#silly lil gays that I finally addressed

[itzabag]

“Oh! I-I don’t have to come inside! I don’t even know if I’m allowed! Am I allowed?”

*He leans back a bit, looking towards where his room is*

@purplelordstudios

[tomhardysteeth]

u wanna say anything for spn ending? Today's their last day of filming

Yeah sure! I love how you worded this ask, it makes me want to give a very serious answer. I’ve been rewatching random episodes the past few days and thinking about how much of my life was shaped by this random lil tv show, both positively and negatively, so here we go. 

I started watching Supernatural during my junior year of college, when I was grappling with being gay and religious, and had a pseudo-girlfriend who was emotionally abusive. I remember I started watching the show because I had been on tumblr for a while and thought, well this is a popular show on tumblr and looks like something I’d enjoy, so I might as well try it. I remember barely paying attention to the first season and thinking it was kind of silly, and I distinctly remember making fun of it right up until the season 1 finale when that truck slammed into the Impala and I said oh.

I remember sitting in the dining hall between classes, hiding in a corner with my pink headphones and my laptop, watching one episode after the other, completely consumed by it. My personal life was a mess at the time and I was angry and sad and frustrated, but I could forget about everything for a little while when I watched spn. I remember falling in love with Dean Winchester, season 3, when Sam gave him the amulet. 

Because I had already spent a lot of time on tumblr, I knew about Castiel. I couldn’t wait to get to season 4, the anticipation killed me. I didn’t really have a choice in shipping destiel, I literally shipped it before I even watched a single episode of the show lol. My first time watching seasons 4 and 5, I remember how mad I would feel every time the opening credits scrolled at the bottom of the screen and Misha Collins wasn’t listed. I cared about almost nothing but Dean and Cas interacting with each other. I was totally enamored by them, by their potential. At some point I got over that and watched the show because I liked the show, but boy did my heart and brain break for destiel. 

I broke up with my abusive girlfriend. I started coming out to more people, including people involved in the Christian campus ministry I was heavily involved in, and it was very very hard. It was 2013. The first episode of Supernatural I watched live was the episode where Dean turns into a fucking dog. 

I don’t remember when I started reading fanfic, and I had no idea how to read fanfic. A friend invited me to ao3, what is ao3? I didn’t know. I used my email address as my username. I read Twist and Shout and Pie Without Plot and other very popular fics that I knew about because everybody knew about them. I vividly remember the first fics I read because I was 21 years old and had never had an orgasm in my life and believed sex was sinful and so when the sex scenes in fics turned me on, I felt guilty about it. 

I quickly got over that and started writing explicit destiel fanfic. 

I still had no idea what I was doing. I know the very first fic I ever wrote was a mess, I’ve completely erased all traces of it, but other than that I began posting with abandon. Pretty much everything I’ve ever written for spn is still on tumblr and/or ao3. I was running a Hannibal blog at the time and started posting more Supernatural content than Hannibal content, so I created a sideblog, @deancasheadcanons​, and things very quickly got out of hand after that.

I was depressed, I was confused, I was spending my last couple years of college trying to figure out my sexuality, trying to hold onto a religion that was rejecting who I was becoming, trying to find my identity while picking a career path and being sad and being pulled in a hundred different directions. Sometimes I was working three jobs at once, on top of 17-credit-hour semesters. I was getting a degree in a field I did not care about, and I spent every class reading and writing fanfic, scrolling through tumblr, making internet friends, letting my life be consumed by Supernatural. I projected myself completely onto Dean Winchester and partially onto Castiel and did not even realize it. 

I started dressing like Dean, and my sister and brother-in-law noticed and assumed I was gay. They were extremely unsubtle in their attempts at getting me to come out by pointing out the flannel and army jackets, and I did not have it in me to admit to them that I was dressing like a fictional character, but I DID tell them I was bisexual. 

I went to therapy every week during my senior year of college, and I was embarrassed about how often I talked about my “internet life,” as I called it. I remember having the arbitrary goal of getting 1,000 kudos on a fanfic, and I remember the day it happened for the first time and I remember going to therapy that week and saying that I didn’t feel any different, that I thought getting attention for my writing would make me feel better, somehow, but I still felt the same, and my therapist asked me if I would still be writing if I was the only one who got anything out of it and I said yes. But I was still obsessed with writing things that were meaningful, and despite the fact that I would receive 10 negative/mean anons per day, I never turned anon off because I desperately wanted people to tell me that my writing meant something to them, that it mattered to them. I was fighting with myself every day over my sexuality and my identity and my purpose, and I put all of that on the shoulders of Dean and Cas. 

