#the other one i would torment is obviously billy but i feel like he has a better sense of humor than owen

[ayesukkhapisit]

911: lone star, obviously

figured this would be the first one i was asked about sjskdkd

blorbo (favorite character, character I think about the most): this is actually hard because so many are my favs but i shall go with future detective carlos reyes

scrunkly (my “baby”, character that gives me cuteness aggression, character that is So Shaped): nancy <3, she is definitely my baby and deserves all the best things

scrimblo bimblo (underrated/underappreciated fave): FIREFIGHTER MATEO CHAVEZ

glup shitto (obscure fave, character that can appear in the background for 0.2 seconds and I won’t shut up about it for a week): they need to make lindsey a reoccurring character, absolutely love that kid

poor little meow meow (“problematic”/unpopular/controversial/otherwise pathetic fave): everyone can get off tk’s d*ck, he’s never done anything wrong ever

horse plinko (character I would torment for fun, for whatever reason): owen…he’d be fun to mess with and oh so easy

eeby deeby (character I would send to superhell): the captain of the 129 (i know his name he just doesn’t deserve for me to call him by it), he slightly redeemed himself for all of 2 seconds before ending right back on top of my shit list

send me a fandom

[myriadof-fandoms]

harringrove week - day 5 - am i walking towards something i should be running away from?

prompt:  A Seance at Hawkins Cemetery During a Red Moon

or: billy haunts steve and steve would very much like him to stop

ao3

Steve has really fucking had it with Billy Hargrove. Even in death the fucker won't leave him alone.

If it's not lights turning on and off, it's the dishes clashing in the kitchen or the stereo suddenly blasting metal.

When he comes home his things aren't where he left them. At work tapes move. The channel in the car changes whenever they play Madonna. His hair products keep running out even when he has just bought them.

Steve is so over it he could scream.

Or, well, he has. Multiple times. He's told Billy to go to hell a couple of times now - the only response he's gotten is Mötley Crüe's Shout At The Devil suddenly starting to play.

It appears that despite Billy's clear ability to fuck with things the one thing he cannot do is speak. And must that not drive him fucking nuts. Steve is only a little gleeful about the loudmouth not being able to annoy him like that at least.

If it weren't for the fact that he is still very much annoyed by everything else Billy does, and if he didn't care for Max a whole lot, he wouldn't fucking be here. Because it's fucking creepy and he's had his more than his fair share of that for the rest of this life and the next.

But no, sadly he is still annoyed and he does care for Max, so now he's stuck on the fucking cemetery while the moon glows fucking red and Eddie The Freak Munson is sitting in front of him with a goddamn Ouija board.

All because Billy had decided to haunt Steve and Max together in the car one day by playing goddamn Def Leppard, which at least confirmed Steve wasn't just going mental, and then Max had made him tell her all about his experience with Billy The Ghost. She was going through it as well, except apparently in death Billy has decided to be nicer to her and keeps helping her pass tests in school or tormenting his father whenever he raises his voice against Max.

After that conversation suddenly all of the kids knew. And of course Dustin and the other knobheads had to befriend The Freak. The Freak who for some reason knows a lot about Seances and talking to ghosts. Which was of course the only logical thing to be done.

Max had just had to look a little sad at the idea of not trying it. And Billy had started blasting I Want To Break Free and Steve actually felt bad for the guy for a minute there. So he agreed. (He regretted it when Billy wouldn’t stop turning the water cold while Steve was having a shower later.)

Obviously Robin had thought it was a great idea to try and talk to Steve's poltergeist when he complained to her about it. So at least he's not alone amongst the nutjobs. He's brought his very own best friend so at least he understands how one of the nutjobs around him works.

She sits beside him, basically vibrating with excitement. Max is on Steve’s other side, more subdued but he can feel her tension. She wants this to work. As does Billy, Steve’s sure. The fucker had once again played Billy’s Got A Gun over and over again while Steve drove around picking the kids up.

They met Munson at the cemetery. He had set the day, because a blood moon is apparently the best possible setup for a seance. He made them set up candles around Billy’s grave, a morbid task that Steve didn’t enjoy one bit. Will looked a bit spooked by it too.

Honestly, Steve doesn’t know why any of the kids are even here except for Max. Mike has been making stupid comments the entire time and has only further made this evening unbearable. As have Dustin and Lucas because they keep fighting about how the pentagram of candles is supposed to be set up. The only one who has been perfectly well behaved is Eleven and she seems to just be fascinated by Eddie’s tattoos so.

Robin and Steve are told to form a circle of salt around the set up of candles and after that annoying piece of work Munson tells them all to sit in a circle with the ouija board in the middle of them. There's a picture of Billy next to it, the one that they used at the pool, with his stupid crop top on. Something about the whole thing irritates Steve to no end.

"Right, so first we're going to have to call Billy here."

“Oh, no need, he’s here,” Steve informs him with only lightly disguised annoyance.

Munson arches one eyebrow, “And how do you know that?”

“Because he keeps breathing cold air down my neck.”

The kids have the audacity to snicker at that. Steve considers just going home. The little ungrateful shits can all walk.

"You sure that's not just the wind?" Munson dares to look at him like that's a valid question.

"Yes, I'm fucking sure, you ever feel a fucking breeze only touch your neck and literally move nothing else, Munson?" Steve doesn't hide his annoyance at all anymore. "He's here just get on with it."

"Right," Steve doesn't quite understand it but Munson looks amused now. "So technically we all have to place two fingers on the planchette-"

"The what?"

Again Munson throws him a look. This time like he's stupid.

"The planchette. The thing that Billy will move to communicate with us, Harrington."

Right. He could've figured that one out maybe.

"Anyway, we're too many so I suggest Red, King Steve and I actually touch the thing and everybody else forms a circle around us."

He rearranges their seating arrangement so that the tiny nerds and Robin sit between them and all hold onto each other's hands. Except the three of them that move their hands to the little triangle and are thus on one side only in the circle through a hand on their shoulder.

Munson looks almost giddy with excitement when he finally gets on with it, "Billy? Are you here?"

Steve should've gotten high to deal with this.

"Didn't you listen to me? I told you-"

The planchette moves.

YES

And right that was really creepy.

It also proved Steve's point which he would really like to point out but Max speaks before he can.

"Oh my god," Her voice is a little shaky but Steve can't blame her. Not when the small thing under their hands is still vibrating with energy. "Billy, are you okay?"

The planchette moves quickly over the board. Both Dustin and Lucas read the letters out loud over Max' shoulder

R U K I D D I N G

Typical. Steve voices his opinion of Billy's sass, "Well, then, at least we know it's actually the douchebag."

Despite the fact that Billy is being a primary example of a dickhead Max sniffles.

"I'm sorry, Billy. I didn't want you to-"

The planchette interrupts her. It drags their fingers to the stark NO before moving over the letters again.

N O T D E A D

"What-" Max's face is drawn together in confusion. "What do you mean?"

The planchette rips out from under their fingers and they all quickly pull them away from the board. It almost flies over the letters now.

W H A T I S A I D S H I T B I R D I A M N O T D E A D

The planchette stops. Steve wonders if all ghosts are this rude and stupid or if Billy is a special case.

"Eh, Hargrove, dude, I think all these people kind of saw you die? We're also literally sitting at your grave."

N O T G H O S T

"What do you mean? We don't understand," Max sounds so desperate it makes Steve want to have words with Hargrove again.

H A V E B O D Y C A N F E E L W R O N G P L A C E

"Wrong- wrong place?" Will speaks up surprisingly. "Describe it."

D A R K C O L D W R O N G

For a moment they stay silent. Munson in confusion and all of the others with the same thought.

Mike says it first, “The upside down?”

"Sure sounds like it," Lucas answers.

"If he's in the Upside Down we can get him out," Max says. "Right?"

The planchette moves again.

W H A T

Max almost absentmindedly answers, while looking between Eleven and Dustin waiting for a response to her own question, "We might be able to get you out of there."

"If we can open a gate, it should work," Dustin says hesitantly.

Now almost everyone is looking at El. Her powers have been wonky at best since Starcourt.

"I can try." Her voice doesn't waver but Steve picks up a slight hitch that used to not be there. It tears at him a little. El is too cute to go through shit that makes her question herself like this.

The tiny noise of the planchette attracts all of their attention again.

P L E A S E

For a heartbeat no one moves a muscle.

"That's gotta be a first, right?" Steve asks into the group, sarcasm heavy on his tongue.

S H U T I T

Steve bristles, "No! You shut it! You've been haunting me for weeks!"

M O S T E X C I T I N G T H I N G I N U R L I F E

"It's not! I'd fucking love to just be alone for five minutes without your annoying music working a hole in my head."

N O T H I N G T H E R E A N Y W A Y

"Oh, fuck off, Hargrove. If I'm that stupid why do you keep coming around?"

The planchette doesn't move.

Everyone is looking at him or at the little triangle.

"Hello? Hargrove? Cat got your tongue?"

Nothing happens.

"What the fuck?" Steve murmurs.

"I guess Hargrove left the seance," Munson laughs. And right, Munson is there. Steve had almost forgotten.

Steve can feel Robin's eyes on him and when he turns to her he's greeted by her smile that usually means I Know More Than You.

"He really likes to pull on your pigtails, huh?"

"I don't have- What?" Steve is convinced this is the weirdest night of his life.

No one answers him and yet Steve feels like everyone around him has somehow gotten an information he missed. Even Mike looks at him somewhat questioningly.

Steve is ready to call it a night and start collecting about 200 candles melting around them, since no one around him seems to deem it necessary to talk to him anyway, when Billy Hargrove decides to get in the last word.

G E T M E O U T P R E T T Y B O Y

[mittensmorgul]

So for the most part, I outright reject the finale. But I do think, in light of the whole "Jimmy was supposed to be in the bar, and Dean was disappointed by that because his perfect heaven would have Cas in it" just makes me all the more convinced that the final episode was some kind of djinn dream. Like.... There's no other explanation in my opinion. If Dean's perfect heaven was supposed to have Cas, and he tragically gets faked out by Jimmy (????? Why tf would jimmy be there anyway), it just proves that it's not ACTUALLY heaven. That, along with he El Sol beer he's drinking is all the evidence I need. I think after 15x19, Dean and Sam got whammied by some monster, and are stuck in a hallucination, and that's what we're seeing. (My headcanon is that it's actually The Empty doing it, because it knows if it doesn't keep Dean and Sam occupied and spinning in circles, they'll invade the Empty to save Cas. So its trying to prevent that) :)

Hello, anon friendo! I am gonna start by offering the socially distanced version of a high five, because yeah... There is just so much to unpack here, and you provided such a succinct and all-encompassing series of statements to start from. Thank you!

*flings open array of questionable suitcases*

First off, Congrats on having rejected the finale. I know a lot of folks are still struggling with that one, for many reasons. But you have hit upon so many of the points I’ve been trying to make about the finale since it aired. I’d just like to start with some of the assumptions I’ve heard from folks about the finale that make it impossible for me to consider it fully honestly canon. Because so much about it just makes no goshdang sense... like... not at all...

One of the biggest issues I have surrounding the reception of the finale in parts of fandom is that it portrayed a “happy ending.” The show itself spent the entire final season telling us that a gravestone marked Winchester was not and never would be a happy ending (thank you Becky Rosen-- words I never thought I’d say, but honestly and most sincerely meant). Let’s break this down a bit.

Starting from the assumption that “heaven was fixed” so that characters could have true free will there, making it satisfying in any way that Dean died so young and never got to truly experience happiness during life, I would like anyone who has adopted this attitude to then explain Kansas the band. I mean... explain that in any satisfactory canon-compliant way. (hint: you can’t. it makes zero sense in canon, if heaven is truly reformed and “happy” with everyone in possession of free will.)

Which brings me to Misha’s comments about Jimmy being in the Roadhouse. Why, if heaven were truly fixed, would Jimmy ever in a bazillion years attend a party for Dean Winchester? If Heaven were truly a “happy” ending for Dean, why introduce this element of eternal tragedy and heartbreak to his heaven experience? Why taunt him with the eternal loss of Cas-- even if you don’t think he reciprocated Cas’s romantic feelings, he was canonically the best friend Dean ever had, and being forced to exist forever in a place where he had everyone else he ever cared for except for Cas? Is frankly horrific.

How the actual fuck is that a happy ending, in any sense of the word?

How is this the sort of heaven that Dean would’ve made for himself before it was “fixed?” At least in the memorex heaven, he could’ve lived in oblivious peace with Cas, even if it was always just his own memories and not ~actually Cas~. I honestly think that would’ve been happier than the abject tragedy of what we did get, and what we would’ve gotten had the original script played out.

All of this kind of makes me wonder if they ever even actually defeated Chuck. Like... it feels more like Dean got pulled into the Empty at that moment with Cas and Billie, and everything else after that point was the Empty’s endless experience of sorrow and despair we knew it subject its charges to. So that’s one potential for what could’ve actually happened. I mean, everything about the finale was sorrow and despair, you know? Dean didn’t even get to enjoy his pie at a pie festival because Sam smashed in in his face. How is any of it happy, in any way?

Because if that was actually heaven, there wasn’t actually any free will (because why tf would Kansas the band have chosen to put on that concert? why tf would Jimmy have been there, just to torment Dean with the taunt of Cas returning to him only to have that hope snatched away again? It’s cruel. It’s, in fact, a source of intense despair).

The djinn theory could also work, and I’ve read some excellent fix-it fic using that as a premise. But that doesn’t really explain what happened to Jack (and Amara, since she was in there with them) after hoovering up Chuck’s power, you know? I think the simplest explanations in canon are that Chuck actually won via the unified power of Light and Dark being transferred into Jack and effectively using him as a vessel. With Sam and Dean convinced they’d won, they effectively stopped resisting Chuck’s story for them, and using Jack’s understanding of humanity and the Winchesters specifically, Chuck finally was able to implement a version of his story that the Winchesters would just waltz into without thinking it was supernaturally influenced at all. Going bigger and bigger with monsters and cosmic troubles hadn’t worked, but going so small Sam and Dean would barely even notice the influence-- even with the incongruous reappearance of a vampire that appeared in their lives once, for like two whole minutes 15 years ago, and an unsolved case from the journal from more than 30 years ago that John had never even linked to vampires at all.

At this point, I need to mention that I’m watching 10.23 as I type this up. An episode in which we confront the Mark, along with Death, and Dean’s despair, where he learns a version of the truth (but by no means the full truth, or even accurate truth in some respects) about Chuck’s Story, Amara/The Darkness, etc. That would unfold more fully over the next five seasons. And what was the case Dean took in this episode? Vampires. LOLOL omg this show is nothing if not horrifically consistent, yes?

So because of this, I went haring off through my own blog looking for a post I made a long time ago about the symbolism of how various monsters are used on this show (because again, consistency). I got sidetracked by other posts in my monsters tag, including this from after 15.09 aired, which feels particularly awfully relevant. This was my reaction to Chuck’s Story he showed Sam in that episode, about what the future would look like should he successfully trap Chuck with a Mark, and which... yeah is basically exactly thematically consistent with what we saw in the finale, right down to a cheesy twist on vampires. Read the whole post right here, but this is the part that reached up and punched me in the face:

this is how Dean personally reacts when he loses Cas. We know how he reacts when he loses anyone else– think about what he did when Charlie died. He went on a murder rampage against the Stynes for killing her. When Mary died he broke some furniture and went full bore toward both resurrecting her and stopping Jack. But without Cas, Dean loses the will to fight. Sam has… always been different. He referenced Jess in 15.04 to remind us of how he was after she died in the pilot episode. Just like John, he picked up the revenge mission and ran with it. But for Dean, Cas is different. Without Cas… Dean gives up.

Because... Dean gave up. Sure, he and Sam weren’t overrun by vampires in the end. Chuck knew they’d never stop fighting the monsters, one way or another. The only way to get Dean to give up is something Chuck hadn’t quite figured out yet... maybe not until after 15.17, after confronting Cas in the hallway of the bunker, after absorbing Amara’s power, knowledge, and perspective on Dean.

Chuck needed Dean to give up, and honestly? Pushing Billie to clear him off the table and send him (and Cas, that pesky angel who never did what he was told) to the Empty would’ve been a direct way to deal with that... pretty much akin to having one sibling locked in a cage forever, yes?

Also, still looking through my monsters tag, I’m reminded of 14.15, and still cannot differentiate the version of Heaven in 15.20 from what was done to the people of that town. This... is not... paradise. This is actively what Dean has been insisting is the OPPOSITE of paradise since like… 4.22… No ending where Dean was a “Stepford bitch in paradise” ever had the possibility of being “happy,” at the core of things, and this “fixed” version of Heaven just doesn’t hold up to any degree of inspection. Something is seriously wrong here. https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/183465650390/so-can-we-talk-about-this-monster-of-the-week-for

And since I was unable to find the post I wrote who knows how long ago about Monsters and how they’re symbolically used on Supernatural to represent larger themes in the episode, I’ll just attempt to sum up what Vampires have been used for. Revenge. Vampires are always, in some way connected to themes of revenge.

(and hooray, I found at least a post adjacent to the one I’ve spent the last four hours trying to find... https://mittensmorgul.tumblr.com/post/187207052080/i-obviously-did-not-think-this-through, where I mention that shapeshifters are about revealing hidden truths (mostly about Dean since most shapeshifters are connected to Dean), zombies are about grief and the inability to move past it.)

So why... why at the end of their road is the monster that comes after them-- literally FOR REVENGE for something that had never been blamed on Sam or Dean to begin with, from season 1, directly connected to John’s revenge mission and the first time they learned about the Colt AND the first time they learned in canon that Vampires were even real... like... this feels very specifically like some kind of layers-of-meta levels of shade on them, you know? Vampires are for revenge, so what vengeance exactly is being visited upon Sam and Dean in this episode? If not Chuck’s entire story for them itself?

So yeah, 100% agree, something is incredibly rotten in the finale. And I am sick to effing death of people trying to convince us that anything about this was “good” or “happy” or “satisfying” in any way. Or even “how it was always supposed to end” with Dean dead bloody, as if the entire back half of the series hadn’t been suggesting that a true win was the subversion of all of Chuck’s story for them, and Dean finally being able to have his chosen family all alive, happy, and chilling on a beach somewhere watching the sunset. Nothing will ever convince me that the ending portrayed in 15.20 wasn’t exactly how Chuck thought he “won,” rendering it entirely irrelevant to the rest of canon, unless all of canon was ultimately the tragedy we’d been encouraged to believe would be firmly defeated in the end.

