fans pretend to be on a case, and with the help of two fans cosplaying as Sam and Dean, they put to rest a group of homicidal ghost children and save the day. Chuck as the special guest of the con has a hero moment that spurs Becky on to return his affections. And at the end, we learn that the Colt, which they’ve been hunting down to kill the devil, was given to a demon named Crowley. It’s a fun episode, but ultimately skippable. This episode isn’t so much metanarrative as it is metatextual—metatextual meaning more than one layer of text but not necessarily about the storytelling in those texts—but let’s take a look at it anyway.

The metanarrative element of a show about a series of books about the brothers the show is based on is dope and expands upon what we saw in “the monster at the end of this book”. But the episode tells a tale about about the show itself, and the fandom that surrounds it. 

Where “The Monster At The End Of This Book” and the season 5 premiere “Sympathy For The Devil” poked at the coiled snake of fans and the concept of fandom, “the real ghostbusters” drags them into the harsh light of an enclosure and antagonises them in front of an audience. The metanarrative element revolves around not only the books themselves, but the stories concocted within the episode: namely Barnes and Demian the cosplayers and the story of the ghosts. The Winchester brothers’s history that we’ve seen throughout the first five seasons of the show is bared in a tongue in cheek way: while we cried with them when Sam and Dean fought with John, now the story is thrown out in such a way as to mock both the story and the fans’ relationship to it. Let me tell you, there is a lot to be made fun of on this show, but the fans’ relationship to the story of Sam, Dean and everyone they encounter along the way isn’t part of it. I don’t mean to be like, wow you can’t make fun of us ever because we’re special little snowflakes and we take everything so seriously, because you are welcome to make fun of us, but when the creators do it, I can’t help but notice a hint of malice. And I think that’s understandable in a way. Like The relationship between creator and fan is both layered and symbiotic. While Kripke and co no doubt owe the show’s popularity to the fans, especially as the fandom has grown and evolved over time, we’re not exactly free of sin. And don’t get me wrong, no fandom is. But the bad apples always seem to outweigh the good ones, and bad experiences can stick with us long past their due.

However, portraying us as losers with no lives who get too obsessed with this show — well, you know, actually, maybe they’re right. I am a loser with no life and I am too obsessed with this show. So maybe they have a point. But they’re so harsh about it. From wincestie Becky who they paint as a desperate shrew to these cosplayers who threaten Dean’s very perception of himself, we’re not painted in a very good light. 

Dean says to Demian and Barnes, “It must be nice to get out of your mom’s basement.” He’s judging them for deriving pleasure from dressing up and pretending to be someone else for a night. He doesn’t seem to get the irony that he does that for a living. As the seasons wore on, the creators made sure to include episodes where Dean’s inner geek could run rampant, often in the form of dressing up like a cowboy, such as season six “Frontierland” and season 13 “Tombstone”. I had to take a break from writing this to laugh for five minutes because Dean is so funny. He’s a car gay but he only likes one car. He doesn’t follow sports. His echolalia causes him to blurt out lines from his favourite movies. He’s a posse magnet. And he loves cosplay. But he will continually degrade and insult anyone who expresses interest in role play, fandom, or interests in general. Maybe that’s why Sam is such a boring person, because Dean as his mother didn’t allow him to have any interests outside of hunting. And when Sam does express interests, Dean insults him too. What a dick. He’s my soulmate, but I am not going to stop listening to hair metal for him. That’s where I draw the line. 

 Where “the monster at the end of this book” is concerned with narrative and authorship, “the real ghostbusters” is concerned with fandom and fan reactions to the show. It’s not really the best example to talk about in an episode about metanarrativity, but I wanted to include it anyway. It veers from talk of narrative by focusing on the people in the periphery of the narrative—the fans and the author. In season 9 “Metafiction,” Metatron asks the question, who gives the story meaning? The text would have you believe it’s the characters. The angels think it’s God. The fandom think it’s us. The creators think it’s them. Perhaps we will never come to a consensus or even a satisfactory answer to this question. Perhaps that’s the point.

The ultimate takeaway from this episode is that ordinary people, the people Sam and Dean save, the people they save the world for, the people they die for again and again, are what give their story meaning. Chuck defeats a ghost and saves the people in the conference room from being murdered. Demian and Barnes, don’t ask me which is which, burn the bodies of the ghost children and lay their spirits to rest. The text says that ordinary, every day people can rise to the challenge of becoming extraordinary. It’s not a bad note to end on, by any means. And then we find out that Demian and Barnes are a couple, which of course Dean is surprised at, because he lacks object permanence. 

This is no doubt influenced by how a good portion of the transformative fandom are queer, and also a nod to the wincesties and RPF writers like Becky who continue to bottom feed off the wrong message of this show. But then, the creators encourage that sort of thing, so who are the real clowns here? Everyone. Everyone involved with this show in any way is a clown, except for the crew, who were able to feed their families for more than a decade. 

Okay side note… over the past year or so I’ve been in process of realising that even in fandom queers are in the minority. I know the statistic is that 10% of the world population is queer, but that doesn’t seem right to me? Maybe because 4/5 closest friends are queer and I hang around queers online, but I also think I lack object permanence when it comes to straight people. Like I just do not interact with straight people on a regular basis outside of my best friend and parents and school. So when I hear that someone in fandom is straight I’m like, what the fuck… can you keep that to yourself please? Like if I saw Misha Collins coming out as straight I would be like, I didn’t ask and you didn’t have to tell. Okay I’m mostly joking, but I do forget straight people exist. Mostly I don’t think about whether people are gay or trans or cis or straight unless they’ve explicitly said it and then yes it does colour my perception of them, because of course it would. If they’re part of the queer community, they’re my people. And if they’re straight and cis, then they could very well pose a threat to me and my wellbeing. But I never ask people because it’s not my business to ask. If they feel comfortable enough to tell me, that’s awesome.  I think Dean feels the same way. Towards the later seasons at least, he has a good reaction when it’s revealed that someone is queer, even if it is mostly played off as a joke. It’s just that he doesn’t have a frame of reference in his own life to having a gay relationship, either his or someone he’s close to. He says to Cesar and Jesse in season 11 “The Critters” that they fight like brothers, because that’s the only way he knows how to conceptualise it. He doesn’t have a way to categorise his and Cas’s relationship, which is in many ways, long before season 15 “Despair,” harking back even to the parallels between Ruby and Cas in season 3 and 4, a romantic one, aside from that Cas is like a brother to him. Because he’s never had anyone in his life care for him the way Cas does that wasn’t Sam and Bobby, and he doesn’t recognise the romantic element of their relationship until literally Cas says it to him in the third last episode, he just—doesn’t know what his and Cas’s relationship is. He just really doesn’t know. And he grew up with a father who despised him for taking the mom and wife role in their family, the role that John placed him in, for being subservient to John’s wishes where Sam was more rebellious, so of course he wouldn’t understand either his own desires or those of anyone around him who isn’t explicitly shoving their tits in his face. He moulded his entire personality around what he thought John wanted of him, and John says to him explicitly in season 14 “Lebanon”, “I thought you’d have a family,” meaning, like him, wife and two rugrats. And then, dear god, Dean says, thinking of Sam, Cas, Jack, Claire, and Mary, “I have a family.” God that hurts so much. But since for most of his life he hasn’t been himself, he’s been the man he thought his father wanted him to be, he’s never been able to examine his own desires, wants and goals. So even though he’s really good at reading people, he is not good at reading other people’s desires unless they have nefarious intentions. Because he doesn’t recognise what he feels is attraction to men, he doesn’t recognise that in anyone else. 

Okay that’s completely off topic, wow. Getting back to metanarrativity in “The Real Ghostbusters,” I’ll just cap it off by saying that the books in this episode are more a frame for the events than the events themselves. However, there are some good outtakes where Chuck answers some questions, and I’m not sure how much of that is scripted and how much is Rob Benedict just going for it, but it lends another element to the idea of Kripke as author-god. The idea of a fan convention is really cool, because at this point Supernatural conventions had been running for about 4 years, since 2006. It’s definitely a tribute to the fans, but also to their own self importance. So it’s a mixed bag, considering there were plenty of elements in there that show the good side of fandom and fans, but ultimately the Winchesters want nothing to do with it, consider it weird, and threaten Chuck when he says he’ll start releasing books again, which as far as they know is his only source of income. But it’s a fun episode and Dean is a grouchy bitch, so who the holy hell cares?

Season 10 episode “fanfiction” written by my close personal friend Robbie Thompson and directed by Phil Sgriccia is one of the funniest episodes this show has ever done. Not only is it full of metatextual and metanarrative jokes, the entire premise revolves around fanservice, but in like a fun and interesting way, not fanservice like killing the band Kansas so that Dean can listen to “Carry On My Wayward Son” in heaven twice. Twice. One version after another. Like I would watch this musical seven times in theatre, I would buy the soundtrack, I would listen to it on repeat and make all my friends listen to it when they attend my online Jitsi birthday party. This musical is my Hamilton. Top ten episodes of this show for sure. The only way it could be better is if Cas was there. And he deserved to be there. He deserved to watch little dyke Castiel make out with her girlfriend with her cute little wings, after which he and Dean share uncomfortable eye contact. Dean himself is forever coming to terms with the fact that gay people exist, but Cas should get every opportunity he can to hear that it’s super cool and great and awesome to be queer. But really he should be in every episode, all of them, all 300 plus episodes including the ones before angels were introduced. I’m going to commission the guy who edits Paddington into every movie to superimpose Cas standing on the highway into every episode at least once.

“Fan Fiction” starts with a tv script and the words “Supernatural pilot created by Eric Kripke”. This Immediately sets up the idea that it’s toying with narrative. Blah blah blah, some people go missing, they stumble into a scene from their worst nightmares: the school is putting on a musical production of a show inspired by the Supernatural books. It’s a comedy of errors. When people continue to go missing, Sam and Dean have to convince the girls that something supernatural is happening, while retaining their dignity and respect. They reveal that they are the real Sam and Dean, and Dean gives the director Marie a summary of their lives over the last five seasons, but they aren’t taken seriously. Because, like, of course they aren’t. Even when the girls realise that something supernatural is happening, they don’t actually believe that the musical they’ve made and the series of books they’re basing it on are real. Despite how Sam and Dean Winchester were literal fugitives for many years at many different times, and this was on the news, and they were wanted by the FBI, despite how they pretend to be FBI, and no one mentions it??? Did any of the staffwriters do the required reading or just do what I used to do for my 40 plus page readings of Baudrillard and just skim the first sentence of every paragraph? Neat hack for you: paragraphs are set up in a logical order of Topic, Example, Elaboration, Linking sentence. Do you have to read 60 pages of some crusty French dude waxing poetic about how his best friend Pierre wants to shag his wife and making that your problem? Read the first and last sentence of every paragraph. Boom, done. Just cut your work in half. 

The musical highlights a lot of the important moments of the show so far. The brothers have, as Charlie Bradbury says, their “broment,” and as Marie says, their “boy melodrama scene,” while she insinuates that there is a sexual element to their relationship. This show never passed up an opportunity to mention incest. It’s like: mentioning incest 5000 km, not being disgusting 1 km, what a hard decision. Actually, they do have to walk on their knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. But there are other moments—such as Mary burning on the ceiling, a classic, Castiel waiting for Dean at the side of the highway, and Azazel poisoning Sam. With the help of the high schoolers, Sam and Dean overcome Calliope, the muse and bad guy of the episode, and save the day. What began as their lives reinterpreted and told back to them turns into a story they have some agency over.

In this episode, as opposed to “The Monster At The End Of This Book,” The storytelling has transferred from an alcoholic in a bathrobe into the hands of an overbearing and overachieving teenage girl, and honestly why not. Transformative fiction is by and large run by women, and queer women, so Marie and her stage manager slash Jody Mills’s understudy Maeve are just following in the footsteps of legends. This kind of really succinctly summarises the difference between curative fandom and transformative fandom, the former of which is populated mostly by men, and the latter mostly by women. As defined by LordByronic in 2015, Curative fandom is more like enjoying the text, collecting the merchandise, organising the knowledge — basically Reddit in terms of fandom curation. Transformative fandom is transforming the source text in some way — making fanart, fanfic, mvs, or a musical — basically Tumblr in general, and Archive of our own specifically. Like what do non fandom people even do on Tumblr? It is a complete mystery to me. Whereas Chuck literally writes himself into the narrative he receives through visions, Marie and co have agency and control over the narrative by writing it themselves. 

Chuck does appear in the episode towards the end, his first appearance after five seasons. The theory that he killed those lesbian theatre girls makes me wanna curl up and die, so I don’t subscribe to it. Chuck watched the musical and he liked it and he gave unwarranted notes and then he left, the end.

The Supernatural creative team is explicitly acknowledging the fandom’s efforts by making this episode. They’re writing us in again, with more obsessive fans, but with lethbians this time, which makes it infinitely better. And instead of showing us as potential date rapists, we’re just cool chicks who like to make art. And that’s fucken awesome. 

I just have to note that the characters literally say the word Destiel after Dean sees the actors playing Dean and Cas making out. He storms off and tells Sam to shut the fuck up when Sam makes fun of him, because Dean’s sexuality is NOT threatened he just needs to assert his dominance as a straight hetero man who has NEVER looked at another man’s lips and licked his own. He just… forgets that gay people exist until someone reminds him. BUT THEN, after a rousing speech that is stolen from Rent or Wicked or something, he echoes Marie’s words back, saying “put as much sub into that text as you possibly can.” What does Dean know about subbing, I wonder. Okay I’m suddenly reminded that he did literally go to a kink bar and get hit on by a leather daddy. Oh Dean, the experiences you have as a broad-shouldered, pixie-faced man with cowboy legs. You were born for this role.

Metatron is my favourite villain. As one tumblr user pointed out, he is an evil English literature major, which is just a normal English literature major. The season nine episode “Meta Fiction” written by my main man robbie thompson and directed by thomas j wright, happens within a curious season. Castiel, once again, becomes the leader of a portion of the heavenly host to take down Metatron, and Dean is affected by the Mark Of Cain. Sam was recently possessed by Gadreel, who killed Kevin in Sam’s body and then decided to run off with Metatron. Metatron himself is recruiting angels to join him, in the hopes that he can become the new God. It’s the first introduction of Hannah, who encourages Cas to recruit angels himself to take on Metatron. Also, we get to see Gabriel again, who is always a delight. 

This episode is a lot of fun. Metatron poses questions like, who tells a story and who is the most important person in the telling? Is it the writer? The audience? He starts off staring over his typewriter to address the camera, like a pompous dickhead. No longer content with consuming stories, he’s started to write his own. And they are hubristic ones about becoming God, a better god than Chuck ever was, but to do it he needs to kill a bunch of people and blame it on Cas. So really, he’s actually exactly like Chuck who blamed everything on Lucifer. 