There was also chubby!dean. I had lived my entire life with this inexplicable thing, this shame that I knew I could not share, that I knew I would just have to suffer with for my whole life, and then I joined the spn fandom and found that there were others like me, others that had a fetish and had similar experiences as I did and were drawn to Dean Winchester because there’s no other character that could make eating and gaining weight be as enticing as he makes it (in fanfic). For the first time in my life I had a community of people that I could relate to about a thing that I never thought I would ever be able to talk about with anyone in my life. I don’t remember if I consciously chose to start posting publicly about it, but at some point I did, and I started writing kink fic, but I was still so uncomfortable with myself and so scared of the things I felt, and I tried so hard to temper myself and not offend anyone and not go “too far” and not be too weird and I was so sexually repressed and pent up and full of guilt and shame, and so now when I go back and reread some of the stuff I wrote it feels like reopening an old wound and letting myself bleed out. 

I was constantly comparing myself to others and wondering why I wasn’t getting as much attention as so-and-so, and I always made excuses about how maybe my writing was too weird and I was too much and maybe I just wasn’t good enough and I hated myself and wanted to delete everything I ever wrote, but also I’m awesome and receive a lot of attention and get a lot of good feedback but maybe that means I’m just a narcissist! I acted like an asshole online and justified it by saying it wasn’t really me, that I could be someone totally different on tumblr than the person I was in “real life,” but in hindsight, now when I think back on my early 20s, I cannot separate what I was doing in “real life” from what I was doing in the spn fandom. I shared so much of myself with the spn fandom without even recognizing that that’s what I was doing. 

And I made mistakes, god I made mistakes, and I tried to be so careful about everything I said but I was also presenting a certain version of myself to the spn fandom so that people would like me (for instance: running a destiel blog and trying my best to hide the fact that I also ship wincest) and still I got in trouble constantly, and I grew bitter and mean because you can only receive the “when are you posting the next chapter?” comment so many times before you want to bang your head into a wall. I became defensive and unkind, afraid to check my inbox because it was a nightmare, and yet unable to turn off anon because, like I said, I desperately needed that feedback, I needed people to tell me that they felt what I felt, that they understood what I was writing and why I was writing it.

I expected Supernatural to give me everything I needed. I fantasized about Dean Winchester being canonically bisexual because I thought it would confirm something in me, that it would somehow make my life a little bit easier. I didn’t want to watch other shows that could maybe help me, I wanted Supernatural to do things for me that it had never promised and would never deliver, and it’s because I was defined by it for so many years. Now that I’m back on tumblr, I’ve been going back through some of my old posts on deancasheadcanons and it’s like reading a stranger’s words. Even so, I find myself telling people “I was deancasheadcanons” instead of “I ran a sideblog called deancasheadcanons” because it really was such a huge part of my identity. What’s wild is that every time I’ve tried to explain it to someone in real life, they just look at me like I’m not making any sense. 

It was easy to stop watching Supernatural. I didn’t have cable, and I had been driving to my dad and stepmom’s house each week and watching it on their tv after they had gone to bed. I was in a new relationship with a woman I nearly married, I was back in school for a new career, I was working full time and absolutely did not have time to continue writing fanfic as prolifically as I had done for so many years. I finally reached a breaking point in 2017 and haven’t watched any new episodes since then (I don’t remember the last episode I saw). But now, as I rewatch some old episodes, it is easy to feel the way I felt the first time I watched the show. It’s easy to see why this campy little heartfelt show was a lifeline during my formative adult years.

So it turns out I have never reckoned with any of this, have never written it down, hence the 2k jumble of words you see here. And it’s like, I know that a lot of this may seem silly, trivial, especially for a show that in itself is not very serious, but as it comes to an end I have to reflect on it as a person who put so much of my heart, my creativity, my pain and my floundering identity into it. I am somewhat embarrassed and wish I could respond to this ask with a joke instead, but we’re in a pandemic and I live alone and have had way too much time to think and reflect and become a lot more self-aware, and part of that reflection has definitely been about my time in the spn fandom. I remember thinking the show was never going to end, yet here we are at the end and I felt compelled to type all this out with a desire to, I don’t know, get some closure? Convince myself that I was a whole person, that I wasn’t just a faceless URL posting destiel fics into the void, that my real life was not at all disparate from the time I spent online? In any case, I’ll always think fondly of the time I devoted to Supernatural, and I’ll take the good and the bad and everything in between. Thanks for the nice ask, anon, apparently I needed to get some things off my chest.  

