#see their insignificant flaws as the entirety of their character then of course the entire life becomes about trying to prove that there’s

[stinkbeck]

me after being a normal, unscrutinized person interacting with strangers for one evening: oh my god dude i was totally overreacting about everything

[backdraft-bimbo]

Why Destiel becoming canon matters

Happiness isn’t in the having. It’s in just being. It’s in just saying it. I know how you see yourself, Dean. You see yourself the same way our enemies see you. You’re destructive, and you’re angry, and you’re broken; you’re Daddy’s blunt instrument. And you think that hate and anger, that’s what drives you, that’s who you are. It’s not. 

This was the best part of Cas’ monologue in my opinion. It was so beautiful. I especially loved how simple it was for him to reshape the way Dean sees himself, how he outright said “It’s not.” Dean has been in a mental downhill spiral the entire season and these were words I think he really needed to hear. 

You can see it in his face when the camera cuts back to Dean. It’s clear just how much Cas loves him; most of the time it’s been through action. Pulling Dean out of hell, rebelling against God, siding with humanity. Those were all actions driven by love, but now we (and Dean) actually get to hear a confirmation of it. 

One of the reasons Dean never made the first move was because he wasn’t confident enough in himself, too buried in his own self-loathing to even comprehend someone loving him so unconditionally. He’s a very repressed character and has struggled with expressing himself throughout the entire show. 

And one of the most heart wrenching parts of the scene is that Cas was completely happy to just admit his love, saying it aloud to the person he loves. Letting himself finally feel the entirety of his feelings for Dean. Cas didn’t need anything from Dean, nor did he ask for anything. He was happy just loving Dean with the possibility of nothing in return. 

The line he says near the beginning, “Because the one thing I want, it’s something I know I can’t have”, is not a confirmation of unreciprocated feelings on Dean’s part. It is Cas acknowledging that his deal with the Empty will prevent him from having Dean, since that is his happiness. If that’s not true love, I don’t know what is. 

This scene literally blew all my expectations away. I thought that if they were going to make Destiel canon, it would be in a very subtle, interpretive way. I thought I’d just have to settle with a slightly not-straight ending with no actual vocal confirmation of love between the characters. Maybe some lingering touches or questionable dialogue. But no. They went all out in the script for this episode, and I literally experienced so much emotional whiplash afterward I had to dance around my room like a lunatic. I couldn’t believe they were actually doing it. 

Cas’ love for Dean is undeniable at this point. People used dig on this ship with claims of “grasping at straws” or “seeing things where there aren’t” and to have a confirmation of their relationship is seriously so vindicating. 

In all honesty, I haven’t seen many non-straight relationships in fiction explicitly use the words “I love you”. The writers didn’t hide from it, they literally had Cas verbally praise Dean’s selflessness and loving character to the highest level possible. Even I, a self proclaimed romantic, had to sit back and breathe because holy shit that was a lot. 

While I do believe Cas is going to be resurrected/saved from the Empty by Dean, even if he isn’t, this scene will still mean so much to me. Historically, Supernatural has had some pretty insignificant representation. It’s got a lot of flaws. The writing and plot line are lacking sometimes. But for me, that is never going to take away the fact that Destiel has been the most frustrating, intense, mind-bogglingly drawn-out slow burn I have ever stuck out. Of course I hoped it’d be canon. But I never put too much hope in the idea of it, since most shows end up queer-baiting me (i.e. Voltron). 

Honestly, I haven’t had this much serotonin in a while. So thanks, Supernatural. 

[thelightofthingshopedfor]

@kiwimeringue replied to your post “I know it’s generally rude and very unwise to reply to a fandom...”

ok I'm super curious now, feel free to message me if you want to talk about it all stealthy-like~

@veliseraptor replied to your post “I know it’s generally rude and very unwise to reply to a fandom...”

i'm so curious

apparently I did want to talk about it, because this got looooong (also please do not add more discourse to this post, it’s probably kind of shitty of me but I don’t super want to have a dialogue about it, I just want to barf out my thoughts and defend my own faves on my own post, so if you want to argue with me I would really rather you didn’t and just made your own post instead)

(I also only just realized that I only put “tony stark negative” and “tony stark critical” in the tags, not anywhere before the cut, so here’s your warning now if you didn’t see the tags that this is me being frustrated with a lot things about how Tony is written)

