#the author’s LARP experience is showing

[abigailspinach]

“He had so much reach on me—ridiculous, decadent amounts of reach, between that enormous black sword and his greater height—and he knew how to use it. As I came rushing in low and fast, he took a leisurely step back, then another, flicking lightning-fast cuts at my hands, my face, my shoulder. I barely parried most of them, taking a light kiss of a cut along my cheekbone and a slightly deeper one on the outside of my arm. He didn’t let me close, maintaining his distance with those liquid backward paces and the indisputable argument of his steel. He kept me right in the worst possible place to be: the small and terrible zone where I was within his reach and he was outside mine, so he could strike at me at will but no amount of skill or effort would let me hit him. It was an absolutely disastrous opening for a swordfight; the advantage was entirely his, and it was all I could do not to get cut to ribbons. But I didn’t care about hitting him. I cared about moving him toward that door. And the distance between him and the exit was vanishing with every taunting backward step he took. He started to circle, sliding to the side, and I couldn’t allow that. Time to change tactics.”

— The Last Hour Between Worlds (The Echo Archives Book 1) by Melissa Caruso

[inthedarknessofnight]

Y’all know what fucking time it is… in other news, I updated my e-reader this week and it deleted all the pages I had bookmarked/stuff I had highlighted 🥲 the horrors persist but so do I

KAYA’S STEDDIE-FIC WEEK PART 2 🕺🏻💃🏻

1. Lovesick in Loch Nora by @red-0ak-tree

THIS is literally the scriptures, THIS is the ancient texts of Steddie, I’m not even kidding… if I’m trying to get someone into Steddie & reading fics, this is what I’m showing them… the Steddie dynamic is so beautiful and so palpable, and I don’t think I’ve every seen the characters sound SOOO much like themselves (ngl I have a theory this was written by one of the ST writers who wanted to make Steddie happen but the producers wouldn’t let them because COWARDS)… I finished this and immediately went to read it again, purely for the experience of it… most definitely in the top 3 fics I’ve ever read

2. the most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you by @greatunironic

let me just start out by saying how OBSESSED I am with the title, and then continue by telling y’all how much this fic DESTROYED me and put me back together at the same time?!?! there’s so much beauty and so much pain in this fic, it’s so emotional, vulnerable and authentic… I’d almost forgotten that feeling of when you hang onto an author’s EVERY WORD, but this fic reminded me of that feeling in every single way

3. stereoscope by @seraphhy

this fic is so beautiful in the most painful ways possible (don’t recommend reading while on period, speaking from personal experience 🥲)… if you’re looking for fluff, this is NOT the fic for you, but if you’re an emotional masochist like me, you literally HAVE TO read it, I don’t make the rules… god, there’s just something about Steve being broken and Eddie putting him back together over and over and over again, isn’t there? and don’t even get me started on the turn of phrase in this one… just magnificent

4. The Shire is NOT on Fire by kissesforcas (not sure if this author is on Tumblr)

this fic is like a warm hug, but if the warm hug had really good smut lmao… the premise of this is that Eddie & the kids drag Steve to a renaissance festival/LARP convention, and ofc stuff happens because Steve in fantasy costumes (I’ve never related to Eddie more phaha)… them flirting in this one had me giggling and kicking my feet like a schoolgirl, occasionally even in public but I really couldn’t help myself

to sum up, this might be my favourite week of Steddie fics ever ever ever, they’re all such classics and I’m so beyond grateful I got to read and experience them… I laughed, I screamed, I cried, I mourned, and I would do it all over again in a heartbeat ♥️

[thistleandthorn-rpg]

Congrats Sapphire on your audition for Honeysuckle Rosewood! Please check out this page for what to do next, and send us her blog within 48 hours! Welcome to the group!

OOC INFORMATION:

Name/Alias: Sapphire Preferred pronoun:  They/them Age: 30 Timezone/Country: EST USA RP Experience: years and years Activity Level:  6/10  ( going to start the fall semester soon and should have a judge of free time once I have my syllabi )  I also Larp once a month for three days in the woods 

IC INFORMATION:

Name: Honeysuckle  Rosewood Designation:  Dom  Age: 22 Birthdate: Dec 13, 2001 Faceclaim: Taylor Swift Orientation: Pansexual- Demiromantic  Kinks: TBA ( Bondage, sensory play, wax, impact)  Anti-Kinks: scat, watersports dental

Key Points:

Friendly, but introverted,  has had friends in the past who will pull her out of her shell-  likely autistic 

Artist- liabile to take over as art lead of the company .  has got natural talent that she has nurtured.

Loves to bake too- she mainly loves the decorating 

Is hurting for love- needs a support system, as her parents aren’t great at the emotional stuff

BIO

Honeysuckle- Honey for short is the youngest child of the rosewoods,  the owners of a luxury brand of art supplies .  She grew up with wealth,  She was the only one in the family to take after their grandmother and love the arts.   Her mother was the dominant in the relationship, though her father had the business sense.    She grew up being sent to private school and away from the family, and there discovered that she had a talent for the art.  Her medium was oil paint, though she was able to shift to watercolor and acrylic.   

  Her family spoiled her with material gifts, and she got love from chosen family at her boarding school.   She’d never had romantic dalianices, but some one night stands for needs met . She got her art degree and has put on a few shows.  She knows she needs to focus and buckle down 

BIO QUESTIONS

What are your feelings about the mark you have received? - I feel like I have to grow into it.  It feels right, I’ve always forged my own path

How do your feelings on the system compare to your parents’ feelings on it?    - It’s super informal at home, roles aren’t enforced at all.  I feel like the expectations give me structure, and I like having a guide for how to conduct myself 

Where do you see yourself after you graduate?   - Hopefully with a nice home, a sub that enjoys my company and working as an artist 

How do you feel about authority?  - Some are there to guide, some are there just cause they want power.  I’ll listen when it comes to safety or wisdom, but if they are there to make me conform no. 

[beepofsleeplessdreams]

thinking out loud about some anime an illustrator i like worked on

so, one of my favorite illustrators (at least, I think that's the right term for him) is yoshitoshi ABe. recently i made the decision to look through a bunch of projects he had a hand in, mostly because i wanted to see what kind of stuff he'd attached himself to over the decades. prior to this i'd only seen Serial Experiments Lain, but i feel like basically everyone's seen that so that's not saying much lol. this was partially spurred on by a friend of mine telling me Texhnolyze was among their favorites. at time of writing, i've finished Texhnolyze and NieA_7, and i'm watching Haibane Renmei on-and-off and loving it. the world is bizarre and beautiful, and the character designs are lovely and have so much personality in my eyes. so that's where i started. so below is a series of rambles and thoughts i've had on this little journey of mine up to this point. i've still got a ways to go.

misc. spoilers for Texhnolyze in the next section

texhnolyze was a show i really enjoyed, but falls into the same pit as serial experiments lain in my brain. i struggle to understand what it's trying to say below the immediate surface and i end up primarily enjoying it as a surface-level product. not to say that i didn't make some connections in my head along the ride, i have so many questions about the world that i want answered, and some really fun observations I made. ichise's conversation with the voice in the chair was something that i had a lot of fun picking apart because it tickled that little goblin in my brain that loves social science. with the whole idea that height relates to authority, the pile of stones bringing images of gods on mountains in myth, but the chair tying all that powerful imagery up in this idea of boredom. apathy of the gods and all that. the entire trip to the surface is something that had me on the edge of the seat, and kinda tied into my greater sci-fi brainrot. that whole idea that one a society stagnates and rots people seek "better times", and this is how you end up with so many space prussians/germans being bad guys in older sci-fi anime like classic gundam and legend of the galactic heroes. it's people clinging to an idea of a """better time""" to larp that they're better than they are. this is what was going through my head during the arc of the story on the surface, whenever i saw that outdated technology that lives only in old b&w movies and period pieces. despite these obversations, i feel like i can't formulate a big picture, this is by no means bad, but i can't help but feel like i'm "missing something". though, this might be rectified in lain's case when i get around to it, it's been close to 10 years since i last watched it.