But I think the most apt analogy we can use for this in terms of who is the creator is to think of Metatron as a fanfiction writer. He consumes the media—the Winchester Gospels—and starts to write his own version of events—leading an army to become God and kill Cas. Nevermind that no one has been able to kill Cas in a way that matters or a way that sticks. Which is canon, and what Metatron is trying to do is—well not fanon because it actually does impact the Winchesters’ storyline. It would be like if one of the writers of Supernatural began writing Supernatural fanfiction before they got a job on the show. Which as my generation and the generations coming after me get more comfortable with fanfiction and fandom, is going to be the case for a lot of shows. I think it’s already the case for Riverdale. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t the woman who wrote the bi Dean essay go to work on Riverdale? Or something? I dunno, I have the post saved in my tumblr likes but that is quagmire of epic proportions that I will easily get lost in if I try to find it. 

Okay let me flex my literary degree. As Englund and Leach say in “Ethnography and the metanarratives of modernity,” “The influential “literary turn,” in which the problems of ethnography were seen as largely textual and their solutions as lying in experimental writing seems to have lost its impetus.” This can be taken to mean, in the context of Supernatural, that while Metatron’s writings seek to forge a new path in history, forgoing fate for a new kind of divine intervention, the problem with Metatron is that he’s too caught up in the textual, too caught up in the writing, to be effectual. And this as we see throughout seasons 9, 10 and 11, has no lasting effect. Cas gets his grace back, Dean survives, and Metatron becomes a powerless human. In this case, the impetus is his grace, which he loses when Cas cuts it out of him, a mirror to Metatron cutting out Cas’s grace. 

However, I realise that the concept of ethnography in Supernatural is a flawed one, ethnography being the observation of another culture: a lot of the angels observe humanity and seem to fit in. However, Cas has to slowly acclimatise to the Winchesters as they tame him, but he never quite fit in—missing cues, not understanding jokes or Dean’s personal space, the scene where he says, “We have a guinea pig? Where?” Show him the guinea pig Sam!!! He wants to see it!!! At most he passes as a human with autism. Cas doesn’t really observe humanity—he observes nature, as seen in season 7 “reading is fundamental” and “survival of the fittest”. Even the human acts he talks about in season 6 “the man who would be king” are from hundreds or thousands of years ago. He certainly doesn’t observe popular culture, which puts him at odds with Dean, who is made up of 90 per cent pop culture references and 10 per cent flannel. Metatron doesn’t seek to blend in with humanity so much as control it, which actually is the most apt example of ethnography for white people in the last—you know, forever. But of course the writers didn’t seek to make this analogy. It is purely by chance, and maybe I’m the only person insane enough to realise it. But probably not. There are a lot of cookies much smarter than me in the Supernatural fandom and they’ve like me have grown up and gone to university and gotten real jobs in the real world and real haircuts. I’m probably the only person to apply Englund and Leach to it though.

And yes, as I read this paper I did need to have one tab open on Google, with the word “define” in the search bar. 

Metatron has a few lines in this that I really like. He says: 

“The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.”

“You’re going to have to follow my script.”

“I’m an entity of my word.”

It’s really obvious, but they’re pushing the idea that Metatron has become an agent of authorship instead of just a consumer of media. He even throws a Supernatural book into his fire — a symbolic act of burning the script and flipping the writer off, much like Cas did to God and the angels in season 5. He’s not a Kripke figure so much as maybe a Gamble, Carver or Dabb figure, in that he usurps Chuck and becomes the author-god. This would be extremely postmodern of him if he didn’t just do exactly what Chuck was doing, except worse somehow. In fact, it’s postmodern of Cas to reject heaven’s narrative and fall for Dean. As one tumblr user points out, Cas really said “What’s fate compared to Dean Winchester?”

Okay this transcript is almost 8000 words already, and I still have two more episodes to review, and more things to say, so I’ll leave you with this. Metatron says to Cas, “Out of all of God’s wind up toys, you’re the only one with any spunk.” Why Cas has captured his attention comes down more than anything to a process of elimination. Most angels fucking suck. They follow the rules of whoever puts themselves in charge, and they either love Cas or hate him, or just plainly wanna fuck him, and there have been few angels who stood out. Balthazar was awesome, even though I hated him the first time I watched season 6. He UNSUNK the Titanic. Legend status. And Gabriel was of course the OG who loves to fuck shit up. But they’re gone at this stage in the narrative, and Cas survives. Cas always survives. He does have spunk. And everyone wants to fuck him.  

Season 11 episode 20 “Don’t Call Me Shurley,” the last episode written by the Christ like figure of Robbie Thompson — are we sensing a theme here? — and directed by my divine enemy Robert Singer, starts with Metatron dumpster diving for food. I’m not even going to bother commenting on this because like… it’s supernatural and it treats complex issues like homelessness and poverty with zero nuance. Like the Winchesters live in poverty but it’s fun and cool because they always scrape by but Metatron lives in poverty and it’s funny. Cas was homeless and it was hard but he needed to do it to atone for his sins, and Metatron is homeless and it’s funny because he brought it on himself by being a murderous dick. Fucking hell. Robbie, come on. The plot focuses on God, also known as Chuck Shurley, making himself known to Metatron and asking for Metatron’s opinion on his memoir. Meanwhile, the Winchesters battle another bout of infectious serial killer fog sent by Amara. At the end of the episode, Chuck heals everyone affected by the fog and reveals himself to Sam and Dean. 

Chuck says that he didn’t foresee Metatron trying to become god, but the idea of Season 15 is that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all their lives. When Metatron tries, he fails miserably, is locked up in prison, tortured by Dean, then rendered useless as a human and thrown into the world without a safety net. His authorship is reduced to nothing, and he is reduced to dumpster diving for food. He does actually attempt to live his life as someone who records tragedies as they happen and sells the footage to news stations, which is honestly hilarious and amazing and completely unsurprising because Metatron is, at the heart of it, an English Literature major. In true bastard style, he insults Chuck’s work and complains about the bar, but slips into his old role of editor when Chuck asks him to. 

The theory I’m consulting for this uses the term metanarrative in a different way than I am. They consider it an overarching narrative, a grand narrative like religion. Chuck’s biography is in a sense most loyal to Middleton and Walsh’s view of metanarrative: “the universal story of the world from arche to telos, a grand narrative encompassing world history from beginning to end.” Except instead of world history, it’s God’s history, and since God is construed in Supernatural as just some guy with some powers who is as fallible as the next some guy with some powers, his story has biases and agendas.  Okay so in the analysis I’m getting Middleton and Walsh’s quotes from, James K A Smith’s “A little story about metanarratives,” Smith dunks on them pretty bad, but for Supernatural purposes their words ring true. Think of them as the BuckLeming of Lyotard’s postmodern metanarrative analysis: a stopped clock right twice a day. Is anyone except me understanding the sequence of words I’m saying right now. Do I just have the most specific case of brain worms ever found in human history. I’m currently wearing my oversized Keith Haring shirt and dipping pretzels into peanut butter because it’s 3.18 in the morning and the homosexuals got to me. The total claims a comprehensive metanarrative of world history make do indeed, as Middleton and Walsh claim, lead to violence, stay with me here, because Chuck’s legacy is violence, and so is Metatron’s, and in trying to reject the metanarrative, Sam and Dean enact violence. Mostly Dean, because in season 15 he sacrifices his own son twice to defeat Chuck. But that means literally fighting violence with violence. Violence is, after all, all they know. Violence is the lens through which they interact with the world. If the writers wanted to do literally anything else, they could have continued Dean’s natural character progression into someone who eschews the violence that stems from intergeneration trauma — yes I will continue to use the phrase intergenerational trauma whenever I refer to Dean — and becomes a loving father and husband. Sam could eschew violence and start a monster rehabilitation centre with Eileen.

This episode of Holy Hell is me frantically grabbing at straws to make sense of a narrative that actively hates me and wants to kick me to death. But the violence Sam and Dean enact is not at a metanarrative level, because they are not author-gods of their own narrative. In season 15 “Atomic Monsters,” Becky points out that the ending of the Supernatural book series is bad because the brothers die, and then, in a shocking twist of fate, Dean does die, and the narrative is bad. The writers set themselves a goal post to kick through and instead just slammed their heat into the bars. They set up the dartboard and were like, let’s aim the darts at ourselves. Wouldn’t that be fun. Season 15’s writing is so grossly incompetent that I believe every single conspiracy theory that’s come out of the finale since November, because it’s so much more compelling than whatever the fuck happened on the road so far. Carry on? Why yes, I think I will carry on, carry on like a pork chop, screaming at the bars of my enclosure until I crack my voice open like an egg and spill out all my rage and frustration. The world will never know peace again. It’s now 3.29 and I’ve written over 9000 words of this transcript. And I’m not done.

Middleton and Walsh claim that metanarratives are merely social constructions masquerading as universal truths. Which is, exactly, Supernatural. The creators have constructed this elaborate web of narrative that they want to sell us as the be all and end all. They won’t let the actors discuss how they really feel about the finale. They won’t let Misha Collins talk about Destiel. They want us to believe it was good, actually, that Dean, a recovering alcoholic with a 30 year old infant son and a husband who loves him, deserved to die by getting NAILED, while Sam, who spent the last four seasons, the entirety of Andrew Dabb’s run as showrunner, excelling at creating a hunter network and romancing both the queen of hell and his deaf hunter girlfriend, should have lived a normie life with a normie faceless wife. Am I done? Not even close. I started this episode and I’m going to finish it.

When we find out that Chuck is God in the episode of season 11, it turns everything we knew about Chuck on its head. We find out in Season 15 that Chuck has been writing the Winchesters’ story all along, that everything that happened to them is his doing. The one thing he couldn’t control was Cas’s choice to rebel. If we take him at his word, Cas is the only true force of free will in the entire universe, and more specifically, the love that Cas had for Dean which caused him to rebel and fall from heaven. — This theory has holes of course. Why would Lucifer torture Lilith into becoming the first demon if he didn’t have free will? Did Chuck make him do that? And why? So that Chuck could be the hero and Lucifer the bad guy, like Lucifer claimed all along? That’s to say nothing of Adam and Eve, both characters the show introduced in different ways, one as an antagonist and the other as the narrative foil to Dean and Cas’s romance. Thinking about it makes my head hurt, so I’m just not gunna. 

So Chuck was doing the writing all along. And as Becky claims in “Atomic Monsters,” it’s bad writing. The writers explicitly said, the ending Chuck wrote is bad because there’s no Cas and everyone dies, and then they wrote an ending where there is no Cas and everyone dies. So talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. Talk about giant craters in the earth you could see from 800 kilometres away but you still fell into. Meanwhile fan writers have the opportunity to write a million different endings, all of which satisfy at least one person. The fandom is a hydra, prolific and unstoppable, and we’ll keep rewriting the ending a million more times.

And all this is not even talking about the fact that Chuck is a man, Metatron is a man, Sam and Dean and Cas are men, and the writers and directors of the show are, by an overwhelming majority, men. Most of them are white, straight, cis men. Feminist scholarship has done a lot to unpack the damage done by paternalistic approaches to theory, sociology, ethnography, all the -ys, but I propose we go a step further with these men. Kill them. Metanarratively, of course. Amara, the Darkness, God’s sister, had a chance to write her own story without Chuck, after killing everything in the universe, and I think she had the right idea. Knock it all down to build it from the ground up. Billie also had the opportunity to write a narrative, but her folly was, of course, putting any kind of faith in the Winchesters who are also grossly incompetent and often fail up. She is, as all author-gods on this show are, undone by Castiel. The only one with any spunk, the only one who exists outside of his own narrative confines, the only one the author-gods don’t have any control over. The one who died for love, and in dying, gave life. 

The French Mistake

Let’s change the channel. Let’s calm ourselves and cleanse our libras. Let’s commune with nature and chug some sage bongs. 

“The French Mistake” is a song from the Mel Brooks film Blazing Saddles. In the iconic second last scene of the film, as the cowboys fight amongst themselves, the camera pans back to reveal a studio lot and a door through which a chorus of gay dancersingers perform “the French Mistake”. The lyrics go, “Throw out your hands, stick out your tush, hands on your hips, give ‘em a push. You’ll be surprised you’re doing the French Mistake.” 

I’m not sure what went through the heads of the Supernatural creators when they came up with the season 6 episode, “The French Mistake,” written by the love of my life Ben Edlund and directed by some guy Charles Beeson. Just reading the Wikipedia summary is so batshit incomprehensible. In short: Balthazar sends Sam and Dean to an alternate universe where they are the actors Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, who play Sam and Dean on the tv show Supernatural. I don’t think this had ever been done in television history before. The first seven seasons of this show are certifiable. Like this was ten years ago. Think about the things that have happened in the last 10 slutty, slutty years. We have lived through atrocities and upheaval and the entire world stopping to mourn, but also we had twitter throughout that entire time, which makes it infinitely worse.

In this universe, Sam and Dean wear makeup, Cas is played by attractive crying man Misha Collins, and Genevieve Padalecki nee Cortese makes an appearance. Magic doesn’t exist, Serge has good ideas, and the two leads have to act in order to get through the day. Sorry man I do not know how to pronounce your name.

Sidenote: I don’t know if me being attracted aesthetically to Misha Collins is because he’s attractive, because this show has gaslighted me into thinking he’s attractive, or because Castiel’s iconic entrance in 2008 hit my developing mind like a torpedo full of spaghetti and blew my fucking brains all over the place. It’s one of life’s little mysteries and God’s little gifts.

Let’s talk about therapy. More specifically, “Agency and purpose in narrative therapy: questioning the postmodern rejection of metanarrative” by Cameron Lee. In this paper, Lee outlines four key ideas as proposed by Freedman and Combs:

Realities are socially constructed

Realities are constituted through language

Realities are organised and maintained through narrative

And there are no essential truths.

Let’s break this down in the case of this episode. Realities are socially constructed: the reality of Sam and Dean arose from the Bush era. Do I even need to elaborate? From what I understand with my limited Australian perception, and being a child at the time, 9/11 really was a prominent shifting point in the last twenty years. As Americans describe it, sometimes jokingly, it was the last time they were really truly innocent. That means to me that until they saw the repercussions of their government’s actions in funding turf wars throughout the middle east for a good chunk of the 20th Century, they allowed themselves to be hindered by their own ignorance. The threat of terrorism ran rampant throughout the States, spurred on by right wing nationalists and gun-toting NRA supporters, so it’s really no surprise that the show Supernatural started with the premise of killing everything in sight and driving around with only your closest kin and a trunk full of guns. Kripke constructed that reality from the social-political climate of the time, and it has wrought untold horrors on the minds of lesbians who lived through the noughties, in that we are now attracted to Misha Collins.