I can't find the actual post now to screenshot or link because I just came across it on my dash, got annoyed, scrolled past, and then made my post when I couldn't stop grumpily thinking about it (so at this point I also don't remember who the OP was or who reblogged it onto my dash, which is probably just as well), but the gist was that almost all MCU title characters have storylines establishing that they're wrong about something and they show growth by accepting that and working to improve...except Steve, who never acknowledges that he might ever be wrong about anything, with the implication that this makes him a bad, self-righteous character who is basically incapable of growth. several other characters--Tony, Thor, Dr. Strange, Peter Parker--were mentioned, but the state of fandom discourse makes me assume any Steve-negative post exists at least in part to show how much better Tony is, which...may not always be a fair assumption on my part, but I do think it's fair to say that's still a relevant context. and of course Steve is one of my favorite characters, so anything even mildly Steve-negative puts me at least somewhat on the defensive right away, which again is not necessarily fair. (the other post that’s already sitting in my notes is about Ragnarok, which is probably even less surprising.)

anyway the post made me grumpy to begin with and then doubly so because I couldn't think of a good way to refute it aside from "yeah well maybe Steve's just a better person than your faves and he doesn't need a whole character arc about realizing he's been an asshole and needs to change because he didn't start out as an asshole to begin with, bet you didn't think of that huh" which is of course VERY unhelpful. but then I started thinking about how I don't think OP is right about the changed characters to begin with, given that a) it's not really fair to compare a character who's only had one solo movie (Dr. Strange) with characters who've had more, b) Spider-Man is kind of an edge case because he's a teenager and a lot of the problems in his movies stem from a combination of him being a fucking teenager and Tony dumping him with tons of dangerous tech that he doesn't have the training or adult impulse control to use safely and then blaming him when disaster inevitably results, and c) the characters who have had multiple movies and arcs focused on realizing they were wrong about something (just Thor and Tony, really) are...maybe not actually great examples because like 75% of that character development seems to reset after each movie and, actually, the narrative still operates under the premise that these characters are basically right even if some other characters don't agree. like...I mean, the only lessons Thor really, consistently seems to learn are "humans are at least not totally worthless (but lbr they're mostly silly and cute)" and "Odin is extremely wise and probably right about almost everything despite mountains of evidence--that grow with every single film he's in--to the contrary". 

and Tony, well--yeah, that's his arc, in theory, and in theory I don't have a problem with flawed characters who keep making the same mistakes because let's face it, that's a very human thing to do. but with posts like this, it's like...you're effectively arguing that he doesn't really make mistakes overall, though, because it’s really just an opportunity for growth? and that when he does, the narrative shows he's wrong, he admits he's wrong, and he makes consistent efforts to change? which...again, obviously I have my own biases, but I have to see this as a weird interpretation because he's basically been the main character of the entire MCU thus far, which means he's likely to get sympathetic treatment and justification from the narrative even if he's ostensibly being called out for fucking up, and that's something I've definitely seen. his entire first movie is about him realizing how wrong he was and working to do better, definitely, but he ends up being his own worst enemy half the time and other people suffer for it. like...he wants to protect the world, okay, that's a reasonable goal. you can argue that the vision Wanda gave him made things worse, and that's possible, but I don't know how much that might be true given that I'm pretty sure he was working on Ultron before that too (and her mind-magic mostly seemed to work by emphasizing something that was already there, not planting new ideas). so he ends up creating a murderbot, with good intentions but he still does it and he keeps it secret from the other Avengers, and now-sentient murderbot immediately reaches the conclusion that humanity is awful and they won't need protecting if they're all gone, and everything breaks very bad, and then Tony...basically does the exact same thing again, without telling anybody else, in hopes that it'll work out better this time because JARVIS? and it does but that seems like mostly luck? and everybody manages to defeat the murderbot, barely, but a not-insignificant number of civilians die anyway because that tends to happen when a sentient murderbot goes on a rampage, and Tony feels really guilty about this when it's shoved in his face, so he deals with his guilt by kind of...spreading it around and allowing the possibility of other major problems down the line so they can hand over some of that responsibility and he can feel less guilty. (that’s not the most charitable interpretation, yeah, but I also don’t think it’s an unreasonable one, based on what’s there in the text.) and then of course things blow up and other problems get dragged in and it's a huge mess and half the Avengers are fugitives, and the general consensus sort of seems to be that nobody was completely right or completely wrong but Steve is the only one who actually apologizes for any of it (no wait, I guess Wanda and Vision apologized but just to each other) and Rhodey reinforces the idea that the Accords were a good idea with no major drawbacks...and then Thanos shows up and things get SO VERY MUCH worse.