misc. spoilers for NieA_7

this is one that i don't think i ever heard someone talk about prior to me just plucking it off of ABe's wikipedia page. it's this weird slice-of-life comedy about living in poverty but there's also humanoid aliens that are kinda just around and comically failing to integrate into society. that whole second point, with the aliens, i feel it kinda detracts from a lot from the show's actually really simple and touching heart about just trying to escape being poor. the whole thing is kinda tainted with this mild xenophobia for the sake of "comedy" and the vast majority of the recurring aliens are these really mean-spirited racist stereotypes. eventually i came to ignore the vast majority of that aspect of the show, besides the titular NieA, and focus on the part of it that really spoke to me. the main character, Mayuko, is a young adult working 3 jobs on top of going to cram school in a desperate attempt to get into a good college and escape poverty by getting a """real job""" and a """future""". the reason why i use quotations is the same reason why her character really spoke to me. she was so focused on the mere act of survival and vaguely working towards the future that she never found the time to really think about the future. no plans, no dreams, inching towards a success she has no idea how to capitalize upon. something similar happened to me, personally. i spent the vast majority of highschool and college fighting for good grades and accolades with no other plan than to just get away from a very toxic family situation. and i succeeded. i gave up a social life for the sake of advancing and was rewarded by getting poached right out of college into a fairly comfortable. i moved out 6 months later and subsequently broke down. without that constant pressure of ESCAPE ESCAPE ESCAPE i had this sort of psychological explosive decompression and became incredibly depressed, and almost made some very poor and very permanent decisions. i saw a character that was flying towards the same mistakes i made and i was wondering all along if the show would propose some kind of "solution" that i'd failed to see. it didn't offer anything concrete, but something much simpler that i nontheless really appreciated. a loving promise that things will be okay somewhere, someday. the same sentiment helped me when i needed it. i get that that's corny as hell, but i'm a stupid mushy man-thing. it's a show i really recommend people look at, because while the lows are INCREDIBLY low and mean, the heart is there and beautiful.

[sourstiless]

i think the worst thing about tiktok is new, young fans discovering what fandom culture is and trying to push adults cosplaying and shit as “cringey” or “weird”. like, not to shame anyone for being young, but y’all seriously need to go outside or have some real fandom experiences.

cosplay, larping, conventions, expos, etc, are all primarily done and attended to, by adults. adults are the one who created things like san diego comic con. outside your weird little bubble of thinking that as soon as you turn 18 you’re not allowed to participate in any kind of fandom culture or events, that stuff is largely normal. it’s not “oh they’re doing that at their big age”.

like, minors i need you to understand that you are a minority when it comes to fandom, and i don’t mean that in a condescending way. i just mean that, adults have been doing these things for years, probably before you even knew what being in fandom was, so when you see them participating in harmless fandom culture, it’s not shocking to anyone else. you are the one making it weird. half of your favorite authors on ao3, fanartists, editors, or content creators are probably adults. especially if you consider yourself part of a fandom that’s relatively older, or meant a for an audience that is adults. yes, we as adults do have a responsibility to make sure minors are safe in these fandom spaces, especially if those spaces are geared towards children, but cosplaying characters and whatnot, isn’t outlandish. especially when it’s adults cosplaying adult characters. you’re forgetting that adult actors from your favorite tv show, are basically doing the same thing.

y’all need to stop being so concerned about being cringey or embarrassing and just embrace what it is. it’s supposed to be fun, and cosplaying a character you like from a piece of media isn’t harming anyone.

[pussyhoundspock]

You’re my fave fic author so I trust you. Do you have any recommendations for non-AU Destiel fics? I’ll take ANYTHING. Sadly, I’ve very recently read all of your fics.

ahhh omg!! thank you so much!! i'm so bad at remembering to bookmark my fics but let me think -- i love komodobit's assimilation and cuckoo and nest -- both are short but impeccable character studies, in my opinion!

unfortunately rageprufrock's the girlfriend experience IS the og sadieservice fic so that's gotta go on here it always makes me laugh ... another fic that always makes me laugh is saltyfeathers' put up your dukes (deeply horny homoeroticism of fighting). OH deeply underrated comedic fic in modern era spn fan-age is broadway musical by griftings! canticles written by 2street2car is a season 4 era fic that was written very recently and makes me insane perfect dean and cas voices and really makes you ache with it!

where the weeds take root by deathbanjo (a writer i love!) is just my absolute favorite post-canon settling down with a house and chickens and the entire hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy series to read. aeli_kindara's first date series is another one that gets even MY cold dead heart to open and i love their cas pov in teaching poetry to fish which spans the entire canon of the show and cas' life before hand and really beautifully integrates poetry with the story!

two format breaking fics i really loved were renrub's r/supernatural (dean's on reddit. VERY funny) and To Boldly Go (dean writes star trek fic fic as i like to call it -- you can even see me larping as one of dean's regular commenters in some of the chapters haha!)

also of course i have to give nepotism shoutouts to the goldenrod revisions by aethylas (PERFECT re-write of 15x19 and continuation of the show), a short history of dean and tentacles by casisms (sadieservice at its finest. impeccable character study) and everything that dies (one day comes back) by gayfranzkafka (supernatural is a story about stories) and looking like a true survivor (feeling like a little kid) by courfeyrac (lovely if bumpy post canon tfw + friends and family build a bear trip)

i can be really picky when it comes to fic so i feel like this list is a bit short (and i know for a FACT i'm totally blanking on and forgetting some INCREDIBLE fics that i've loved because i'm very forgetful and also NOT organized about my fic reading) but @katebushstandean DID create this INSANE epic and organized spreadsheet of all our fic recs if you want like HUNDREDS of fic recs you can check that out! (you can also sort by my name -- sadie -- to see which fics i rec'd on there haha!). you can also try my bookmarks on ao3 (amidsizedfrog) though GOD KNOWS im inconsistent as hell about those. finally, @jewishcharliebradbury is my favorite blog to go to for fic recs!

[tigerdrop]

i have a lot of trouble writing benrey in my fics— how did you experiment with his characterization until you were satisfied with it, and what other benny interpretations do u enjoy from other fic writers? i love the way you write him, his dialogue feels so authentic and believable.

AW thank u......it always makes my day to hear something nice about the way i characterize ppl......there were a lot of things i did to try to nail how he talks and thinks. thank u for asking this b/c i have a Lot to say about this subject

the first thing is, obv, watching the series. i have to include this one b/c i feel like quite a few ppl in this fandom.....like.....havent. there is a certain way of characterizing him as an Epic Mischievous Gamer that is, uhhh, very much a fanon thing that ppl see on tumblr and imitate and flanderize all to hell. but, like, im an obsessive little weirdo who will rewatch things over and over again to take notes on characters’ behavior and dialogue and i really gotta recommend just sitting back and listening to how benrey talks.

hes not dropping gamer references constantly. hes not making every single sentence out of his mouth some obnoxious quip. hes slow on the uptake and drops conversations entirely if he doesnt care about them. he has never once said “cringe” before and whenever i see a fic that has him doing it multiple times i feel minutes shaved off of my lifespan. the #1 tip i can give here is to not have benrey talking in fucking 2010s gamer lingo every time he opens his mouth. please

(i feel partially responsible for the spread of this kind of characterization. my first 2 fics have him doing stuff like that every once in awhile. sometimes i debate going back and changing them, but like, benrey saying “poggers” one time aside, i think they hold up pretty good. so i havent. something something historical accuracy)

the more i wrote about him, the more i tried digging into the aspects of his character that i found the most appealing. some people are really into his polite side. i am really into his bullying side. so i would watch the bits where benrey really has his “gordon bullying” mode cranked up to 11 and make note of how he acts, how he talks. trying to replicate it. “benrey saying epic random shit to piss gordon off” is much less his vibe than, like, demeaning gordon, and i feel like the bathroom skit is the ultimate manifestation of this. it is genuinely my favorite bit in the whole series b/c its so ideally representative of their weird-ass dynamic. this fuckin high school bullying LARP in the middle of a public restroom. god in heaven

the less you lean on the crutches of “gamer lingo” and “wacky non-sequitur”, the more it forces you to think about how he behaves. what motivates him. and generally, like, he operates on his own wavelength. he doesnt fully understand everything thats going on around him and selectively chooses what he tunes into. and, most importantly, he just wants to play games, man. benrey likes goofing off with the science crew and playing mind games with gordon. he fails to understand the gravity of his actions a lot of the time b/c hes not human, and hes not operating under the same social guidelines.