Number two: Realities are constituted through language. Before a show can become a show, it needs to be a script. It’s written down, typed up, and given to actors who say the lines out loud. In this respect, they are using the language of speech and words to convey meaning. But tv shows are not all about words, and they’re barely about scripts. From what I understand of being raised by television, they are about action, visuals, imagery, and behaviours. All of the work that goes into them—the scripts, the lighting, the audio, the sound mixing, the cameras, the extras, the ADs, the gaffing, the props, the stunts, everything—is about conveying a story through the medium of images. In that way, images are the language. The reality of the show Supernatural, inside the show Supernatural, is constituted through words: the script, the journalists talking to Sam, the makeup artist taking off Dean’s makeup, the conversations between the creators, the tweets Misha sends. But also through imagery: the fish tank in Jensen’s trailer, the model poses on the front cover of the magazine, the opulence of Jared’s house, Misha’s iconic sweater. Words and images are the language that constitutes both of these realities. Okay for real, I feel like I’ve only seen this episode max three times, including when I watched it for research for this episode, but I remember so much about it. 

Number three: realities are organised and maintained through narrative. In this universe of the French Mistake, their lives are structured around two narratives: the internal narrative of the show within the show, in which they are two actors on a tv set; and the episode narrative in which they need to keep the key safe and return to their own universe. This is made difficult by the revelation that magic doesn’t work in this universe, however, they find a way. Before they can get back, though, an avenging angel by the name of Virgil guns down author-god Eric Kripke and tries to kill the Winchesters. However, they are saved by Balthazar and the freeze frame and brought back into their own world, the world of Supernatural the show, not Supernatural the show within the show within the nesting doll. And then that reality is done with, never to be revisited or even mentioned, but with an impact that has lasted longer than the second Bush administration.

And number four: there are no essential truths. This one is a bit tricky because I can’t find what Lee means by essential truths, so I’m just going to interpret that. To me, essential truths means what lies beneath the narratives we tell ourselves. Supernatural was a show that ran for 15 years. Supernatural had actors. Supernatural was showrun by four different writers. In the show within a show, there is nothing, because that ceases to exist for longer than the forty two minute episode “The French Mistake”. And since Supernatural no longer exists except in our computers, it is nothing too. It is only the narratives we tell ourselves to sleep better at night, to wake up in the morning with a smile, to get through the day, to connect with other people, to understand ourselves better. It’s not even the narrative that the showrunners told, because they have no agency over it as soon as it shows up on our screens. The essential truth of the show is lost in the translation from creating to consuming. Who gives the story meaning? The people watching it and the people creating it. We all do. 

Lee says that humans are predisposed to construct narratives in order to make sense of the world. We see this in cultures from all over the world: from cave paintings to vases, from The Dreaming to Beowulf, humans have always constructed stories. The way you think about yourself is a story that you’ve constructed. The way you interact with your loved ones and the furries you rightfully cyberbully on Twitter is influenced by the narratives you tell yourself about them. And these narratives are intricate, expansive, personalised, and can colour our perceptions completely, so that we turn into a different person when we interact with one person as opposed to another. 

Whatever happened in season 6, most of which I want to forget, doesn’t interest me in the way I’m telling myself the writers intended. For me, the entirety of season 6 was based around the premise of Cas being in love with Dean, and the complete impotence of this love. He turns up when Dean calls, he agonises as he watches Dean rake leaves and live his apple pie life with Lisa, and Dean is the person he feels most horribly about betraying. He says, verbatim, to Sam, “Dean and I do share a more profound bond.” And Balthazar says, “You’re confusing me with the other angel, the one in the dirty trenchcoat who’s in love with you.” He says this in season 6, and we couldn’t do a fucken thing about it. 

The song “The French Mistake” shines a light on the hidden scene of gay men performing a gay narrative, in the midst of a scene about the manliest profession you can have: professional horse wrangler, poncho wearer, and rodeo meister, the cowboy. If this isn’t a perfect encapsulation of the lovestory between Dean and Cas, which Ben Edlund has been championing from day fucking one of Misha Collins walking onto that set with his sex hair and chapped lips, then I don’t know what the fuck we’re even doing here. What in the hell else could it possibly mean. The layers to this. The intricacy. The agendas. The subtextual AND blatant queerness. The micro aggressions Crowley aimed at Car in “The Man Who Would Be King,” another Bedlund special. Bed Edlund is a fucking genius. Bed Edlund is cool girl. Ben Edlund is the missing link. Bed Edlund IS wikileaks. Ben Edlund is a cool breeze on a humid summer day. Ben Edlund is the stop loading button on a browser tab. Ben Edlund is the perfect cross between Spotify and Apple Music, in which you can search for good playlists, but without having to be on Spotify. He can take my keys and fuck my wife. You best believe I’m doing an entire episode of Holy Hell on Bedlund’s top five. He is the reason I want to get into staffwriting on a tv show. I saw season 4 episode “On the head of a pin” when my brain was still torpedoed spaghetti mush from the premiere, and it nestled its way deep into my exposed bones, so that when I finally recovered from that, I was a changed person. My god, this transcript is 11,000 words, and I haven’t even finished the Becky section. Which is a good transition.

Oh, Becky. She is an incarnation of how the writers, or at least Kripke, view the fans. Watching season 5 “Sympathy for the Devil” live in 2009 was a whole fucking trip that I as a baby gay was not prepared for. Figuring out my sexuality was a journey that started with the Supernatural fandom and is in some aspects still raging against the dying of the light today. Add to that, this conception of the audience was this, like, personification of the librarian cellist from Juno, but also completely without boundaries, common sense, or shame. It made me wonder about my position in the narrative as a consumer consuming. Is that how Kripke saw me, specifically? Was I like Becky? Did my forays into DeanCasNatural on El Jay dot com make me a fucking loser whose only claim to fame is writing some nasty fanfiction that I’ve since deleted all traces of? Don’t get me wrong, me and my unhinged Casgirl friends loved Becky. I can’t remember if I ever wrote any fanfiction with her in it because I was mostly writing smut, which is extremely Becky coded of me, but I read some and my friends and I would always chat about her when she came up. She was great entertainment value before season 7. But in the eyes of the powers that be, Becky, like the fans themselves, are expendable. First they turned her into a desperate bride wannabe who drugs Sam so that he’ll be with her, then Chuck waves his hand and she disappears. We’re seeing now with regards to Destiel, Cas, and Misha Collins this erasure of them from the narrative. Becky says in season 15 “Atomic Monsters” that the ending Chuck writes is bad because, for one, there’s no Cas, and that’s exactly what’s happening to the text post-finale. It literally makes me insane akin to the throes of mania to think about the layers of this. They literally said, “No Cas = bad” and now Misha isn’t even allowed to talk in his Cassona voice—at least at the time I wrote that—to the detriment of the fans who care about him. It’s the same shit over and over. They introduce something we like, they realise they have no control over how much we like it, and then they pretend they never introduced it in the first place. Season 7, my god. The only reason Gamble brought back Cas was because the ratings were tanking the show. I didn’t even bother watching most of it live, and would just hear from my friends whether Cas was in the episodes or not. And then Sera, dear Sera, had the gall to say it was a Homer’s Odyssey narrative. I’m rusty on Homer aka I’ve never read it but apparently Odysseus goes away, ends up with a wife on an island somewhere, and then comes back to Terabithia like it never happened. How convenient. But since Sera Gamble loves to bury her gays, we can all guess why Cas was written out of the show: Cas being gay is a threat to the toxic heteronormativity spouted by both the show and the characters themselves. In season 15, after Becky gets her life together, has kids, gets married, and starts a business, she is outgrowing the narrative and Chuck kills her. The fans got Destiel Wedding trending on Twitter, and now the creators are acting like he doesn’t exist. New liver, same eagles.

I have to add an adendum: as of this morning, Sunday 11th, don’t ask me what time that is in Americaland, Misha Collins did an online con/Q&A thing and answered a bunch of questions about Cas and Dean, which goes to show that he cannot be silenced. So the narrative wants to be told. It’s continuing well into it’s 16th or 17th season. It’s going to keep happening and they have no recourse to stop it. So fuck you, Supernatural.

I did write the start of a speech about representation but, who the holy hell cares. I also read some disappointing Masters theses that I hope didn’t take them longer to research and write than this episode of a podcast I’m making for funsies took me, considering it’s the same number of pages. Then again I have the last four months and another 8 years of fandom fuelling my obsession, and when I don’t sleep I write, hence the 4,000 words I knocked out in the last 12 hours. 

Some final words. Lyotard defines postmodernism, the age we live in, as an incredulity towards metanarratives. Modernism was obsessed with order and meaning, but postmodernism seeks to disrupt that. Modernists lived within the frame of the narrative of their society, but postmodernists seek to destroy the frame and live within our own self-written contexts. Okay I love postmodernist theory so this has been a real treat for me. Yoghurt, Sam? Postmodernist theory? Could I BE more gay? 

Middleton and Walsh in their analysis of postmodernism claim that biblical faith is grounded in metanarrative, and explore how this intersects with an era that rejects metanarrative. This is one of the fundamental ideas Supernatural is getting at throughout definitely the last season, but other seasons as well. The narratives of Good vs Evil, Michael vs Lucifer, Dean vs Sam, were encoded into the overarching story of the show from season 1, and since then Sam and Dean have sought to break free of them. Sam broke free of John’s narrative, which was the hunting life, and revenge, and this moralistic machismo that they wrapped themselves up in. If they’re killing the evil, then they’re not the evil. That’s the story they told, and the impetus of the show that Sam was sucked back into. But this thread unravelled in later seasons when Dean became friends with Benny and the idea that all supernatural creatures are inherently evil unravelled as well. While they never completely broke free of John’s hold over them, welcoming Jack into their lives meant confronting a bias that had been ingrained in them since Dean was 4 years old and Sam 6 months. In the face of the question, “are all monsters monstrous?” the narrative loosens its control. Even by questioning it, it throws into doubt the overarching narrative of John’s plan, which is usurped at the end of season 2 when they kill Azazel by Dean’s demon deal and a new narrative unfolds. John as author-god is usurped by the actual God in season 4, who has his own narrative that controls the lives of Sam, Dean and Cas. 

Okay like for real, I do actually think the metanarrativity in Supernatural is something that should be studied by someone other than me, unless you wanna pay me for it and then shit yeah. It is extremely cool to introduce a biographical narrative about the fictional narrative it’s in. It’s cool that the characters are constantly calling this narrative into focus by fighting against it, struggling to break free from their textual confines to live a life outside of the external forces that control them. And the thing is? The really real, honest thing? They have. Sam, Dean and Cas have broken free of the narrative that Kripke, Carver, Gamble and Dabb wrote for them. The very fact that the textual confession of love that Cas has for Dean ushered in a resurgence of fans, fandom and activity that has kept the show trending for five months after it ended, is just phenomenal. People have pointed out that fans stopped caring about Game of Thrones as soon as it ended. Despite the hold they had over tv watchers everywhere, their cultural currency has been spent. The opposite is true for Supernatural. Despite how the finale of the show angered and confused people, it gains more momentum every day. More fanworks, more videos, more fics, more art, more ire, more merch is being generated by the fans still. The Supernatural subreddit, which was averaging a few posts a week by season 15, has been incensed by the finale. And yours truly happily traipsed back into the fandom snake pit after 8 years with a smile on my face and a skip in my step ready to pump that dopamine straight into my veins babeeeeeeyyyyy. It’s been WILD. I recently reconnected with one of my mutuals from 2010 and it’s like nothing’s changed. We’re both still unhinged and we both still simp for Supernatural. Even before season 15, I was obsessed with the podcast Ride Or Die, which I started listening to in late 2019, and Supernatural was always in the back of my mind. You just don’t get over your first fandom. Actually, Danny Phantom was my first fandom, and I remember being 12 talking on Danny Phantom forums to people much too old to be the target audience of the show. So I guess that hasn’t left me either. And the fondest memories I have of Supernatural is how the characters have usurped their creators to become mythic, long past the point they were supposed to die a quiet death. The myth weaving that the Supernatural fandom is doing right now is the legacy that will endure. 

References

I got all of these for free from Google Scholar! 

Judith May Fathallah, “I’m A God: The Author and the Writing Fan in Supernatural.” 

James K A Smith, “A Little Story About Metanarratives: Lyotard, Religion and Postmodernism Revisited.” 2001.

Cameron Lee, “Agency and Purpose in Narrative Therapy: Questioning the Postmodern Rejection of Metanarrative.” 2004.

Harri Englund and James Leach, “Ethnography and the Meta Narratives of Modernity.” 2000.

https://uproxx.com/filmdrunk/mel-brooks-explains-french-mistake-blazing-saddles-blu-ray/

[eng2100]

blog 04 - avatar (the one with the blue people not the last airbender)

preface

I went into this with absolutely no feelings about this movie beyond the absurdity of how many sequels it’s apparently going to get. As an artist, I find the visual effects extremely impressive even to this day, but as a storyteller, I thought this story was almost so inoffensive that it’s offensive. 

However, I think that engaging with things in good faith is a good way to find ways to expand your horizons and thoughts, and I like to enjoy things despite my dad’s insistence that I like to not enjoy things. (It’s not that I like to not like things, it’s that it’s easier to entertain people when it’s a bad review. Tough crowd.) I’m a firm believer in the idea that cerebral analysis of media adds to the joy of consumption rather than takes away from it, so let’s dive right in.

I like structure, so we’re gonna layer it like a delicious theme cake. 

1. the elephant in the room

Everyone has seen Pocohontas. Everyone has seen Dancing With Wolves. I’m not really here to rehash arguments, but I think getting into this movie without addressing what first comes to everyone’s mind when they think about it is pretty much impossible. The “White Savior” trope is more or less a narrative cliche in which a noble white person will take a stand against the Bad White People on the side of a sympathetic oppressed people-- Native Americans see this plotline probably the most, but black people still see it today every now and then (Green Book got nominated for a lot of Oscars, after all. The hunger is there for easily digestible feel-good race relation drama.) Wikipedia sums up the White Savior trope better than I could, so here it is:

“At the cinema, the white savior narrative occupies a psychological niche for most white people, as an expression of their latent desire for interracial goodwill and reconciliation. By presenting stories of racial redemption, involving black people and white people professing to reach across racial barriers, Hollywood is catering to a mostly white audience who believe themselves unfairly victimized by non-white ethnic groups, because they are culturally exhausted with the unfinished national discourse about race and ethnicity in the society of the United States. Hence, films featuring the narrative trope of the white savior have notably similar storylines, which present an ostensibly nobler approach to race relations, but offer psychological refuge and escapism for white Americans seeking to avoid substantive conversations about race, racism, and racial identity. In this way, the narrative trope of the white savior is an important cultural artifact, a device to realize the desire to repair the social and cultural damage wrought by the myths of white supremacy and paternalism, regardless of the inherently racist overtones of the white-savior narrative trope.“

Native Americans factor into this most significantly in the case of Avatar-- aliens in movies are hardly ever just aliens. Whether they represent an oppressed underclass (District 9), childhood innocence (E.T.), or fear of foreign invasion (War of the Worlds), aliens are an easy vessel to carry almost any idea you want them to. So if the Na’vi are more or less an ideological stand-in for Native Americans during the conquest of America, our protagonist Jake is the future space cowboy to the Cowboys and Indians In Space.