Folks, you can’t have it both ways. 

[toscrollperchancetomeme]

Lestat de Lioncourt - A playlist

So, guess who made a Lestat Playlist (like there aren't enough already) and decided to sit down for 4-6 hours to find some excerpt corresponding with each song? Featuring 80s and 90s music (clearly showing my age...) as well as many european songs and showtunes. Enjoy!

1. Cathedrals – Ramin Karimloo (Original by Jump, Little Children)

In the cathedrals of New York and Rome There is a feeling that you should just go home And spend the lifetime finding out just where that is

And that was not a good year for me. I was wandering aimlessly. I was sick of things. I was furious with myself that the „beauty“ of life wasn't sustaining me, wasn't making my loneliness bearable.

I wanted to join them. Always do want to join them and never do. „Go home,“ he whispered. - Prince Lestat

(I actually feel like there are quotes that would correspond to this song in every one of the books and indeed have not yet found any other song that captures the general spirit of The Vampire Chronicles as perfectly.)

2. Edge of Seventeen – Stevie Nicks

Well, I went today Maybe I will go again tomorrow Yeah yeah, well, the music there Well, it was hauntingly familiar Well, I see you doing what I try to do for me With the words from a poet and a voice from a choir And a melody, and nothing else mattered

He sat next to me, hugging me and asking me why I was crying, and though I couldn't tell him, I could see that he was overwhelmed that his music had produced this effect. There was no sarcasm or bitterness in him now. I think he carried me home that night. And the next morning I was standing in the crooked stone street in front of his father's shop, tossing pebbles up at his window. When he stuck his head out, I said: „Do you want to come down and go on with our conversation?“ - The Vampire Lestat

3. I ain't scared of lightning – Tom McRae

No I ain't scared of lightning And thunder never killed I was born in a summer storm and I live there still

I wasn't part of the world that cringed at such things. And with a smile, I realized that I was of that dark ilk that makes others cringe. Slowly and with great pleasure, I laughed.

And the labor that brought it forth was rapture such as I have never known. - The Vampire Lestat

4. Junge Roemer – Falco (Young Romans – Full Translation)

Don't ask for new old values See white light, see only feeling The night is ours till morning We play every game Don't ever let this journey end The doing comes only from the being Only from dimensions, that Are worth illusions and sensations Give me more, give me more, give me more...

... and again she laughed. „Ah, but we are splendid devils, aren't we?“ „Hunters of the Savage Garden,“ I said. „Then let's go into Paris,“ she said. - The Vampire Lestat

5. Running up that hill – Candy Says (Original by Kate Bush

If I only could, I'd make a deal with God, And I'd get him to swap our places, Be running up that road, Be running up that hill, Be running up that building,

„Not even with Nicolas?“ „No, god, no!“ I looked at her. She nodded slightly as if she approved of this answer. „Why not with Nicolas?“ she asked. I wanted this to stop. „Because he's young,“ I said, „and he has life before him.“ - The Vampire Lestat

6. Florence – Notre Dame de Paris (Full Translation)

The little things always triumph over the large And literature will kill architecture The school books will kill the cathedrals The Bible will kill the Church, and man will kill God This will kill that

„I never lived in it. I push against the glass. But how do I get in?“ „I can't tell you that,“ I said. „You have to study this age,“ Gabrielle interrupted. Her voice was calm but commanding. He looked towards her as she spoke. „You have to understand the age,“ she continued, „through its literature and its music and its art. You have come up out of the earth, as you yourself put it. Now live in the world.“ No answer from him. Flash of Nicki's ravaged flat with all its books on the floor. Western civilization in heaps. - The Vampire Lestat

7. Go your own way – Fleetwood Mac

Loving you isn't the right thing to do How can I ever change things that I feel

If I could maybe I'd give you my world How can I when you won't take it from me

You can go your own way You can call it another lonely day

„Keep your promise,“ she said. And quite suddenly I knew this was our last moment. I knew it and I could do nothing to change it. „Gabrielle!“ I whispered. But she was already gone. - The Vampire Lestat

8. Désenchantée – Olympe (Original by Myléne Farmer - Full Translation)

If death is a mystery Life isn't exactly tender If heaven has a hell Then heaven can still wait for me Tell me how to handle this headwind Nothing makes sense anymore, nothing's fine

Laughter. That insane music. That din, that dissonance, that never ending shrill articulation of the meaninglessness... Am I awake? Am I asleep? I am sure of one thing. I am a monster. And because I lie in torment in the earth, certain human beings move on through the narrow pass of life unmolested. - The Vampire Lestat

9. A kind of magic – Queen

The bell that rings inside your mind Is challenging the doors of time It's a kind of magic The waiting seems eternity The day will dawn of sanity

And quite completely I understood that it was looking for me, this sound, it was seeking me out.

Blood like light itself, liquid fire.

It seemed beneath the roar of the flow he spoke. He said again: „Drink, my young one, my wounded one.“ I felt his heart swell, his body undulate, and we were sealed against each other. I think I heard myself say: „Marius.“ And he answered: „Yes.“ - The Vampire Lestat

10. La quête – Bruno Pelletier (French version of „The Impossible Dream“ from Man of La Mancha)

To try when your arms are too weary To reach the unreachable star

This is my quest To follow that star Ooh, no matter how hopeless No matter how far

I would remain in New Orleans if New Orleans could only manage to remain. Whatever I suffered should be lessened in this lawless place, whatever I craved should give me more pleasure once I had it in my grasp. And there were moments on that first night in this fetid little paradise when I prayed that in spite of all my secret power, I was somehow kin to every mortal man. - The Vampire Lestat

11. Wicked Game – Chris Isaak

What a wicked game you play, to make me feel this way What a wicked thing to do, to let me dream of you What a wicked thing to say, you never felt this way What a wicked thing to do, to make me dream of you

Yet Louis gained a hold over me far more powerful than Nicolas had ever had. Even in his cruelest moments, Louis touched the tenderness in me, seducing me with his staggering dependence, his infatuation with my every gesture and every spoken word. - The Vampire Lestat

12. Do I disappoint you – Rufus Wainwright

Do I disappoint you, in just being human? And not one of the elements that you can light your cigar on Why does it always have to be fire? Why does it always have to be brimstone?

„And suppose the vampire who made you knew nothing, and the vampire before him knew nothing, and so it goes back and back, nothing proceeding from nothing, until there is nothing! And we must live with the knowledge that there is no knowledge!“ „Yes!“ he cried out suddenly, his hands out, his voice tinged with something other than anger.

And then I sensed it. He was afraid. Lestat afraid. - Interview with the Vampire

13. Ordinary World – Duran Duran

What has happened to it all? Crazy, some'd say Where is the life that I recognize? Gone away

But I won't cry for yesterday There's an ordinary world Somehow I have to find And as I try to make my way To the ordinary world I will learn to survive

I do not remember when it became the twentieth century, only that everything was uglier and darker, and the beauty I'd known in the old eighteenth-century days seemed more than ever some kind of fanciful idea. - The Vampire Lestat

14. I'm still standing – Taron Egerton (Original by Elton John)

And there's a cold lonely light that shines from you You'll wind up like the wreck you hide behind that mask you use And did you think this fool could never win? Well look at me, I'm coming back again

But after the third night up, I was roaring around New Orleans on a big black Harley-Davidson motorcycle making plenty of noise myself. […] I was the vampire Lestat again. I was back in action. New Orleans was once again my hunting ground. - The Vampire Lestat

15. Catch my fall – Billy Idol

I have the time so I will sing, yeah I'm just a boy but I will win, yeah Lost song of lovers, fellow travelers, yeah Leave me sad and hollow out of words

It could happen to you so think for yourself If I should stumble, catch my fall, yeah

I've survived, obviously. I wouldn't be talking to you if I hadn't. And the cosmic dust has finally settled; and the small rift in the world's fabric of rational beliefs has been mended, or at least closed. I'm a little sadder for all of it, and a little meaner and a little more conscientious as well. - The Queen of the Damned

16. I want it all – Queen

I'm a man with a one track mind So much to do in one lifetime (people do you hear me) Not a man for compromise and where's and why's and living lies So I'm living it all, yes I'm living it all And I'm giving it all, and I'm giving it all

It is not enough any longer that my little rock band be successful. We must create a fame that will carry my name and my voice to the remotest parts of the world. - The Vampire Lestat

17. Let me entertain you – Robbie Williams

Hell is gone and heaven's here There's nothing left for you to fear Shake your arse come over here Now scream

I'm a burning effigy Of everything I used to be You're my rock of empathy, my dear

So come on let me entertain you

"I AM THE VAMPIRE LESTAT!" I shouted at the top of my lungs as I stepped way back from the microphone, and the sound was almost visible as it arched over the length of the oval theater, and the voice of the crowd rose even higher, louder, as if to devour the ringing sound. - The Vampire Lestat

18. La bien qui fait mal – Mozart l'Opera Rock (Full translation)

I can feel a violent urge I feel like I'm sliding towards the ground If I don't find out where this plague is coming from I adore having it under my skin Bewitched by mad ideas Suddenly all my cravings take off The desire becomes my prison Until I loose my mind

Yet I was in her arms in this chilling darkness, in the familiar scent of winter, and her blood was mine again, and it was enslaving me. When she drew away, I felt agony. - The Queen of the Damned

19. Tainted Love – Soft Cell

And you think love is to pray But I'm sorry I don't pray that way Once I ran to you Now I'll run from you This tainted love you've given I give you all a boy could give you Take my tears and that's not living, oh

„What do you think I am that I am so easily swayed? I was born a Queen. I have always ruled; even from the shrine I ruled." Her eyes were glazed suddenly. I heard the voices, a dull hum rising. "I ruled if only in legend; if only in the minds of those who came to me and paid me tribute. Princes who played music for me; who brought me offerings and prayers. What do you want of me now? That for you, I renounce my throne, my destiny!" What answer could I make? - The Queen of the Damned

20. Dancing in the Dark – Ruth Moody (Original by Bruce Springsteen)

They say you gotta stay hungry Hey baby, I'm just about starvin' tonight I'm dyin' for some action I'm sick of sittin' 'round here tryin' to write this book I need a love reaction Come on now, baby, gimme just one look

"I want you to put the book aside and come join us," he said. "You've been locked in here for over a month." "I go out now and then," I said. I liked looking at him, at the neon blue of his eyes.

"Do you love me now?" I asked. He smiled; oh, it was excruciating to see his face soften and brighten simultaneously when he smiled. "Yes," he said. "Want to go on a little adventure?" My heart was thudding suddenly. It would be so grand if- "Want to break the new rules?" "What in the world do you mean?" he whispered. - The Queen of the Damned

21. I want you – Savage Garden

Oh, I want you, I don't know if I need you But oh, I would die to find out

"You don't think you'll be back?" he asked. "I think you will, whether I call or not." Another little surprise. A little stab of humiliation. I smiled at him in spite of myself. He was a very interesting man. "You silver-tongued British bastard," I said. "How dare you say that to me with such condescension? Maybe I should kill you right now."

I thought of David Talbot's face, and that moment when he'd challenged me. Well, maybe he was right. I'd be back. Who said I couldn't come back and talk to him if I wanted to? - The Queen of the Damned

22. Lay your hands on me – Bon Jovi

I'm a fighter, I'm a poet, I'm a preacher I've been to school, oh baby, I've been the teacher If you show me how to get up off the ground I can show you how to fly and never ever come back down

I sat down on the bed beside him. And then I bent down and kissed his face again gently, as I had in New Orleans, liking the feel of his roughly shaven beard, just as I liked that sort of thing when I was really Lestat and I would soon have that strong masculine blood inside. I moved closer to him, when suddenly he grasped my hand, and I felt him gently push me away. „Why, David?“ I asked him. He didn't answer. He lifted his right hand and brushed my hair back out of my eyes. „I don't know,“ he whispered. „I can't. I simply can't.“ - The Tale of the Body Thief

23. 20th Century Boy – Placebo (Original by T-Rex)

I move like a cat, charge like a ram Sting like a bee, babe, I wanna be your man, hey!

He drew back with a speed that astonished me, cleaving to the wall. „Don't do this, Lestat.“ „Don't fight me, old friend. You waste your effort. You have a long night of discovery ahead.“ - The Tale of the Body Thief

24. Way down we go – KALEO

Oh, Father tell me, do we get what we deserve? Whoa, we get what we deserve And way down we go

„In chains, to my friend and my scribe, I dictated these words. Come with me. Just listen to me. Don't leave me alone.“ - Memnoch the Devil

25. Personal Jesus – Depeche Mode

Reach out, touch faith

"Don't tell me," Gabrielle said slurringly, "that it's a matter of faith." She sneered and shook her head. "You come like doubting Thomas to thrust your bloody fangs in the very wound." "Oh, stop, please, I beg you," I whispered. I put up my hands. "Let me try, and let him hurt me, and then be satisfied, and turn away." - The Vampire Armand

26. Papillon – Editors

Darling Just don't put down your guns yet If there really was a God here He'd have raised a hand by now Now darling You're born, get old, then die here Well that's quite enough for me We'll find our own way home somehow

"And if I spill my blood down into this coffin now," Lestat asked her, "what do you think will come back? Do you think it will be our Louis that will rise in these burnt rags? What if it's not, chérie, what if it's some wounded revenant that we must destroy?" "Choose life, Lestat," she said. - Merrick

27. Sunday Light – Choir Boy

Why, why, why, are you silent on the ride home? I'd love to see the temple with you Heavenly and bright, golden angel twisted scathing You were one of us, one of us, one of us, you were one of us

"Then come, Little Brother, take me to where you want to talk," he said, and I felt the soft squeeze of his fingers on my arm. "Why are you so kind to me?" I asked him. "You're used to people being paid to do it, aren't you?" he asked. - Blackwood Farm

28. Für mich solls rote Rosen regnen – Hildegard Knef (It should rain red roses for me - Full translation)

It should rain red roses for me All wonders should encounter me The world should rearrange itself And keep its worries to itself

I want to be a saint. I want to save souls by the millions. I want to do good far and wide. I want to fight evil! I want my life-sized statue in every church. I'm talking six feet tall, blond hair, blue eyes- Wait a second. Do you know who I am? - Blood Canticle

29. Constant Craving – K. D. Lang

Even through the darkest phase Be it thick or thin Always someone marches brave Here beneath my skin And constant craving Has always been

I was hunting, thirsting though I didn't need to drink, at the mercy of the craving, the deep agonizing lust for heated pumping human blood. - Prince Lestat

30. Kalte Sterne – Jan Ammann (Cold Stars from the musical Ludwig² - Full translation)

Get up, ride home, on your horse, through your land Across the morning with your reins trailing behind you Build a castle like a dream, build it with mighty hands And it shall be named „future“

Build a castle like a dream Up from the ashes and close to the heavens Build a castle like a dream And realise the future as king

If we wanted to survive, if we wanted to inherit the millenia […] then we had to meet the future with respect as well as courage and count fear and selfishness to be small things. - Prince Lestat and the realms of Atlantis

31. C'est une belle journée – Mylene Farmer (Full translation)

I'm going to bed To bite eternity With my mouth wide open It's a beautiful day

And I felt the cold numbing shell of alienation and despair which had imprisoned me all of my life among the Undead – I felt that shell cracked, broken, and dissolved utterly into infinitesimal fragments. - Blood Communion

32. Princes of the Universe – Queen

Fly the moon and reach for the stars With my sword and head held high Got to pass the test first time, yeah I know that people talk about me, I hear it every day But I can prove them wrong 'cause I'm right first time

„I know that you meant full well to bring Rhoshamandes down, of course you did. But you had no way of knowing that you could. And no one would have predicted that you could. And with the willingness to die, you gave yourself over into his hands... and you disarmed him and destroyed him.“ – Blood Communion

And finally, because I can, a bonus track:

33. Primadonna – MARINA

And I'm sad to the core, core, core Every day is a chore, chore, chore When you give, I want more, more, more I wanna be adored

[katsidhe]

15.17 Final Thoughts (1/2)

.....part one, because I realized I wanted to talk about basically every goddamn scene. I’m dividing this roughly based on Dean-centric and Not Dean-centric thoughts. 

Who is the villain? Fighting against narrative-fate and fighting against order-fate are two similar but subtly and crucially different ideas. Chuck-as-narrative is contrary to the idea of endings in a way that Billie-as-order is not. Both agents of some definition of fate, but Chuck is a force in fundamental opposition to decay. He drags things out, he reassembles his favorite pieces over and over. Death, inasmuch as she is an agent of order, is entropic. Part of order is the chaos of natural unspooling, the inevitable unwinding of a clock.

And there was something fascinating in how s14 laid these pieces out: narrative resurrections as the villain, the peace of natural endings as the goal. To defy the God that kept Sam and Dean living past their natural years is to embrace Death. This episode pulled something like a philosophical reversal in setting up Death—and therefore both types of fate—as something which must still be defied, and I am confused and interested. Essentially, what I viewed in some ways as the fundamental meta-narrative question of s15—coming to terms with an ending when that ending has been delayed at all costs for years and years—is being fought and naysayed by Sam, of all people. I’m still noodling on this one, and I might have more to say later.

What does this even mean, to defy Death? Sam’s (weak, tbh) justification of why Billie as Supreme Ruler would be a bad thing is that her power would specifically undo certain wrinkles in the cosmic order that he and Dean have been party to. But which? How far back would this go? What kind of magics would be undone, would we have, like, a hard reset to season 2? Because that would be Bad for sure. But if Billie would simply be sending a handful of people off to overdue ends, and ensure no more demon/angel shenanigans, I don’t really see the problem with handing her the keys to the kingdom. I guess Sam’s point is that we don’t know, Billie has obviously been less than forthright, and we probably should take a second to think about who we’re giving absolute power to, and why, but. Idk.

[To be involved in the underpinnings of fate is to have some of those powers… can we discuss the Winchesters’ complicity in determining how the universe is structured?]

Part of this also feels like it slots into how Sam has moved on from the concept of martyrdom as a panacea to apocalyptic ills. He and Dean have both tried it over and over, and even when it’s accomplished something good for awhile the universe inevitably unspools further. His frustration with Jack’s willingness to sacrifice himself here reeks with the same frustration Sam had with Dean in 14.12, carrying his  coffin behind the car.

To what extent is Chuck lying about his control over the meta narrative? I’d say, a fair amount. His frustration has, in this season and in this episode, seemed very private and genuine. I think he’s adjusting most of this on the fly.