(this is the part where people like to speculate exactly what kind of non-human he is, and i think this can be helpful for setting up his motivations! me, personally, i am of the opinion that hes just a video game guy made real. kind of like a live-action cartoon character. so hes operating on video game logic a lot of the time, and doesnt grasp that consequences for actions are different for normal people who cant noclip or respawn. a kind of lack of empathy that manifests in him being capricious, indifferent, detached......purely oriented around “getting his job done” and “chilling” and, naturally, “fucking with gordon freeman“.)

ultimately it boils down to distilling just what i like out of their interactions and trying to Manifest it repeatedly. i go crazy about their actual canon interactions and i want to write things that hit the notes i like: two guys who are mutually kind of obsessed with one another, for better or worse, and engage in a lot of play fighting (and, you know, genuine fighting, too) as a sublimation of it. best frenemies, if you will.

i think that a lot of the problems people have in writing benrey is that they kinda just project whatever attributes they want in a lover onto him. like, man, i like cute shit as much as the next guy, but do you really think that the dude who bullies gordon freeman while hes having a panic attack is gonna tenderly stroke gordons hair and wipe his tears and tell him that everythings gonna be okay? no, dude. even when benrey expresses any kind of concern, he does it in a way that communicates that he doesnt understand the gravity of whats going on and he doesnt “get” why gordons lying on the ground yelling, or why gordons howling in pain after getting his arm cut off. he is not an empathetic guy. hes actually kind of a creep!!! a lil freakjob! the weirdness and the lack of humanity are what make him hot!!!!

and this is what makes it own so hard on the rare occasions he does show empathy! its the same reason why its so cute when gordon stops bitching for 0.5 seconds and tries to be nice! theyre earned moments, not character defaults. and cutesy/lovey-dovey shit with these two is definitely doable, but i would love to see more of it take into account the fact that these are two dudes who fucking suck and who especially suck at being emotionally open with each other.

as far as characterizations that i really like........okay. full disclosure. the biggest reason ive been losing my shit over the catmaid freemind fic is b/c the author is one of the few people who really taps in to what i like about benrey, and what i like about his relationship with gordon. hes teasing. he likes to use his perceived authority to bully people. hes weirdly protective of gordon. but hes also just, like, a chill dude who wants to play video games. and he legit likes gordon and expresses affection for him in some of the most in-character ways ive ever seen

like. deliberately spilling milk on the couch and flatly going like “oops.” b/c he wants gordon to sleep in his room......playing nurse by doing fuck-all apart from giving gordon powerade while hes sick and keeping the volume on his video games low......kicking barmey under the table for making fun of gordon being dogboyed.......it is all exceptionally cute shit and its delightfully in-character. i feel so bad for the author b/c im a frenrey head and i am primarily reading it for those two. but god they do it so well.......im hooked. im obsessed

thank u again for asking this and for the lovely compliment ^q^ i hope this answered your question......i have spent entirely too much of my life thinking about my favorite half life funny guy

[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/

[p4nd0ran-punk]

Meet The OC: Victoria the Siren

Got inspired by @border-spam​ to put more effort forth in providing info and details on my OC! Here’s a better look at my siren OC, bio and other info is below the cut.

(The first and second artworks are by me, the third was made by the awesome and lovely @lazulizard​ ! The title card above was made in Pixlr E, and the font used is Aberus.)

CHARACTER INFORMATION

NAME: Victoria

AGE: 18

BIRTHDAY: October 26th

HOMEWORLD: Olympianas

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

» HAIR: Black (With purple and pink ombre dye at the tips). Victoria almost always wears her hair shortly cropped, usually in a pixie cut or an asymmetrical bob. She rarely (if ever) wears her hair longer than neck length.

» EYES: Light Blue. But they turn pink whenever she uses her powers.

» SKIN: Very fair, but she can get a decent tan on the right day.

» HEIGHT: Victoria is 4’10” out of her platform boots, and she’s 5’4” while she’s wearing her boots. Victoria has a bit of a height complex, and hates it whenever people bring her height up. Her height (and bust size) have been the subject of jokes (even to the point where some people nickname her “titget”).

» PHYSICAL BUILD: Victoria’s overweight, with a curvaceous figure. She’s quite content with her shape, and likes to flaunt it whenever she can.

» STYLE: Victoria often mixes corporate and gothic aesthetics in her dress style. Back when she was more associated with Hyperion, she couldn’t exactly dress how she wanted to. So Victoria would sneak in punk and gothic elements into her dress style.

BACKSTORY:

Victoria was born on the Eridian homeworld of Olympianas, and she inherited her siren powers shortly after birth. She was trained and raised by a cult known as the Enlightened Sisterhood, to become the next siren queen of Olympianas. Growing up, Victoria spent most of childhood locked away from the outside world, only being allowed to leave with strict supervision. The Enlightened Sisterhood convinced Victoria that they were keeping her locked away for her own “safety”. But they were actually keeping her locked away to fulfill their own selfish motives.

Once Victoria became of age, the Sisterhood planned to have her open Olympianas’ vault. But unfortunately for the Sisterhood, their plans would never come to fruition. Victoria had no interest in becoming Olympiana’s next queen, and became increasingly fed up with her strict lifestyle.So one day while Victoria was going for a walk around town, she siphoned her supervisor. And then she ran into a crowd of tourists, to keep herself being noticed by members of the Sisterhood. After successfully getting lost within the crowd, Victoria hitched a ride on a Dahl tourist shuttle to Pandora. 

After a certain period of time of being on Pandora, Victoria was found and adopted by a Hyperion Engineer. At this time Handsome Jack was still the CEO of Hyperion, so Victoria’s guardian went to great lengths to hide that she was a siren. After the fall of Jack and Hyperion, Victoria would stop hiding her tattoos, but she still faced problems socially. People were either afraid of her, wanted to profit off other powers, or treated her with prejudice.

Grew up being known for her child prodigy status. Being trapped in a tower for most of her early childhood came with one benefit. It gave her a lot of time to become well-studied, especially with how strict the Sisterhood was with education. She graduated from high school early, and was in college until she became bored with her rather mundane life.

Shortly after starting college, father randomly went missing. It’s suspected that the Enlightened Sisterhood might have something to do with his disappearance.

Speaking of Victoria’s education, she followed in her adoptive guardian’s footsteps, and was studying to become an engineer for Hyperion. She quit college at 16 to become a Vault Hunter, find her adoptive father, and to regain a childhood that she never had.

PERSONALITY:

Victoria is an adventurous  young woman known for her  rebellious and unlady-like behavior. She appears to be a “lone-wolf” having a more cynical outlook on life in general, and never really goes out her way to do good unless it comes with personal benefit. Victoria’s a bit of a misanthrope, and generally doesn’t have much faith in people, especially the ones on Pandora. 

She also hides behind a sort of “bad girl” persona, as a way of protecting herself from being seen as weak or vulnerable by those around her. This also means that she has a tendency of hiding how she truly feels, making her appear too cold, even at times where showing emotion is appropriate.

Her “bad girl” persona fades away with time, when she’s around friends, or when someone has gained her trust.

TRAITS:

��� POSITIVE Traits

Undying Loyalty:

From first appearances Victoria seems to be an “every man for himself” kind of gal. But once someone has gained Victoria’s trust, she’ll never turn her back on them. She will even go as far as getting herself injured or killed, if it means protecting those who she cares about.

Diligence:

Victoria is not the type of person to half-ass any sort of job given to her, whether she likes the job or not. She likes the rewards, and sense of accomplishment that come from a job well done. 

Assertiveness: 

Victoria doesn’t take anyone’s bullshit, period. Whether it’s someone bossing around or insulting, Victoria or her friends, she will stand her ground to make sure that person knows their place. 

Adaptability: 

Victoria’s gotten used to abrupt changes in her life at this point, mainly because she’s had no option but to. Pandora’s a tough planet to live on, so you either adapt and get used to the craziness or you die.

Resilience: 

Despite everything that’s occurred in her life so far, she’s managed to keep herself together. She rarely breaks under pressure, and tends to handle traumatic experiences well enough.

x Negative Traits

Insatiable Greed:

Victoria has a love for money that  borders on obsession. No amount of money is ever enough for her, and there’s no such thing as “too much” when it comes to the finer things in life for Victoria. Her greed for money is almost immeasurable, and she’ll do just about anything to get it, as long as it doesn’t involve humiliation or sex.

Pridefulness: 

For the most part, Victoria mainly works to achieve her own goals, very rarely putting others before herself. She can be impatient and cold to those who she considers to be a waste of her time. Victoria also has a hard time acknowledging her own faults.

Stubbornness: 

One thing that Victoria hates most is being told what to do. She doesn’t take being bossed around lightly, and will often do the opposite of what she’s told to do. She also has no respect for authority figures, and this has gotten her in trouble with the law. 

Recklessness: 

Tends to be carelessness and recklessness with her own life. She suffers silently with passive suicidal ideation, and generally hates that she has to take Eridium to live.

Arrogance: 

Acts like a bit a know-it-all due to status as a siren and child prodigy. Nobody can control Victoria, and very few can tell her what to do, due to her inflated sense of self-worth. 

Likes: 

Money.

Being treated like a normal person.

Makeup.

Rock and Metal music.