Both Jake and Grace sort of fall in and out of the White Savior space-- ultimately Grace condescends to the Na’vi a little more and she has a more complete character arc that ends with her transcending this trope, but Jake is whole hog in it. He’s like, the legendary prophecy warrior. He’s The Guy. 

(Pictured above: The Guy)

James Cameron grapples pretty hard with the White Savior trope-- he never truly goes one way or another about it and the concept of Avatars-- as in the Na’vi bodies that Jake and company jump into-- significantly...well, complicates the idea of race relations in this movie. There are certainly some uncomfortable ideas about identity wrapped up in the concept of body swaps (if this idea interests you, Altered Carbon is a really good read), but re: the readings and lectures, the concept kind of works towards what is ultimately the broad takeaway of the movie.

In summary: no, we’re not doing this whole review about White Guilt in Space. Now that that’s out of the way...

2. james cameron predicted late stage capitalism

Imperialism

"The policy of extending the rule or authority of an empire or nation over foreign countries or of acquiring and holding colonies and dependencies."

Avatar is about imperialism. This is as broad and pointed a theme as you can get from a movie that draws such heavy inspiration from Native American and Aboriginal cultures. Interestingly enough, the movie’s futuristic setting goes hand in hand with the commentary about the military and Western Imperialism. 

The company in Avatar, and all the almost comedically evil military men, are very brazen about their lack of ideological purpose. They are on Pandora for money. They are being paid to go to Pandora to take its resources-- the delightfully named “Unobtanium” in specific. As mentioned in the reading, Unobtanium is valuable for its properties as a superconductor, and I’m not a STEM kid, so I’ll leave it at that for simplicity’s sake. 

That the mercenary force on Pandora is so open about their exploitative intentions draws an interesting parallel to the world of today that’s maybe a touch haunting, considering that Avatar came out some years ago. In politics, at least up until now, you notice the use of a few common euphemisms as smokescreens for more extreme ideas-- for example, the Right’s: “protecting American jobs”. 

Protecting American jobs is a euphemism for racism against Mexicans-- it was the most common smokescreen reasoning for the border wall pre-Trumpian politics. Trump and company have since dropped the euphemism all together. The death of a euphemism usually means that the euphemism is no longer culturally or socially required-- you can just come out and say whatever horrible thing you mean. In Avatar’s universe, it’s clear that the political-economic climate has come to a point where they can just say that they’re there to steal the Na’vi’s resources whether they like it or not.

The movie and the lecture both draw specific attention to the parallels the film draws explicitly between military tactics used in the movie, and real-world events. “Shock and Awe”, a tactic coined by the Bush era, is referenced in exact terms-- it being a display of overwhelming force intended to break the fighting spirit of the enemy. The commander character whose name I just read but I can’t remember now says that he is a veteran of both Venezuela and Nigeria-- both real world locations in which the U.S. has invaded and destabilized for material interests under the guise of American ideology. 

In Avatar, we see the thin veneer of “freedom and democracy” as the driving forces of U.S. intervention stripped away explicitly. The opening narration of Jake’s arrival to Pandora has him say that “on Earth, these men were soldiers fighting for freedom...but here, they’re mercenaries”, however, the line between a supposed freedom fighter and a mercenary is borderline nonexistent. 

3. western scientific objectivism sucks

Another current running through Avatar is the juxtaposition of what is “real” with what is “unreal-- aka Western objectivity science versus belief systems. This is embodied in the character of Grace, a scientist and anthropologist who has been researching Na’vi culture for some time. The reading characterizes her as “the happy face of liberalism” that tries to put a nice coat of paint over the same imperialist ideas that the more blunt military types embody-- she is kinder to the Na’vi and sees their culture and planet as worth preserving, but she is ultimately dismissive of their beliefs and of Eywa (”pagan voodoo”) the same as the other mercenaries.

We’re gonna put on tinfoil hats for a little bit here to make a relation between Western culture (imperialism and colonialism) and capitalism and paganism. Are you ready?

Okay.

So you know how they burned witches at the stake at the onset of the Industrial Age in America and the pagan practices of “hedge magic” were pretty much obliterated? I don’t think that’s a coincidence. Capitalism is a system that can only operate materialistically-- people aren’t “people” but “workers”, and the concept of magic and belief exists in terms that capitalism can’t define, and more importantly, can’t exploit. So witches were burned and women were placed with great reinforcement back into domesticity, where their function in capitalism was to give birth to and rear new workers.

You can see this dichotomy between the science of objectivity (what is “real”) and belief systems (what is “unprovable”, “unobservable”) in the way Grace uses scientific terms to justify the Na’vi’s spirituality. A very powerful through-line can be seen in the way that imperialism, capitalism, materialism, and objective science intersect. Their interconnected natural collective consciousness is like the raw function of a brain to her, likened to a network. It isn’t until Grace is mortally wounded and experiences the Na’vi’s healing ceremony that she is able to transcend the capitalistic, materialistic terms for definition for Eywa to have a spiritual experience, and to become one with Eywa herself (”she’s real.”)

In a plot that hinges on the material (Unobtainium) interests of a capitalist mercenary force, the ultimate refutation of this is the Na’vi’s spiritual values.

4. avatar: endgame

So what is this all working towards? Well, the idea of an interconnected spirituality like Eywa. The idea takes root in geomantic ideas, more commonly known as “feng shui”-- it’s sort of the concept of an earthly energy, a flow that moves through and connects the Earth and its people and creatures. The strange braid cord things that allow the Na’vi to interface with certain points and other creatures is a very straightforward metaphor for that concept of feng shui and geomancy.

Here we come back around to the concept of Jake as the White Savior/chosen one/The Guy. It’s kind of obtuse, but the general theory is that Eywa chose Jake as a sign that all peoples must needs transcend their boundaries and become one with the larger concept that Eywa represents. This of course comes packaged with an urgent environmental message-- our life is that of the planet, and to exploit and sacrifice one is to sacrifice the other.

Pandora, Eywa, and the Na’vi represent the polar opposite of everything that capitalist imperialism is. Thus, James Cameron, ironically, used a huge budget Hollywood endeavor to refute everything that Hollywood is. Now he’s making Alita: Battle Angel. 

Funny how that works. Oh, I made myself sad.

[thoughts-of-loyalty]

Captain Marvel (2019) Review

So, I saw the Captain Marvel movie recently (on 3/9, as this’ll likely end up posted a bit late) and as the big movie that’s set to bridge the gap between Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, as well as the big-screen debut of Captain Marvel (not to mention the first Marvel female hero to get the limelight), there was a lot of excitement and hype built around this film.  Starring the titular Captain Marvel, real name Carol Danvers, and set in the 90s - before any film sans Captain America 1 - we’re given a look into the origins of the “Strongest Avenger,” the one Nick Fury sought to call upon at the end of Infinity War to fight against Thanos.

Full movie spoilers and my opinions below.

Synopsis: This film focuses on the origin story, so to say, of the future Carol Danvers/”Vers” (as she’s known among the Kree), in the adventure that sets her on the path to become the superheroine known as Captain Marvel.  Believing herself to be a part of the Kree due to memory loss, she is part of a group tasked with investigating the reported abduction of a Kree agent who was captured by the Skrulls (an alien species capable of mimicking the appearance of any human they view, one which is supplemented by their poorly-elaborated-upon talents at learning a lot about their targets).  Due to events beyond her control, she is separated from her Kree allies and ends up stranded on Earth.  Discovering details about her past life while there, she teams up with a young Nick Fury to discover the truth about her past and how intimately tied she is to the current Skrull-Kree conflict...

The Good:

The Visuals: To be sure, Captain Marvel - like all other big budget Marvel films - is a visual spectacle.  The CGI is very on-point for this film, the fight scenes are generally well handled, and it generally managed to capture the 90s look and vibes that the film is set in fairly well.  The Skrull are also made to look great for their big screen debut, with amazing work put into the transformation scenes, and Captain Marvel’s abilities are a visual delight.

Not Bogged Down by Continuity: One good thing about Captain Marvel in the relative sense is that it doesn’t bog itself down much with a desire to connect itself to the other films.  While some things will certainly make more sense in context of other movies (such as the importance of the power source everyone is fighting over and who exactly Phil Coulson is in relation to Nick Fury), the movie is self-contained enough that one can enjoy it without feeling they need to see everything Marvel-related prior to keep themselves informed.  This is in contrast to, say, Ant-Man 2 or Spider-Man, which require one to have seen Captain America: Civil War to understand all the ongoing character dynamics.

A Straightforward Story: Tying in to the above, but Captain Marvel never loses itself in trying to tell an overly-complex narrative with a million different plot-lines at once.  While there is certainly a twist or two to be had, the movie kept itself focused on the important characters and most of it’s attention was on Captain Marvel and her personal journey.  It told the story it wanted to tell and never did it veer into pointless sub-plots or give focus to truly meaningless characters.

A Lack of a Love Story: In what is something of personal gripe, I appreciate the complete lack of a romance story in this film.  A common criticism that has been directed at many other Marvel films was the inclusion of romance between the male lead and a major female character (usually inspired by one of the comic romances), usually to the detriment of the film as the romances were rather out of nowhere and had little purpose beyond just having one.  This film didn’t have any of that, and while one could make arguments or ship as shippers are wont to do, there was never a “These two are suddenly in love and kissing because there needs to be a romance” moment and I am glad.

The Cast is Well-Acted: A bit of a weird one, I suppose, but most of Captain Marvel’s cast is just as enjoyable to watch as any other Marvel movie’s cast.  I never felt a single cast member wasn’t giving the role their best, and while the dialogue could be cringe-worthy at times, it was only ever due to the script, not the actor/tress in the role.

A Good Message: It was made no secret that Captain Marvel would be a primarily feminist film and have messages about gender equality and women not needing the approval of men to be who they are.  And the film delivered it with only a minor heavy-handed approach.  The female characters were all competent and never eye-candy, but at the same time the movie never used the “machismo men who talk big but are actually pretty lame” trope other less-subtle movies used, all the characters were as competent as they were implied to be.  It was occasionally blunt during some portions of dialogue, but it never felt forced and it carried its message well.

The Bad

A Tonal Disaster: The movie was unfortunately bogged down by an overindulgence, so to say, on comedy.  Now, this in and of itself is not an issue, as Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor: Ragnarok can prove - a movie can be primarily comedic in nature but still have great stories and be serious when they need to (though one could argue both had tonal issues, I wouldn’t deny that).  That said, where this movie most falters is in how it tries to be primarily comedic at times where characters necessarily shouldn’t - for example, there’s a earlier on moment where Carol blasts open a door some time after Nick Fury had done secret spy stuff to open a prior one, making him incredulously ask why she hadn’t done so before and her responding she didn’t want to steal his thunder.  This is at a time when Carol knows there’s a time limit of sorts (the Kree are due to arrive in less than 20 hours to rescue her) and Carol is learning about events that may intimately involve her and her lost memory, but they let the cast wait around so they can have this joke.  This is around the point I started to worry for the movie, as well, because I could tell the movie would be willing to let it’s mood go to waste for a quick joke.

A return to basic villains: One common issue held with many of the earlier Marvel films was the very weak villains in their movies.  They could look cool or be menacing, but Loki was pretty was really the only one who was complex for the longest time.  It took until arguably either The Winter Soldier or Age of Ultron to buck this trend and give us memorable or complex villains.  This continued for most of Phase 3, with their villains being complex, sympathetic at times, or otherwise memorable presences.  Spoilers: the Skrulls were build up as that, but plot twist, the Skrulls aren’t the villains, the Kree are.  And the Kree do nothing to establish themselves as memorable villains - you could arguably have even forgotten two of them were main antagonists in the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie.  The only relatively memorable one is Yon-Rogg, Carol’s mentor, and the two spend so little time properly interacting after he’s revealed as a villain that any complexity he could have is never properly utilized.  For that matter...

The Supreme Intelligence is kinda pointless: Tying into how the Kree are an unfortunate return to basic villains, the Supreme Intelligence - the Artificial Intelligence ruler of the Kree - is an exemplar of this aspect of the Kree in this movie.  The Supreme Intelligence is something of a recurring presence in this movie (though I use that term lightly, given that it only appears before Carol for a grand total of five minutes if I’m being generous), and as the guiding force behind the Kree, it is technically the main antagonist of the film (Yon-Rogg is the most present of the Kree antagonists, but his actions are ultimately guided by the Supreme Intelligence).  As noted above, though, Carol and the Supreme Intelligence only spend about five minutes together, and only half of THAT time is spent as them on opposing sides, where it is little more than a generic overlord-emperor type, giving us a nothing driving force for the antagonists as a whole. Which is unfortunate, because...

The Kree are very underdeveloped in general: This is an issue because for a chunk of her life, after receiving amnesia, Carol considers the Kree her people and becomes part of a Kree task force.  While somewhat understandable that she’d be willing to stand against them as they’re responsible for her predicament in various capacities, the movie spends so little time developing the relationship between them and the other Kree.  Neither she nor the named Kree she battles seem to hold any strong emotion about coming to blows, to the point that they could have been replaced with a random Kree task force she never knew and nothing would have changed.  This goes double for both Korath and Ronan, who were incredibly flat villains in Guardians of the Galaxy - any hopes one might have had that they’d receive stronger characterization was misplaced, as they’re just as one-dimensional as before.

“Subverting Audience Expectations” ruins the Skrull: Many have (supposedly?) praised the Skrull for their role in the movie as a red herring antagonist who are actually sympathetic, with many bringing back the old praise of “This movie is great because it subverts audience expectations” that popped up during Star Wars: The Last Jedi.  I have a much longer rant about that, but that isn’t the issue I mean to address here.  And before anyone gets on my case, I have no desire to argue “the Skrull are ruined because they don’t follow their comic book selves;” the MCU is perfectly allowed to reimagine the Skrull as they desire, and if they wish to make the Skrull sympathetic, then that is their prerogative. In this case, the issue is that they’re so intent on making the Skrull red herrings that the Skrulls pre-reveal and post-reveal are essentially entirely different beings.  Before the reveal, Skrulls are making an proactive effort to discover what they need, capturing a Kree agent and luring Carol in with deception to read her mind and learn where to go, and when they get to Earth, they immediately install themselves so that they can best discover what they need to know - which isn’t necessarily bad, because that can still be played as sympathetic but willing to do whatever is necessary to get what they need to survive.  But post-reveal, the Skrull we knew as antagonists are almost entirely different beings - Talos and his “Science Guy” are almost comic relief after the truth is revealed, albeit with a few moments of competence (for a prime example of their newfound incompetence, it’s revealed the Skrull couldn’t find Wendy Lawson’s lab because their “science guy” didn’t realize the coordinates they were trying to figure out were directing them to space).  Talos in particular goes from “Leader of the Skrull remnant doing whatever is necessary to save his species and his family” to “Leader of the Skrulls who wants to save his people but never wanted to hurt anyone while doing it.”  Sure, Marvel subverted our expectations, but when your red herring is essentially two different characters before and after the reveal, it’s no wonder audiences ended up surprised.