Jack successfully wins Adam’s rib by identifying that the divine is nested in every rock. Does this make anyone else uneasy at the idea of the plan to obliterate anything divine with a black hole spell? Just me?

Sam infiltrated the library of Death herself, got ambushed unexpectedly by a hostile cosmic power, and quickly discerned its  motives and knowledge while being tortured. And then he pulled the SMOOTHEST LIE of this entire damn show right out of his ass. Sam, we aren’t worthy of you.

Cas’s one contribution this episode was to compliment Sam for looking for a different solution. (I did the same thing, Cas, so I think this makes me as important as you.) But significantly, Cas does this specifically by affirming 1) Sam’s moral compass and 2) Sam’s sanity, and this is a big thing, because those two points are the accusations that Dean (and others) most frequently uses to tell Sam he’s in the wrong.

Something Cas does NOT do is intervene when Dean points a gun at Sam, even though guns don’t hurt him. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  This could be viewed as a mere issue of staging, but I prefer to slot it into the pattern of Cas finding it difficult to stand up directly to Dean in late seasons.

Jack quietly asks Sam if he’s angry or disappointed. He doesn’t bother asking Dean; he knows. Sam, with candor that Jack utterly deserves from him, tells Jack that he is impressed by Jack’s courage but that he thinks this plan is wrong. Sam doesn’t push harder than this, and he doesn’t say anything to Jack when Jack overhears Dean’s outburst: he just smiles this awful, awkward little smile, the plaster over the ways their relationship has been crumbling and unsteady with the weight of everything that has gone unsaid since 13.23. Jack understands where Sam stands so much less than he understands Dean.

Jack’s got this horrible, twisted air of maturity and gravitas this episode, as he goes to his unnecessary death. He is thoughtful and solemn; he insists he understands and accepts Dean’s condemnation. He is more placid than he was in 14.20, and even more cooperative, because he feels that he’s chosen this path for himself. I found myself comparing his attitude with Sam’s in 5.22: it’s very “I’m the least of any of you”, even though it’s tempered by Jack’s relative fearlessness (he’s going to oblivion, not torment). He’s likewise doing this out of guilt as much or more than necessity, and in service to a larger picture he doesn’t understand.

I really, really want Amara and Jack to bond over their shared status of Superpowerful Cosmic Beings Who Deserve Better.  

Amara wanted nothing more than to believe the best of Dean, and then of Chuck. When Chuck offers her equality and love and partnership, she weeps with how much she wants to believe him. Amara’s acceptance of Chuck, and Sam’s acceptance of Dean are both chilling versions of “unity”, when they have both spent so long sidelined and subordinated by their brothers.

We are in endgame, and this is the first episode that made me feel it. I’m gonna write more about this in Part Dos, but this episode felt like a SPN thesis.  

part two, dean boogaloo, coming tomorrow

[marvelslut16]

A helping hand

Pairing: Billy Hargrove x reader

Synopsis:(Y/N)’s younger sister is part of the party. so what happens when she witness’s Billy getting hit when she goes to pick Max up and then when he arrives bloody and bruised on her doorstep two days later? Will she help him and let him in on her life before Hawkins, or will her hatred for him make her turn him away? Takes place between seasons 2 and 3.

Word count: 2602

Warnings: First (and possibly only) time writing for Billy, so he’s pretty OOC. Swearing. Abuse. Neil being the grade a asshole that he is. Talk of domestic violence. Angst?

“Stay in the car, I’ll be back in a minute,” you turn around to face your little sister, Carol, who’s sitting in the back seat flipping through the pages of her seventeen magazine.

“Okay,” she glances up at you. “We’re supposed to be at the arcade in ten minutes, we can’t be late.”

She’s frantic that she’ll be late and upset Dustin. “Ah, young love,” you tease her as you step out of the car, catching the last seconds of her sticking her tongue out. Carol and Dustin had been friends their entire life, and she’s been in love with him for almost as long. 

You make your way to the front door of the Hargrove house, you’re here to pick up Max and drop the two off at the arcade to meet up with the rest of the party. It was a cold and snowy January in Hawkins, so the kids obviously couldn’t ride their bikes or skateboards. As you get closer to the door, you swear you can hear the hushed tone of someone yelling at their kids. You ignore the uneasy feeling rising in your stomach and knock on the door. 

Susan Hargrove answers the door with a fake smile plastered on her face. You’re about to greet her when you hear shouting coming from down the hall. “You’re just a worthless fucking faggot Billy,” you hear a male voice bellow, you make eye contact with Max over her mothers shoulder. She looks embarrassed, which makes a deep frown appear on your face. This must be normal. “You’re too busy staring at yourself in the mirror that you can’t drive your sister to the arcade, you make some girl come out of her way to get Maxine.” Billy and his father are now in your line of sight, but blocked from your sister's view because of your frame.

Before you can assure them that it’s no problem and that it was actually on the way Billy mumbles, “she’s not my sister.”

“We’ve already talked about this,” his father seethes. “You need to learn respect and responsibility.” As the last word leaves his lips the sound of flesh on flesh resonates in the air. 

It takes you half a second to realize that Neil’s hand is in the air and Billy’s face is turned away from the door. The smack happened so fast that you almost missed it. A small gasp leaves your lips, reminding everyone that you just witnessed their dark secrets. Billy’s blue eyes snap to yours as they seem to glow in rage, but towards you and not his father. There’s also a sadness deep within those angry eyes, a sadness that only someone who can relate can see. 

Max is frantically pulling on her red winter coat, trying to get out of the house as fast as humanly possible. 

“I’ll have Max home by eight,” you give Susan a sad smile. “I have to go shopping, but then I’ll be at the arcade with the kids for the rest of the time. And really, it was no bother picking her up, Max and Carol get along great.”

“Bye mom,” Max mumbles as she pushes her way out the door and towards your car. Susan gives you one last sad smile, and your eye’s briefly flick to Billy who looks like he’s about to break something, before the front door closes. 

As you walk away you can hear Neil’s voice pick back up, there’s a part of you that wants to cry for the poor broken boy on the other side of that door. But it’s Billy, the bully, the new king of Hawkins High. The Billy that goes around tormenting Steve, and the one that makes fun of the nerdy kids. No, you wouldn’t cry for him. He’s just as bad as his father. 

Max and Carol talk and laugh the entire way to the arcade. Max pretending nothing happened, and Carol none the wiser to what goes on in the Hargrove house. Carol is impatient and practically jumps out to the car before it stops moving, five minutes late from when she promised Dustin she would be here. Max is slower, almost like she’s at war with herself on whether to say anything or not.

“Max,” you say as she slides a foot out the door. “If it’s ever too much and you need somewhere to stay for a night, our door is always open. No questions asked and no one has to know.”

“Thanks,” she says quietly before following your sister into the arcade.

When you drop Max off later that night Billy’s Camaro is nowhere to be seen.

--

At school the next morning you feel a tight grip around your wrist as you’re walking down the hall to first period. Before you can properly react you’re spun around and engulfed in the strong scent of cologne and cigarette smoke. You’re once again greeted by Billy’s angry blue eyes as he pulls you into a secluded corner. 

“Let go of me,” you glare at him, yanking your wrist away from him. Taking a few steps back, wanting as much space between you and him as you could get. Billy looked angry, and you sure as hell didn’t want to be on the receiving side of that anger. 

“I don’t want your pity and you best not say anything to anyone about what you saw yesterday (Y/L/N),” Billy threatens. Even though it’s the middle of January Billy still only has half of his shirt buttoned. His chest muscles visibly flexing with his erratic angry breathing. 

“Why the hell would I say anything? Just so you can deny it before beating me to a pulp like you did to Steve? I’ll pass,” your eyes narrow at the bad boy. “And I sure as hell don’t fucking pity you. Yeah, you’re life sucks, Neil sucks. But you choose to be just like him. Abused or not, that’s no excuse to become the bully Hargrove. A bad life doesn’t give you the excuse to be a shit person. And you could try to be nicer to Max, while she may not be the one getting hit, living in a toxic home is just as terrible.”

Billy takes a step back, like you’ve burned him. His face holds a faint trace of sorrow, good. Maybe he’ll be knocked down a peg or two. Out of the corner of your eye you see Steve shoot you a weird look as his eyes land on you and his enemy. 

“Harrington,” you call as Steve walks passed you and Billy. He stops and turns around, raising an eyebrow when his eyes flick to your company. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Studying for our calculus test,” he watches you intently as you step closer to him, still wondering why you were with Billy. 

“The kids are coming over to watch the new Indiana Jones, do you want to join us? We can study after the movie, I love Harrison Ford too much to actually miss the movie,” you laugh softly. “Plus my parents left this morning, so I’m babysitting seven hormonal middle schoolers alone, please save me.”

“You’ll be fine,” Steve laughs at your over dramatic attitude. 

“Half of them are dating each other, and then my sisters crush on Dustin, I can’t handle all that drama on my own,” you whine as you start to walk down the hall. “Plus it's free pizza, popcorn, and all the ice cream you can eat. And a new episode of Saturday Night Live when the kids fall asleep” You bat your eyelashes at your friend and co parent to the party. 

“Fine,” he sighs reluctantly. “But Hargrove better not be there.”

 “Like he’d ever show up,” you laugh as you run down the hall as the warning bell sounds. 

--

Before you know it, it’s Saturday afternoon and you’re surrounded by kids. Susan dropped Max off first, and the poor woman couldn’t look you in the eyes. And that fact that Billy, who according to Max always takes her places, wasn’t the one dropping her off made you slightly worried. 

You’re about twenty minutes into the movie and throwing popcorn at Steve when there’s a hesitant and irregular pounding on your front door. “Stay here,” you tell the kids. Steve follows a few steps behind you.

 You’re greeted by Billy’s bruised face when you open the door. He has a bruised and swollen eye that pairs with his split lip. Dried blood on his chin and drops on his white shirt. 

“Oh my God, Billy,” you breathe. Your body works without your brains help, and you gently grab his wrist and pull him into your house. 

“I know you said the door was always open for Max,” his voice hoarse, almost like he was in a screaming match earlier. His right arm wrapped tightly around his torso. “Do ya think you can make an exception for me?” Max joins the three teens when she hears Billy’s voice, her face falls slightly at the sight of his condition. 

“Steve, Max, why don’t you guys go back to the movie. Billy, let’s go get you cleaned up,” you grab his hand and gently pull him towards the stairs. Steve goes to protest, but Max pulls him away with her. 

“What happened?” you ask after you shut the bedroom door behind you, running to the bathroom to get a wet washcloth. Billy remains silent as he watches your concentration face as you lightly dab at his split lip.

“I was working out too loudly, then I accidently spilled his beer,” Billy won’t look you in the eyes. 

“We graduate in a few months and then you’ll be free,” you interject optimistically. 

“You know I’ll never change, right?” Billy says as he thinks back to what you said to him school.

“I think you can,” you sigh, grabbing some aspirin. “You just choose not to.”

“What do you know?” he snaps, blue eyes murderous. 

“More than you would think,” you deadpan, lifting his shirt to rest under his pecs. Boy was it hard not to just rip it off completely. 

“If you wanted me shirtless you just had to ask sweetheart,” Billy winks and seductively licks his lips. You inhale sharply, trying to ignore the rush of heat you feel throughout your body. Sure he’s hot, bet he’s a manwhore and an asshole. Don’t fall for it. Instead of verbally responding, you push on his ribs without warning and it’s his turn to inhale. “Shit!”

“They don’t feel broken or fractured,” you stare at the splotchy blue and purple bruises forming over his rib cage. 

“How would you know?” he asks through clenched teeth. 

“I have years of practice,” you hand him the aspirin and wait to talk until he swallowed the tablets. Were you really going to tell him this? “My dad, my birth one, used to toss me around like a rag doll. Carol got lucky, he liked her so he would never hurt her. But when he was mad at something she did he would just take it out on me twice as hard. I had to clean myself up when my mom would shut down, and I’d have to fight through the pain to check to see if anything was broken. One night it was so bad that I was unconscious on our kitchen floor when my mom and Carol got home. That’s the day my mom decided to leave him.”

“How old were you?” Billy’s face a mix of sadness and anger. 

“Younger than Carol and Max. We moved around a bit before finally landing in Hawkins,” you’re afraid to look in Billy’s eyes. Afraid to find that pity he didn’t want to be on the receiving end of. “I know you have a distaste for the town, I did too when I moved here my freshman year, but it’s the first place we stayed. It’s where my mom met my amazing stepdad, it’s home to some of us.”

“That’s why you offered Max a place to stay when it gets bad,” his voice softens as he stares at the side of your face.

“I had nowhere to go. Carol had nowhere to go,” you sigh. “I couldn’t let Max suffer through the same life we did.”

“I didn’t know,” he reaches forward and rest his fingers on top of yours. 

“No one did, you’re the only one,” you pull your fingers away from his to wipe a single tear away. “Carol doesn’t even know, the doctors say she’s blocking out the memories, that it was so painful her brain refuses to remember it.”

“I want to be better,” he refuses to look you in the eye, opting to pick at the corner of your comforter instead. 

“And you can be, one step at a time Billy,” you gently place your hand on his shoulder He finally looks up at you, eyes glistening with unshed tears. “It’s why I said you could change, be better. I’m nothing like my father, and I know you're strong enough to be better than yours.”

“Will you help me?” he sounds so vulnerable and defeated. So broken.

“Of course, as long as you’re actually trying.”

Thank you,” he lays down on your bed, pulling the sheets up over him.

“Do you like Saturday Night Live?” you ask as you walk to your door,

“I love it,” he gives you a lopsided smile you’ve never seen before. 

“Cool. Get some sleep, and you can join Steve and me when it’s on tonight.”

“Anything for you sweetheart,” he shoots you a lazy wink. 

“And Billy? You owe me big time,” you put on a fake scowl as you look into Billy’s tired blue eyes. “You made me miss shirtless Harrison Ford.”

He scoffs and rolls his eyes, but doesn’t say anything. He’s too caught up in the way the bed smells like your floral perfume, and the strawberry shampoo that you use. He takes a deep breath, deeply inhaling your scent, trying to memorize it. To memorize the smell of safety and home. His eyelids grow heavy and he drifts off to sleep, wondering what changing would mean for the two of you.

“Where is he?” Steve immediately jumps up from the couch when you walk back into the living room.

“Upstairs sleeping off some pain meds,” you send hi a warning look. “Now how much did I miss?”

“Harrison is making out with the blonde chick,” Lucas says through a mouthful of popcorn.

“Well that narrows it down,” you laugh lightly. 

“They’re giving the stone back to the village,” Carol adds. You let out a long sigh as you realize you missed almost the entire movie. You give Max a small smile, hoping that it conveys to her that Billy is alright. 

“When’s Hargrove leaving?” Steve asks annoyed. 

“He’s actually gonna watch SNL with us tonight,” you meet Steve’s angry eyes. “He promised to help make french toast in the morning.” That may have been a lie, but Steve doesn't need to know that. But something tells you that you’ll be able to convince him to help. 

“So when are we gonna order pizza?” Carol cuts in, wanting to cut the tension. 

“In a little,” you promise, as you sit down to enjoy the last few moments of Harrison Ford. 

An hour and a half later, when the pizza’s on it’s way, you go upstairs to wake up Billy. “Don’t let me down Billy,” you whisper to his sleeping form as you lean against your door frame.

Part 2: Too much

Forever tags:  @crimson-knuckled-queen​ @rexorangecouny​

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: Christmas Special Villains

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

Much like I did for Halloween, I wanted to do a bunch of one-shot or at the very least minor Christmas villains, which presented me with an interesting problem – most Christmas specials don’t really have villains. Usually the main obstacle to overcome in any holiday special is some sort of emotional fault of the main character, a lack of belief in the spirit of the holiday, or something to that effect, and when there is an actual villain, it tends to just be ones from the show at large with a Christmas-related scheme. Like I’m not doing Princess Morbucks or the Kanker sisters for this.

Luckily, There were a few I was sure on, and I managed to scrounge up a few more to deliver five lovingly-wrapped holiday villains. We have:

Mrs. Claus from The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy

Ghost Writer from Danny Phantom

Robot Santa from Futurama

Edna Jucation and the Faculty Four from Codename: Kids Next Door

The Woodland Critters from South Park

Here’s the most interesting thing: Despite Christmas stories tending to lean more towards internal conflict and self-reflection, when they do have actual, tangible threats like these, they tend to be honestly and genuinely great. This is in stark contrast to A lot of the villains from the Halloween specials, who tended to just be big scary baddies without much oomph to them.

Actor: Mrs. Claus is portrayed by Carol Kane, an incredibly prolific actress who you may know best as Valerie, the wife of Miracle Max from The Princess Bride. And much like in that film, she manages to be as enjoyable and funny as the guy playing her husband, which is a tall order indeed – in that film it was Billy Crystal, and in the special it’s Gilbert Gottfried.

Ghost Writer is portrayed by Will Arnett of all people. This was post-Gob Bluth but pre-Batman and BoJack, so while not unknown by any stretch it’s definitely weird to go back and see him in a Butch Hartman action cartoon of all places. He does a great job, as to be expected; when has he ever done poorly?

In his first appearance, Robot Santa was voiced by none other than John Goodman. Normally I’d say Goodman would be perfect for the role of Santa, but… this one’s a maniacal robotic serial killer. It’s a wonderfully jarring juxtaposition. After that, John DiMaggio gave Robot Santa a voice for his other appearances, and he does a good job for sure. Obviously he’s no John Goodman, but really, who is?

Edna Jucation is voiced by Candi Milo, and the Faculty Four are played by Dee Bradley Baker and Darran Norris; Baker is the Unintelligible Tutor and Thesaurus Rex, while Norris is Mr. Physically Fitastic and the Human Text. These are all top-tier veteran voice actors, and they do a fine job, but I can’t particularly say they really make any of these characters stand out or be memorable, which is a shame.

As to be expected, the Woodland Critters are voiced by Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Big shock there. Even less shocking is that they are perfectly funny as these depraved animals.

Motivation/Goals: Out of all of these, I think it’s really fitting that Mrs. Claus is the one with the best motivation. As the HEAD head vampire in the North Pole, she has turned Santa into a vampire and put a halt on Christmas because she is overworked and exhausted, having to do all the household chores all year while Santa only works one night. It is absolutely, perfectly understandable that she snapped… but apparently this isn’t even the first time, as Santa mentions at the end this has happened on multiple prior occasions. You think he’d treat her better after the second or third time, but then we wouldn’t have a plot.