Alcohol. Victoria likes it… Maybe a little too much at times.

Bunkers and Badasses.

LARPing.

Dislikes: 

Being a siren.

Rude nicknames, especially the ones directed towards her height, weight, or bust size. 

Tight spaces. Victoria is moderately claustrophobic.

Being treated like a child. Victoria’s 18, and because of that some people try to baby her.

People. Not all, but most.

Being seen as a “nerd”. She’s secretly nerdy, but she prefers that everyone sees her as a badass.

[some-weirdo-person]

Stop LARPing a serious trauma disorder. You are either faking it or you just don’t remember your trauma.

Oh welp they got us boys, what a whimsical misunderstanding, the other person in my head who's been claiming to be their own person and expressing their own opinions and feeling their own feelings and occasionally fronting, all with 0 indication of trauma other than plurality somehow, is just regular singlet behaviour. Along with the several other ones of those who occasionally show up. Sorry lads, we'll shut it down immediately.

Haha anywho, seriously, we never claimed to have DID OR OSDD, and we're very clear that we don't claim the authority of having had serious trauma or that specific experience. And yet, we're still very much here, and have been for years, just not been very open about it. Sorry man, I can't and quite frankly don't want to do much about us all existing. If you wanna DM me about it, I THINK our public dms are open, I wanna get whatever misconceptions you have sorted out.

[hrthrive19]

Roller Coaster

Roller Coaster

Planet K proudly has the world’s first ever, player centric, live action role playing (LARP) theme park. Macao is first to the table with this innovative and immersive family entertainment concept. Within its massive 100,000 square feet facility, Planet K is exquisitely designed to house eight distinct gaming zones containing more than 200 whimsical games.

Rivaling traditional theme parks, Planet K is destined to become one of the most interactive entertainment experiences within Asia and abroad.

Case in Hand

Due to the very high minimum wage rate in Macau, Planet K found an easy way out by smuggling people from Indonesia. These workers have been forced to work under poor conditions, without proper facilities provided to them, nor are they fairly paid to work in the park. These workers have no option but to work for you, as they do not have the necessities to get back to their country as Planet K has withheld all their documents.  

Over the years, various questions have been raised regarding the carelessness of the employees regarding the maintenance of the rides, quality of food and misbehaviour with the visitors. And yet, the management has not taken any action.  

On 20th November, 2019 one of the visitors was found dead in the locker room, on further investigation of this case it was found that the woman was brutally assaulted and murdered. The CCTV footage showed only the workers were present in the premises after closing hours. When this news was brought to public notice, a large number of anonymous complains with regards to harassment by the employees was brought up.

Currently, the investigation is still in process, many of your employees are in custody, there are various cases against Planet K, there are also cases filed against the HR manager for smuggling of the employees.

Task in Hand

You're the HR manager of Planet K and you are responsible for the following:

• Justify your actions to the authorities.

• Decide the future course of action for the employees you've smuggled from Indonesia, prepare a compensation plan if any.  

• Compensation for all the victims  

Deliverables  

• A PPT of not more than 10 slides.

Submission Details:

Submit your presentations to: hr.thrive19@gmail.com

Submission Time: 1:00 A.M. 28th November 2019 

Negative marking starts from 1:05 A.M.

P.S. Put up a great show. Show us that you deserve to be in the Top 5. 

Make sure your Presentations are readable and understandable.

Goodluck! Sky is the limit when it comes to creativity!

[toilalo]

RULES . answer  the  questions  in  a  new  post  &  tag  20  blogs  you  would  like  to  get  to  know  better.     (  repost  don’t  reblog !  )

TAGGED BY: No one. ( stole from my boo @ahundredwars !! ) TAGGING: anyone who wants to do it!

NICKNAME: Ray!! STAR SIGN:  Taurus !!! Idk anything about this Sun / Moon alignment otl CURRENT TIME: 5:15 pm PRONOUNS: He / Him SINGLE OR TAKEN: Single SEXUALITY: Gay  FAV MUSIC ARTIST: Uuuuuhhh Cavetown ?? I don’t listen to a lot of specific artists... SONG STUCK IN YOUR HEAD: Royalty - Conor Maynard LAST MOVIE WATCHED: The Conjuring LAST SHOW WATCHED: The Magicians RP EXPERIENCE HOW LONG (MONTHS / YEARS?): About 10 years in terms of writing, add 4 on top of that if you count LARPing. PLATFORMS YOU’VE USED: Neopets, Webkins, Deviantart, Facebook, Skype, Twitter, Tumblr, Discord! BEST EXPERIENCE: So far probably my time here and on deviantart. I’ve met some super amazing people through both that will!!! Most likely be long term friends!!!  FEMALE OR MALE MUSE: I’ve done all forms but I’m most comfortable with male aligned muses!! Female muses kinda fuck me up a little anymore LOL MULTI OR SINGLE: I’ve done both, it really just depends. I can keep track of and am more active on multis because having to watch over multiple blogs ( even if they are sideblogs ) I get overwhelmed / tend to not use most of the other characters. FLUFF, ANGST, OR SMUT: Fluff most often, angst would come next. I do smut on rare occasions if I’m really feeling up to it ans a muse is into it. PLOTS OR MEMES: Both, but I get scared to ask to plot so most often its memes ;u ; LONG OR SHORT REPLIES: I tend to accidentally end up with long, I’ve been trying to keep things short though sldjfhglsjdkfglsd BEST TIME TO WRITE: I’m a night owl, so nighttime!!! That’s also when its quiet and I can think properly. ARE YOU LIKE YOUR MUSE(S): I share a lot with Ignis and Nyx, and Silver was originally me SO like....... yeah I’m pretty similar to half of my muses. WHEN DID YOU CREATE YOUR BLOG: I’ve blog hopped a tiny bit, my origin was December 2017 on a chocobo blog, then to Unmeiochita / Fujubun, and now here! WHAT KIND OF STUFF DO YOU POST: Lets just leave it at “I’m not quality.” OTHER BLOGS: I have more blogs than I would like to admit, I think I’m at 20+ now? WHY DID YOU CHOOSE YOUR URL: Honestly I don’t remember, I made this blog specifically for Silver a LONG time ago and I KNOW the url has a specific meaning but I don’t remember what it was... HOGWARTS HOUSE: Gryffindor POKEMON TEAM: I haven’t played pokemon in so long but I CAN say.......... wooloos. FAVORITE COLOR: Pastel Green! AVG HOURS SLEEP: Probably four? LUCKY NUMBER: H........how do you know the answer to this?? I have no idea what it is.... HOW MANY BLANKETS DO YOU SLEEP WITH: Two big ole plaid ones bc I’m gay DREAM JOB: Author / Webcomic Creator / Animator / Ect 

[anarchy-is-organization]

given this post where an anarchist is being a racist fuckhead, I thought I would type up a list of issues I’ve seen in American anarchist organizing over the last year and a half. 

just for some background, I’ve been guilty of many of these things, but I started to think more critically about how I behaved at protests after some Black Lives Matter and Jewish Voice for Peace members called out the anarchist group I was involved with for being disorganized and immature. I’m writing this because I know that most anarchists have their hearts in the right place, but it’s important for us to consider whether our actions are harmful, and further, if they’re even effective in the first place.

1. refusal to pick leaders.

I know that anarchists are critical of authority--that’s why I’m an anarchist. and not having a leader can be a good thing at times. there’s no one for authorities to negotiate with and no chance of a leader becoming corrupted.

however, there are times when electing a leader or leaders is appropriate, and refusing to do so on principle is counterproductive. for instance, when the cops are coming in to arrest people, the group needs to move in a coordinated manner that’s difficult to do without a leader. also, a lot of time is wasted at protests because everyone is just sitting around waiting for someone to decide what to do next. leaders can focus energy and organize large groups of people at once. I promise that electing a leader for a single event is not going to cause the rise of an authoritarian regime. 

2. racism. 

Nova provided a perfect example of how white anarchists are often racist and refuse to take the feelings of POC into account at protests. there’s resisting the police and standing up against oppression, and then there’s endangering everyone around you in order to feel like a badass. 

a lot of anarchist events end up being extremely white for this reason. POC are understandably nervous around the police, and they’re not interested in coming out to an event where white people are running around acting like idiots, so we end up with hundreds of white people claiming to speak for POC.

also along with the previous point, the fact that no one elects a leader means that anyone in the group can make the decisions as long as they are willing to take charge. so time and time again, white men are the ones deciding how the event goes. they also speak over others and end up being the only voices being heard. 

when confronted on this, white anarchists become defensive and angry. we need to start doing better if we claim to be in solidarity with people of color.