Nick Fury backstory is now a joke: Now, this in and of itself isn’t an issue - there’s no rule stating Samuel L. Jackson NEEDS to be badass in every movie, or we can’t have a “Younger Nick Fury who is comedic due to being new to it all.”  Like I noted above, Nick Fury is generally competent - as are most characters in this film, even the Skrull post-reveal - and does well enough in his role in the film.  But there’s an elephant in the room: how Nick Fury lost his eye.  Namely, he lost his eye to Goose the Cat/Flerken after the cat decided is was being messed with and scratched his eye.  Yes, you read that right.  Nick Fury’s lost eye was due to him essentially getting scratched by an alien in cat form he pissed off.  And no, it wasn’t “rampaging alien form that hit him with a massive claw,” no, it’s “small house cat claw to the eye.” Now, if it isn’t clear why exactly it’s bad, let me explain it in a bit better detail.  This isn’t just an issue of “We wanted to subvert audience expectations, so Nick Fury lost his eye in a funny way because no one saw it coming” - though it still is that, too.  Rather, the issue here is that what happened here is now canon, and is retroactively canon for the whole of the MCU up to that point.  Nick Fury justifying why he hid secrets to Captain Freakin’ America as because “Last time I trusted someone, I lost an eye.” - that’s the story he tells everyone because he’s too embarrassed to admit the truth.  That big reveal at the end of the Winter Soldier, where he reveals he had a backup retinal scan of his scarred eye because he was just that prepared in case someone tried to lock him out of the S.H.I.E.L.D. systems by removing the retinal scan of his good eye?  Thank goodness he had that eye scarred by a cat, otherwise, there’s no way that plan would’ve had a chance of working later on.  Him calling Coulson, his most loyal supporter, “His good eye?”  Thank goodness a cat clawed out his eye so he could make it clear how much Coulson meant to him with that distinction. That’s the big gamble you take when you retroactively introduce a character’s backstory in a prequel - everything that happened there is now canon to everything since.  And now Nick Fury’s backstory in the MCU will forever be “He lost it to an annoyed cat,” because Captain Marvel decided that it was better to make a joke of it.

And now, for a minor gripe: This is a bit of a lesser example, but y’all recall what S.H.I.E.L.D. stands for?  Don’t recall off the top of your head?  You could rewatch Iron Man, because it tells you in recurring joke form - Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division.  Someone really should shorten that, right?  Something the characters note anytime the full name is brought up.  And at the end of the movie, Coulson tells Pepper - who is going to recite it by name - that it’s S.H.I.E.L.D. for short now. If only Coulson was around back in the 1990s, where Nick Fury makes reference to how he’s “Nick Fury, S.H.I.E.L.D.” and namedrops S.H.I.E.L.D. a few times. *ahem* Yeah, it’s a minor continuity error in the grand scheme of things, but it was something I figured should be mentioned because that was something that I noticed and wanted to bring up.

Final Verdict

Captain Marvel is a... competently-made movie.  And I’m really sorry to say it, but that’s the most I can say about it.  It’s well-made, well-acted, tells a simple enough story to understand that isn’t bogged down by continuity, and it has good messages in it’s narrative.  But it loses so much of itself due to having an inconsistent tone throughout, and it’s plot goes from decent to bog-standard around the time it decides to “Subvert audience expectations” and give us some of the most boring villains this side of the Phase 3 MCU films.

Would I recommend others to watch it?  Somewhat.  It’s not exactly incredibly essential viewing for the MCU and I don’t think it’s really all that good, but it’s not a terrible movie, I can understand why one would like it despite all it’s flaws (people can learn to overlook nearly everything), and it does add to the MCU enough that it is worth seeing if you want to see all the Marvel films.  But if you want a good female superhero film with a feminist message, you’re better off watching Wonder Woman.

And now, to address the elephant in the room pretty much every male who didn’t enjoy the film needs to deal with:”You didn’t like Captain Marvel because the main character was a woman and it had a pro-women message and you must hate feminism.”  It’s a comment that tends to get directed at males who don’t enjoy films with female protagonists, regardless of quality of the film (see: Ghostbusters) or reasons for disliking the film (albeit not without reason, to some degree - after all, those biased against something would be much harder on it than something they aren’t even if their flaws are much the same).  Not helping matters were that trolls DID review-bomb its Rotten Tomatoes score before it even had a full day under it’s belt - which the movie didn’t deserve, it should be judged on it’s own merits, not targeted by insecure men angry about there being a Marvel movie starring a female hero.

And I don’t expect to convince anyone who isn’t willing to believe me otherwise.  I can point to all the video games (Metroid, Portal, Resident Evil, etc) I love that star female protagonists, or that I considered the Wonder Woman film to be excellent, and it won’t convince anyone.  If you think I’m sexist garbage because I’m a male who didn’t like the film, my reasonings above or thoughts below won’t probably won’t convince you.

Here’s my views on this, however: Marvel had taken much too long to give us a movie primarily starring a female hero.  Marvel has many great female heroes, Captain Marvel included, and any one of them would have been as worthy of a film as a male counterpart.  The MCU dropped the ball repeatedly when it came to giving their female heroes films - Black Widow would’ve been great for a film but never got made and the omnipresence of Scarlet Johansson has made many people not care; Scarlet Witch got primarily confined to Avengers-focused films; The Wasp is very enjoyable but still has to share screentime and billing with Ant-Man; Gamora was probably the best and still those films still spent more time with Star-Lord, not to mention she was killed of in Infinity War without certainty of her return, leaving that “Third Guardians movie focused on her” up in the air.

We finally have a Marvel film that’s starring a female, and it’s primary message is about how feminism is important - and it’s good we’ve finally got one, but it took us until Phase 3 to finally get it and the film was marred by so many other issues I would struggle to call it good even with its positive qualities.  And that’s not the quality it deserved - not as a Marvel film, as a Captain Marvel film, or as a feminist film.  And anyone who would say “Who cares if it was not all that good, we’ve finally gotten a feminist superhero film from Marvel”?  You’re settling, and you shouldn’t.  What we deserved isn’t what we got, and by defending it, you’re essentially saying that Marvel can get away with low-quality movies so long as they can say “Sure, but fans were asking for this and we gave them what they wanted.”

You want a film with a female superhero protagonist that has a feminist message that is, above all else, good?  You should watch Wonder Woman.  And I know how there’s all the issues with the DCEU as a whole, or the rivalry between Marvel and DC fans and the former who wanted this movie to be good so they could be proud Marvel made a feminist hero film that was better than DC’s.  And kudos to you who support brand loyalty.  But DC did what Marvel didn’t for the longest time, and for all of the DCEU’s issues, Wonder Woman had very few issues on its own, and the issues that were present were very minor compared to everything it had going for it.  Wonder Woman was what Captain Marvel wanted to be, and what it ultimately failed to be.

[pass-the-bechdel]

Orphan Black season three full review

How many episodes pass the Bechdel test?

100% (ten of ten).

What is the average percentage per episode of female characters with names and lines?

55.17%

How many episodes have a cast that is at least 40% female?

Nine.

How many episodes have a cast that is less than 20% female?

Zero.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Twenty-seven. Nineteen who appear in more than one episode, eleven who appear in at least half the episodes, and three who appear in every episode.

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Twenty-seven. Seventeen who appear in more than one episode, seven who appear in at least half the episodes, and one who appears in every episode.

Positive Content Status:

Not shining. While the number of dynamic female characters around is strong and refreshing, there are more male characters flying the flag for sexual assault this season than in any previous, and the show continues to revel in such content with only cursory acknowledgements that it might not be ok, and that’s not good enough at all (average rating of 2.9).

General Season Quality:

When it’s good, it’s arguably the best the show has done. When it’s bad, it’s bad. While the last few episodes end it on fairly good terms, the early/middle portions of the season are a big let-down.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) under the cut:

Let’s talk about jumping the shark.

For starters, let me say this: I do not think they’ve jumped the shark yet on this show. As I’ve noted variously, I haven’t seen the whole series yet; I’ve also avoided spoilers successfully, so I have absolutely no idea how this is all gonna shake out in the end. The return-to-the-start feel that the revelation about Neolutionist involvement carries implies that, perhaps, the showrunners might actually have an idea where they’re taking things and that we might get a deftly-interwoven narrative that impresses and/or wows us on intellectual and entertainment levels, by the time all is said and done. Certainly, I hope for that. There are other revelations we’ve had, however, that instill me with a lot less confidence, and contribute to a concern that this show will turn out to be a lot of flash, and little real substance.

Another tv show which was heavily involved with mystery and revelation was the great LOST, which I have reviewed in the past, and which copped a lot of (I believe, undeserving) flack over whether or not the writers ‘had it all figured out’ from the very beginning. As I noted in relation to that show, I don’t actually think it’s important for the writers to have everything planned in advance (in fact, it can be detrimental when the show structure is rendered too rigid to allow for natural character or story growth over time); what’s important is that whatever new twists the story makes, they adhere to the internal logic of the show and don’t contradict previous elements. It doesn’t matter if the writers don’t have it figured years in advance, so long as what they write on the fly fits into the narrative in a sensible way. LOST was full of interlocking pieces by design, and so any surprise character connections were a deliberate part of the mythos, and since the story never accidentally looped around and contradicted itself, the mysteries were successfully rendered instead of becoming useless shock-value bullshit with no purpose. Orphan Black is...not doing great in that regard. The idea of secret Neolutionists in the mix all along was the one good ‘twist’ we got as this season pulled to a close, and the reason it’s a good twist is that it’s a pre-established part of the show’s fabric which the audience has had time to forget about, and so reintroducing it now feels clever, as if it were pre-planned, as if we were always building in this direction. It does seem kinda weird for it to be a shock revelation for the characters when obviously, openly-Neolutionist Aldous Leakie was running Dyad for most of two seasons, but I’m willing to run with the idea that their influence and numbers is more pervasive than anyone had realised; they’ve earned the twist well enough on logical grounds that my suspension of disbelief can carry the question. The whole original-genome-is-actually-Siobhan’s-mother thing? Not so good. It’s utterly convenient, doesn’t hold up to logical scrutiny, and worst of all, it’s pointless. If you’re gonna ask for narrative concessions, they’ve gotta exist for more than shock value. The Siobhan connection is just a connection for the fun of it, and that would be fine if it also made sense, but it doesn’t. It asks too much, and gives too little in return, and the elements which allow it to exist on any grounds were only introduced this season, so convenience plotting abounds. Likewise, Rachel’s supposedly-dead mother being alive and involved in the Neolution business is, at present status, just a shock tactic. It contradicts Ethan Duncan’s assertion that she was killed, and Leakie’s apparent conviction that the same was true, and every time I think of a different potential explanation for what the different characters did or did not know in this situation, I think of a myriad of plot holes in the theory as well, so while they MAY have something up their sleeve that makes logical sense and that I just haven’t thought of, I’m not counting on it, nor does it change the fact that they set the scene for that revelation too poorly for it to feel like a real twist. Retroactive explanations don’t change misconceptions in the moment, and a good mystery should never rely on retroactively filling in gaps: you should always set the stage first so that an info dump later isn’t required to justify your twists. 

The Castor plot, meanwhile, was such a disaster of convenience plotting and illogicality I hardly know how to unravel it. I won’t get stuck railing against Paul Dierden’s existence again, but I am convinced that much of the useless Castor story existed only to try and justify Paul’s presence on the show, despite contradicting various aspects of his past behaviour by asserting his supposed complicity and knowledge of clones since the beginning as Beth’s handler. While the military being interested in the practical potential of raising clone armies (hello, Star Wars) makes plenty of sense, it has no actual baring on the narrative that ends up being told, and I suspect again that Paul’s pre-established military history is the sole reason Castor involves soldiers at all - certainly, we can’t pretend there’s any logic in Virginia Coady’s preposterous interest in pursuing the idea of a sexually transmitted neurological defect that causes infertility in women as a potential weapon of mass destruction (which, in its current form, would require her clone army to commit mass genocidal rape, which is a war crime as well as obviously horrific and completely impractical, but hey, this show loves sexual assault AND shock value, so, ok). The last four episodes of this season barely involved anything Castor related, and even then it was inconsequential leftovers masquerading as the backbone of the seasonal narrative; again, the Castor plot may still have somewhere to go, but as it stands it was a total waste of time, just filler and distraction and a lot of build-up at the beginning of the season which ultimately went nowhere. It leaves me seriously questioning how much of this season actually mattered in the long run, and that’s not a good place to be. 

As I have blathered in the past, I’ve been confused about why I’m weirdly nonplussed with this show, and how it is that I walked away from it the first time I tried to watch it, despite also feeling like I enjoyed it. We’re almost up to that same point at which the show and I parted ways last time, and I’m feeling the same detachment again, and I think the prospect of future shark-jumps is a big part of it. The final episodes of this season were pretty solid, which leaves one feeling like they watched something good, but reviewing the season as a whole exposes the more bitter failings, and the sense of a show directed more by dramatic reveals than by character motivations. I have also blathered in the past about feeling distanced from most of the characters, and finding the show more plot driven than character driven, and as it goes on that feels like more and more of an intractable problem. I don’t care if there’s a conspiracy a drama or intrigue or mystery, I only care about the people involved and what this means to them and how they’ll handle it. At least, I’m trying to care about them. But, if the show isn’t actually concerned about its characters and only keeps them for their narrative potential, it’s hard to make that character connection anyway. If the character’s motivations are made mysterious so that their allegiances can be used for ‘twists’, then their behaviour becomes nebulous and contingent upon the whims of the writer, rather than innate to their characterisation. They are rendered puppets, not people, and it’s hard to relate to puppets. From the very first episode, I flagged this show as having a motivation problem; characters reacting and behaving in ways that seem plot-convenient, just excuses to put them into certain situations that logical and consistent human behaviour might not have pushed them towards, and I think they’re still suffering from that. At midseason I noted that Helena is the real mover and shaker of the plot, arguably the only character who makes the plot obey her whims instead of the other way around, and I’m concerned that the lack of agency in the rest of the cast is drowning this show in its own attempted cleverness. I said the Neolutionists were the one good twist this season, but don’t let that suggest that I think the Neolutionist movement represents an interesting concept or direction for the show: I couldn’t care less about Neolutionists. It was a good twist because it obeyed internal narrative logic and felt like it was bringing us full-circle with part of the plot, which implies direction and purpose, but what it means moving forward is an unknown, and not a tantalising one. What does it mean for the CHARACTERS, the ones we’re trying to both know and love? Hopefully, it means something. I guess we’ll find out.