I’d say that Ghost Writer and the Woodland Critters are tied for the next spot; both of them have solid reasons for doing what they’re doing. Ghost Writer was just a humble author trying to finish a Christmas story in time for Christmas, but unfortunately this caught the eye of the extremely Scroogey Danny Phantom, who absolutely hates Christmas due to traumatic events caused by his family fighting on Christmas in the past. Danny, in a moment of incredible callousness, blasts the poor ghost’s manuscript to bits and then proceeds to rub it in, which drives GW to breaking the annual truce and using his powers to torment Danny by trapping him in a Christmas story where he and everyone else can only speak in rhyme. It’s honestly hard to feel sympathy for Danny here, but GW does take it a bit too far.

The Woodland Critters, on the other hand, are just utterly depraved… but that’s to be expected seeing as they are the creations of Eric Cartman, inhabiting a Christmas story whose sole reason for existing is to make Kyle look like a tool. In the story, they get Kyle knocked up with the Antichrist. You see, there master is Satan, and they want nothing more than for his spawn to be born into the world. They really just exist as a reason for Cartman to rip on Kyle for being a Jew at Christmastime, as Kyle himself points out in their debut episode.

Edna and the Faculty Four are a bit simple and amusing, as is befitting of a gimmicky villain from The world of the KND. They team up with the Delightful Children because Substitute Teacher’s Day is virtually unknown compared to Christmas, the kind of absurd, wacky reason for villainy you’d expect from a world where some of the most feared supervillains include an evil dentist and a vampire who spanks people. Robot Santa is likewise extremely simple, yet effective: every Christmas he flies down to Earth to punish the naughty – which is everyone except Zoidberg. This is due to a programming oversight that left his standards set way too high, so no one can ever measure up. Except Zoidberg. There’s really not much more to him than that, but really, does their need to be?

Final Fate: Mrs. Claus is redeemed at the end of the special thanks to Billy, who helps her understand the true meaning of Christmas and who heals her husband so that he can apologize. Things seem like they might work out for real this time because now Malcolm McDowell’s vampire is around to help with tidying up, so hooray! Happy ending here!

Ghost Writer gets thwarted because Danny picks up an orange; as Ghost Writer never watched Drake & Josh and thus didn’t realize that “door hinge” is an acceptable rhyme, he was unable to continue writing his story and got beat up by Danny and his rogues gallery and then thrown into Walker’s prison for breaking the yearly truce in the Ghost Zone. At least he got to complete his book?

The Woodland Critters go out when Santa comes in and blasts them away with a shotgun… but since they are technically fictional characters, they show up in Imaginationland to cause problems. Still, it’s reassuring to know they can be taken out with simple firearms.

Edna Jucation, the Faculty Four, and Robot Santa really don’t have any canonical final fate; they just get defeated and then go on their merry way. In Robot Santa’s case, he actually showed up quite a few more times after his initial appearance to wreak havoc, but the Faculty Four and Edna were entirely oneshot antagonists.

Final Thoughts & Score: Christmas honestly fares a lot better than Halloween does as far as I can see. The villains tend to be a lot more thematic, or at the very least they have more personality and thematic function. Halloween doesn’t really have any sort of core themes to work off of as opposed to Christmas, which has a lot of reoccurring themes in works based around it. Still, most of these characters just settle on being funny.

Mrs. Claus and the Woodland Critters are the best of the bunch here, and both earn themselves a spot on the Nice List with a 9/10 each. Mrs. Claus is just a lot of fun, mostly because of the fact she has legitimate grievances on top of being a unique twist on the character. Mrs. Claus as a vampire overlord who commands hordes of vampire elves? That’s the sort of creative wackiness that Billy & Mandy delivered on. The Woodland Critters are just funny, plain and simple, acting as the sort of amusing subversion that could be expected of from South Park in its glory days as well as being totally in line with Cartman’s personality. These are the exact sort of original characters I’d expect from a guy who ground up a kid’s parents and made them into chili, what with their blood orgies and ultraviolence. Amusingly enough, they score a point higher than Cartman did in his own Psycho Analysis, which is mostly due to their limited appearances meaning that they stay remarkably consistent, where Cartman tends to be whatever an episode needs to be, be that hero, anti-hero, or villain.

Next up are Ghost Writer and Robot Santa, who both get 7/10. Ghost Writer is a very amusing oneshot, but it’s honestly weird that out of all the Villains from Danny Phantom, he’s the first one I talked about. You’d think it would be Ember or Vlad or something… at any rate, he’s an amusing antagonist, but he’s also one who it’s hard not to view as being in the right, especially since Danny was just a jerk to him completely unprovoked due to his own personal hangups with the holidays. As usual with fun ideas on the show though he was only ever used once, which is a real shame but at the same time understandable; his gimmick really only works with Christmas, so it would have been weird shoehorning him into another episode’s plot. For what he is, he’s fun.

Robot Santa has a similar problem, not really being able to function outside of Christmas specials, but his few appearances leave him as an amusing antagonist who never really overstays his welcome. He’s not as entertaining or engaging as, say, Mom, but he definitely offers some laughs with his hilarious concept and his ridiculous levels of bloodlust. Points t him for helping out the heroes in the first Futurama movie too.

That just leaves us with Edna and the Faculty Four, and the Faculty Four just manage to scrape onto the bottom of the Nice List with a collective 5/10. They don’t really have much character or personality, especially when compared to the heroic Marvel pastiche that is Elfa Strike, but as brief amusing gag villains meant to pay loving tribute to the Fantastic Four, I think they’re decent. Edna is not so lucky; she’s a bit obnoxious, shrill, and doesn’t really correlate to any sort of Marvel character, which is baffling since the entire episode is one big love letter to Marvel comics. Sad to say, but she’s landing smack dab on the Naughty List with a 2/10. She doesn’t even have a cool gimmick!

I suppose that wraps it up for Christmas special villains. Doing something like this is tough, because it really makes you sit back and wonder what sort of Christmas villains you should put on. Obviously I avoided any theatrical film villains, but that did leave one particularly glaring omission of a villain from a holiday special… a big, green, unpleasant omission. He’s a mean one, for sure...

[hellolittleogre]

Billy Goody Jane Eyre AU

@lazaefair wrote a wonderful not!fic Billy x Goody Jane Eyre AU, which you can find here, and it was amazing and then my brain went but what if Goody was the mad wife in the attic? Because Wide Sargasso Sea is a thing. And then my brain went BOOM and spat this out.

Thank you @lazaefair for the inspiration, it was really fun writing this and I hope you don’t feel like I’m playing all over your sandbox.

The not!fic is under the cut because its a lot.

Soooooooo, it struck be that of course the real touchstone for this would not only be Jane Eyre, but also Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys about Bertha’s life before the attic, and the Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, about a woman who marries for love but her husband is a abusive and a drunkard.

Goodnight is the rich spoiled son of a Creole family on Jamaica who runs away with his brother to fight in the America civil war (they have family in Louisiana), he admires his brother and has always done what his he did. The brother dies and Goody becomes a celebrated sharpshooter but still comes home a disgrace, fighting for the losing side,  severely traumatised and having made friends with Sam Chisholm a free black man, and with alarming notions about equality and slavery.

The family marries him off to Bouge as quick as they can with a fat dowry and no questions asked. (Same sex marriages exist with the proviso that the leading partner is allowed to have one official mistress in order to have an heir, or the couple can joint decide to adopt a child).

Bouge, a nouveau riche robber baron is at first elated over such a social coup, a status spouse, old money, beauty plus the official allowance to have a mistress in order to get an heir but soon he realises he has been cheated. Once the honeymoon is over and they have settled on his new estate in England he realises the extent of his mistake.

Goody is too frail, too obviously damaged to help him get ahead socially and it's a scandal to have a mad husband, can’t even fulfill his marriage duties because he is so mentally frail (Think pretty vulnerable Ethan Hawke in the mid 90s), Bouge finds this unacceptable.

Goodnight has written letters tightly to Sam during the first year as married, trying to put on a good front (elements of the Tenant of Wildfell hall), too proud to admit mistakes. He tries to have optimism, maybe Bouge will have a child and the act of raising it will bring them together. Surely Goody is just to sensitive to his meanness, tries to be a good partner but Bouge will have none of it.

Then he has a bad period and Bouge locks him away, writes to Sam and tells him Goody has asked him to cease writing it that his emotional state is too easily upset to undertake this task himself.  Sam insists that Goody writes and Bouge gets pretty nasty.

“If you knew how he begged me, your attentions upsets him and you are a constant reminder of his unhappy past. I would not be so I gentlemanly to make further reference to your history but cease this contact, if only for the sake of the one you profess to love so.”

Sam realises he has to play the long game.

Meanwhile Billy has grown up in an orphanage, the son of a woman who came to work as a servant to a British explorer. The man was working and collecting in China, and even managed to gain entry to Joseon, where he took the woman on as houskeeper. When his mother died the man took Billy in out of good will and when he suddenly died too, Billy was bundled along with the rest of his belongings to his family back in England. The family was expecting a white child and are besides themselves when Billy shows up, it might be implied that the explorer had fathered him (he hadn't, Billy had a very loving father who unfortunately also died. If anyone feels all this dying is unrealistic I would please refer you to Elizabeth Gaskell). Billy is pushed off as quick as they can to a school. He is very learned due to the old gentleman and becomes a very good student. When he is grown he advertises as a tutor. The boys home taught him how to fight, he makes two friends a brash Irish boy called Faraday, illegitimate child and Vasquez, nephew of some Spanish noblewoman married to an English lord (everyone’s an orphan! see: Gaskell)

Billy has been working  as a tutor for a while when he meets Bouge, he wants a governess for a little girl but changes his mind when he finds Billy.

Billy is curious as to why,  as it turn out Adele his ward is half Vietnamese, her mother a French-vietnamese dancer who used to be Bouge’s mistress and Bouge figures one Asian is as good as another.

Adele is as vain and silly as she is in the book and Billy kind of loves her. Her airy head has lots of space for learning. She speaks french and english in a charming unselfconscious mix and Billy was worried how they might talk to each other but in the end he finds that his old tutors were right, the language of arithmetic is universal.

She is not Bouge’s daughter, his mistress in Paris left him and he killed her new lover and stole her daughter to torment her. She is now destitute in Paris and he sends her letters now and then to remind her that her daughter is entirely at his mercy.

He tells Adele that her maman is dead,.

Billy hears somebody crying at night. Adele is terrified of the crying ghost but later calms down,  and when Billy asks after a couple of days she says the ghost is telling her fairy stories in French and he's not dangerous, only sad. Billy is kind of bewildered by this. Sees a man spying on him in the library, looks like nobody in the household.

Bouge has come back, Billy startles his horse, and he twists his ankle and Billy has to help him home, Bouge says that he owes him entertainment for being responsible for his incarceration. There is something hungry in how he looks at Billy. Sends for him in the evenings and talk to him.

Taunts Adele, Billy tries telling himself that it is playfully.  “that's how she charmed the money straight out of my pretty pocket”. Pinches her nose and cheeks just a little too hard

Billy is teaching Adele how to fight and Bouge watches them, silent and approving, eyes roving over Billy. Presses him a little. Mentions in passing that he is dependent on him, that without reference he would never be hired again, and then how will he live. No relations and no means?

Flirts a little and makes promises, comes down one evening with his face scratched, “by an owl” but you'd always be sweet to me? It makes Billy smile. It's nice to be wanted.

Billy hears the ghost crying at night, sees a white figure in the hallways.

Then as a cold shower Bouge invites a party of similarly ranked men, McCann and Denali, hints that he might be engaged to McCann. That he might ruin Billy and leave him on the street. Your reputation is in my hands, you can never leave me.

Billy meets the ghost man. Himself and Adele are exploring the garrets when he hears a voice singing a drinking song, they can't decide from where the sound is coming from but Adele is not afraid, it is the Goodnight man, he helps me sleep. He speaks French like maman.

Eventually Billy, pretty stiff with fear at this point though he would never admit it, finds a little crawl space that leads into another stairs and they find Goodnight. (Goody is kept in a room which is bolted not locked from the outside and his nurse often dips into the laudanum and he goes wandering.) He is beautiful and confused, flitting between lucidity and imagination but the more Adele and Billy talks to him the steadier he becomes.

Goodnight are convinced they are figments of his imagination. A little girl as he imagined at the beginning of the marriage. To tell stories to and never never go to war. And their shared features convinced him, Billy and the child with the same dark hair, mere reality could never conjure anything so beautiful.

They meet at night, both of them still not convinced the other is real. Adele calls him The prince in the tower after the story of Richard III nephews and Billy secretly agrees.. Billy wakes up one night to find Goody at the foot of his bed, looking terrible. He startles and goes looking for him. Follows him into Bouge room and finds a candle overturned, saves him from the flames.

Bouge proposes the next day.

Billy accepts, he's tired of being at somebody else's mercy and charity all the time. Bouge is not too unpleasant to look at, his attention is flattering and being a married spouse offers a hell of a lot more protection than he ever thought he would have.  So he accepts.

(Bouge plans to marry him so he can become his legal guardian and force him to be his assassin, plus Billy is hot)

Meets Goody and tells him he is going to stay, and that they will have more time together. Omits to mention that it's because he's getting married. He feels reluctant to tell Goodnight that.

Billy brings wine up one night and becomes terribly drunk and kisses Goodnight. The last little bit of freedom I have left.

Adele tells Bouge about the ghost and Billy tries to downplay it and when Bouge won't be deterred he makes up a story about seeing a woman in white, an interred nun. However it makes Bouge confine Goody more securely and they can't meet anymore. Billy is smart enough to understand he can't let Bouge know he and Goody know each other.

The night before his marriage he hears Goodnight wailing in the tower, like a banshee or a condemned soul.

Sam and Red show up to stop the wedding. Sam has been living in the Indian territories (Bass Reeves!) and befriended him and finally has bided his time enough to come to Europe and track down Goodnight (they have agreed to go on a Grand Tour if it turns out Goody is fine), Bouge tries to say that he is dead but Billy puts two and two together and alerts them of Goodnight in the tower.

“There he is,” Bouge says with disdain, Goodnight white and crouched at the far end of the room, “Who would not change a vulture for a raven? Look at him, so hale and beautiful, who can blame me?”

Red and Sam bring the family lawyer who concludes that its not lawful for Bouge and Billy to be married but equally since Goody must be seen as mentally deficient its perfectly fine for Bouge to keep him locked in the attic. Like y’know, no problem.

Sam and Red tries to resist but are powerless to help, Bouge locks Goody away, very upsetting scenes between Goodnight and Sam, fighting to get to each other.

Goody comes to Billy’s room at night, tells him he has to go, go Bouge plans to do something terrible to him (possibly lock him in the cellar?) Billy doesn’t want to leave but has no choice, Goody refuses to follow him. Without me you have a chance but if I come with you Bouge will never stop hunting us, besides he has the law on his side if he chooses to bring me back while you can go where you chose and have full protection of the law.

Billy flees in the night and ends up on the moors with Faraday and Vasquez, who are living together in a cabin (coincidence!)

They plan to go back and free Goodnight (and Adele) but before that Billy finds out that the explorers family has all died and he is the sole heir, he is now rich enough to take up the fight against Bouge. He hears Goody call for him in the night.

They prepare but as they are travelling back the hear that the whole house has burnt down and the poor madman in the attic perished in the flames. Billy goes over to kill Bouge but instead finds Goodnight, the house (mysteriously!) caught fire (some say they saw a man with a bow and arrow but such talk is nonsense surely?) and Bouge died in the flames. Goodnight was rescued and inherited the lot.

Then they all live together and are disgustingly rich. They send for Adele’s maman and Emma comes to be Adele’s governess.

FIN

[qqueenofhades]

Hello Hilary! I was wondering, if you haven't already done so, if you could do a meta about how Frank can't even look at Karen when he first sees her? Thank you!

Ahaha. Keep in mind that I have only watched 2x11 from the season, so I don’t have the broader context for the reason he ends up in the hospital and so forth. However, he obviously assumes he killed the three women that in fact Billy killed, because boo hiss, Billy is terrible and idk what he has going on with that therapist, but it seems like it has problems. This is eating Frank alive, because he’s always had a code and he’s always had his way of doing things, he kills bad people and he kills people who deserve it and by and large, he only ever kills men. (Sidenote, Mahoney has known Frank how long? Why does he always go through the “Frank probably did it” spiel even when he should know better? I get they want to have conflict/challenge in the narrative but also, Mahoney is the wrong place to provide that now. Anyway.)

So Frank has clearly been beat to shit, he’s half-dead, he’s in the hospital and his life is in danger, he doesn’t know where Amy is or if she’s okay, he’s tormented with guilt and feels that he’s permanently gone to the dark side….. and then, obviously paralleling their first meeting in DD 2x06 where they meet in a hospital, and there’s literal red tape separating them, Karen is there when he wakes up. Karen. Of all people. And she’s not standing on the far side of the room. She’s been sitting next to his bed, watching over him. She is physically close to him, she has been protecting him, she (although of course Frank doesn’t know this) coolly bluffed her way in there and continues to do absolutely anything to protect her man. It probably feels like he’s still dreaming, and with the mental state he’s in, she’s almost the last person he wants to see. Not because he doesn’t love her, but because he does, so much, and as he explicitly says later, he can’t stand the thought that she’d throw away her entire life for him. (Which… too late, my man. Too late.) We already had that line about Maria knowing who Frank really was and loving him anyway, and they directly had Karen say that it’s the same case for her. Which Frank still can’t really wrap his head around and accept, and he is already in pieces, and Karen is giving him this trust he doesn’t feel worthy of, and… yes.

So Karen’s just… there and she’s fighting for him and accepting him no matter what and no matter how ferociously and instinctively Frank tries to push her away (which is his default mode with people he cares about). When he has a nightmare, she is literally holding his hand and snuggled up next to him and stroking him to comfort him and talking him through it. All the space that was there in DD 2x06 has been visually and physically and emotionally erased. Karen says “we” and “you and I” and “us” the whole time. In her head, they pretty much ARE together. Madani turns up and finds Frank’s wife and daughter already there with him, basically, and it’s reinforcing that as grumpy as Frank is and as much in the dark as he presently is, he is not alone. Karen and Madani and Amy spend the whole episode fighting for him and clearing his name and helping him escape and whatever else. And of course, the instant Frank tells Karen to go and she makes any indication of actually going, he clings for her and wants to bring her back. Because he loves her so intensely, and she loves him, but right now, there’s just no actual way they can be together or Frank feels like he can possibly take the chance or risk losing her. And the sad thing is, especially given the way the season has been written, he’s probably right.