3. LARPing.

LARPing is really the best word I have for this problem. a lot of anarchists right now are young, inexperienced, and were radicalized on the internet. their enthusiasm is great, and I think if we had older, more seasoned anarchists around, that energy could get channeled in a more positive direction.

the problem is that there really aren’t experienced organizers around to do that work. as such, a lot of anarchist events end up being chaotic and disorganized. there’s a lot of self-congratulation that goes on about how awesome what we’re doing is without much critical thought going into whether it’s efficient. 

as such, there’s a lot of “life-stylism” and “adventurism” that goes around. just for an example, last summer, I went to a small protest on the Fourth of July. I ended up leaving early because it was disorganized and the protesters were making me feel uncomfortable. their plan was to set off fireworks in the middle of a city. I pointed out that no one would know it was a protest--the fireworks would get taken as just another patriotic display. the planners got upset with me and insisted it would be effective without any argument as to why. 

after I had left, several violent arrests were made, and for what? I doubt anyone in the city had any idea what the point of the protest even was. just because actions are justifiable and feel good doesn’t mean they’re actually making a difference. 

4. losing sight of the point.

along the same lines, anarchist events often end up moving away from the original purpose. at a meeting after a protest against ICE, I remember one man asking if the event had been about ICE or if it had been anti-police. 

obviously we can’t help the fact that the cops show up to brutalize us every time we have a protest, so it’s natural that some of our focus will end up on them. but without fail, our protests end up being more about the cops than whatever the stated purpose was. at that anti-ICE protest, we were outside of a detention center where they were holding immigrants. we had megaphones, but rather than shouting support to the inmates, who could hear us, instead almost all of our time was spent heckling the cops. 

every time I go to an event now, I ask myself if what I’m doing is for myself or for the people I claim to be helping. I also push for more inclusion of individuals who are directly affected by the issue at hand. there’s a huge difference between privileged white kids who’ve never dealt with police harassment yelling at the cops and BLM organizers speaking their lived experiences. 

I don’t think any of the issues I’ve listed here are inherent to anarchism, but if we want to be an effective political force, we need to become more organized and take things more seriously. political action isn’t taken for personal gratification. there is joy in resistance, but let’s make sure that resistance is accomplishing what we want it to. 

[destielthedeathofme]

Dates and Desires

Prompt: @toomanyfandoms008 sent this to me after I begged for prompts. First of many and a big thanks to all of you who sent me prompts.

Author: @destielthedeathofme

Tags/Genre: Destiel,Highschool AU, Fluff, Oneshot.

Warnings: I curse

Summary: A harmless joke with unknowingly desired consequences.

A/n: boop

~♡~

Dean kept whacking Castiel until he looked at him, utterly pissed off. Dean didn't know why Cas paid more attention to the book than Dean, what's so interesting about a fucking book? Especially a Chemistry textbook at that. God Castiel was such a nerd. Dean loved him for it. Not that he'd ever admit that to his best friend. He loved Cas, in a friendly way, and maybe a bit more. Okay, a lot more.

Charlie was chatting on and on about Game of Thrones with Sam who looked a bit too interested in the conversation. He was surrounded by fucking nerds. Where did he go wrong with Sam?

The librarian glared at them, a common theme in there daily endeavours to the library. It was tradition, she had to frown at them at least once. Dean gave her a cheeky smirk, while Cas scolded him about something, whatever it was, Dean wouldn't listen anyway.

"Anyone want to LARP this weekend?" Charlie asked looking around.

The table tensed, all looking at each other. Each face held accusation, reading,"You do it." Dean would've loved to, but Charlie tended to take things very seriously. She tried to have him be-headed for not "fetching her a glass of wine". Ahh the perks of being a knight.

Sam suffered a much worse fate and was chosen to be her personal foot masager, which Sam argued was not a real thing in medieval times. But well, you couldn't disrespect the Queen. "God save anyone who disrespects the Queen."; something she made her "subjects" practically chant, every day. Charlie was one hell of a dictator; and she knew it.

Cas was the only one who had somehow always been able to maneuver his way out of every LARPing experience. Dean and Sam gave him a pointed glare and he seemingly tried to shrink into his seat, officially fresh out of execuses.

Cas weakly said,"Uh I have a date this weekend?"

Dean snorted, while Sam and Charlie gaped at Castiel. Dean had made sure that everyone in school knew not to get within a safe distance of Cas. Castiel was his. And his only. He could tell Cas was lying because his eyes wouldn't meet Dean's or anyone's for that matter. So he didn't worry and played along. Maybe this would turn into something else.

"Please Cas? Just this once and I'll make up the date for you." He winked at Cas who blushed very deeply. Dean loved when Cas did that. And no, he wasn't kidding about the date, he would, if Cas wanted to. Dean heard Charlie squeal, probably excited to bring a new person along, but he didn't miss the thumbs up she shot Cas. Interesting. Sam, similar to Charlie seemed happy that he wouldn't have to be the one going LARPing. But Dean saw the smile he gave Cas. What was going on? Was he missing something? "Probably" his subconscious added. Dean couldn't figure Cas out sometimes. Despite being best friends.

"Just so you know, I'm missing a very hot date for this," grumbled Castiel.

"And you're getting a hotter one in return." Dean joked back. But his heart was melting at the hopeful glint in Castiel's eyes. Castiel's blue eyes were sparkling with so many emotions, Dean wondered if he'd seen all of them before. He could write a book on Castiel's eyes. The whole shebang. Yeah he's a little lost in them. Has been for the past 17 years. And he had no intention in ever getting found. Dean was content there, Castiel's eyes were a comfort. His heaven. With his own personal angel.

Soon Charlie changed the conversation, drifting off into her own world, while dragging them there as well. Cas kept giving Dean weird looks and Dean was starting to get really uncomfortable with them. Sam kept glancing between the two and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like "so much sexual tension". Dean would interrogate that later, right now he had a weird Cas to deal with. It couldn't be over the date. Right?

Dean was snapped out of his thoughts when Castiel's usually calm demeanor changed into a full on bad ass vibe. And he was smirking, fucking smirking.

"So when's our date?" Cas asked noticing how Dean looked a bit shocked.

"Friday night, I'll pick you up at 7:00." Dean replied coolly.

He had no fucking clue what he was doing, or what Cas was for that matter but he was going to keep playing along. Just to see what would happen. And the possibility of a date with Cas was definitely a good idea too.

"What are we going to do?"

"We'll go mini golfing and then get dinner."

"At the Roadhouse?"

"You know it."

Both men continued to plan the date while Charlie recorded the conversation, claiming it was for to show their future child. Dean choked at that while Castiel proceeded to fall out of his chair. All while Sam chuckled knowingly, grinning like an idiot.

That hopeful glint was really starting to kill Dean and he decided that Cas needed some reassurance because he didn't have to just hope Dean would take him on the date, Dean fucking would. Dean hugged Castiel really hard, hoping he could transfer those thoughts to Cas through touch, because discussing his feelings never worked out.

That didn't work because Cas ended up asking,"Are you really going to take me on a date?"

Dean beamed at him,"Uh yeah Cas, I'll take you on a date."

[geekygirlexperience]

221B Con Panels are up! There’s more to 221B Con than just Sherlock Holmes!

If you want a convention that’s like 80% women, LGBTQA+ people, and just awesome, PLEASE CHECK OUT 221B CON! They just announced this year’s panels!

221B Con isn’t JUST an everything Sherlock Holmes convention. It also features other fandoms, LGBTQA+ panels, and writing workshops. Here’s some of the non-Sherlock panels they announced this year.

I’m applying for the Thrawn panel this year!!!

Thrawn - The Sherlock Holmes of Star Wars (And His Watson’s) - A look at the parallels between Grand Admiral Thrawn and Sherlock Holmes (and his various Watsons like Eli Vanto, Gilad Pellaeon, and Karyn Faro)

Fandom Panels:

-After Canon Ends - What happens to a fandom when there is no new canon? Why do some fandoms survive or even get stronger while others die? Is it the fabric of the original work or the fervor of the fandom that sustains it? Why does Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter fandom thrive when Battlestar Galactica and Babylon dwindle?

-Captain Marvel - Finally a Marvel movie headlined by a woman! Sorry Black Widow. We were rooting for you first.

-D&D Level 0 - A beginner’s guide to Dungeons and Dragons.

-Discrimination Within the Canon - From the KKK in the Five Orange Pips and the little girl in the Yellow Face to Holmes’s own dismissal of women, how do we square our love for Canon with the problematic nature of Victorian ideals? (While this s Sherlock Holmes centric, I’m sure other fandoms will be discussed)

-Doctor Who: A New Chapter - Moffatt is gone and we have a female doctor for the first time ever. How is the show holding up?