[shadyobservationtragedy]

Arma 3 Contact Communicate With Alien Entity

Arma 3 Contact Communicate With Alien Entity Search

Arma 3 Contact Communicate With Alien Entity Alien

PLEASE NOTE, YOU WILL NEED THE MAIN GAME 'ARMA 3' TO PLAY THIS EXPANSION (DLC). ABOUT THIS GAME What if humanity suddenly encounters extraterrestrial intelligence on Earth? Bohemia Interactive presents: Arma 3 Contact –. Departing from its long-standing tradition as a highly-realistic military-sim, the Arma 3 ‘Contact’ expansion pits players against mysterious aliens. Although one would think that putting aliens as your enemy would degrade your reputation as a military simulator, does it really? After all, considering the unfathomable expanse of the universe, it is highly unlikely that aliens.

Alien Entities (Arma 3: Contact) Alien Grunt; Alien Hominid; Alien Reef (Hungry Shark) Aliens (The Hum) Alimbic; Alkari; Allayi; Allosaurus (FMM-UV 32) Amblyr; Amoeboid; Amorphous Trandicula; Amperi; Amphituber; Andrewsarchus (FMM-UV 32) Category:Android App Species; Angara; Anglerfish (Outer Wilds) Anjellyun; Anode Beetle; Anodite; Antenna Beetle. If you pre-order Arma 3 Contact before the official release date, you can start testing the new terrain as of right now (with the new weapons, vehicles, and gear to follow soon). The expansion's singleplayer campaign will unlock later on Arma 3 Contact's planned release date on July 25.

Arma 3 players patiently waiting for the alien encounter expansion to be rolled out for the online military, simulation, first person shooter, will be pleased to know that it is now available via Steam priced at $27.99, €24.99 or £21.99 depending on your location. Check out the launch trailer below to learn more about what you can expect from the new Arma 3 Contact expansion and the single player campaign.

“What if humanity suddenly encounters extraterrestrial intelligence on Earth? Bohemia Interactive presents: Arma 3 Contact – a spin-off expansion about the most important discovery in the history of mankind. As a soldier deployed to Livonia’s militarized Nadbór region, you will be among the first to study our alien visitors and determine their intentions. However, amid the tension and chaos, armed conflict inevitably unfolds. Arma 3 Contact’s military science fiction campaign arrives together with a massive new terrain, and introduces new factions, weapons, vehicles, outfits, equipment, and more to the wider Arma 3 sandbox.”

If you’re interested in Arma 3 Contact but do not yet own the Arma 3 base game, we recommend purchasing the Arma 3 Contact Edition. This includes the Contact expansion plus the Arma 3 base game at a much lower price than when both are bought separately. For those that don’t delay a 10% launch discount via Steam is available until August 1st, 2019.

Source: Steam

Filed Under: Gaming News, Top News

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Released 25 Jul 2019

I was as skeptical as anyone when the news showed up that the next Arma 3 expansion was going to be about aliens. 'Oh no,' I thought, 'this always goes badly.' And while the game's latest content pack, Contact, winds up being a fun kind of X-Files diversion into what can happen in single player, it's of limited use to anyone who thinks about Arma as a war simulator.

Look: I'll save you the trouble of reading the rest of this review. If you're hoping for weird alien technology that you can work into your warfighting scenarios, this package doesn't have it. For the purposes of general Arma play, what you get with this is basically a couple of robots, and that's about it. When we work this piece of DLC into our master list of 'Arma Stuff You Must Have,'Contact will rank very near the bottom. That being said, I liked this campaign a lot. Contact shows Bohemia and its partners at their most creative, although as ever this weird scenario does come down to a cold war popping off hot in a small regional area that is, strangely enough, cut off from the rest of the world's communications.

Here's the gist: You are Spc. Aiden Rudwell, a linguist-turned-drone operator on a field exercise near the Russian border in a fictional state called Livonia. You're in some comms unit working with local Livonian partners on a combined arms exercise that's definitely not supposed to annoy anyone on the other side of the wire.

Quickly things go pear shaped, thanks in no small part to a PFC you're friends with who was already on latrine duty and has global conspiracy theories on the brain. A routine drone training exercise results in an armed bomb landing within walking distance of your lookout point and, well, guess who gets to check it out?

This all takes place so you can get acquainted with your first bit of new equipment: There's the drone, yes, but what you'll be married to for this entire exercise is the Spectrum Device: A tool that can jam radio, pick up radio signals, and work out where those signals are coming from.

As the campaign progresses, you'll use the Spectrum Device to send spoof missions to enemy command and work out where enemy squads are working. It's not a bad piece of kit, on paper - you can spot-jam enemy communications - but it feels like you're carrying out the most basic of tasks.

Indeed, the campaign has you use this piece of equipment over and over - mainly to make sure the people at an area you want to go to aren't there when you get there. And that's all fine. But even when you get a new antenna for it that lets you 'communicate' with extraterrestrials, its use is strictly limited by the script of the story. Within that story, there are some admittedly clever bits, I should say. Using a recorded 'move left' order from Livonian command on an enemy (look, it's complicated) squad prowling out in the woods at night feels very Cold War Kids, at least once I worked out what it was the game wanted me to do.

The other headline piece of tech that comes with this expansion is the ED-1 UGV, which is a tracked R/C car with an armature, probe, and camera on it. As you might expect, it's a fun little toy to mess around with at first, but it's only useful within the bounds of the story missions Contact sets up for it. Even then, what you're ultimately doing with it most of the time is 'go to location A to poke thing B.'

You could uncharitably say that about most Arma objectives, sure. And it's what Contact does to layer meaning onto those simple tasks that makes it a fun X-Files style diversion. It feels fresh, mostly because instead of shooting things most of the time you're waving a radio antenna around in the woods, trying not to get spotted. The missions open up a bit in the middle acts, and you can choose which order you want to take on objectives, but narratively they all boil down to a core of well-meaning military officers and scientists trusting the future of humanity to an E-4 and his ability to make his way through the woods with a radio jammer. Having spent some time as an E-4 myself, I don't like our odds.

Contact has some truly standout moments baked into the campaign (which I won't spoil), and you've certainly never seen in Arma before. Alien tech makes certain things spookily hover just above the ground sometimes, and the scenario writers were smart enough to keep the actual aliens themselves hidden from you. The rest relies on scary noises and lights in the woods combined with what your own brain makes up for the majority of its runtime. But as diverting as those moments are, it doesn't change the fact that the storyline is a bit hamfisted, and at best might have made for a middling two-episode X-Files arc. That's enough to keep me entertained for a few hours, and I suspect the same is true for quite a few Arma players. Thankfully the payoff, when you get it, is pretty grand.

Arma 3 Contact Communicate With Alien Entity Search

However, that's not near enough to put this on any list of truly ‘essential’ Arma DLC, particularly when you realize that the hardware it introduces is effectively useless outside that scripted story campaign. The Spectrum Device is literally unusable anywhere outside Contact's story missions, and the UGV it brings in is effectively the same - unless modders want to start adding 'probe material at location X,Y' to their list of missions in Arma's sandbox.

A couple other notes worth mentioning: Contact brings with it a new landmass, Livonia, and that's certainly interesting enough. It's some hilly woodland featuring a radar base and steep terrain - it's nothing particularly dramatic, but it's certainly more land on which to do Arma things. I was, however, disappointed to find that Contact seemed to make Arma 3 perform even worse on recommended settings than it had before, and this was after I had installed a brand new RTX 2070 Super graphics card in my PC. This is a game that's feeling its age.

All that said, I hope it's pretty clear where Contact lands in the panoply of Arma 3 add-on content. From a wargamer's perspective it's probably the least essential piece of DLC Bohemia has ever put out for the game. But it's an entertaining and, by Arma standards, unique story experience that's worth playing through once, and that bit at least is characterized by Bohemia's pleasingly authentic ear for military dialogue and characters, even if it can be a bit uneven and cartoony at times.

But Contact is also Arma 3's most expensive piece of DLC, with a price tag that's higher than the massive and game-changing Apex expansion. Contact, sadly, makes almost no impact on the broader game and even at its highest moments never really justifies itself. It's a fun little story, and that's it - unlike almost any other piece of DLC, it doesn't make Arma 3 itself more interesting at all.

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[amwritingmeta]

12x19 Deconstruction: Cas and Kelly, and Most of the Episode

Oh, this episode. This episode has me salivating with inspiration and a bit of worship - the structure is so damn good I want to just use it as a private staple from here on out. (I won’t.) (Or will I?...) Okay, let’s move onto the actual focus of this deconstruction: the baby. I have stated again and again how...

I do not believe the baby is evil - I believe it’s good. 

So let me here give you my foremost reasons for why I so firmly believe this, but first, can we just do a slow clap for the amazing work of writers Robert Berens and Meredith Glynn and the stunning job done on this episode by director Amanda Tapping? Thank you. (Yes, okay, let’s stop now.)

I’m going to have to dip into the entirety of this episode now in order to make my reasons for believing the baby is of the Good stick. I’ll spend an extra moment on the pivotal scene in the motel room, but honestly, this episode is so Cas/Kelly focused that it’s impossible not to look at the entirety of both of their story lines through every beat of this forty-two minute blitz of deep character development for Cas. It’s fucking amazingly crafted. Again, prostrated on the floor, Writers.

But what about Destiel?

Well, of course this is a Destiel heavy episode, and for very good reasons, too, but I’m going to discuss Dean as he relates to Cas’ character arc this time around, rather than how they both relate to their joint love story arc. (Okay, the love story arc will be part of this discussion because it can’t not be, but it won’t be in focus.) (There will be Destiel.) (Wait COME BACK I SAID THERE WILL BE DESTIE—… Good. Hi. There will be Destiel. Okay? Just alittlemoreCasKellybabydiscussionshhhhhhh let’s begin now.)

So, then: Why Is the Baby Good?

Oh, boy. The answer is a long and complex one, because it doesn’t really occur in one scene, rather it just keeps coming at you throughout the episode. And it starts as early as the recap sequence, where we’re reminded of Dagon’s role as Protector. The dialogue where she convinces Kelly to come with her is chilling, and significant:

Dagon: I’m a demon - you’re Rosemary, complete with baby. Kelly, the angels, the Wincesters, the good guys - they want you dead, but I can protect you. I can protect your son.

Even though Kelly might have had reservations, what happens when the Winchesters decide to interfere, tricking Kelly and more or less kidnapping her against her will, really only serves to prove one thing: they have nothing on Dagon.

Sam: We want to help. Kelly: You call this helping?

Kelly has no faith in them whatsoever and when Dagon comes for her, she’s resigned to go with her - there’s no salvation to be had here, the Winchesters, whatever their motivation, can’t protect her or her child.

THE OPENING SCENE

The opening scene of 12x19 gives us a harrowing setup, immediately declaring the new relationship between Kelly and Dagon as Dagon is now Kelly’s Captor - the Protector role long gone. Dagon forces vitamins down Kelly’s throat as Kelly’s refusing them. Kelly’s appearance is filthy, her expression vacant: all hope has gone from her. The following exchange (shortened) is, however, intriguing to the extreme in terms of foreshadowing:

Dagon: Stop disrespecting the god inside of you. Kelly: He’s gonna kill me. Dagon: Yeah. And he’s not gonna stop there. Every sad, weak human; every tight ass angel; every snivelling demon - they’ll all be consumed.

Now, I would like to draw your eye away from the narrative of the entire series, and instead focus you on the contained narrative of this specific episode. Everything interlaces gorgeously either way, and the whole of the series is reflected in the prisms of the character arcs of this episode, but putting that aside, let’s simplify it, for simplicity’s sake.

Dagon is not only a Prince of Hell, she’s Lucifer’s closest, she’s acting directly under his orders, but, in the context of the narrative of this episode, she is not a parallel to Lucifer: she is a representative of Evil, of darkness, of death and of destruction. She is everything bad in this world, every last minute of suffering and heartbreak. She is representative of the end to all things. She declares this in her speech: all will be consumed, and she’s delighting in the thought.

(This is, of course, in perfect linkage with Lucifer’s arc this season: he’s breaking daddy’s toys and he just created the ultimate weapon of mass destruction, but I’m adding that as an aside. In the narrative of this episode Dagon is a representative of all Evil, not just the evil of Lucifer.)

Now, after Dagon has drained every last morsel of any possibility that hope might rekindle within Kelly, we witness one of the most horrifyingly realistic and absolutely amazingly shot and acted suicides I’ve ever seen on television. It has such cinematic quality, it’s so deeply sad and moving, that I again send out kudos, this time especially to the amazing Courtney Ford. Because wow, what a performance.

Now, the act of Kelly killing herself is tied into the overarching theme of the show: that of sacrificing yourself to save the world, to do what is right; but moreover it’s also tied to the S12 prevailing theme of parenthood. Kelly tells her son she’s sorry, she loves him, but she can’t allow him to be the cause of so much suffering - she’ll sooner kill them both. This is what Dagon’s words have brought her to: suicide.

Of course, the baby saves her life, only to have Dagon taunt Kelly’s newfound faith in her son - telling her that her son doesn’t want her alive, he saved her to save himself. He’ll kill Kelly when he’s born and then Dagon will raise him, nurture him, teach him to kill - like a mother should. Yup, there’s that parenthood theme again, now firmly tying itself with Dagon’s character arc. (I do believe this theme has been there in practically every single episode this season and I’ve been loving it.) (In case that hasn’t been made clear by previous posts.)

THE REUNION/MIXTAPE EXCHANGES

I’ve gone into deep-deconstruction mode on this already and won’t do so here, except to take a closer look at Cas and his motivations in this scene, and the following one with Dean and the (I still get so giddy at the very thought) mixtape.

We know what the brothers don’t: Cas has been approached by the angels to assist Heaven in tracking down Kelly Kline. So as soon as Cas delivers that line about going to the angels, thinking they might help with Dagon, we as the audience know he is lying, and that he’s clearly not back at the Bunker to ask Dean and Sam for help or even to be honest with them.

Cas is having to go behind their backs - and he’s distressed about it.

Damn is Misha good in this scene. Okay, back on track.

Cas can’t stand deceiving the people who trust him, and the fact that Dean is so pissed off with him doesn’t make things any easier, but Cas has to do this, because if he doesn’t, Dean or Sam will have to kill Kelly and her baby and he knows what that will do to them. Oh, he knows it very well, even before he asks Dean if the brothers could kill an innocent, because he knows that they’d never get over it.

This ties in with what Dean told him in that Let’s Have an Impromptu Lunch Date scene from 10x09, in which Dean tells Cas that some things you have to forget about, confessing to this being the opposite of what he does. So now, with Kelly Kline and her child, Cas can’t have that. He’s protecting Dean, and he’s protecting Sam, as he always has done. As he’s learned you’re supposed to do for the people you love, and he’s learned this from Dean, whom he considers a role model, someone who has always been the one to guide him through the human experience, advising and berating him in equal measure, but, more than anything else, showing him true loyalty and friendship.