[tfw-no-tennis]

mtmte liveblog issue 33

[sees rewind cover] time to be emo

swerve giving us a nice lil recap of the wild events of slaughterhouse thus far

and then the roll call page...I love how the last one is ‘rewind?!?’

OUGHGHGGHGHGH REWIND TINYYYYYYYYYYYY

I adore that nautica has a list of in-jokes to check off 

ohhhh man I forgot that alt-lost light rewind doesn't really know skids?? bc the alt lost light never picked him up....

POOR REWIND he wakes up all elder scrolls style and then immediately autobot megatron is just There without explanation lmao this poor lil guy

love the casual gender stuff honestly

nightbeat: ayyyy rewind!! sup? what horrific slaughter happened here? spill the tea! 

hvakjdfbskdf poor rewind is going thru it jesus

nautica and riptide hvbhkjasdsfasdfn ‘are jokes not funny where you come from?’ immmmm

nautica is so cute I love her

ohhhhh I love the panel of the two lost lights going off in separate directions with the title right below 

‘I remember it well. kind of’ that's a really funny line actually hbvkdjfnasdfl

I really like how on the alt lost light, rodimus’s risky stunt with the sparkeater actually kills him - I mean I'm glad that didn't happen in the main story but that's such a cool jarring discrepancy 

ok but its inherently VERY funny that the djd like, murdered the entire lost light, but later in the story the lost lighters are obviously still around and not dead...that's so fucking funny, the djd were probably like ????????????????? what the fuck didn't we kill these guys?????? but also they were tripping so they cant be sure

isn't it brainstorm who called the djd on the alt lost light??? oof 

LOVE the continuity of the alt lost light being the place that the djd went at the end of the scavengers 2 parter wayyyy back in the beginning of s1

more horrific slaughter, as one would expect from an arc called ‘slaughterhouse’ 

jeeeesus I forgot how completely fucked up all the shit was for poor rewind 2. christ 

also the like, thematic irony of alt-chromedome refusing to erase rewind from his memory and choosing to die horribly instead....SCREAMS I cant handle it

ITS SO HORRIBLE I'm so sad. poor rewind

‘silly string’ I love riptide

nautica is so smart I lov her 

oooh skids going off on megatron is really good. I find the whole ‘cons are super anti-organic/alien life’ angle interesting, bc it like, Makes Sense that a race of robot aliens who live for millions of years wouldn't consider shorter-lived organic life to be on the same level as them, but its also like, not morally right, so the autobots are correct w/the whole ‘freedom is the right of all sentient beings’ thing...its LAYERED

rewind: ‘I'm tiny’

me, crying: yeah...

honestly I really really love the quantum duplication plot in this arc. its like, peak sci fi nonsense but it also like, Makes Sense, and is presented in a very understandable manner...plus its like, super entertaining and fun, so I just love it

love how they're perusing brainstorms lab and just stumble across a dead body. classic

aaaand the plot thickens, with the reveal that brainstorm is a decepticon????? whoaaaa

I love that twist too oh man. I cannot WAIT for the time travel arc yessss

oof nautica being in denial about brainstorm being a con :( 

I find it kinda funny that getaway is IMMEDIATELY like, punching walls and going full that-one-wack-storm-trooper-from-that-star-wars-movie abt brainstorm being a con lmao, like what's even ur beef dude

when nightbeat is all like, wait there's a Type™ for decepticon double agents? and megatron says ‘hm. have you never been approached?’ bvhjaskdfbaksfd

mannn tho, I love all the character stuff this issue...I love the panels of megatron where he looks mad and crushes brainstorms mask, bc like, he’s gotta be thinking abt the fact that the djd, his personal squad of bloodthirsty attack dogs, were the ones responsible for all of this, as well as overlords presence, and brainstorm secretly being a con....

ok rewind and megatrons interactions are fantastic

like, rewind IS the nice one, but the definition of ‘nice’ is probably a little different than it used to be due to Big Ole War 

how are they propelling themselves in space????

NOOOOOOO I'm so fucking sad, rewind 2 is literally like ‘I'm fine with being deleted from existence bc my husband and everything I knew is gone’ aughhhh

and then megatron lies and tells him that he and chromedome, on the og lost light, are ‘inseparable’ 😭😭😭 I mean I guess that's not a lie if you count cd rewatching rewinds goodbye video on loop...AUGHHH

‘let’s not drag out the goodbyes’ but rewind, what about one of the story’s themes, ‘how to say goodbye and mean it’? 

and we cut off right there for maximum suspense...

omg I love swerve like, fistbumping cyclonus in the chest, and cyclonus is just like ?

skids,,,,,maybe surprising chromedome with his not-so-dead alternate-version husband isn't the best idea...like, this isn't exactly a zero-explanation-necessary kinda situation...