Honestly, I was Shook because they seemed to be going for the “Kastle is important but we don’t know what it is/that relationship remains undefined/etc” prior to the season, and then Bammo! Canon love confirmation, both in show and by the actors, y’all! Karen wants them to be together and was begging Frank to let her come with him! Frank knows she would throw away her whole life for him? Karedevil Whomst? (I mean… that was ballsy, given as DD is the “main show,” and this was filmed before it was cancelled.) They straight-up in canon went for “Karen and Frank are in love, bitches!” and while yes, it ended with them separated, Jon and Deborah are literally unable to shut up about how much they love working together/each other/Frank and Karen/Frank and Karen’s relationship. We also know Lightfoot wanted more of Karen in season 2, but it didn’t work out with filming schedules. Obviously there would be more angst/some obstacle to Frank and Karen being together together if we somehow eked out a season 3, but they did at least explicitly confirm that the characters are in love and there would be a chance to explore more of that.

…anyway, this has been a long and more or less coherent ramble, but yes. Obviously we all wanted more Karen. So did they. But then they went That Hard with the one episode, and while I think the writing of s2 has problems across the board, the context that was created it made it unavoidable for it to end with a Kastle separation. Plus they’ve always been angsty and Frank needs motivation to keep being a killer blah blah. So he’s not going to get an immediate happy ending or so on. But all further doubt about the nature of the relationship has been put to rest, I was not expecting that, my wig hath been snatched, and yes.

[faiakishi]

Well Delilah was a child when all the horrors happened to her. I don't think she was upset that it happened to her, just that people allowed it to happen. and suddenly she is supposed to care about the same people who built the world she suffered in. Fat chance. If you have been never taught empathy, you will never learn to show it.

Okay, back the fuck up. I wasn’t really planning to go on My Delilah Rant tonight, but I guess this is going down.

Shit’s under the cut because I know this is going to be long.

“Well, these horrible things happened to Delilah as a child” You’re absolutely right. It is horrible. You want to know who else had a shitty childhood? Oh, about half the people in the game.

Let’s look at Daud, for instance. Daud canonically A) is a product of rape, which resulted in B) his mother literally murdered his father, (justifiably, but still) and raised him as a single parent in a foreign country where she was treated like dirt, likely didn’t even know the language, and had to be brutal just to get by, which ended when C) he was kidnapped as a child by a man who exploited him and likely abused him, and it’s implied that Daud ended up snapping and killing him before being unleashed onto the world. Yeah. Not really great formative years. Not a whole lot of teaching him empathy and personal responsibility, was there?

Or Billie Lurk. The child of two broke drunks who didn’t give a shit about her. Her mother physically abused her and her biological father isn’t even mentioned aside from one line from the Heart, so Billie quite possibly may not even know who he was. She was a hungry, homeless kid who at fifteen watched as her first love was brutally murdered by an aristocrat for-what? Annoying them with her presence? They literally killed her because they fucking felt like it and laughed about it. And when Billie retaliated-because she knew they wouldn’t face any repercussions for killing a street girl, people like her were disposable, those boys were supposed to be her betters-she was hunted down like a dog and spent a year on the run, completely alone, because she’d be brought to face ‘justice’ for doing to Radanis Abele what he did to Deirdre. She was taken in by a man who taught her she had to cut throats and be merciless in order to get ahead, and that lagging behind would mean a knife in the ribs for people like them. She learned she had to be terrible if she wanted to survive. Also not great for learning how to be empathetic, but she sure still managed it.

“Oh but those are the bad guys” Yep. That’s intentional. I purposely did not mention the ‘good guys’ to give this comparison a more even contrast. Billie and Daud both did terrible, awful things. What sets them apart from Delilah is that they don’t try and excuse it with ‘my childhood!’ Their brutal childhoods definitely played a part in their formation but ultimately, they accept that they are responsible for the choices they made and understand that their actions had a negative impact. And they care about that. They feel guilty. They both refer to themselves as evil people and see themselves as beyond redemption, but still try to make up for their sins not because they want to feel better about themselves but because they feel like they should. They still have a functioning fucking moral compass, despite the ‘bad childhood’ experience. They aren’t trying to say ‘my actions were okay because x’. (and likewise, nobody in the fandom really should either-their actions weren’t excusable, that’s the point) They still have a sense of empathy. That doesn’t make them good people or even redeemable, but it makes them understandable.

Now let’s look at Delilah. For starters-Delilah is a narcissist. She literally meets every criteria of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. (She’s also very obviously a sociopath and is probably host to multiple other mental disorders, but I’m just going to focus on the first one)Narcissists have, at best, a very warped sense of history, and are at worst delusional.

There’s absolutely 0 proof that Delilah is Euhorn Kaldwin’s daughter, for one. In fact, there’s evidence against it. She didn’t come forward to take the throne during the first game, the ideal time to come out as Euhorn’s long-lost second daughter-she doesn’t even say she’s Euhorn’s daughter until DH2! Her story is inconsistent. And she gets her father’s hair color wrong, which is weird; it’s kind of flimsy evidence but I’m pointing it out anyway.

But let’s assume that she is a Kaldwin, to make things simpler. That Euhorn Kaldwin knew she was his daughter, treated her like so and promised her shit, and that it all ended when she got in trouble for breaking a decoration and that was the sole reason her mother was fired and Euhorn Kaldwin decided to conveniently ignore the fact that his daughter and mistress were living on the streets. (yeah, there’s more to that story) At what point was that Jessamine’s fault? Jessamine was a literal fucking child. She didn’t lie with the intent of making Delilah homeless and getting her mother killed. She shouldn’t have lied, yeah, but she was a kid and didn’t understand. Delilah’s hatred of Jessamine is so strong that she plans to remove her daughter’s soul-her daughter, someone who wasn’t even born at the time and had nothing to do with it-and inhabit her body, and would have likely arranged to have Jessamine and Corvo murdered if Burrows hadn’t done so. She defaces her memorial and still rants about her even in the last mission of DH2-you know, after Jessamine is at peace. She’s been dead for fifteen years and has literally faded from existence, and Delilah still can’t get over her anger at her. For telling a lie. About forty years ago.

(also, I just want to point out, NPD on the level that Delilah displays it does not freaking happen overnight. Delilah was likely a child narcissist. So the whole “Daddy I pwoooomise I’ll be a good girl, wHaT dId I DooOOoO’ act-yeah, no, that’s complete bullshit, it did not happen like that. If it happened at all, she was using it as a manipulation tactic. I can tell you what I suspect happened but I know if I do someone will scream ‘you’re just making shit up’ and use it to discount my entire argument, so I’m just going to leave that bit out)

Alright, so we got that established. Delilah went through some shit. She’s angry about it. And that’s 100% understandable! Anyone would be mad!

The problem is what she did with that anger.

Delilah focused 100% on enacting pain to ‘make up’ for what happened to her as a kid. This included people like Jessamine, who her retribution against doesn’t, you know, really match the crime. But it also included people like Emily and Corvo, who had nothing to do with that. Included people like Billie and Daud, who were already fucked over by those same circumstances that fucked her over. Included the lower class who were actively being fucked over by those circumstances. They didn’t ‘build the world that made her suffer’. The world is making them suffer too!

I could understand if Delilah’s plan was ‘fire and brimstone to this because it caused me so much grief’, and then worked to build a better society where people like her didn’t get fucked over. I could understand if that was Delilah’s motivation to take the throne.

But it wasn’t. Delilah wanted the throne because it was hers. She’s the rightful Empress, she’s perfect and wonderful, she’s a literal god, don’t you see?! Why aren’t you worshipping her?!!

She did not give a single shit that this system existed. She did not care about all the people it crushed under its boot. She was angry because she was better than those people, and how dare they act like she isn’t!

“Buh-but she was never taught empathy!” We’ve already established that Delilah has no excuse not to have a sense of morality. People who survived much worse conditions managed to form one. And even if no one ever showed her kindness, it would only take a scrap of self-awareness to realize that she was making others suffer just as others made her. She just didn’t give a shit.

Now, let’s move onto Delilah as a ruler. She lets her coven run wild. They murder indiscriminately-rich folk, guards, peasants, doesn’t matter. They torment and kill because they enjoy it. She encourages Luca Abele to treat Serkonos as his personal piggyback and playground. She thinks it’s funny how he fucks people over. She never sees the irony of that. She’s incapable of seeing it because those people are just her subjects. Not even in the monarchic sense, she literally sees them as just objects to serve her.

The only person, by the way, that she doesn’t treat like a disposable commodity is Breanna Ashworth. She’s the only one Delilah seems to have any genuine respect and love for. (she still gets over her death quite quickly, which plays into her sociopathy, but that’s another argument) Even Luca Abele, she sees more as a pet than a lover and partner. She shows her coven some moderate respect, because they worship her indiscriminately, but even them she doesn’t seem to care about too terribly much. Her allies are nothing to her. She turns Ramsey to stone because-why? They let him out of the saferoom and his first action wasn’t to prostrate himself and thank her for gracing him with her attention? She does this to literally anyone who annoys her.

So all those people screaming “well Emily wasn’t a perfect Empress either” well, you don’t have to worry about the Empress daydreaming during court because Delilah had Parliament torched! Court isn’t held! Delilah kills anyone who ever even suggests she do her job, because Delilah has no actual interest in ruling. She just wants to take from Jessamine and be worshipped as the god she knows she is.

When Delilah got crushed under the boot of the Empire, she was not mad that it happened. She was mad because she wasn’t the one doing the crushing.

This all, by the way, isn’t me saying that Delilah is bad as a character. On the contrary, I think Delilah is a beautifully written character! It’s just that not every character is meant to be redeemable. That’s not a requirement of being a well-written villain. And that, ultimately, is my problem with Delilah’s depiction in DH2 and a lot of the fandom’s response to her. Because she isn’t redeemable. Trying to throw a sympathetic backstory at her in order to justify her actions just comes off as cheap, because it does not explain why she does what she did. It basically says she just did it all out of anger and hate, which is not really a sympathetic standpoint.

She’s an awful person who took joy in hurting others, not out of her own pain but because she enjoyed having the ability to cause it. She has no excuse for any of it. She doesn’t care to excuse it. In her mind, this is how things should be. She’s the god. Everyone else are just objects to orbit her. It’s a fantasy incompatible with reality. And in trying to make it a reality, she becomes the oppressor she always railed against. She never sees the irony of that.

That is why Delilah is a Bad Person.

[nellie-elizabeth]

Supernatural: Damaged Goods (14x11)

Ouch? That was... just... ouch.

Cons:

I don't care about Nick, and it bothers me that we spent so much time on him in this episode. The thing is, there could have been a version of this story that was clever or interesting, but they just didn't find it. I actually laughed out loud when Abraxis explained that he'd killed Nick's family in order to make him vulnerable for Lucifer. Like... yeah. Duh. Remember when we all briefly thought that Nick had killed his own family, and the darkness within him had drawn Lucifer to him? Well, that was a pretty predicable story. The only more predictable, more boring story I can think of is the one where Nick was just a random dude and Lucifer had his family killed to make him vulnerable. What was the surprise here? What was the point of drawing it out, and making it some mystery? What a waste of time.

Actually, more than a waste of time. Including Nick actually draws attention to a pretty significant plot hole. Unless I'm missing something. See, at the end of last season, our heroes had a weapon that was able to kill an Archangel. Dean (with Michael's aid) was able to kill Lucifer by stabbing him, and Nick survived. Why doesn't anybody suggest just repeating that process now? Killing Michael by stabbing Dean? If Nick could survive all of that, couldn't Dean?

Earlier in the season, I praised this show for finding a creative way to explain various characters' absences from the plot. But they need to put the work in. The bunker was empty this week. Couldn't we have a throw-away line about Cas and Jack on a hunt, and the other Apocalypse World folks on various assignments? It feels lazy not to include that.

Obviously that scene at the end with Sam and Dean was heartbreaking and amazing, but there was this one moment when Sam said "since when do we believe in fate?" and Dean says "since now." There was no further discussion of that very important plot point... Dean is the freakin' president of Team Free Will, so this is a pretty big switch, and maybe something that should have been given a bit more weight in the moment.

Pros:

The stuff with Nick took up way too much time, and that unfortunately worked to drag this episode down quite a bit. But there was so much to enjoy about the remainder of the episode that it actually counterbalances it pretty well.

First of all: Donna. I love her so much. I just want to watch her and Dean being best friends forever. They're the cutest. Also, she and Mary get to close the deal at the end and take down Nick, which was pretty fun. I always get a twinge of worry for recurring female characters on this show, but I think Donna is pretty untouchable at this point. If the writers know what's good for them.

I love Dean taking this little farewell tour, saying a secret goodbye to Donna and to Mary. Mary making Winchester Surprise, Dean's favorite meal from childhood, was just so heartwarming and depressing. Even though it's not stated outright, I'm going to infer that Dean didn't extend this farewell tour because he knew that Cas and Jack, maybe even Jody, would be able to see through him and try to stop him. He avoided Sam partially for that reason, which I'll talk more about in a minute. It's just so... Dean-like of him, to try to spare his family pain on his way out.

Despite feeling that Nick is a waste of time, I did like Sam's little speech at the end. I know Nick isn't Lucifer, but Sam did get to stare into the face of his abuser and tell him to burn. That was really satisfying. I also liked the bit in the car where Dean was pissed off at Sam for trying to help Nick, and Sam points out that he could have been Nick. He was Lucifer's vessel. He very nearly ended up in Nick's position, and he was showing some compassion. I think it's important for the show to reinforce the fact that Sam was possessed by Lucifer, and Sam spent countless years in the Cage with Lucifer. He's in a unique position to empathize with Nick... and with Dean, which is the elephant in the room during this conversation.

That ending scene. Just. Wow. Mary tells Dean that she knows what he's been up to, and that he has to tell Sam what's really going on. So Dean does. The only way to avoid Michael ending the world, at least according to Billie, is if Dean locks himself up in a box with Michael for all eternity. Sam is furious and upset that Dean would consider this, and even worse, that he planned on leaving without even telling Sam about it. Dean comes back with the devastating confession that he was afraid to be around Sam because Sam's the only person who could talk him out of it. Instead, he asks Sam to help him do this, and Sam says "alright."

A few things to highlight here: I loved, loved Jared's delivery of the line: "You were gonna leave, and you weren't even gonna tell me." It was the right mix of anger, devastation, disbelief. Gorgeous. Also, Dean admitting that Sam has the power to talk him out of this plan is so great. It goes back to so many moments we've seen in the past. Sam was ready to die to close the gates of Hell, but Dean convinced him not to. There's precedent for this in the other direction, too. Every time Sam has let Dean sacrifice himself to save Sam, save the world (I'm looking mostly at the end of Season Eleven here), Sam has been the brave one in letting Dean do it. If Sam had said no, Dean might have listened, and the world might not have been saved. That's just such a devastating way to frame these moments that we've seen over the years.

Also, Dean says "I love you" to Sam. It might not seem like much, but Dean doesn't just say that, and it was really powerful to have it slip out seemingly so easily, in this really high-pressure moment. And just. Sam. I love the moment early on when Dean gives Sam an awkward hug and calls him "Sammy" before heading out the door. It was as much of a goodbye as Dean would allow himself, but it was more than enough to tip Sam off that something was seriously wrong. I love that he follows Dean to the cabin. He doesn't know what's going on, but by now Sam Winchester has got to have a sixth sense about his brother's crazy bad ideas. Excellent.

One other note that I want to put in here: the reason that all of this is so devastating isn't because we think it's really going to happen. If Dean does end up on the bottom of the ocean in a box with Michael, we all know it's temporary. There's a greater than zero chance that when Supernatural ends, Sam and Dean are dead, but I would say there's no chance of them doing something this utterly devastating, and having the brothers separated, while one is stuck in eternal torment. That's how the show would have ended if it had ended after five seasons, and it would have been an appropriate way to tie up the character arcs at that point. But we've had nearly a decade since then, and that's simply not how the show is going to end, at this point. It's devastating to us because of the emotional underpinnings. Because Sam and Dean don't know they're on a TV show, and their fears and joys are real to them, and we love them. Supernatural is such a weird show, because the stakes never make any sense, the plot holes are constant, the stories go in every which way... but we love Sam and Dean Winchester, and that's enough to carry it all.

So, we've got one more episode and then the one after that is the 300th, where John Winchester will be making a reappearance. Get ready for me to be extremely angry with how that goes down... but for now, I'm pretty happy with all of the angst!

7.5/10

[mittensmorgul]

Plastic fantastic

I've put off doing this long enough, and spent the intervening days reading everyone else's interpretations, so there's gonna be a lot in here, but also a lot that I've probably not focused on too heavily because other folks have already said the things better than I could've. So this is just a recap of the things I personally feel are most significant and thematically cool going forward. It's... a lot... :'D

15.04 was infused with an element of surreality. Which I ended up referring to throughout this post as “plastic.” Hence the title. But this got super long, so here have a cut. :’D

Right from the THEN segment, we're reminded of Cas. Rowena's sacrifice, Cas's own suffering at Chuck's hands, and how this has affected Sam and Dean-- Sam miserable for having done what they had to do (right?) in sacrificing Rowena, and Dean PISSED but feeling like this was the only way to free them from what he sees as Chuck being a "fanboy" of them. It shifts directly into BECKY, who was described previously as a "fangirl" and involved in a supremely unhealthy relationship with both Chuck AND Sam (even if it was completely one-sided and creepy with Sam). And then shifts to Chuck being told-off by Amara in 15.02, in essentially a recap of all the best insults and condemnations she could fling at him... because he deserved it honestly, I mean HE LOCKED HER AWAY FROM THE DAWN OF CREATION TO SUFFER ALONE WHILE HE DID HIS THING TO MAKE HIMSELF FEEL BIG.

Okay, sorry, I just really hate that guy and his hypocrisy sometimes (read: all the time).

Right. Where were we. At the beginning.

Gunfight in the bunker, with the Danger Lights activated. I've been waiting for this scene since we got BTS photos of Jensen all battered and ragged with the beard. This... isn't real. It's not SPN universe real anyway. Since the SPPT promo came out, I have been eager to see this episode just for this scene. I guessed it was a vision Sam was having/receiving because of the Equalizer Wound, the beginning of his glimpses into "Chuck's writing process." Is this an AU that Chuck actively created? Is it just the sort of thing Chuck daydreams about? Or in the style of Supernatural episodes past, is this some sort of window into the ending Chuck wants/intends to write for them, which obviously would be something they absolutely could not let stand?