and Tony is once again stricken with grief and guilt (not to mention half dead), so lashing out at Steve is understandable, but what he actually says is basically that this is all Steve's fault because he wasn't there (even though he immediately sent Tony that phone, which means Tony could have contacted him at any time but hesitated to do so even when monsters were basically falling from the sky), and he was right about the Accords and Ultron even if the latter didn't work out so well in ways that probably could have been predicted, and...that's what we're left with. nobody else has a meaningful opportunity to say "now hold on a second, you cannot possibly be arguing both for accountability and for your right to decide for the entire world that exchanging some freedom for some potential security is a good trade, and also how are you saying you were essentially right about Ultron when Ultron is what kicked off the desire for the Accords" or, like, anything. (does the world need a security blanket? going by the evidence...yeah, probably? but again. Tony. you tried that and you made a sentient murderbot instead so like, your track record is not great!!)

and then it all culminates with Tony sacrificing himself to save the universe, which I do at least think was a climactic, thematically resonant send-off for such a major character--for the final time, in the most final possible of ways, he reaches a point where there's no more clever tricks and he reacts by selflessly taking the entirety of the consequences onto himself. I can't say I'm happy with it, because I'm not a fan of character death in general even when it doesn't involve my top faves, and it absolutely would have been possible for the filmmakers to keep him alive if they hadn't gone into this with the specific intention of ending Tony's arc with his death. (ditto on all the other major character deaths, which is a big part about why they make me mad--none of them really, honestly had to happen, some even less than others.) but regardless of my feelings on whether it had to happen, it's inarguable that his entire arc from Iron Man to Endgame is that of a brilliant but selfish manchild who changes and grows until he doesn't hesitate to make the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of the entire universe.

BUT THEN THERE'S SPIDER-MAN AGAIN.

spoilers if you haven't seen Spider-Man: Far From Home but like, the entire conflict of that movie was based on two major things: a bunch of disgruntled Stark Industries employees, at least some of whom had to have legitimate, recent grievances (and frankly that whole mess demonstrates--among other things--that Stark Industries must have unforgivably lax security around its arsenal of world-ending weapons); and Tony's decision at some point to essentially REMAKE ULTRON AND THEN DUMP THAT RESPONSIBILITY ON A FUCKING TEENAGER WITH ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN THE WAY OF WARNINGS, TRAINING, OVERSIGHT, OR EVEN BASIC FAILSAFES, like holy shit my computer spends more time making sure I definitely want to delete that file than EDITH does about confirming that yes this random teenager is a legitimate target for IMMEDIATE DEATH. all the other adults involved in this clusterfuck bear a good share of the responsibility for this too, given that not one of them ever seemed to think either "hey, maybe saddling a smart and very good but basically normal sixteen-year-old boy with the power and responsibility (but not the resources or experience) of a grown-ass adult with unlimited resources is not the smartest move here, and yelling at him when he inevitably fucks up this power and responsibility we dumped on him with no training whatsoever is not actually fair or reasonable" or even "maybe before giving a piece of massively powerful and dangerous tech to a sixteen-year-old boy, we should spend at least 15 minutes going over the device's major functions and how to not accidentally kill someone, even if we figure things like ethics and privacy rights and knowing when not to use this tech aren't that important".

but, but, Tony still made the decision to give it to him, and he did so without building in any precautions at all, which is the exact same thing he did in CW/Homecoming with Peter's new suit (yes, the Training Wheels protocol was a good step, but the fact that it could just be turned off that easily--and that Tony isn't shown even trying to tell Peter to use the training programs or safely practice with the suit--shows that it really, really wasn't good enough) except even worse because EDITH is about 100 times more invasive and destructive than the suit. and he pretty much scolded Peter in Homecoming for getting ahead of himself, but then the second Peter did well in a bad situation Tony was right back to making this teenager an official Avenger and giving him all this power and responsibility he'd just decided Peter hadn't really earned, and Peter turned him down because at that point he had a better idea of his own limits and need for growth than Tony did, and then!! in what must have been one of his last acts alive!! Tony dumped an even bigger, more dangerous power/responsibility combo on him!!! way way bigger than the one he'd already turned down and maturely decided he wasn't yet experienced enough to handle!!! without even giving him a chance to say no!!!! and did not take any of that (or the mess with Ultron and the lessons he theoretically learned there, or the mess with the Accords and the lessons he theoretically learned there, or for that matter the lessons he theoretically learned in his three solo movies about treating his employees well and making sure he knows exactly what his company is doing at all times) into account when designing it, handing it off to other adults who also should have been more responsible about it, and leaving it to a teenager against that teenager's stated wishes, thereby ensuring that this teenager will follow Tony's footsteps in being unable to have a normal life!!!!!