I adore rewinds massive shoulder pads tbh

oh god. GODDDDD. the panels of rewind and chromedome sitting next to each other, not saying anything, and just slowly moving closer to each other while looking out at the stars....literally these gay robots invented romance, thank you very much

I'm so fucking tender guhhhhhhh

like,,,,the fact that both of them separately watched the other die horribly and could do nothing to stop it, and now they're reunited here, and they don't even need to say anything...AUGH.....

OUGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH I'm sorry I can’t. SO tender

and MANNNN I'm so so glad that rewind is back. I don't always love when characters don't stay dead but I'm completely happy w/it here for multiple reasons, like the fact that I really like rewind and chromedome’s story after this arc - like, I LOVE that they addressed the fact that rewind 2 is different from OG rewind, despite being fundamentally the same person, so he and cd cant just immediately get back together and pretend everything's fine, but also there's really only an 18 month (?i think) disparity between the 2 rewinds which is nothing compared to literal millions of years, soooo

ALSO I literally never considered this until this reread but it would've been kind of an L for rewind to die and stay dead considering that rewind and cd were The First transformers gay couple, and that's a really big deal! and I don't really consider it bury your gays bc like, rewind doesn't stay dead that long and also there are soooo many other gays, but STILL 

plus rewind and cd ended up having a lot of story left to get thru, which is awesome

also I just love rewind so I'm glad he’s back :) 

ok the fact that the suspense over brainstorm being a con still isn't resolved bc not everyone knows....spectacular tbh

don't knock the power of love, nightbeat! 

the briefcaseeeeeee

ok but I really don't remember jros explanation as to why rewind 2 and the briefcase didn't get deleted hvbhjsdkhfk I gotta go look that up again

OHHHHHHHHHH I FORGOT THE EPILOGUE IS THIS. OHHHHH MANNNNNN THIS IS ONE OF MY FAV PARTS 

BRAINSTORMMMMMMMMM ILYYYYYYYYY

I fucking love this scene bc this is basically the culmination of brainstorm being Completely Ominous for the entire story thus far, like, it really hit me this readthru that brainstorm was so totally sinister for like most of his screentime up until this arc...and this scene is the pinnacle, I love how everything brainstorm says is overlaid with so much tension for the reader bc of what we know now about him

like brainstorm saying ‘yes - here’s to fixing things’ is so fucking sinister even though out of context that sentence is just normal

and when atomizer basically voices what the entire audience is thinking as brainstorm opens the briefcase - ‘brainstorm, you can’t do that.’ bc yeah, what the hell, he’s opening THE briefcase, Oh Shit

AND THEN THE FINAL SHOT....brainstorm front and center looking SCARY AS HELL.... ‘I can do whatever the hell I like.’....everyone suddenly collapsed around him...the fantastic shadowy lighting...the ominously open briefcase...the clear segue Directly into the next high-concept arc....[chefs kiss] ART

seriously I love this issue so much. SO many good things. such good character stuff, really great interactions, some fantastic plot development, super creative sci-fi fun times...all around just an extremely solid and enjoyable issue, 10 outta 10

and MAN OH MAN I cannot wait to get into the elegant chaos arc, it fucking SLAPS, that arc and remain in light have always been my favs, I'm so excited to revisit it 

AND ruth bought the physical comic TPB for like issues 34-38 or something and I'm so so glad I can read that instead of braving the many split-up double page spreads on the online comic 

so yeah, cant wait!

[drag-oon23]

10 Reasons why I love Wynonna Earp

I’ve made it no mystery that I really really *really* like Wynonna Earp. However, I don’t remember if I made a list detailing why I love it so much. So here’s a list with 10 reasons (because I love to ramble given an excuse):

In no particular order:

1. It gives a Buffy/Xena vibe complete with campiness and numerous one liners. Now, I know this turns off a bunch of people but for me? This is great! I love this aspect of the show so much since lots of shows these days have done away with silliness and are super serious 100% of the time. Wynonna? Nope! It knows what it is and does it shamelessly. It doesn’t take itself seriously while also delivering a pretty bleak storyline which just works in a quirky way.