Cas’ confession to Dean - honesty amidst the lying - says so much about what his mental state has been ever since he was told he was expendable in S11. He’s been carrying that feeling with him ever since then, he’s been low on energy for all of S12, feeling tired and despondent, and verbalising this when he tells Dean that he needed to come back with a win for him, then adding that extremely significant “for myself”, this moment, and this particular bit of Cas exposition, is so important for how the rest of the episode shapes up.

Because Cas’ starting point is all things Bad: duty is forcing him to lie to his friends, his family, in order to get that win, in order to do what’s right and protect the people he loves by making a choice for them. His hopelessness and willingness to selfless sacrifice is mirrored in Kelly’s attempted suicide: their character arcs’ starting points in the episode are the same, moving them onto a conjoined path of Good where they begin to share a need of protecting the baby. (No, they’re not brainwashed into it by.) (No, they’re not being controlled.) (Hang on, I’m getting to it, I promise.) (Okay, let’s skip ahead to...)

MOTEL ROOM EXCHANGE

Cas is now, in effect, acting as Kelly’s Captor. He is escorting Kelly - and her unborn child - to a place where both of them will die. He’s doing this because he believes it’s right - just as Dagon did - only Cas is Dagon’s complete Opposite. As demonstrated in this scene. 

Even before this, when Cas is telling Kelly his plan to take her to Heaven, where she and the baby will die, but peacefully, he’s still regretful, even though he’s more Castiel - soldier of the Lord - in that exchange than I believe we’ve seen him in quite some time. This because he has a determined mission, these are his imperatives, and this is his plan: this is Cas with a purpose. He states the facts to Kelly, in that scene in the truck, without much emotion or circumvention.

But then, this following exchange takes place in the motel room:

Kelly: Something happened to me, Castiel. I lost hope, I tried to… I killed myself. I slit my wrists. I died. And then… he saved me. He brought me back to life. Cas: That was the pulse. We felt that in Heaven. Kelly: His power. His soul surged through me and it was good. Pure. I feel-… I know he is good. Cas: Kelly, what your child did that’s testament to his power, but it’s not proof of some goodness. He needs you alive. Kelly: Maybe. Or maybe it was a miracle. Maybe everything that I’ve been through, everything that I still have to go through is happening for a reason. Maybe it’s part of some plan. Cas: No, it isn’t. I used to believe in a plan. I used to believe that I had some mission. But I have been through enough now to know that everyone is just winging it. Some of us quite badly. Lucifer - he’s just breaking toys, he’s sowing destruction and chaos and there is no grand purpose at work. And there’s no special role for you. When Lucifer took over Rooney’s body, I’m sorry, you were just there. Kelly: I know my baby can be good for this world. Cas: Kelly, if he’s born… That is not something you can survive. So even if you are right, and even if the worst isn’t inevitable, then who will care for him when you’re gone? Who? Who is strong enough to protect him and to keep him from evil influences and to keep him on the righteous path? …What? Kelly: He just kicked… Do you wanna? Cas: Oh… No. Kelly: It’s not a big deal, Castiel - he does it like ten times a day.

Let’s talk about this now. Let’s look at the words chosen for this exchange. Let’s YouTube the sucker and look at the scene again and really let all of the details sink in, especially with regards to how these two characters interact. 

Cas is quite stand offish when the scene begins and they’ve just entered the room. He’s a little impatient, annoyed at the error of the truck breaking down, at not knowing how to fix it (thinking of Dean Dean Dean), and - remembering what happened last time he let Kelly go to the restroom alone - he promptly escorts her out of the small bathroom and has her sit on the bed.

He then fetches her the water.

If there wasn’t a difference between him and Dagon before, this is where we really begin to notice it. In his Captor role, all he’s doing is done because he believes it’s right - just as Dagon did - and the fact that he’s taken up her cape becomes even clearer during his dialogue with Kelly, when he almost verbatim repeats Dagon’s words back at Kelly regarding her son: saving his mother’s life doesn’t prove the child is good, the child needs his mother alive in order to survive.

Kelly begins her rebuttal speech to this statement in an over-zealous, almost devout way - the same, nearly startling, conviction on her face that she had while speaking to Dagon about the baby having saved her life. This could be the look of someone under the influence of a supernatural being - but because of what comes after it, because of the dialogue chosen for these two characters, I believe this is the Good Mother showing her utter devotion to her child. She is not being influenced to convince Cas. 

Why not?

The answer actually lies within Cas’ speech to her about there not being any grand scheme afoot here, there is no plan, no greater purpose. He tries to bring Kelly down to the level he’s at with his faith, which is - after everything he’s been through - at zero. He tries to make her see reason, the way he’s been forced to. 

Because God has left. Actually, God left a very long time ago. Cas was never following God’s orders and the disillusionment this caused in him chipped away at every ounce of belief until he was left with this emptiness. Heaven may be more or less in order, but at what cost? Lucifer was let out of the cage because of a decision Cas made and managed to produce a nephilim on his watch so it’s little wonder Cas feels responsible. No wonder Cas needs Kelly to hear him. She will die either way and her baby? 

Oh, yes, here’s the clinch. This is it. This is the piece of dialogue that sealed it for me. Cas says:

Cas: Who is strong enough to protect him and to keep him from evil influences and to keep him on the righteous path?

And not only is it that the dialogue makes use of that incredibly significant word “righteous”, but even more than that is it the action that follows it - when the baby kicks.

I yelped at the mention of the word “righteous” because not only is it another callback, but it takes us all the way back to 4x16, and Cas telling Dean that line of dialogue of how the righteous man who began it is the one who will end it. Yes, it was all a rouse to get Dean to become Michael’s vessel. The dick angels played Dean and they played Cas and this is where Team Free Will really began. But see? This is where Team Free Will really began.

To Cas, Dean has always been The Righteous Man because Cas could see what the others couldn’t. That’s why he beat Dean up in that alley - because he knew Dean was better than that. And what if - it’s a big if - but what if Kelly’s right and Cas is wrong believing there isn’t a plan? It doesn’t take away Free Will. It just means that to reach the end result of the plan - which, to me, is endgame represented in a balance between Heaven, Hell and Earth - the people entrusted with this task need to make the right choices. They need to have faith, show trust in each other and work together.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, into the conjecture part of the proceedings. I apologise.

As if making me yelp by bringing up the word “righteous” wasn’t enough, then the look on Cas’ face when he places his hand on Kelly’s stomach made my heart ache for him. This is Cas as we’ve come to know him, someone who loves and is in awe of humanity, and how it can create life. That smile is something we’ve never seen on Cas’ face before. 

He’s more human than angel in this moment.

And this is what the baby responds to when it shows Kelly a flash of the future: I would assume it’s Lucifer rising, Cas stepping in front of Kelly saying “You stay away from her”. Cas, in complete contrast to Dagon, who thought of Kelly as disposable waste, is protecting the baby’s mother. This is why the baby now chooses Castiel. It happens in this moment. Cas goes from being Captor, to being Protector.

THE WINCHESTERS

All I’m going to put in here, because this scene of the brothers arriving to the motel room will be tackled in the 12x20 meta I’ll start working on tomorrow (I hope) (Fuck, it’s midnight.) (Okay.) (Yeah, I won’t finish that this weekend. Grr.) But what I’m going to add in here is Kelly’s attitude to the Winchesters:

Kelly: Sam and Dean, they want to take away his power because they’re scared.

This line of dialogue is delivered as Cas and Kelly have stolen the Impala and revved out of the motel parking lot. In this scene Cas learns that the baby has chosen him. He tries to tell Kelly that he’s not fit to protect her, in dialogue restating for the third time in this episode how useless he thinks he is.

Dean, I just keep failing. Again and again.

But I have been through enough now to know that everyone is just winging it. Some of us quite badly.

I am not someone that you should put your faith in, Kelly.

And Kelly responds with this:

Kelly: I don’t know why it’s me, and I don’t know why it’s you, but I know that we are destined for something here. Something great. Cas: I wish I had your faith. Kelly: You will.

They start out in the same place this episode: faithless. But Kelly, through her son soul surging through her - a power felt even in Heaven - saving her life, now has complete faith, and puts some of it, if not all of it, in Cas being the right choice. She trusts him implicitly. In a sense, she steps in as his spirit guide. She has good cause to trust him, too - even though he’s taking her to Heaven to die: he didn’t kill her in cold blood, he went with the diplomatic route by allowing her to choose. He went with the route of Free Will. 

Cas has always been a representation of what is Good in humanity: love, loyalty, perseverance, selflessness.

Even in his darkest moments, those moments have only come about because of these staple traits to his character. And his inability to involve others in his choices - which is inspired by who again? Oh, yes, that’s right - Dean Winchester’s inability to involve others in his choices, Dean making choices for those he loves, always feeling and always carrying that weight of the world that makes everything and everyone his responsibility. Is it any wonder then, that Cas is forever trying to share in the burden? All he’s ever done since placing his hand on Dean in Hell has been to try and help Dean. But unfortunately, this need has never lead Cas to anything but catastrophe - because he needs to root the need in his own wants and needs, not what he believes Dean wants and needs from him.

So, leaving Destiel (told you there’d be a touch of love in this post) I’ll restate as a short reminder:

Dagon represents Evil Castiel represents Goodness

Let me say it once more time, because it hones into the point I want to make (you know, the one about the goodness of Lucifer’s son): Cas and Dagon are each other’s mirror Opposites in this narrative and it’s so extremely well-written I can barely even stand it. Seriously. I’m like wringing my hands and pulling on my hair over here, my brain crackling like I’m going absolutely mental over it. (I kind of am.)

The Evil one starts out on a power trip believing she is destined to rule all, next to Lucifer, while the Good one starts out feeling lost and powerless. Can you see how they built this narrative into an X? The Evil and the Good meeting in the middle, where Cas gets his hands on Kelly, and Dagon is left being screamed at by her now finally terrifying again - even though he’s still chained up - boss from Hell? And how the narrative again splits as we move towards that final scene and Castiel spreading his proverbial feathered wings? Oh, there is such glory here I now want to cry. (Not really.) (Yeah, kinda really, actually.)

WWCD

Now we come to the root of the matter. We come to that thing that makes me believe, more than anything else in this episode, that this baby is good. 

If the fact that Dagon so clearly represents Evil that will Destroy the Universe and Cas so clearly represents everything that is Opposite to this (i.e. the future) isn’t enough to convince you, then let me tackle Cas’ character development in this laser-focused narrative of one episode. Let me tell you how I have waited, and waited, for Cas to get his comeuppance. Ever since that heartbreaking moment in 11x10 when first his own angelic sister, and then this woman who has bewitched the man he loves, told Cas that he was expendable, what little self-worth he’d gathered over the years, whatever belief in his own capabilities, just drained from him completely.

We all saw it.

It was so goddamn painful to watch, and it has so clearly lingered, like something heavy, ever since Lucifer was exorcised from him in 11x22. (The fact that Dean couldn’t open up in that damned (beautiful) Brologue in 11x23 didn’t help the matter.) 

As for Cas and Dean this season, which has been such an influence on Cas’ character arc - as ever it was - it has been intriguing and exciting to watch the undercurrent of unspoken things between them. There has been such a snappy annoyance there, practically every time they’ve been in the same room together, that it’s been entertaining and gorgeously frustrating at the same time. The UST has been thick enough to cut through with a dull knife, especially on Dean’s part, where Jensen’s body language has just gotten tenser and tenser as the season has progressed. (And then there’s the Rock Star Leather Jacket of Sex moment.) (After Dean serenades Cas on the guitar, of course.) (All look at me, look at me, I’m not just a lumberjack, I’ll sing songs, I’ll sing songs.) (I love this show.) 

Cas has been mostly confounded by it all, mirroring Dean’s annoyance and feeling, more than ever, like he doesn’t belong. Like there’s no place for him anywhere. So that heavy feeling has progressively gotten worse. And when he picked up that angel blade and killed Billie, that choice was riding on the back of walking into that fight with Lucifer, not caring for his own safety in the least. Because this is the thing: Cas sees himself as the hammer. He sees himself as the expendable first wave, clearing the way for the real heroes, because this is his deepest fear pertaining to his character arc: that this is all he is to the brothers and, furthermore, that this is all he is capable of being.

The first half of this season (and most of S11) was heavily focused on this for Cas’ character arc. He has lost all faith in himself after making all those horrendous choices that have gotten angels and humans killed, that has devastated Heaven. Not only has he been labeled expendable, but, especially this season, he’s been called the Winchesters’ purse dog, attack dog - dog, dog, dog. This, I feel, is to demonstrate the role he has assigned himself in their dynamic: the hammer and the shield. It’s a vicious fearful circle because he plays the part afraid that if he doesn’t there is no place for him with the brothers, not seeing that neither brother expects him to play this part. (As demonstrated over and over this season, and finally coming to a head in 12x12 where the brothers, at last, take a stand for him and show him that he is truly one of them. Only... there is still that one thing missing, of course. But I shan’t digress!) 

What this episode does, with such amazingly even beats, is not only remind us of Cas’ past - which is why it’s so wonderfully Destiel heavy, fitting perfectly with Dean’s character arc and furthering their joint love story arc in what is nothing short of writing gold - but this episode also tells us of where Cas is at right now: that soldier of Heaven who blazed into Dean’s life with the confidence, the arrogance, of someone who knows they work for God himself, that soldier left Cas a long time ago.

He’s learned that there is no reason to have faith, because no one is watching over you. You’re on your own. What he needs to be reminded of is that, though this may be true, this means, more than anything, that you should have faith in yourself.

And this is what his character arc has been all about. From the very first. Choosing Free Will does not mean throwing yourself headfirst into impossible situations, it does not mean sacrificing yourself without a thought for the consequences, it does not mean taking all the responsibility on yourself, always. Free Will simply means asking yourself “What do I want?” And Cas has never once done that. Cas needs to find his way into his own individuality, into his own self. As mentioned, he’s been so lost because all he’s ever done is relate himself to Dean and what Dean might need or want from him. This is as stunting as the brothers’ codependency. Cas loves Dean, but Dean cannot be his only reason to feel love, because that will keep Cas from growing as a person. 

So how can Cas grow as a person then? Well, Dean is human and yes, he does represent humanity, but Cas has watched over humanity since long before Dean was born. Cas’ love for humanity itself - his deep awe of his father’s creation is what is now giving Cas - through this baby - a sense of purpose that isn’t tied to Dean. (And still is tied to Dean. I know, this narrative is so deliciously complex.) Cas wants to help. He’s restated that over and over and over again. This is his foremost motivation: to help and to protect. He isn’t a hammer and he isn’t an attack dog. And this is why the baby chose him as its mother’s Protector.