Like Dean’s nightmare he awoke from in 10.09 where he saw himself slaughtering a room full of people at the beginning of the episode, which became reality by the end of the episode? Is Chuck’s horrific ending that Becky hated what we actually saw play out in Sam’s nightmare? The show has invited us to consider that as at least a possibility. Or, to at least assume Chuck’s horrifying ending was at least that awful.

There's so much in this scene that doesn't match up with what any of us might imagine Sam would even consider a nightmare of his own mind's creation, you know? And yet it's SAM who is plagued by these incongruous nightmares that don't even really connect up with things that are relevant to the things currently on his mind, you know? After recent events, one would think the things that would plague Sam's nightmares would be the loss of Jack, or his role in Rowena's apparent death and his guilt/depression over it, or even the fight against the ghostpocalypse and the people who lost their lives as a result of that. Instead, he's having "nightmares" about having gone full Boy King of Hell demon blood addict, which hasn't been a pressing personal fear of his for more than a decade. He's even talked specifically about how he's made his peace with that entire time in his life, such as his talk with Magda in 12.04. NOT coincidentally also written by Davy Perez.

That's because... this is NOT Sam's "nightmare." Why would Sam "dream" about Dean's regular gun having the power to spark out demons? Why would he "dream" about BENNY being a human (and alive!) ally of Dean's that Sam had sent his own army of demons to destroy? Why would Sam dream that his demonic-self would hunt down and kill his loved ones (Bobby! Jody! and nobody else mentioned! as if this was some weird time-travelling situation combined with Benny's human presence!), and then in the end hunt down and murder Dean in cold blood? This wasn't Sam-As-Lucifer (though I believe we will be seeing that particular nightmare in next week's episode), but SAM. HIMSELF. Turned into the demon he always feared he was "destined" to become before they learned how to tear up the story and make their own choices about their destiny.

The problem now is that they actually believe that Chuck has gone, and they're on their own now. Sam believes that this must be his own nightmare, and therefore he's just stuck with it, as his own mind and memories and fears come back to torment him. He's lost his power to fight against it, like Dean's lost his power to fight against his current experience. It's as if the only power Chuck retains over them is in the fact that they BELIEVE he's gone, you know? Magic's power is in the belief of the caster, Rowena has recently reminded us with her own life. And I think that's exactly what's leaving Sam and Dean so completely vulnerable to manipulation by Chuck, in ways they've never before been vulnerable to it. Because they've both staked their entire futures on the fact that they so firmly believe they're free of Chuck's story.

Sam is just... so confused by this nightmare, he can't even make sense of it at all. And the sleep deprivation isn't probably helping.

I think we've all covered the Meat Man conversation already, as well as all the Dean vs Food stuff, so I'll only add that commentary in here if I think of something I haven't already said on the subject.

Dean calls out Sam's assertion that he's fine, directly telling him "No, you're not," and expressing his understanding of what he's going through.

And here come the cheerleaders. And doesn't this (as I believe many of us have already said over the last two weeks) just smack of Sam's "fake case" Gadreel had him trapped researching inside his own mind in 9,10? Crowley had to convince Sam that what he was trapped inside wasn't real, that he was possessed by an angel who was forcing him to experience these things. And obviously the God Wound isn't direct possession, and I don't doubt that this is a real case, but how much of this case might have been "arranged" by Chuck, or how much of Sam's perception right now may be clouded or colored because of the effects of that Wound?

Not only that, but Dean is also a participant in this entire odd case, and he doesn't even HAVE a wound connecting him directly to Chuck, you know? But his judgment seems to be equally clouded by something, as well... I'm gonna call it Intense Denial. Dean is basing his entire life right now on the presumption that Chuck has stopped interfering in their lives, when I think the exact opposite is true. I think Chuck is now focused on them more directly and more intensely than he ever has been before, and their obliviousness to that fact is only strengthening his hold on them, and amplifying his power over them.

But back to the current point in the episode:

Sam interviews the vice principal of the school, and the girl who was killed was in the drama club, debate team, cheerleading, campus ministry, you name it. That's... an awful lot of potential friends, so Sam asks about BEST friends, and we're directed to Veronica "and the girls." Veronica is singled out, which makes her speech to the empty room later even more interesting...

This episode relies on a lot of the elements of the case they're investigating to seem rather... plastic. And Veronica stood out as one of these elements. She could've just been "one of the girls," but she was identified specifically here, and it's like that designation itself somehow altered reality just a little bit. Heck I think I'm gonna need to put this line of thought on hold until we get to the speech scene. Remind me to come back to this.. >.>

The Whitmans interrupt (oh those crazy parents from 1.08, at it in a completely different role), seemingly uncaring of the dead girl and demanding their son's future not be ruined by postponing the lacrosse game. (OH THE IRONY) Sam rightly calls them out on framing it as "the end of the world" if he doesn't get into his first choice college. These parents have already been established to be Those Kinds of Parents who will do anything for precious little Billy to get whatever he wants in the world. They'd probaly strangle kittens on live TV if it would guarantee their son's future, you know? We haven't even seen the full extent of what they were willing to do for their son, and they already feel like cartoonish villain types.

I need to take another aside here to talk about the boy’s name. BILLY. Which, considering how we left things in 14.20, we’ve all been wondering about what Billie is up to in the Empty, right? This boy that will, by the end of this episode, become a literal stand-in for Jack on a cosmic scale? Is called Billy. Just... consider that.

I can already hear Becky critiquing Chuck's Monster of the Week here... and in turn parts of the fandom cynically saying that this is the complaint on MotW episodes forever-- that they're boring or unimportant or skippable because the monsters are predictable and boring, and just... NO. YOU HAVE OFFICIALLY MISSED THE POINT.

I think the general assumption is that the case we watch Sam and Dean solve is being directly affected by Chuck's simple act of typing it out. In exactly the same way we believed Metatron influenced the events of s9 by the simple act of typing it out. Could he control the thoughts of the people he wrote about? Not exactly. Could he manipulate the situation via the power of the angel tablet-- the direct word of God-- to influence the scenario and events in improbable ways? Yes, I absolutely think he can. And I'll continue discussing this as we go along.

But we return to Dean leaning against the car eating pretzels. I've already written about his constant eating and drinking in this episode, but PRETZELS?! That's a new one for Dean. It's usually jerky, or chips, or candy, or... all sorts of other things. Where did he even get the pretzels from?

He'd apparently been at the morgue examining the body, and found a vampire tooth. So this case that seemed NOTHING like a vampire case based on how the body was found, suddenly there's irrefutable evidence that it's a vampire instead. Almost as if the facts of the case have shifted somehow, rather improbably and inexplicably. Just as inexplicably as Dean finding the beaver mascot riding a scooter "awesome."

The second girl to be abducted calls out Veronica as being "so fake" in her grief over Susie's death. And yet, improbably, after a long cheer practice, she's the only one alone in the school parking lot late at night. Where's the rest of the cheer team? The coach? Anyone? How was she there all alone? Yet she was, because the case needed her to be.

It's plastic.

Like the little square of crime scene tape left unattended in the woods. Weird, right? That after the scene was cleared and the original investigators left, it was still left there around an empty patch of dirt. And Sam and Dean... are just... standing there at the edge of the woods, boxed in by yellow crime scene tape and orange cones while they have their conversation about the fact the police have no idea what could've done this, and Sam laments the fact that it's THEIR job. THEY deal with the truth and carry the weight, while everyone else gets to go back to their blissfully unaware lives.

Dean busts out the flask while the two of them stand there in their own personal crime scene box, like their lives are the crime here. They ARE the victims of a cosmic crime. And the corpse of what their lives could've been, of what Sam had always thought he'd want of his own life, to live in a little town like this and just be NORMAL, is what they'll find on the autopsy here. And Sam is just beginning to realize he can't identify with those sorts of people at all.

And then we jump right from Sam lamenting the lost white picket fence to Becky's house-- where the front railing is white pickets, where she's built a real life for herself. Yet even something about it seems... off... just a little bit. That older kid seems way older than 7, which I assume would be the oldest any of her kids could be based on when we last saw her in canon, before she began to recover from her obsession and begin building a true happy life for herself. Heck maybe I'm talking myself into a problem that doesn't exist, and he's supposed to be just a really big 6-year-old, but okay. Or maybe he's adopted, or the kid of her husband from a previous relationship. GAH This is so not relevant to anything, why can't I let it go... >.>

Regardless, she clearly loves her family, and is invested in her life with them. Her husband is a man who truly appreciates and loves her in return. I'm really happy for her. Her husband at one point says, "Where would I be without you," and she jokingly replies "Covered in puke." And it's the same sort of cute exchange we saw between Sam and Jess in the pilot, where he asked, "What would I do without you?" and she jokingly replied, "Crash and burn." And considering that Sam himself will mention Jessica at the end of the episode, it seems worth pointing out the thematic similarity they're trying to set up here.

I wonder how much Becky has told her husband about the reality of the Supernatural books she's built her business and hobbies around, or her own part in the events of the books? More than Sam ever told Jess about the reality of his life? At this point, I'm gonna be glad her husband didn't end up pinned to the ceiling on fire.

Becky waves goodbye to her family as they leave for a day of fun, and Chuck waves back at her. He's inserted himself into her life again, and it's freaking creepy.

Chuck says he "wanted" to see her, and corrects himself to "needed." And here we have the laying out of the classic “NEED VS WANT” conundrum we’ve been yelling about for literal years. Funny that Chuck has it all wrong himself, you know? Becky makes herself clear that she neither wants nor needs him. He's not welcome there at all, and yet he presses on, past her assertion that his problems aren't her problem. I've already written a little bit about what Chuck apparently wanted from Becky, and what he actually got from her, so I'll try not to repeat myself, but to say that Becky was far kinder to him than he deserved.

So we learn about the second cheerleader's kidnapping, Dean makes an uncharacteristically flippant comment in front of the Vice Principal (somebody has a fetish), and kinda... blinks in shock at himself before professionally affirming they'll look into it and turning and walking away. Like he can't quite believe he actually said that. Which is weird, right? Because this is the sort of thing Dean has made flippant and kinda gross comments on in the past, right? But even when he's made comments about which cheerleaders are legal (4.13), or suggestive comments about even college students, he's rarely done so this blatantly directly TO the school principal, you know? This was... odd... like everything is just slightly out of sync.

I'm fascinated by the tiny models of Supernatural things that Chuck is prodding at in Becky's house. The first thing we see is Lil Levi's gas station. The only time we have EVER seen this gas station was in 10.03, when Hannah and Cas stopped there for gas, and yet Becky has the Impala parked by the pump, and what looks like a yellow classic car of some sort on the other side, hidden by the pumps so it's impossible to really see it there.

(I swear I will replace these Mittens Quality Screencaps™ as soon as HotN properly caps the episode... apologies for the photos of my tv in the meantime)

It was Cas's pimpmobile we've actually seen at this location in canon. And this was the gas station where Cas was losing his grace, desperately trying to get to Dean in time to save him, and Hannah kept getting them lost. He calls her out over her feelings-- dangerous temptations-- clouding her judgment and getting in the way. They're attacked by Adina, and Crowley arrives just in time to save them both from her, stealing her grace and force-feeding it to Cas, enabling him to power up again and save Dean. Aah, callbacks! And I mean, it might just be a visual callback to the fact that Jensen also directed that episode (and that gas station was named after his nephew), but it's still a reference that brings an awful lot of baggage with it, regardless of what prompted its appearance in miniature in Becky's house. Not to mention, this reference happened LONG after Chuck had supposedly stopped writing about the Winchesters' lives. And yet... Becky seems to know this reference, which had nothing to do with Sam and Dean and everything to do with Cas.

The second model we see looks incredibly like (or at least should all be having us THINKING of) the Carver crypt from the first three episodes of s15. And that's... super creepy, right? What is this building? Why did Becky have a model of it at all? This happened DAYS ago in canon.

And the third is Singer Salvage yard, with the Impala parked out front. How long has it been since we've seen it? In an episode that opened on Sam's "nightmare" that involved him strung out on demon blood having just killed Bobby and Jody in Sioux Falls? Interesting that Chuck expressed fascination with that particular model in this episode, isn't it?

He asks if Becky is still obsessed with his work, and she corrects him. She's obsessed with HER work. She'd essentially dismissed Chuck as the creator of Supernatural, and relegated him to the role of Recorder Of Events, as a prophet. It wasn't actually HIS story. But what she's made of it, what she's made her life's work, IS HER OWN CREATION, based on the same reality she believed that Chuck had been nothing more than a conduit for. And OUCH for a guy like Chuck to not even get credit for any of it now, because of the lie he'd told to insert himself into his own creation. It's incredible to me. He wants nothing more than recognition as the creator, as the writer, and Becky's far more interested in her OWN stories about the same characters. She saw herself as more than Chuck’s equal as a writer, she saw herself as his superior. He just recorded, she CREATES. She dismissed everything Chuck was most interested in, and writes the characters all having achieved a measure of peace and happiness, the same as she has. And Chuck... hates it. :'D

Remember, this is the guy who invented monsters before he invented anything else. Leviathans were his first creation, even before the archangels. But they had a nasty habit of eating everything else he tried to create, so he grudgingly locked them in Purgatory, and moved on to the next thing. And he's had a lot of similar failures over the years... like the original hellhound that Lucifer stole away (and that Sam killed in 12.15). Seems like this has always been the story Chuck wanted to tell, because he's always only ever had his original drama with Amara as a source for his creation. He's... obsessed... with his version of events, no matter how many times he's confronted with reality, he weasels out of personal responsibility for everything. Like he does in this scene with Becky, letting her believe he's just a poor dude who wants to keep writing and lost his writing mojo because his prophet powers dried up.

This is probably the first Becky's heard Chuck had a sister, who Chuck only explains rejected him because she "sucks." And... Chuck... you're leaving out the horrific things you've done to her as an explanation of why she refused to help you. He's still hiding behind the “super cute” Chuck Facade. And nothing he says is an out and out lie, but it's entirely a manipulation, a complete reframing of the cosmic scale of what's happened into something he expects Becky to be able to offer him sympathy over. And she's just not having it. And again, good for her.

Chuck admitting that he's lost and hates himself at least engages Becky enough to try something to get him moving forward (again, still thinking he's just a guy who's lost everything). And tells him if writing makes him happy, then he should write.

Meanwhile Dean's incongruously eating a hot dog (WHERE IS HE GETTING ALL THIS FOOD?!) and interviewing a beaver. Sam questions why, and Dean's not only gotten information about the case (mascots have access to cheerleaders), but information about the kid inside the suit (he's a smart kid, got a full ride to IU). Dean's been unusually productive while chewing that hot dog, apparently. But he’s basically a caricature of himself during this case, like he’s trying to wear a suit he hasn’t worn in 15 years, and is finding it really ill-fitting. (it’s probably all the snacks he’s eating, honestly)

Veronica hands Billy a black wristband printed SUSIEFOREVER, which... is probably how Billy's feeling at the moment (hello, she was his girlfriend and he accidentally killed her... this is gonna haunt him forever). Veronica (who we've already been told by the latest girl to disappear is "so fake" in her grief over Susie's death) seems to be coming on to Billy, or at least making her interest in him known. And we DON'T know how all of this will resolve yet, but there's an awful lot going on in this scene. Did Veronica actually kill Susie? Is she the vampire and is that the reason for this OTT "so fake" grief on her part? Did Billy's "anything for my kid" mother who interrupts the scene actually kill her and Billy know something about it? Why is everyone acting so... weird?

Because we're back to the plasticity of this entire case again. What's actually killing cheerleaders? What's really going on here? If this entire case is Chuck's machination, because he wrote it down, and therefore subtly affected the situation, is that why everything seems just slightly off? Slightly malleable, as if Chuck is only working out the details of the case as he's writing it all down?

Billy leaves with his mom, and Veronica is left in a dimly lit gym filled with empty chairs and programs for the memorial service. She's practicing her speech to this huge empty room, speaking into a microphone. And as she talks, she edits her speech.

We've seen Chuck do this. in 4.18, he had Dean push the doorbell with determination, and then went back and edited it to read "with forceful determination." Just before the doorbell rang, and it was a forcefully determined Dean doing the ringing... So Veronica's self-edit here seems almost like a Chuck self-edit.

Remember how I mentioned way back toward the beginning of this mess how Sam asked the VP for a clarification on who Susie's "BEST" friends were, and Veronica was singled out among a group of her close friends? And now Veronica stands alone not only as the sole person in the room here talking to empty chairs, but as the one with apparent motive to kill Susie, who's been accused of expressing a lot of over-the-top melodramatic "so fake" grief. And... she edits her relationship with Susie on the fly:

Veronica: We are here to celebrate the life of my friend Susie. No. *clears throat* *takes a breath* We are here to celebrate the life of my best friend Susie. My best friend Susie who I miss like... *sigh* like she was a part of me. And in many ways she's still a part of me. She'll always be a part of all of us. Susie Martin was as rare as a ghost orchid and as unique as a snowflake. So beautiful inside and out. But as Robert Frost tells us, nothing gold can stay. And that's what Susie was. Pure gold.

And during this entire speech, to the empty room, the music in the background is ominous, looming, tense. The musical cue is telling us to doubt her performance here, with the high strings picking up the tension just as she comes to a close and Dean shows up with his slow clap. I mean, it was a pretty OTT speech, delivered with an intensity that literally does feel rehearsed. Stilted. Plastic. Everything in the case so far has pointed the arrow at her being the monster. The framing of the narrative would support it if it had been true, but the background of the entire case feels exactly as Becky has described it. What if THIS was the original ending to the case that Becky had voiced her complaints about, as if THIS is the story that Chuck would've written.

But that's such weaksauce. MotW episodes are nothing if not thematically consistent. Vampires are about revenge cases, and this case is a very specifically pointed bit of revenge, of Chuck against the Winchesters. They ruined the last story he tried to tell, and the fact this started out looking like something OTHER than a vampire case (possibly a ghoul, based on the parallel to 9.10, and a dismembered body), and then seemingly remolded itself INTO a vampire case halfway through... it feels like that first fang Dean found at the morgue was Chuck sinking his teeth into their lives.