...................but, okay, the point of the original post was that Steve is generally deemed to be Always Right and therefore he never has to change, and that makes him unrelatable at best and also not a great character. which...well, that's part of the point, that's why he was picked for Project Rebirth in the first place because he's a good dude dedicated to doing what's right; even before the serum, he was literally willing to die to protect a few people he barely knew (the grenade scene, remember). he was already starting from a point of selflessness and an understanding of responsibility that the others lacked, so it would be tough to give him a similar character arc without undermining or ignoring the whole point of the character. sure, though, even a character like Steve is imperfect and human and bound to be wrong sometimes, and when that happens he should acknowledge he was wrong and take steps to make amends, and if he's never shown doing any of that, it's true that it's not great even if part of the issue is that he's never really put in a position to do so. 

except, except DID YOU ALL COMPLETELY FORGET THE ENDING OF CIVIL WAR

like, sure, if what you wanted was to hear Steve say "I was wrong about everything and Tony was right about everything, and I will humbly submit to whatever you think is best regardless of my own convictions, my very good reasons for having those convictions, and my personal concerns for my friends, or at the very least I will humbly ask for forgiveness and accept whatever you throw at me, because Tony Was Right About Everything," then...yeah, I'm sure it was a disappointment, especially if you figure Tony was right about the Accords and at least the intentions behind Ultron. it's true Steve doesn't really address any of that, which indicates he definitely still believes he’s right about those parts. but...look, the last time he saw Tony, he was fighting to save his lifelong friend from being murdered from a crime he didn't necessarily remember and really wasn't responsible for. once again I don't blame Tony for reacting emotionally and lashing out at the nearest targets instead of the people who were really at fault, but that doesn't change the facts of the situation, which are, Steve was fighting to save Bucky's life. and when he did that by incapacitating Tony, he didn't go any further; he took Bucky and left. and then he almost immediately sent Tony a letter of apology and a means of contacting him in return if an emergency comes up--and again, yes, his apology wasn't "I'm sorry for everything because I was wrong about everything," but it was a genuine, compassionate apology for the ways he'd hurt Tony even if his intentions were basically good. (this of course assumes that he really did know for a fact that Bucky killed the Starks and consciously chose to hide the knowledge from Tony, and frankly I'm not convinced that's true, but it's not really the issue here.) honestly, I thought his letter was kind of funny because it so closely followed the format of the apology-note meme--you know, "I was trying to do X, but I see now that I hurt you because Y" and everything. he didn't apologize for opposing the Accords or protecting Bucky or fighting in Germany so he could get to Siberia in time to stop what he had every reason to believe was a much bigger threat, because all those actions stemmed directly from his convictions and sense of morality and he wouldn't be Steve Rogers or Captain America if he was willing to compromise his most foundational convictions--but he absolutely did apologize for hurting Tony and recognized that he'd made at least one big mistake where Tony was concerned. 

Tony...didn't. even before doubling down on the Accords and Ultron, I don't think he ever really said, hey, at least some of this was my bad; most of what he said boiled down to "okay this situation isn't ideal but I'm sure if I throw more money at it things will work out fine, more or less". in the Raft and in Siberia he got close to saying that maybe he'd been wrong about a few things, but that all went out the window pretty quick, and I don't think there's ever a point where he--just for instance--at least apologizes for trying very very hard to kill Bucky. and by Endgame, apparently he’s pretty much walked back what little he did kinda sorta think he was maybe wrong about. so.

that's...basically what I've got, OP’s interpretation is wrong because their facts are actually wrong and I was apparently annoyed enough to barf out all these words when I could’ve been doing anything else, the end