It’s very telling to me how Kelly consistently calls Cas “Castiel”. She never once calls him Cas, which is quite unusual. Even characters that only share one scene with him have reverted, since early on, to calling him Cas rather than Castiel. We’ve had callbacks to Castiel through Ishim and through Kelvin this season, so is there any wonder that, when Dean watches Cas get powered up, all Dean can see is Castiel? And is there any wonder this freaks him the hell out? Nope. Remembering that badass, fucking terrifying, celestial being who was completely unreliable and unpredictable I would say there is no wonder whatsoever.

FULL-FEATHERED ANGEL

That final scene. Oh, that final scene of the episode. 

Here I would say that Cas passes a final test with flying colours when he confronts Dagon - a Prince of Hell - with nothing but an angel blade, stepping in front of Kelly with a “You stay away from her”, echoing the words he spoke in the flash of the future the baby showed Kelly in the motel room. He will fight and he will die if it means protecting the Good Mother from the Bad Mother. The Protector will shield mother and baby from the Captor - who stands for nothing but suffering. The baby, convinced, works through Kelly and restores Cas’ powers so that Cas will be able to protect them to his absolute fullest capabilities.

Cas is Castiel once more.

Sam: What was that? Cas: It was me. But it was also…

This, I believe, is the beginning of “the better way”. I believe the baby sets them all on a course down the better way, towards a series ending that will have everything to do with balance, but I’ll jot my thoughts down on endgames and such in another post. This one is already balking under the word count. ;)

Now, I say “Cas is Castiel” - but what I mean is that, of course, he’s still Cas. Like he even says himself: “It was me.” The difference is that, this time, instead of lacking faith, instead of fearing making the wrong choice, as he has done on so many other occasions when shouldering the weight of the world, he knows now what has to be done, and he knows - because he believes, finally, in himself - that this is the right thing to do. This will bring peace, this will bring balance, this child is innocent and as long as he’s kept from Lucifer he will grow up good. And it will change everything for the better.

This moment - this reward, this win - for Cas’ choices throughout the episode, is what the story arc has been moving towards. He began convinced mother and baby had to die for the greater good, and now he knows that for the good to be great, the baby must live. This, again, reflects Kelly’s journey in that opening scene and their mutual tie to the baby loops around Cas with the theme of parenthood, which has already been explored in his character arc through Claire and his need to make amends for taking Jimmy from her.

This further’s my conviction that, in a season dealing with Good Parents vs Evil Parents, this Good Parent coupling (don’t worry, I don’t mean that in a sexual way, simply a spiritual way) underlines the fact that the baby is not controlling them. It’s clearly influencing them, showing them flashes of what can be if they make the right choices and sure, this could be construed as it lying to them, manipulating them, and that the twist will be that we’re lulled into a sense of security, but the baby turns out to have been evil all along, but it doesn’t fit with the tone of the episode or Cas’ deeply personal and profound character evolution he’s afforded for making the right choice.

There’s also the visual of the white light that is mingling with the hellfire in Cas eyes as he kills Dagon...

...and how the baby used Cas to kill her: the baby wasn’t protecting itself, the baby was always protecting its mother. I’ll restate that the parenthood theme throughout the season has dictated that the Bad, Negligent, Selfish, Evil Parent is dealt with: this type of parenting is inadvisable, to say the least. (And it goes so brilliantly with Dean’s character arc and his need to settle everything with the past in order to move into his brighter future that I can’t even.)

Dagon’s speech to Kelly about how her son was going to be raised by Dagon into killing everything, I believe, sealed Dagon’s fate and helps to underline my point: this child does not want to kill everything. It does not want to kill its mother. There is love in this child already. And why shouldn’t there be? It’s grandfather is God himself, the child has angel grace in it, it’s just as linked to Heaven as it is to Hell, and more than that, of course, it is a product of humanity. 

(And this is why it’s powerful enough to oversee all three and bring order to the chaos of this world, where angels were never meant to walk among humans and where demons are running amok. I don’t think it’s by chance that Dagon refers to the baby as “the god inside you” to Kelly. This child has the power to be the new God - but he would be so with faith in his grandfather’s creation, and an iron fist for those that disobey him.) (I could discuss Chuck’s shortcomings as a father and how that has lead to the creation of this nephilim to begin with, but not here. Nope.)

I want this scenario so badly now that I don’t know what to do with myself. It’s such a glorious loop back to how this all began. With Azazel and Sam, with Dean and the 66 seals, with Lucifer like this dark shadow over both their lives, over the lives of their parents, and Chuck somewhere in the peripheral, the angels always watching, and here we now come upon the final confrontation and it’s all just tying up into a beautiful tapestry of perfection. WRITERS I LOVE YOU. EVEN IF I’M COMPLETELY WRONG, I SHOULD ADD. *shouty*

What about that final moment between Cas and the brothers? What about that final shot of the brothers knocked out and Cas and Kelly driving away? Ominous anyone? Well. No, actually. I take other things from it, because here’s what leads up to it. 

Cas: You’re hurt.

I mean. Do I even really need to comment on this moment? There’s such tenderness here, such sudden intimacy, and I feel it bodes well. Cas has gotten his mojo back and with it he feels more himself than he has in a long time. I believe returning to his angelic form is imperative for Cas to choose to become human, but I’ll explore that in my spec post. Back to the scene...

Because then:

Dean: Cas? Are you okay? Cas: I am. I’ve been so lost. I’m not lost anymore. I know now this baby must be born, with all of his power. Sam: You can’t actually mean that. Cas: Yes, I do. I have faith.

And then:

Cas: You have to just trust me.

And then:

Dean: No, no, no, whatever that thing did to you we’re not gonna let you just walk away.

Especially Dean’s comment is what is important to me here, because not only does he protest three times with those repeated “no”s, but he also calls the child “that thing” and unequivocally hints that the brothers are going to fight to keep Cas there. So Cas knocks them out, because he’s leaving and where he’s going they can’t come with him. Especially if they’re going to refer to the child as a “thing”. Sorry, Dean, lights out for you.

Cas asks the brothers to trust him. Okay, he more or less tells them to, but he does it with an ease about him. As though he expects them to, because he knows he’s trustworthy and because he knows he’s right this time around. Bringing up trust in this moment, to me, is also significant, because Cas is trusting himself for the first time in a long time, and he wants that trust reciprocated. Team Free Will. When they don’t, not only does he make the decision of proceeding alone, he also knocks them out to protect them, to keep them from following, because what’s another glaring detail that hints toward Cas being Cas is that Cas - again underlined as the Opposite of Dagon - does not zap Kelly and him out of there.

Instead, they get in the truck - you know, the truck that Dean fixed with his own bare hands...

...and they drive off.

The mournful tune at the end signals, to me, that FOR FUCK’S SAKE AGAIN YOU GUYS CAN’T JUST GET YOUR HEAD’S OUT OF YOUR ASSES AND WORK TOGETHER IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE TEAM FREE WILL! Then again, maybe that’s me projecting my frustration. :)

Either way, I’m not worried now. I believe the team will reassemble in the season finale.

So, in conclusion, these are all the reasons why I believe the baby is Good and that we are headed good places. Through hellfire and death and tons and tons of worry, of course.

Thanks, as ever, for your time and your patience!

[thehallofgame]

Review: Final Fantasy 8

Release: 1999

My Rating: 7.5

 Review Beneath the Cut:

              Located right in the golden age of Final Fantasy the eighth entry in the series took some surprising risks and changed up the formula that had seen the franchise through seven prior entries. Instead of the traditional reliance on grinding to higher levels for power players were presented with a new system that gave them nearly complete freedom to customize their party’s abilities and strengths. The results of the experiment are decidedly mixed and ultimately result in a unique but often frustrating jrpg experience.

              Final Fantasy 8 puts the player in the shoes of Squall, a teenage student at the elite mercenary academy called Garden. Right off the bat one may find this a little suspect and to clarify any doubt: yes, Final Fantasy 8 is about a group of child soldiers. After graduation Squall and his newly formed unit are given their first assignment: help the insurgency in an occupied city. There he meets Rinoa, his costar and the rebel leader. Under her leadership Squall and his party of mercenaries are pulled into a war on the world stage. An evil sorceress is attempting to take over the world and it is revealed that the true reason the Gardens exist is to train warriors to fight sorceresses.

              This launches Squall and co on an epic journey to defeat a century-spanning power. Along the way, however, Squall and his friends periodically experience strange visions where they observe the adventures of enemy soldiers who lived some twenty years ago. At first the two scenarios seem disconnected but in the final stages of the game the reason for these odd flashbacks, and the presence of a mysterious young woman who seems to know everyone in the party but yet is not known to them, all make sense.

              This game becomes an interesting exercise in story-telling as Squall is essentially a normal boy viewing conflicts between the immensely great power of the sorceresses from the outside. Meanwhile, it is the sorceresses that the plot revolves around and their past and personal development that form the core of the game’s emotional impact.

              Magic in this world isn’t naturally common. In fact only a handful of people, the sorceresses, can use it unaided. The rest of the world have to use a complex system to ‘junction’ it to themselves. This is achieved via Final Fantasy 8’s answer to the summoning system of previous entries.

              On their own characters in combat may only attack enemies with their weapons. To access more abilities characters must equip one or more Guardian Forces (the familiar summons of the series). The starting set unlock the ability to summon Guardian Forces, cast magic and use the draw command.

There is no MP in this game. Instead single use spells are stocked via the draw command and expended one at a time. Spells are found at (often invisible or hidden) draw points around the world and can be drawn from enemies during combat to be cast immediately or stocked for future use. Early in the game draw points are few and far between so it’s usually advantageous to begin every battle by drawing some magic from the enemies present before dispatching them. Using the draw command on bosses is also the only way to attain most of the game’s Guardian Forces which can be terribly easy to forget in the heat of an exciting battle. As the player develops stockpiles of magic they can begin to explore the other core feature of the junction system. Guardian Forces will unlock the ability to ‘junction’ magic to character stats and HP. The stronger the magic, and the more of it available, in question the stronger the bonuses to the stat will be. Elemental and status effect magic can also be junctioned to attack and defense for added specificity of customization. In late stages of the game this results in the ability to make the party functionally immune to status ailments, able to absorb elemental attacks for HP and strike enemies for thousands of points of damage more than the unaided weapon would do.

Meanwhile, Guardian Forces perform an active role in combat as well as support roles. The first few GFs acquired each have powerful elemental magic attacks. Later the player can also acquire summons with powerful non-elemental attacks and support magic to buff the party, as well as a host of unique abilities to equip to the party.

Summoning Guardian forces in combat costs nothing. Instead there is a merely a timer that needs to wind down before the summon will appear. While the timer is going the character’s HP will be replaced with that of the summon and damage to the character will be taken by the GF. If the GF’s hp is depleted they will be KOed and will no longer be available to summon until the party rests or heals the GF. The longer a GF is equipped to one character the more familiarity the two have which results in a shorter summon time. This familiarity can also be effected by actions like using healing items on the GF or by using certain types of magic while the GF is junctioned to the character in question.

As characters grow so too do the Guardian Forces. Equipped GFs will gain experience and level up alongside the party. They will also gain ability points at the end of battles (in fact many boss battles give the party no experience but many ability points for their guardian forces) which will be used toward the GF learning new abilities. These new skills can increase the power of the GF, the character they’re equipped to, unlock new combat actions or even the ability to create new spells, medicine or items from the player’s inventory. This development is integral to controlling and winning the late game. The party’s level growth is quickly outclassed by the benefits provided by equipping multiple high level Guardian Forces.

This turns out to be a necessary equalizing mechanic because Final Fantasy 8 displays no qualms about frequently splitting the party, removing characters from it and forcing the use of certain characters even into the last hours of the game. At the same time, if Squall is present he MUST be in the party, which means the player is forced to rotate the other five characters through two slots instead of three. This means Squall is routinely much stronger than the rest of the party who quickly and easily fall behind. Toward the end of the game even if the player has hunted down the rare items needed to fully upgrade all of the characters’ weaponry Squall will be the only character whose physical attack still does significant damage.

Meanwhile, the upgradable weapon each character has is the only piece of equipment each carries. The extensive equipment and item system of previous Final Fantasy games has been removed in favor of the Guardian Force system. This is a boon in disguise (as frustrating as it becomes to not be able to equip traditional status effect preventing accessories) because the money system in Final Fantasy 8 is a disaster.

Instead of collecting money from fallen foes and from chests like in most JRPGs this game decided to have the party paid by their bosses at the Garden. The player’s exploits in the tutorial section/final mercenary exam section of the game determine a starting salary rank that determines how much money the party is paid at set intervals. Throughout the game the rank can be raised at will be taking ‘written exams’ under the tutorial menu, but easily lost by performing actions unbecoming of a mercenary. This includes talking to too many NPCs, lollygagging and side questing on the way to objectives or disobeying orders. This system is predictably infuriating in an otherwise traditional RPG. Any game that requires a goodly amount of exploration and experience grinding to progress properly shouldn’t also financially penalize the party for doing so. Ultimately this system is of little consequence because the accrued money, no matter what rank, usually piles up faster than can be spent and is easily bolstered by selling the items enemies drop. However the constant wrist slaps for trying to explore the game is infuriating.

Considering how unusual and temperamental Final Fantasy 8’s core mechanics are it’s a miracle that the game actually came out relatively balanced. Sure, it’s still pretty easy to shoot yourself in the foot and permanently cripple yourself by accident by missing too many Guardian Forces in the early game, but as long as the player works that out the game progresses like it’s supposed to. In the late stages of the game Final Fantasy 8 uses its unique hooks to craft compelling and tricky boss battles. Meanwhile, the story that frames all of this is beautiful, strange and poignant. (Slight spoilers ahead. Skip to the next paragraph if concerned). I also think Final Fantasy 8 deserves special accolades for managing a time travel based story that didn’t turn the narrative into useless goop. In the past this game has been accused of having a non-sensical and hole-filled plot and I played with a special eye on this. I can see where the complaints come from, and they’re somewhat justified. However I believe this was actually a purposeful story-telling choice. Squall is presented as an observer to massive events but his motivations in participating are very small in scope. His primary drive is to do his job and protect his loved ones, and as such doesn’t necessarily explore the reasons the things around him are happening. This leads to a lack of expositional storytelling and instead forces the player to gather the scraps of the story Squall does witness and draw their own conclusions. Additionally, while Squall lands the final blow, Final Fantasy 8 really isn’t his story. I maintain it is, rather, about the interplay of politics, power and responsibility that surround the multiple sorceresses appearing throughout the game.

I probably already said more than I should’ve from a spoilers point of view. Suffice it to say I loved this game and that I believe the commentary about the story largely unfounded. Final Fantasy 8 is solidly worth taking the time to visit for JRPG fans though it may be a little too fiddly and arcane for players who aren’t fans of the genre. If the player can suspend their confusion and disbelief over the world state and take the story for what it is, cheesy one liners and slapstick humor and all, they can find a lot to love here.