2. The characters are just awesome. Wynonna as a tough badass with a good heart under all the one liners and snarkiness, Waverly being a shotgun wielding cinnamon roll, Dolls and his non-human stoic angst, Doc with his mustache, Haught being hawt, etc. etc. I could go on. Even the side characters get their moments like Gus confronting a Rev even though she *knows* they could tear her apart easily or Nedley casually having Haught’s back when Champ is being ass, etc. etc. It’s really a testament to the show that I actually remember names from the show. I have a very bad habit where I cannot remember character’s names and just go with generic descriptions ie “blonde girl with glasses, girl with long dark hair, nerdy dude, stoic dude, etc. etc.” Speaking of characters:

3. Wynonna Earp herself is a really interesting main character. She’s snarky, fiesty as hell, has one liners for everything, is usually quite observant about everything except her own family (we usually poke fun about her obliviousness to Wayhaught but she’s also oblivious to the tension between Willa and Waverly), is very casual about being tortured or torturing, has a background that makes batman’s look tame by comparison (aka woobie points lol), knows how to take care of herself, and is all around really interesting to observe.

4. Waverly Earp is just awesome. I love her so much. She’s a nerd who wields a shotgun, has a knowledge of the occult that Doctor Strange would be salivating over (Okay I’m stretching for this one, but I still stand by it! haha), has self esteem issues, has anger issues that she doesn’t show because it doesn’t match her “perky go happy” facade, learns some things about her sexuality, just go for it, etc. I love her :3

5. The sister relationship is so well portrayed. Wynonna being a protective big sis and who so clearly loves her lil sis. Waverly happy Wynonna is back full time but also having never before addressed grievances against Wynonna for being the One as well as abandonment issues. By all rights they could have easily have a hate/frosty relationship but nope!, they are sisters through and through and have each others back from the get go and love each other. Compare this with Willa’s return into the fold and how it disrupts their dynamic. Willa and Wynonna being close while little Waves being left aside. It’s all around really interesting dynamics.

6. The storyline itself. I’ll be the first to say that the pacing itself is a mess frankly. It’s hard to keep track of when something is happening in the general scope of things and why it’s important. But I can also say that I honestly care about what happens to all these idiots in the show. I wanna know whether Wynonna can kill the 77 revs, what’s up with Dolls’ eyes, is Waverly really an earp, how can the quirky town of Purgatory be so oblivious to all the strange happenings, who is JC, etc. etc. Many times I couldn’t care less about the main storyline and just care about my OTP (Doccubus, Swanqueen, Supercorp, Sleeping Warrior, etc.) but here I care.

7. Shoutout to the chinese rev who spoke chinese! You know how rare it is to have a chinese character in a western show who speaks chinese and it’s not treated as something exotic? He just speaks it, the other Revs understood what he said, and responded. That’s just awesome. I know he’s a baddy and needs to die by Wynonna’s hand eventually, but I am delighted whenever he makes an appearance. 

8. The Revs, when they’re not being generic baddies, are a pretty interesting bunch. Fish and Levi in particular intrigued me the most because they were so unlike their evil brethren. They were pretty much the only good Revs seen on the show. The Doctor rev was really creepy, the mirror rev slightly less creepy, the assassin rev had cool powers, etc. Bobo is the creepiest one of them all which is fitting.

9. The stone witch was very interesting. She’s disturbing in a different way from the Revs. It was pretty fun to speculate what her endgame was since she was pretty mysterious until the latter half of the series. I hope we see her again in season 2.

10. No list is complete without a mention of Wayhaught. I really like their storyline and development and how different it is to typical portrayals. Nicole is completely unambiguously gay and is a contrast to the typical lesbian predator who evokes feels and temptation leading to cheating angst trope. Soon as Waves mention she has a boyfriend, Nicole backs off to be a good supportive friend. Wynonna’s return into her life and NIcole’s friendship makes her think about her relationship with Champ and probably by extension her sexuality. And when she finally has enough of of the manchild? She dumps him like a load of potatoes because she realizes she deserves more. She’s Waverly Earp, expert on all things occult and Keeper of the bones, and she’s gonna jump Nicole’s bones. Which she does in glorious fashion. It’s just, so different from the typical “I’m totally 100% straight! No homo! Gonna screw with the boyfriend to prove how straight I am!” and/or cheating trope. And Nicole is so so supportive of Waves. She has Waves back no matter what, romantically or platonically. And Wynonna being instantly supportive of their relationship even though it took a while for her to realize it.

“Finally picked a smart one” indeed.

[purplelordstudios]

Purple: “well you SHOULD go in, doesn’t a certain someone have something he stole from you?”

Arancia: “I didn’t steal it, just… kinda…”

*purple makes a dramatic hand gesture*: “point in case, now shoo shoo! Go inside! He needs someone to actually talk too”

Arancia: “don’t shove him! That’s rude!”

*Arancia opens the door so the servant can walk inside*

@purplelordstudios