-The Good Place - I Kant Stop Watching!: Motherforking shirtballs! We’re renewed for a fourth season! Someone tell Janet to bring me a frozen yoghurt to celebrate!

-Kingdom Hearts - A discussion of Disney’s hit game.

-Legalities and Ethics of Fan Works - As creators become more aware of fan made content, what are the legal rights of the fan?

-The Magicians - A fan discussion of the hit Syfy show.

-McElroy Panel - A panel for all things McElroy-related. My Brother, My Brother and Me, The Adventure Zone, etc. Come in your favourite Taako cosplay, that’s what we really want to see right?

-MCU - A closer look at the Marvel Universe. Is Tony back from space? Is Peter okay?

-Representations of Women in Modern Science Fiction - From Ripley to Okoye, an in depth discussion of how women are viewed differently in science fiction and fantasy.

-Tabletop Gaming and Fandoms - Tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons, Vampire, and Starfinder, have been around for decades. And the number of people that play have grown from a few people in a room to full conventions across the globe. Come join us as we discuss our favorite or even some lesser known tabletop games, what we love about them, and the fandoms born from them.

Tarzan in Cinema - Along with Sherlock Holmes and Dracula, Tarzan is one of the most adapted characters in movie history. Let’s discuss the good and the bad that came from these films.

-Yuri!!! On Ice in 2019 - What Will it Mean for the Fandom: With the anticipated new canon for Yuri!!! On Ice what will it mean for the fandom going forward?

 LGBTQA+ Panels:

-50 Shades of A - Asexuality in Fandom and Canon: This panel will discuss representations of asexuality in fandom and canon.

-Bitextuality in Sherlock Holmes - exploring the canon through the images that accompanied them.

-Polyshipping Time - More More More: Is more always better? It is in a polyfic! Come discuss the proliferation of plurality and passion.

-Queer Interpretations of Holmes and Watson - The beauty of Sherlock Holmes is the ability to adapt it to other times and places. The Canon is open to interpretation of many kinds. Come discuss the queering of Holmes and Watson in Canon and beyond.

Fanfiction and Writing Panels:

-ABO (18+) - ABO is one of the most discussed and misunderstood tropes in fan fiction today. Our panelists will discuss the where ABO began, where it is, and where it is going.

-Beyond Wikipedia - A crash course in research methods for the discerning writer.

-Co-Writing - The Ups and the Downs: Join our panelists as they discuss their experiences with co-writing, both positive and negative, and offer tips for making co-writing work.

-Cuddle Fic and Fluff - A look at the softer side of fanfiction.

-Every Disguise Is A Self Portrait: Healing Through Fic - A discussion of reading and writing fic as a method of obtaining support for self-discovery, personal growth and recovery. Helpful tips for writers having difficulty addressing important, yet uncomfortable, issues in their own work (homophobia, abuse, addiction).

-Fanfiction Panel - All ages discussion of fan works.

-Freaks in Love: Thank You, May I Have Another? - A discussion of bdsm, consensual kink, power dynamics, and the challenges of writing a scene. 18 and up (ID Required).

-How to Scrub Your Fanfiction - Are you interested in publishing your fan fiction as an original work? Panelists will give tips on how to rework a story to make it viable for publication.

-Insecurity, Imposter Syndrome and other Creative Pitfalls - Back by popular demand. Being a fanfiction writer or artist is hard. You put your stuff out there and hope for the best. But there's often that feeling of not measuring up, that your stuff isn't good enough, that nobody really cares. It's important to talk about this, because it's normal, and it's okay. Everyone starts from somewhere, and someone does want to read or look at your stuff.

-OCs Encouraged - How To Go From Writing Fanfic to Creating Your Own Novels -Authors give insight into moving into the publishing world.

-PWP Fic - We all know that adult themes abound in fanfiction but why do we interact with this specific type of media differently than things that would traditionally be deemed pornographic. 18 and up (ID Required).

-World Building for Writers - Creating in depth universes to play hosts to your characters. What are some pitfalls we have all faced and how do we get around them?

 Other Fun Panels You Should Check Out!

-221B Baking Street - Join us for a scrumptious panel on how Sherlock has inspired marshmallows, tea blending, and other foods.

-Anachronistic History - Research is always important in period pieces but modern storytelling and sci fi have made it possible to alter the rules of time. A look at out of place technologies in different historical eras.

-Communicating in a Meme Culture - A discussion of how millennial and Gen Z members use a collective and fast changing meme culture to communicate.

-Creativity and Neurodiversity - How does one take care of themselves while also creating, and how can one use the gifts that an unusual mind can give.

-Designing and Building an Original Costume - What do you do when you love Steampunk AND Disney, or Moulin Rouge AND Star Wars, or historical fashion AND superheroes? What if you have a great LARP character who needs a definitive “look?” Maybe you want to cosplay a non-human character, or an object! We've got you covered.

-Drug Use in the Victorian Era - It was a crazy time when opiates were readily available and women used cocaine for headaches. A discussion of drugs during the reign of Victoria. Spoiler alert: A 7% solution would have killed you.

-Edgar Allan Poe - As we observed the 170th anniversary of Poe’s death, let’s look back on his work and his contributions to detective fiction.

-Fandom Un-raveled: We’re Crafty – A look at online communities for Sherlock fans and fiber arts: knitting, crocheting, spinning and weaving.

-How to Make Podfics and Audiobooks - A How To guide for those starting out.

-Tattoos and Sherlock Holmes - A group discussion of Sherlock Holmes related tattoos and what they mean to you. Do you have a fandom tattoo? Come share your story.

-Teaching and Fandom - Many of us in fandom are teachers or Librarians, and no matter what subject we teach, fandom has influenced our teaching practice in many ways. In this panel, a group of educators will share ideas and talk about how participating in fandom has made us better teachers.

 AND there’s of course all of the many Sherlock Holmes panels too! All Sherlock Holmes welcome from the original canon to the Great Mouse Detective, House, Psyche, and all the actors too! Check it out at 221bcon.com

[huntertales]

Let’s Write a Different Ending.

Pairing: Sam Winchester x Prophet!Reader

Word Count: 4,343. // Episode Setting: The Monster at the End of This Book.

Summary: What if the “Supernatural” book series wasn’t written by Chuck Shurley? Instead, by a young woman named Y/N Y/L/N? She finds herself living out her most recent story—about the end of the world, an archangel whose sworn to protect her is moonlighting as a trickster and two fictional characters by the name of Sam and Dean are about to drag her straight into it. (Semi-rewrite from episode 4.18 The Monster at the End of This Book to—?)

Full Masterlist | My Other SPN Rewrite

Note: Is this a possible semi-rewrite of the show for my Sam girls???? Yes, it is! And no...This is not like my regular rewrite where I do it episode by episode, this is more like I’m taking Chuck’s entire plot line and writing it as the reader up until the season five finale. Along the way I’m gonna try to focus on a Sam/Reader element ‘cause my boy needs some love.

And before you fret...this is a side project. My original rewrite will always come first. Plus I’m still figuring out the details of what I want to do, but updates for this are gonna be really scarce. I don't know how many parts this will be or how many episodes I will cover, but it'll be part by part. Updates are probably gonna be scarce until I finish season six. More importantly, if you guys like this and want to see more, please let me know. I hope you guys enjoy possibly a new series! 

Chapter One: It Started With a Knock. 

Carver Edlund: it was a name nobody would be probably familiar with if you asked a stranger on the street who he was. To Sam and Dean, he was a man who knew too much. A thief who made a buck and gained an underground cult following from a book series he wrote called "Supernatural." Twenty four books detailing the lives of two hunters who traveled across the country in their 1967 Chevy Impala, saving people from monsters and seeking revenge on the yellowed eyed demon who killed their parents. Each action, every little personal aspect of their lives—from their upbringing, to every internal thought—was all in paperback for the world to read. 

The brothers made the horrifying discovering when they were working a case in town, the first stop on the list of places to check out was some run-down looking comic store. The guy behind the counter mistook their questioning as a game of "LARPing" and failed miserably in attempting to remember the main character's names, only for the younger Winchester to correct him after the third time. That's when they discovered the first book in the bargain bin, a hidden gem abandoned with other comics no one bothered to read. The cover alone looked like a seedy romance novel someone might find on their middle middle-aged mother's nightstand. Sam and Dean found every copy they could find and examine each word. 