And Veronica, no matter how the case had painted her to this point, was completely innocent. A bit plastic, because she's a victim of this reality bend as much as Sam and Dean are, because the real monster of this case is Chuck-- only Sam and Dean don't have any idea yet.

Dean calls her on her fake emotions, and they directly accuse her of killing her friend. And get the proof that she was innocent because she HAS BRACES, which she's apparently self-conscious about, but it proved she wasn't a vampire. *SIGH*

Plastic.

So Sam and Dean look for video evidence from surveillance cam footage, which the police had apparently already looked at and found nothing, but now they find a car driving past immediately after the second girl's abduction. Did the police not see it? Or is this another bit of plastic?

Meanwhile back at Billy's house, his parents refuse to even hear him say Susie's name, and suspicion immediately shifts to their entire family. Billy's father washes blood off his hands, and nobody seems to find this strange. Are they all monsters? Did one of them slip up? What the heckeroo is actually going on here? Whatever it is, it feels like they're all complicit, and Billy seems to be having reservations. Except they've also got the latest victim tied up and blindfolded in their storage room. So... they're definitely guilty of something. But we're only halfway through the episode at this point, so there's clearly more to the story.

Chuck tells Becky he can't see what Sam and Dean are doing anymore, as he conveniently scratches at his left shoulder where his wound connecting him to Sam is. Which is wild, right? Because what little we know about the Equalizer gun was that it fired INTENT. And that it affects the person shot and the shooter identically. So what was Sam's intent when he shot Chuck? Dean had just told Chuck to "Go to Hell," but Sam didn't say anything out loud when he shot Chuck. Was his intent "stop fucking with our lives" or more vaguely grief-filled "go to hell" or something more? Because whatever intention Sam shot at Chuck seems to have directly caused both Chuck's loss of power AND his inability to see directly into their lives now. And after having watched the Sam and Dean show for their entire lives, Chuck is PISSED about not being able to see what they're up to.

And I wonder, incidentally, if this will be the same factor that's causing problems for the Winchesters, too... that Sam may have inadvertently severed whatever protective force had made their lives as hunters as... implausibly unproblematic as they've always been, you know? I think we'll be seeing that develop more in the next episode, but we saw hints of it happening in this episode too (like with Dean's comment about the killer having a cheerleader fetish). But regardless, I think this is why Sam is suffering these grief-fueled nightmares, his inability to breathe, and his general current mental state. He’s suffering from the same intent he’d fired at Chuck. Only it hit Chuck with a case of writer’s block, while it hit Sam with something he’s been unable to truly define or explain. Yet.

Becky tells Chuck to write about the Winchesters if he loves their story so much, because that's what SHE does. Her stories don't have to be based in reality for her to enjoy them, but Chuck's only metaphorically a writer. He doesn't just want to make up tales, he wants to literally create reality. During Becky's entire pep talk, Chuck's holding a little figurine of Sam pointing a gun, and ain't that just on the nose? She plucks Sam out of Chuck’s hands and puts him back on the mantle (and I admit to at first thinking it was the Cas doll from 5.06, because Dean did the same thing with Cas, putting him up on the mantle like that), but Chuck still expresses doubt in his ability to actually write.

And here's where the most incongruous stuff in the entire episode begins happening-- the family dynamics of a killer family. It's still unclear who the monster is among them, but like Dean, we are leaning toward the father. The thing is, none of it's actually plausible. That's the beauty of this entire case. It's plastic.

How did this single kid out of this entire town get turned by a vampire, and his parents just... completely accepted what happened immediately without question? How did they KNOW what to do for their son in this circumstance? They went out and killed animals for their blood for him. Where did they learn to do this for him? And then how could they so casually just... kidnap a whole human being just to feed their son? Why not go back to feeding him animal blood like he'd done before? They didn't see anything wrong with any of this, either. DID THESE PEOPLE NOT HAVE QUESTIONS?!

And what of the vampire that made him? Did that vampire just... turn him and run? Did he give the kid a pamphlet explaining vampire life to him or something? It's just utterly baffling that this whole family just... incorporated this development into their lives as if it was all an entirely normal thing to accept about their kid. The dad KIDNAPPED A WHOLE ENTIRE HUMAN BEING for him on his own initiative, the mom was ready to shoot Sam and Dean for interfering in their plans. LIKE HOW IS ANY OF THIS NORMAL?!

And perhaps most bizarre of all, Sam and Dean didn't see anything wrong with it in reflection later that night. But I'll get to that when we get there. Heck this note-writing thing is really hard when I already know everything that's gonna happen. I have enough trouble staying on point without the benefit of foresight. :'D

So these parents are insistent that they're doing all of this, sacrificing all of this, just for him. And when he tells them he doesn't want them to, they just beg him to tell them what he wants from them. And he's just so frustrated because they aren't listening to him. Like they don't even care about him despite professing they're doing all of this so he can be happy. And he's just... profoundly not happy.

So the father, when Sam and Dean show up, still thinks they're going to ARREST him. Which is a weird thing for a suspected vampire to believe, and he's horrified when Dean pulls out a machete instead of handcuffs. This is a totally shocking development for him, and yet he STILL holds it together enough to bargain for his wife and son's lives. And the wife is profoundly confused by this, and our suspicions shift to her. But that's still... not quite right. She's prepared to literally shoot what she believes to be two FBI agents to save her son, again, as if all of this was entirely normal. As if this is what normal people are willing to do for their monster children.

I've already written a bunch about Becky's critique of Chuck's writing, and how poorly Chuck takes her notes. Chuck... is really out of touch with fanfic culture. Becky's reading this story as if it was fic, not reality. She kudos'ed and commented, and expected Chuck to just accept that and move on, because that's how fic culture works. But he demanded a beta read level critique, and Becky gave it. And he shouldn't have asked for it if he didn't actually want it.

And here comes the revenge that justifies the Vampire Plot. Chuck... is the vampire. he's the monster that doomed Billy for no reason. Who drove the parents to such extreme lengths to protect their child. Because that's how CHUCK saw what TFW had done to protect Jack. He saw it as just that outrageous and unfounded, even though it was in no way the same. We just witnessed Chuck's critique of TFW's actions in 14.20, and it was scathing, mocking, and vindictive.

Plastic.

But I also suspect that Becky wasn't reading ~this case~ exactly, because she complained that Sam and Dean were tied up (they were never once tied up in this episode), and she complained about the villain monologue being stale (Dean does most of the monologuing here, and it's Sam who figures out what's actually going on). Just one more bit of plastic.

But Chuck somehow managed (even if he couldn't see it) to put Jack's 14.20 realizations about himself into Billy's mouth. As if Chuck's story had already been written, and through some power of its own it was brought into reality via these previously innocent people. The story itself is more powerful than the author.

Like Jack, Billy has been trying to accept responsibility for his actions. He couldn't control himself, he didn't know it would happen, but he's dangerous and needs to be stopped. And Billy's speech isn't a "villain monologue," but a painful confession of everything he'd done. So what story was Becky reading?

Sam angrily judges the parents' actions, and Dean expresses his shock that the father would've just let him cut off his head to save his son. And is taken aback at the comment that he must not have kids, if he doesn't think he wouldn't have done the same for his own child.

And Dean's like... well, no I wouldn't have done the same for my own child. It's a super messed up situation that I'd really been trying not to think too hard about, thanks. It's been less than a week and here you go bringing up the worst day of our lives, so thanks for that... but they carry on. The mother says they just wanted him to have a normal life, and that's something Jack never would've had regardless because of what he was. But he had *a* life, with the Winchesters. If Jack had been a vampire, they wouldn't have gone out hunting and kidnapping teenage girls for him to eat, you know? But they were willing to raid heaven and shout down God for Jack. But context matters. And this hastily assembled vampire family ready to play revenge/victim for Chuck's story lacked all context. They were plastic.

It's Billy who ends up dictating how his parents are to handle everything, calm as can be. And his parents finally listen to him. And he sacrifices himself to the Winchesters. And they just... go along with it, take him out to the woods, and Dean kills the boy kneeling at his feet, accepting his fate as he's clearly crying, while Sam watches on. It's what Chuck had wanted in 14.20, and Dean had refused to give him. And now this entire situation has been Dean, manipulated into providing that demanded sacrifice, one way or another. And the most interesting bit of it? Chuck... couldn't even see it playing out. He missed the whole show that played out in Chuck Puppet Theater despite the fact. Like whatever he actually wrote was irrelevant, because his intent is somehow still connecting through to the Winchesters in pantomime.

And Sam and Dean's reactions to all of this are also just weirdly plastic.

I've already written about Chuck and Becky enough I think, but Chuck's moved on from "Writers lie," to "I can do anything, I'm a writer." With some of the worst villain monologue we've ever gotten, with "There, see, it's making you feel something! That's good, right?" While Becky is outraged and heartbroken over Chuck's ending. The only thing I need to say about whatever Chuck's planned ending is, is that if the series ends the way CHUCK wants it to, it'll go down as the biggest intentional betrayal of a fandom in the history of television. The show has stated to us in this episode that Chuck is the final boss big bad, and that he cannot be allowed to win. He can't have the final word in this story.

In *our* world, the current writers have officially called out a good number of sins of their past and exposed them via Chuck. They wrote the Leviathans being a personal favorite of Chuck's despite being pretty universally hated by fandom... well... they're looking for redemption for themselves in s15. THEY can't allow the story to end horribly. They've staked their current writing cred on it, as well as the entire history of 15 years of building TFW into the heroes. Sure, they've joked that not all fans will be happy with the ending, but in serious comments they've also promised a "real" ending and not some advanced level deus ex machina that wipes everything clean, either. That's a lot to deliver, and Chuck's suggested ending of the Winchesters horrifically dead doesn't deliver any of it.

So... back to the denouement of the episode. To the Impala! The least plastic thing in the entire episode. But it's pretty plastic.

Sam suggests that what Henry did for his son, was something they would've done for Jack, given the chance. And no, he's not talking about kidnapping teenage girls to feed him, he's talking about offering himself as a sacrifice in his son's place. Because Dean literally did do that. He was willing to sacrifice himself to kill Jack before he could kill again. It's what Chuck had presented as the ONLY way to stop Jack from destroying the world, with the examples of Jack having accidentally killed Mary, and then the whole of society crumbling because Jack told everyone to stop lying. But Sam? He wasn't willing to sacrifice both of them. And then he learned the truth from Chuck, about the manipulations that forced them all to this point, how Chuck probably did have the power to make everything right, restore Jack's soul, everything... but he didn't want to because it was more entertaining for him to watch them act out his plots instead. He WANTED that drama, that horrible sacrifice. He ENJOYED it.

But given the choice, I think Sam and Dean both would've traded places with Jack. We actually *saw* Cas literally exchange himself for Jack in 14.08. But Chuck wasn't satisfied with that trade. He wanted more from them, and they decided they were done playing on his stage.

There's a bit of incongruity in the speech Dean gives Sam about his current state, as well. He's usually so much better at reading Sam, yet he's comparing Sam's current mental state to his own back in the crypt, after Chuck. And just... no? This is not it at all? When he told Sam he's felt like cashing in, *we* think of 13.05, where he literally DID think of cashing in, you know? That feels far more similar to how Sam's feeling right now than to Dean's ANGER and "we need a plan!" bossiness from the crypt after Chuck. It's jarring as a comparison, because IT'S THE WRONG THING ENTIRELY.

But it's wrong, because it's the glaring omission of Cas that's already been lampshaded in the episode. That Dean's current blind spot here is shining a violently bright light on what SHOULD be said. Just like the end of 13.05 when we all yelled "HELLO, DEAN" at the television when Cas didn't say the line to him. We've been talking FOR YEARS about how this show uses narrative negative space like this, how it expects us to shout HEY WHAT ABOUT CAS?! at the screen, or to see that even this driving scene in the dark, in the car, is a perfect inverse mirror of that scene in 13.05, where Sam had spent that entire episode feeding his favorite junk food that he criticized Dean for in this episode, Dean and dragging him out on a case in the hopes of making him feel like himself again and... that's what Dean's telling Sam he wanted to work this case for now, to show Sam exactly what Sam had tried (and failed spectacularly) to show Dean in 13.05.

Dean even quotes some of Cas's last words to him before he left, that he should "move on."

But they needed to walk around the giant Cas-shaped hole in the narrative. And they needed to do it this incongruously. And that's exactly why it works.

And it's why Sam CAN'T move on. He doesn't feel free. I've already written a bit about this, and how it's directly tied to Sam's wound, and what it's probably doing to him. And what IS it doing to him? Chuck wobbles his head side to side, and the Sam and Dean bobbleheads on the desk beside him follow suit.

[spaziedoesntknow]

Billy...

So a little less than a week ago I stumbled across a small whisper of a head cannon that someone wrote. It was barely two sentences, but it completely changed how I feel about Billy in Stranger Things. The head cannon was about Billy meeting Eleven.

Now just to get it out of the way my first opinions of Billy and feelings for him up until that point were pretty standard. He's an abusive, racist, dick. He didn't deserve to get beat by his father but he seems to enjoy tormenting Max way past the point of treating her badly because of the way his father treats him and Max's (possible) ignorance of the abuse he faces every day. In my head Billy was one of those guys who started fights for the thrill of it, for the power of destroying something because they could. And maybe he is, but the thing I thought the most was that his introduction and behavior would have been so much better story wise if Billy had been the baby in the flashbacks or one of Eleven's siblings. And that his anger was the same as Kali's just left unfocused and in his father's mind reigned in by the abuse and responsibilities of making sure that Max is home when she's supposed to be. For some reason it was always more interesting to have Billy as a supernatural bully who in contrast to Kali and Eleven wasn't focused on destroying Papa and the people that took them or even saving the world. But instead living as close to a normal life as he could.

" Well, all I'm saying is that I want to look back and say that I did I the best I could while I was stuck in this place..." - Dawson, dazed and confused (1993)

For the most part I haven't delved into Stranger Things fanfiction. None of the stories had caught my eye and with season One it was one of the few times that I thought something was perfect as is. Season two there are a few things that I would change but with a lot of the fics being written focusing on Billy and Steve, I stayed clear. Until last week. There are only a few stories that have Billy and Eleven's interactions as main plot and a lot of those are still Billy/Steve centric, which while I like them better as friends or casual enemies who will have to keep saving their kids , aren't too bad. The all give the couple a real relationship and none of them shy away from Billy as a bully or the abuse of his father or even Billy and Max's estranged relationship. Instead they dive in head first, and use it to bring Billy into the fold and show that he's something more than an angry sack of racism and hate. Some show him turning around in response to the bat, others have him and Eleven bonding over their bad fathers and the abuse they suffered as well as battling thoughts of being a monster.

All throughout the show we are shown two stories, those of the children and those of the parents. We go insane with Joyce as she searches for Will. We weep for Barb with her parents and their desire for closure, and we struggle with Hopper as he deals with a pre-teen girl, her superpowers and the loss of his own daughter.

With the children we see Steve stepping up where parents should be, how Mike and Nancy's parents are technically there but might as well not be and how each of them are determined to keep each other safe when the adults have failed them. By adding in Max and Billy the show forces us to look more directly at the relationships between the families. Because before Billy, and his dad, the only adults harming children were Papa and the scientists. They may be running and fighting for their lives but they can always go home. The parents may be oblivious or may fight for their child but no one in the party had a home that wasn't safe because of their parents. Even now Max isn't the one that gets hit, Billy does, she deals with the aftermath which isn't coming from a parent but from her brother.

Billy 's relationship with his dad is the only one that comes close to mirroring Eleven's experience with her Papa in the context of the party. Because while Kali also was abused she made a new life for herself and has focused her intentions. But Billy and Eleven are still around father figures, still under somebody else's control, and someone else's responsibility, So when they lash out it has direct consequences in the way they interact with their parents, those around them and themselves.

Its also interesting to note how Billy and Steve's lives are paralleled in each other. While Steve's parents are never around, most of season two we didn't even know that Max and Billy had parents, much less moved to Hawkins with them. Obviously their care for their hair, car, and popularity are simular as well. The only real difference is Steve as the golden boy was seen as a goal for Nancy, them dating being a miracle the size of John Hughes' sixteen candles. While Billy is more like the bullies from Footloose and the Karate Kid, actively trying to murder people for fun and drinking for status. Steve is rich and Billy is poor. Steve is all heart and Billy is all fist. They are set up as direct foils for each other and will definitely push both characters farther than their established molds as they interact more.

In the coming season it will be interesting to see if these parallels continue, and how Billy becomes more integrated into the story. Because Billy as he is now is a Bully who's out of control and being abused so the only way he can gain control is to hurt people. But he becomes so much more interesting when put near Eleven and Steve. As a foil to the established characters he helps show the holes in the established relationships, how perception determines affection, and if anyone is truly a monster or if circumstances and support structures have more to do with it

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: Halloween Special Villains

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

Ah, Halloween, that magical, spooky time of year where ghosts and goblins come out to play and children dress up in the hopes of getting some delicious Halloween candy. But what about all of us who are trapped at home on the night of this pagan costume and candy festival? What do we have to keep us entertained?

Why, Halloween specials of course!

If there’s one thing Halloween delivers on almost as well as Christmas does, it’s spooky Halloween-themed episodes of cartoons, where the show is allowed to get darker and more disturbing than it usually does in some cases. And what is any special without a special one-shot villain? Gotta have someone stirring up some Halloween trouble on this spooky night. And since these characters are usually one and done with little in the way to go super in-depth about, I’d figure we’d look at five of them at once! They are:

Jack O’Lantern from The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy

Pumpkinator from The Fairly OddParents

Bun-Bun from Underfist

Fright Night from Danny Phantom

Ron Tompkins from Toy Story of Terror!

I’m sure some of you feel there are some glaring omissions. Where’s the Flying Dutchman? Where’s Stickybeard? Well, I decided that this time around I’d go with characters whose major appearances and debuts are Halloween episodes; both those guys had major roles in non-Halloween episodes as well, so I’ll be saving them for full reviews at a later date. Also of note: I am aware the story of Toy Story of Terror! does not take place on Halloween, but it is aired as a Halloween special, so I’m counting it.

Actor: So if there’s one thing these guys aren’t lacking in, it’s the actor department, and this isn’t a huge shock since when you’ve got a holiday special you want to splurge a bit, you know?

Jack has one of my favorite actors ever, the always-awesome Wayne Knight. Knight just has that sort of voice that’s perfect for smug jerk characters like Mr. Blik or Dennis Nedry, so really it’s pretty fitting for a pranking trickster like Jack, though I will say that it’s hard to match Knight’s voice to the human version of Jack when you see him in a flashback.