Sam tried to figure out who this Carver Edlund was, but he was shady as the characters he wrote about. There wasn't a single paper trail or photograph of him in an attempt for either of the boys to recognize his face to figure out who he was. Best guess the guy was using a pen name to keep his identity. All they knew that the books started rolling out in early of'05, the year Sam left a life behind after tragedy hit. His girlfriend Jess, the only woman he was weeks away from asking to marry him, was killed in the same gruesome manner as his mother. The finale of the "Supernatural" series ended in of Dean being torn to bits by Lilith and Sam alone, just like reality they were forced to live in.

Sam and Dean doubted it ended here. There was someone behind this name, a person the boys were itching to have a  “formal” chat with to figure out how he knew so much about them. The boys decided to start with the most obvious place to track down the author’s real name, the publishing company that printed the crap. A lovely young woman held the possible trail to finding out who it was, only it came with a test when Sam and Dean claimed to be journalists wanting to write an article about the books.

The publisher wouldn’t give up any sort of information so easily. She grilled them with all sorts of questions each of the boys got correct, but only seemed satisfied they were the real deal as she sat in her office chair, watching with a close eye as Sam unbuttoned his flannel and under shirt slightly to reveal the anti-possession tattoo on his chest. She had one of her own, right on her bare ass to show the boys. But the view that made Dean’s day wasn’t the only parting gift she gave the boys. She might not have known the true identity of the person who wrote the books, she had a  current address the boys could visit. All though she warned them—authors were temperamental people.

“He’s very private.” She warned them. “Like Salinger.”

You lifted your hands away from the keyboard when you attempted the second draft of the newest edition to a series that ended months ago. But it didn’t mean the adventures that ran through your head would stop. It flowed vividly as it did after the first dream you had them and sat down to write the first page of the "Supernatural" series. You read the words back to yourself as another part of the newest story printed, waiting for your approval to join the rest of the story you were working on.

Writing was a tedious process. Some people could whip out a beginning line to sink the reader in, others thought to start in the middle and figure out the rest later. Your process was a jumbled mess. You wrote down fragments until everything connected itself together into a perfect story you were happy with. However, the newest story you were working on was a bit...different.

You sat in your office, a small room containing a desk pushed up against the window to enjoy a spacious backyard and the rainy days when you felt the most inspired. Behind was you as book shelf taller than you, crammed with novels your family collected over the years along with bound and unpublished books that haven’t seen the light of day. You reached out to grab the second cup of coffee you made for yourself and the still warm papers from the printer. Skimming the words, you snickered into the ceramic mug at what the hell you were attempting to write late last night.

You took pride in being a creative person since early childhood. Maybe it came with having both of your parents being successful writers and having a hunger for all sorts of adventures you tried to seek in reading endless books. Ever since you could hold a pen and form proper sentences you were writing down all your crazy stories. You were a daydreamer, with a wild imagination to match. Never did you think any of it would be good enough material to be published.

It was the summer before you were supposed to start your freshman year of college when you had a dream that felt so real. Normally you forgot the dream you had the night before the second you woke up. But this one stuck like glue. All day your mind wouldn’t stop replaying what you dreamed about, thinking about these characters you named Sam and Dean. For a week you had dreams that felt so vivid about them, the first adventure of many to come. Over the years you had some that were pleasant and quite enjoyable to form into words. Other ones made you wake up in a cold sweat, terrified from the horrendous things your brain could think of all on your own. You showed the first fifteen pages you had wrote nonstop in the span of three days to your parents—who suggested you to go for it. Write a novel and see where it took you.

It took you farther than you ever expected. You made the decision to publish the name under a pen name of Carver Edlund, You were afraid nobody would take an eighteen year old with no prior experience seriously. You sent the books off to every publishing company you could think of and waited for nothing but rejection letters. Almost all of them were a fail, until you got your lucky break with an Indie company that loved your work. She gushed over the first "Supernatural" book and how good it was, so good that she was reading for the second time after finishing it all in just a day. The work was so good, she  desperately pleaded for more. You agreed to work on more stories, if you were granted complete and total privacy. She agreed.

You placed the cup back down on your desk in favor for a pen, deciding to edit the part you were working on last night. You felt a tinge of embarrassment from what the kind of nonsense your mind was able to come up with. It was always the day after you decided to edit. A fresh perspective to edit the mistakes you might have made and correct words that might flow better. However, it didn’t take much effort to slip back into the fictional world you thought you created.

“Sam and Dean exited the Impala and stepped onto the sidewalk. Dean took out the ripped piece of paper with the address scribbled down and read it one more time, wanting to make sure it was correct. All though he wasn’t sure what kind of house a man who wrote the lives was to look like, what they saw wasn’t what they...perceived. A small two-story house laid in front of them didn’t look like it belonged to a person they never met. It looked like every other one on this street, a white picket fence and a flourishing garden blooming this early spring. The boys knew looks could be deceiving. They wanted to make sure this was the residence of the man who knew personal details about themselves, things nobody should know.

The boys waited not a second longer. They approached the front door with trepidation. Did they really want to learn the secrets that lay beyond that door? The brothers traded soulful looks, answering the question without speaking a word. With determination, Dean pushed the doorbell with forceful...determination."

You furrowed your brow when you noticed you accidentally repeated the same word twice. You clicked on your pen and scratched out the word for something better. Before the tip of the pen could even touch the paper, you found yourself looking over your shoulder when the doorbell rang. Your dog, who had been peacefully resting at your feet, raised his head in curiosity. You rolled your eyes when he followed the behavior by a series of loud barks. You shushed the German Shepherd, mumbling for Winchester to calm down as rubbed a hand across his fur. You weren’t expecting any visitors today. And it’d been ages since you ordered any packages. You pushed yourself up to your feet, deciding to answer it anyway.

You heard a set of nail tap across the wooden floors, Winchester followed behind you to join you in the adventure of who was bugging you this early afternoon. You lived in a safe neighborhood, it was the reason why you moved here in the first place. Plus the rent was cheap. You unlocked the dead bolt and opened the door a crack to see who stood on your porch, two men you’d never seen before.

You noticed their hands were empty—no bible, no useless products to sell you. It meant the “No soliciting” sign worked. But the “Beware of Dog” didn’t ward off strangers who weren't’ here with a good explanation. You were a single woman living on your own and two men that looked to be twice your size were visiting you. Nobody could be too cautious these days with all those sickos running around. Winchester peeked his head out from behind you to see who it was.

“Excuse me, we don’t mean to bother you, but…” The man standing closest to you greets you with an expression that makes it look like he’s having a bad day. He trailed off momentarily when he saw Winchester peek his head out, the dog staring at him. The stranger continued on by asking you a question that made your welcoming smile drop slightly. “We’re looking for a Carver Edlund.”

“Never heard of the guy.” You lied straight through your teeth, shrugging your shoulders. You gave the two strangers another smile, this time, more sympathetic. “You got the wrong house.” “We’re looking for the man who wrote the ‘Supernatural’ books.” You turned your head to the second man, who’s taller, but much more nicer looking. “We know he wrote them under a fake name. But we didn’t get his real one, just his address. We were told he lives here.”

“We really need to talk to him.” The man standing next to you said, urgency in his voice. You could tell he was trying to be polite. Your swallowed slightly as you wrapped your fingers around the door frame. It seemed he could read your hesitance. “Let me guess, he’s your boyfriend. He probably likes his privacy. But this is important. Is he home, by chance? It’ll just take five minutes. That’s all.”

“Why do you want to meet him so badly?” You questioned the both of them.

“We’re...We’re really big fans.” The taller one said. You narrowed your eyes slightly when both of them share a look before directing their attention back to you. “You see, my brother and I are journalists and we were hoping to have an interview with him, see who the real man is behind these books. Shed some light on the series to gain more attention. That’s all.”

You looked at the two of them for a moment, wondering if what you were hearing was true. You had never had something like this happen before. Most journalists, all three of them, contacted you through email to try and get a personal interview with you. You never had someone show up on your front door, trying to figure out the true identity behind a book series that paid your way through college, something that started out from a vivid dream. Your body relaxed as you let out a sigh, deciding if they were big fans, you’d let him in on a secret.

“Well, since you guys went all this trouble...Hi,” You opened the door slightly wider and leaned yourself against it, your lips stretching into a smile when you spoke the truth you had been trying to hide for over four years. “The name’s Y/N Y/L/N. I’m the author of the ‘Supernatural’ books.”

"Wait, you? You’re the sucker who wrote all those books?” Your face scrunched up slightly when the man standing closest to you changed his attitude. He suddenly broke out into a smile, acting as if you told him a funny joke. You slowly nodded your head and gave him a dirty look. If he was here to make fun of your work, you’d be more than happy to tell him to shove his arrogance where the sun didn’t shine. It seemed that wasn’t the case. He sobered up when he realized you were telling the truth, he was in the right place, and he was speaking to the author. “Well, nice to meet you. Let me tell you who we are. I’m Dean. This is Sam.” He pointed a finger to the taller man stan is next to him. “The Dean and Sam you've been writing about.”

You stared at the two men standing on your porch, trying to process what they just said as the ends of your lips slowly stretched into a smile. You didn't know what you should laugh first at. The fact that these two men went through all the trouble of tracking down your publisher that you hadn't talked to in almost five months for an address to figure out who the real writer of a barely popular book series. Or they were crazy, pretending to be fictional characters you made up. You didn’t even bother wasting your breath to give a response. You stepped back and slammed the door right on their face. You reached up a hand to lock the door, but before you could, you heard the doorbell go off again.

You contemplated for a moment if you wanted to do the right thing and ignore them. Worst case scenario if they got rowdy you'd call the cops and get their asses hauled off. However, you found yourself suddenly overcome with anger when you heard them switch from the doorbell to furiously pounding on your front door. You rolled your eyes, you decided to confront the two very delusional men who needed a dose of reality.  

“Look, uh... I appreciate your enthusiasm. Really, I do. It's, uh, it's always nice to hear from the fans. But how about you be like everyone else and drop me an email or something. Not show up on my doorstep like a bunch of freaks. The reason why I wrote under a fake name was so I could keep my privacy. And I’d like to keep it that way.” You spoke in a serious tone, informing them they needed to get out of here. “For your own good, I strongly suggest you get a life.”

Your left the two men with the words of advice they should take as you swung the door shut to end this conversation once and for all. Instead the one who called himself Dean thought it was a good idea to reach out a hand and slam it against the door, using his strength to keep it open.

“See, here's the thing, sweetheart. We have a life.” He said. You scoffed loudly at his words that sounded like a lie from how they were acting. You attempted once more to shut the door and lock it, but he was quicker than you. He inched himself closer so his fingers wrapped around the edge of the wood. “You've been using it to write your books.”

“Right.” You mumbled, chuckling at the tough guy act this idiot was putting on. You didn’t try and make Winchester calm down when he prowled closer to the two strangers. He let out a low, threatening growl when he sensed a changed in the atmosphere. “You have five seconds to get your hand off my door and off my property before I call the cops.”

It seemed “Dean” would take his chances with your threat. He pushed his way into your house, making you stumble slightly into the place as Winchester jumped in between the both of you, making the men suddenly stop dead in their tracks before they could do anything else. The dog began to bark incessantly and growl at the strangers when he thought one of them might try and do something stupid.

“Look, we’re not here to hurt you.” The one who thought he was Sam reassured you. Your face scrunched up from his words that sounded the least bit comforting. Their actions spoke louder, and it screamed they were a bunch of lunatics. “We just want to know how you’re doing it.”

“Doing what?” You asked them. “I’m not doing anything.”

“Are you a hunter?” The other man questioned you.

“What? Are you high or something? Get out of my house. Now” You ordered, as if you had any sort of authority to do such a thing. It took all of your control to keep your voice steady as your heart pounded roughly against your ribcage. The two men didn’t listen, they just stared at you, waiting for an answer. "I'm a writer. That's it."

“Then how do you know so much about demons and tulpas and changelings?” Dean threw out a few fictional monsters you wrote about in your series. You backed away slowly, wondering how to stop this situation before it could escalate to the nightmares a single woman had while living on her own. Murdered, robbery...other things that made a shiver run down your spine just form the thought.

“I read a lot of science fiction and horror books. H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King all that stuff. That’s where most it came from. And I did research, too. I wanted it to be realistic as possible.” You admitted. You thought the answers would be enough, but the one who thought of himself as Dean wouldn’t back down so easily. “Look, is this some kind of weird ‘Misery’ thing because I killed off Dean?”

“It’s not a ‘Misery’ thing. Believe me, we are not fans.” He said, shaking his head at the accusation. You didn’t believe one word he spoke. The man looked down at your dog when he heard it stop barking but showing no signs of backing down. Because it thought his owner was in danger. He quickly realized barging in like this made a wrong impression. They didn’t think a twenty something year old woman wrote their lives. The man changed his tone of voice, into more of a calm one. “Look, we aren’t here to break your legs. We just wanna talk. That’s it. Five minutes. And then we’ll be out of your hair for good.”

You didn’t feel the least bit reassured by his promise, but as a sign of good faith, or stupidity on your part, you stepped forward and shushed Winchester to keep quiet. You ushered him to back down and reassured that everything was fine. You stared at the two men in front of you, wondering if they were going to keep to their word.

“Fine. Who are you?” You asked them. “Really?”

“I’m Sam. This is Dean.” The taller man must have thought you were stupid when they tried to keep pulling this little act.

You rolled your eyes and pushed yourself back up to your feet, trying your hardest not to lose your patience with them. “For the last time, Sam and Dean are fictional characters.” You told them in a quiet, strained voice from what was going on. “I made them up! They're not real!”

The two men thought they could change your mind with some proof. You didn’t know why, but you found yourself following outside to their car—which was a 1967 Chevy Impala, color black and in mint condition, kept a single scratch on it. You’d never seen one in person, but she was a sight for sore eyes. Winchester trailed behind you to the outside and sat himself down on the sidewalk after you told him to. He was quiet, but he remained diligent, waiting for one of them men to try something.

The one who called himself Dean wanted you to take a look at the inside of their trunk, the words were a bit more creepier than he expected. You crossed your arms over your chest, expecting it to be empty and for one of them to shove you inside before locking you in there. When the trunk opened up, it wasn’t empty and you remained where you stood, but what you saw was even more horrifying. You inhaled a deep breath as you felt your eyes jumping around at all the stuff they had in there, an arsenal for a mad man.

“Are those real guns?” You asked in a meek tone.

“Yup.” The one who thought of himself as Dean said. You swallowed when he pointed out all the things you mentioned in the book. “This is real rock salt, these are real fake IDs.”

“Well, I got to hand it to you guys. You really are my number one fans. That’s,” You scratched the back of your neck as you felt yourself choosing the flight option in this situation. You nervously chuckled and began to slowly back away, hoping you might be able to dash inside the house and call the cops before things got too far. They were crazy, you thought. Obsessed. “That’s awesome. So, I-I think I've got some posters in the house.” You turned so fast on the back of your heels, you had a shot at running for your life. But before you could take a single step to safety, you heard the one who was pretending to be Dean spoke up. “Y/N, stop.” He called out to you, and for some reason, you listened to him.

“You lay one finger on me and I’ll start screaming.” You warned them as you turned back around to face the two men. You gave them a deadly glare as Winchester pushed himself back up on all four legs and came back over to you. "What the hell do you want?"

“How much do you know?” The taller one, Sam, questioned you with all sorts of things that you had written about in the secrecy of your own office. “Do you know about the angels? Or Lilith breaking seals?”

“Wait a minute. Wait a minute.” You mumbled, shaking your head from what he was asking you. You looked at the two men in front of you with a confused expression from what was going on, all of a sudden you had a few questions of your own. “How do you know about that?”

“The question is,” This supposed Dean asked, “how do you?”

You furrowed your brow slightly, "'Cause I wrote it."

“You kept writing?” Sam, or so he called himself, wondered.

“Yeah, even after the publisher went bankrupt, but those books never came out. Nobody's ever seen them except for me.” You said, telling them as you pointed a thumb over your shoulder and to your house. You suddenly felt a nudge against your leg, the dog was growing funny all of a sudden when he let out a low whine. You rolled your eyes and gave him a command, speaking his name for the first time in front of the boys. “Winchester, sit.”

"You named your dog Winchester?" You nodded your head, knowing this was the conversation that you would make up the lie that it was about how your dad was a big fan of guns and you named the dog after him. The man decided to formally introduce himself. "Well, nice that's a mighty fine coincidence. Cause you see, like I said...I'm Dean Winchester, and this is my brother, Sam."

You looked up from your dog after you began to subconsciously ran a hand through his fur to try and calm him down. You felt your face fall in surprise from what they told you. "Last names were never in the books. I never told anybody that. I never even wrote it down. Nobody knows I even wrote those books. People only think I named my dog after a freaking gun. You mumbled. You suddenly felt yourself hit with a dizzy spell from the things that were slowly connecting in your head. You stared at the two men in front of you, the ones you had wrote God knows how many books on and years of dreams about. Alive and in the flesh. “Sam and Dean Winchester...Well, nice to meet you.”

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