Ron Tompkins isn’t too far behind in the impressive VA department, being voiced by none other than Stephen Tobolowsky, who you may remember as the overbearing Ned Ryerson from GroundHog Day (and how can you forget him? You see him repeating the same scene about thirty times). He does a great job at making Tompkins cartoonishly evil and mostly enjoyable, a tall order for a character who steals toys from children to sell online.

And if you thought the list of awesome actors was done, boy were you wrong! Star Trek’s very own Michael Dorn voices the Fright Knight, and Dorn’s voice is absolutely perfect for a cool, evil, undead knight.

Bun-Bun is voiced by Dave Wittenberg who is an insanely prolific VA, playing characters such as Henry Wong from Digimon Tamers (AKA the beast season of Digimon) to none other than Kakashi from Naruto. I think it goes without saying a VA this versatile manages to make the role work.

And finally, we have the Pumpkinator, who is played by Dee Bradley Baker, and if I sat here listing all the notable roles this man has played we’d be here all night. But here’s a small sample: Appa, Momo, Squilliam Fancyson and Bubble Bass, Klaus the goldfish, Cow and Chicken’s dad, Cinderblock and Plasmus, the Alien and Predator in Mortal Kombat, Lion and Frybo, Numbah 4 and the Toilenator, Remy Buxaplenty, most of the animals in The Legend of Korra… you get the picture. This guy’s a legend. He’ll do any sort of role, big or small, so even if he’s not playing the most complex character here, he’s at least giving it a unique spin with his voice because man, this guy has RANGE.

Motivation/Goals: Jack has a rather simple motivation: revenge. You see, ages ago he managed to steal Grim’s scythe when he was about to be reaped, and bartered for the scythe’s return, asking to be made immortal. Grim reluctantly gave him this, but, as Grim is not someone who likes being tricked, also cut his head off. As anything cut off with Grim’s scythe is permanently cut off, Jack had to replace his head with a pumpkin (of course). This lead to him being shunned as a freak, which just made jis desire for vengeance even stronger; I mean, wouldn’t you want revenge if you could only go to the ding-dong grocery store to get pudding once a year?

If you want to get even simpler, the Pumpkinator is your guy! He exists simply to blow up planets. Tat’s it. He’s very much just an obstacle Timmy needs to overcome so that he can undo his wish for every Halloween costume to be “real and scary” before the consequences end up destroying the world.

Bun-Bun is rather simple as well: he just seems to be a jerk. But they don’t just make him a simple jerk, no, this is a Billly & Mandy spinoff so things have to be taken to their ridiculous extreme. Bun-Bun turns out to be behind numerous extremely petty actions that affected the lives of the main heroes, having haunted Hoss as a child and made him afraid of monsters, made Billy afraid of spiders which estranged him from his son Jeff, and, uh, sawed off Fred Fredburger’s tusks. The fiend! As you might guess, there’s no real rhyme or reason to this, it’s just goofy absurdist over-the-top sort of thing you’d expect from Maxwell Atoms.

Ron has a relatively simple motivation, but frankly it might be the most evil out of all of these: the man steals toys from the children who stay at his motel to sell them for monetary gain. Yes, this is more evil than attempting to blow up the planet, you heard me. I have no idea how sick and twisted you have to be to think that stealing toys from children is acceptable. Funnily enough, this is the same sort of motivation Al (who was played by Wayne Knight, funnily enough) from Toy Story 2 had, though Ron takes it above and beyond.

And finally that brings us to Fright Knight, Much like most of the ghosts on the show, Fright Knight seems to just want to cause a ruckus after he’s released, attempting to take over Amity Park when Danny foolishly releases him. Later in the show he is freed to serve Pariah Dark, and after Dark is beaten he joins up with Vlad. In his final appearance of any consequence he is seen serving the Ultimate Enemy in the bad future. Basically the guy is just a really cool overhyped henchman.

Personality: So let’s get the easy one out of the way first: The Pumpkinator doesn’t exactly have a personality, because it is a big generic doomsday villain meant to act as an obstacle for Timmy to overcome. However, when it returned later in the episode where Timmy goes to Unwish Island, it did have one notable personality trait: an undying hatred for Timmy Turner, It’s a pretty relatable trait the more into the series you watch.

Bun-Bun is also rather evil and simple. He’s just a petty jerk, as can be seen by his crimes listed up under motivation. There’s not much else to him, same with Fright Knight who, again, is mostly just an overhyped henchman who acts as the hardcore badass serving whatever big bad of the week is out to get Danny (or he would have, but more on that later).

Out of all of these, Ron and Jack have the most personality. Jack is an unrepentant prankster who, at least when alive, was heavily implied to just not get he was taking it too far with his pranks (“too far” in this case being tricking people off of cliffs, at the least), and simply morphed into a bitter, jaded, vengeance-seeking supernatural entity after hundreds of years of rejection by society and isolation. Jack’s honestly pretty tragic in that regard, though it obviously doesn’t excuse his actions.

Ron is just a straight-up jerk, putting up a facade of being a charming, friendly motel owner while stealing toys from under his guest’s noses. As the truth comes out about him, he becomes more cartoonish and hammy, which really doesn’t help his case at all, and in his final scene he actually does something so cartoonish he almost feels like he doesn’t belong in the Toy Story universe.

Final Fate: Funnily enough, Pumpkinator actually gets the happiest ending out of anyone here: after being unwished by Timmy, he goes to Unwish Island and, after Timmy eventually journeys there, gets to have fun tormenting Timmy clones for the rest of time.

Ron probably has the second happiest ending, for a given definition of “happy.” Bonnie’s mother calls the cops on him for his theft, and when they show up, he somehow manages to trick them, run away, steal their car, crash it into a telephone pole when backing up, and then run off before they even move a muscle. It’s ridiculously cartoonish, and there’s no way this guy is gonna be getting off easy after that little display.

Onto Bun-Bun. Bun-Bun made one simple mistake: he put any trust at all int Skarr. For those not in the know, Skarr was the “Starscream” to Hector Con Carne, always hoping to overthrow him and take over his world domination schemes for himself before he ended up retiring from that life and becoming a reoccurring character on Billy & Mandy. So, when he joins up with the villain by betraying Underfist, what do you think he does? He betrays the villain, pushing Bun-Bun into hot cocoa and melting him, using his power of treachery and backstabbing to help his team save the world. It’s pretty amusing in that classic Billy & Mandy way.

Good ol’ Jack ends up getting sent to the underworld this time since Grim wasn’t putting up with his crap anymore, and it seems Jack still hasn’t learned his lesson about pranking. When last we see him, he’s now tormenting demons, who all start moving in on him while he laughs at his dumb pranks. The screen cuts to black and we hear a squishing noise. It’s safe to say he won’t have to worry about that pumpkin head causing him problems anymore.

Fright Night is easily the most tricky one to talk about because his entire intended purpose in the show got aborted. After he was brought back to serve Pariah, he ended up under Vlad’s control by episode’s end, but for some reason, nothing ever came of this and it was never mentioned again – well, except in the “Ultimate Enemy” special, in which the Fright Knight cameos at the beginning, acting as something of the hype man for Dan Phantom, softening up Amity Park for Dan’s attack. After that, though, he’s basically out of the series, save for a couple of brief cameos here and there.

Best Scene: Jack has the flashback to his origins, because not only is it perfectly dark for a show’s Halloween episode, you have to give props to anyone who managed to outwit Grim, even if he did end up paying a steep price for it.

Ron has his aforementioned escape from the police. I do think it’s a bit too cartoonish and silly for Toy Story, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t pretty hilarious either way.

The Fright Knight has the aforementioned scene where he mentions he’s serving The evil future Danny. Considering that’s his last real role in the series, at least he got to go out on a high note, though it still sucks nothing ever came of the plotlines set up for him.

Bun-Bun’s best scene is when he revealed that he was the architect of most of the protagonist’s woes. Again, it’s just classic over-the-top Billy & Mandy silliness, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

The Pumpkinator… just doesn’t have one. Sorry.

Best Quote: While most of these guys aren’t exactly a goldmine of quotes, Jack has one of my favorite quotes from anything, ever, and I even already referenced it above: “Three hundred and sixty-four days a year, I can't even go the the ding-dong grocery store to buy pudding! And do you know why?" The why, obviously, is the fact he has a pumpkin for a head.

Final Thoughts & Score: Frankly, this batch of Halloween hooligans is a very mixed bag. We didn’t fare quite as bad as Charlie Brown did on Halloween, but we only got one King Size candy bar out of this lot.

I guess let’s just start with the black licorice of the bunch: Fright Knight. God, I wish I could love Fright Knight, I really do, but considering the overwhelming quality of most of Danny’s rogues gallery and just the fact this guy was totally shafted and everything set up for him was ignored there’s just no excusing how lame this guy looks, Michael Dorn or no. He has a great design and a cool concept, and the ideas for interesting stories with him were there, but he ends up being a 3/10, saved only by his cool first outing, great voice work, and awesome design.

Worse still is the pile of weirdly flavored candy corn that is the Pumpkinator. He has a cool design, but he’s not much of an antagonist to be honest. He’s just a cool-looking robot who wants to blow up the planet. That’s about it. There’s really not much to say about this guy, and his only other appearance doesn’t really add much. I suppose he serves his purpose, but I have to wonder, why even bring him back if he wasn’t going to do anything remotely interesting? I don’t like generic doomsday villains at the best of times, but if you’re gonna bring one back, at least try and do something interesting with them to justify their existence, otherwise they’re just gonna end up getting a 2/10.

Finally, we get into the good candy! Let’s start off with the tasty marshmallow bunny we got, Bun-Bun (isn’t that more of an Easter candy? Weird). Bun—Bun is a funy, goofy, cartoonish villain, perfect for the first (and sadly, only) outing for Underfist. The fact they went above and beyond to cement him as this ludicrous mastermind who just screwed with everyone’s lives for no apparent reason other than the fact he’s a jerk is pretty funny. I don’t think he’s gonna win any Villain of the Year awards, but I think a 6/10 is good enough for this above average nuisance.

Oho, what’s this? A… candycane? Well, it’s a bit out of season, but it’s still tasty! And that’s kind of where Ron is. I do like just how unabashedly scummy he is, and there is precedent for people like him in the Toy Story universe, but I feel he takes things to a cartoonish extreme. For crying out loud, the guy has a trained iguana that acts like a dog! He feels like he belongs in a different series than this one, but again, I don’t really think that’s a bad thing, because at the very least he is funny. He gets a 7/10, a bit higher than usual just because I love how ridiculously nasty his whole scheme is. Stealing from kids, what the actual hell.

YES! A King Size candy bar! Just what I was looking for! It’s just a generic Hershey bar, but hey, that’s a lot of chocolate, so who’s complaining? And that’s Jack, he is simply put a perfect Halloween special antagonist. Most of this comes from his voice work, since Wayne Knight is a national treasure, but his backstory and concept are worth praising too. His origin story is something of a twist on the old legend of “Stingy Jack,” the origin story of the Jack-O’-Lantern appropriately enough. While obviously there are liberties, such as substituting Grim for the devil, it’s a mostly accurate retelling, something that would go over most people’s heads unless they’re really into classical folklore. Jack’s a lot of fun as a character, earning himself a nice big 8/10, only being held back from a higher score because despite being rightfully beloved by audiences, he never really had a major role again, getting a minor shout out in Big Boogey Adventure and… that’s it. I think Jack could have been a really entertaining reoccurring antagonist in the same vein as fwllow ensemble darkhorse Eris, but alas, it was not to be. Maybe if Underfist had been picked up he could have been brought back for that, but the fact is it just didn’t happen. Oh well, might as well appreciate what we got.

And that’s it for this batch of Halloween goodies. Halloween specials seem a lot less prevalent than Christmas specials, but they’re no less important or fun, and as you can see, they do produce at least mildly interesting villains, sometimes. If only they could produce a villain so devilishly Halloweenie that he could perfectly embody the spirit of the holiday…

Hey, what’s that at the bottom of the bag…

Wait… is that…

OH NO.

[elizabethrobertajones]

Has anyone compared/contrasted Lucifer pulling Mary into the AU at the end of s12 and Sam and Michael in "Swan Song" going into the Cage? What are your thoughts on the parallel structure, if any? [Thanks so much for your meta; I look forward to the tumblr discussions just as much as the episodes sometimes

Ellooo!

I’ve seen it commented on a LOT right after the episode, although I can’t actually find a gifset comparison… And I would have to get out the DVDs and cap it by hand to make a comparison so *ugh* :P

I can’t find any meta on it though when going through my 5x22 tag so it had to all be passing comments just on how similar it looked.

I guess obviously the surface level parallel is just to give a sort of cinematic contrast to what Sam did because even though she’s not possessed and didn’t MEAN to fall through with him, she was doing a sort of sacrifice play, living the dream to go punch Lucifer in the face like she said she wanted to do. In defence of her boys. I mean, obviously. Not just punching Lucifer. I don’t *think* this all happened because of her vindictive need to punch him to make up for everything that ever happened because of her, although that is a valid reading I guess :P

It’s all a bit messed up because Lucifer pulled her through because of spite, while Michael was the one who latched onto Sam, and tried to stop him, but fell into the Cage with him because he couldn’t let go and be chill about the fight he was supposed to have with Lucifer. You can’t line up motives with the reasons why Mary went into the AU with why Michael got dragged into the Cage, and Lucifer wasn’t even in charge when it happened in 5x22. 

So going more than superficially makes it pretty hard to say it’s more than using the parallels as the means of removing Mary from the story and a comparison that like Sam she was doing something heroic for them, and ended up trapped in another world, and when they first see her again, she’s in a cage, ironically with Michael (I guess with dramatic irony that they don’t know this but we do so it’s somehow even more obvious to us)… 

It does make a direct parallel to Sam though, that he was trapped with Michael and Lucifer in the Cage, and though the AU stuff has been pretty thin so far and we’ve only had one real episode of Mary there, plus a glimpse for us in 13x01 and a glimpse for Jack and the Winchesters in 13x09… The parallel we got on screen was to Dean in Hell, and they were VERY not subtle about that since they used 13x08 to show that - which makes a parallel instead that Mary has been condemned to the AU, which is the world that *technically* she broke since it’s the world where Sam and Dean were never born, because she didn’t take the deal. 

I’m not entirely sure what that’s saying about anything or if there’s an unintentional crappy message if you dig too deep :P But in 12x23 it was a sort of vindication at least. That their world was so nice BECAUSE they were all in it and their entire chain of events had happened the way it was supposed to since before they were born.

Thinking a few other loose thoughts while prodding this. Season 12 started with a strong theme of season 6 being reversed, and if you roll it backwards far enough you get to 5x22. Obviously all the events being messed up so it’s all a bunch of superficial similarities but all the results and characters and motives and even the angle of the hole they’re falling in are all changed around, arriving at that end and falling into an apocalypse does seem to finish rolling season 6 back through to season 5. 

Also if Mary is a Sam parallel in terms of circumstance, more than Dean being in Hell despite the superficial parallel which is more about motivating him than drawing a proper allegory - Mary’s there accidentally and getting tormented by Lucifer and then Michael just because she happens to be around and caught in the middle of all of it - Sam was saved by Cas in this example. Of course, brought back soulless so there’s got to be consequences… That was part of Cas’s post-apocalypse (lol that phrase is meaningless in this show) hubris and at that point feeling like he could do anything so why not jailbreak Sam from the Cage because Dean would want it and it would be a happier ending than what they had, and of course that causes a whole bunch of problems. 

BUT it is a Winchester codependency deal free zone, because although Dean was LOOKING for ways to do it all through that year, Sam was already back, and the deal he cut with Death to get Sam back turned out to be a lesson Death wanted him to learn and he was intending to give Sam back, because he felt there were bigger problems they needed to deal with. An advantage of Gamble being really un-critical of the codependency is that while none of this is particularly healthy, it’s not all being put on full blast like in Carver era.

I think there’s the obvious parallel now that Jack is the one who had the means to get Mary - like Cas did while Dean had no clue how to save Sam - and had been pursuing it behind their backs for 3 episodes, before coming up with a solution to get her back that’s preeeetty sketchy because aside from any of the consequences they’ve already been warned by Death to back off from messing with the cosmic stuff and here they are… In 6x11 he’s warning them before Cas opens Purgatory, in 13x05 she’s warning Dean before they go universe hopping and cause what’s already happened plus I bet a whole bunch more nonsense on top of that yet to come :P

But anyway Jack has been given the sole task of rescuing Mary because no one else made it to Apocalypse AU with him, and that seals the comparison to Cas in/before season 6 saving Sam, especially as we get a lot of motivation overlap, but Jack’s is much more clear and personal in some ways because we’re seeing it as it happens and getting explanations as we go, such as his need to do something good and seeing the whole process by which he would arrive at deciding that he can and should save Mary, and why, and who for, and all that. 

I think we need to see more of the consequences/Jack’s overall season to keep on comparing him to season 6 Cas because so far as we’ve seen he’s not cut any shady deals (and I doubt he has, at least because anyone who he could cut a shady deal with is still looking for him :P) and he’s still just at the part that technically Cas had already done before the end of season 5 since Sam was already back before the credits there. We really just have Cas’s explanations in season 6 to go on, told from the perspective of the END of season 6, where everything’s got all hecked up… 

I’m guessing if this is going to be bad in some way it will continue to be a different sort of light on things, especially to make a parallel with Cas which could be like one of those scenarios about the son accidentally atoning for the father’s mistakes or whatever by having a take 2 and doing it better on their go around - it’s Cas’s biggest mistake and it’s why, for example, so many angels are dead and they’re pestering Cas to get Jack to make more angels (and we’ve had a few reminders this season about Cas being responsible for that, with his face in the Empty when it tells him all the other dead angels are in there too). I think Cas has long ago redeemed himself *personally* to the Winchesters for the season 6 stuff, but it would be nice if this is heading a way to make Cas less catastrophically guilty to Heaven because he could move on with his life if that guilt was lessened. 

(On the other hand I do worry about Jack doing the exact same thing he’s doing with Mary in 13x09 - “Oh you want this done? And it will make everything better! Okay!” *just goes and friggin… does the thing… without stopping to consider the consequences* - oh, Billie will be facepalming if all the previously-dead angels suddenly drop out of the Empty or something like that :P) 

Anyways this is all getting really ahead of where we are, but something like knowing it would be a season 6 parallel with Mary in “the cage” and Jack going off to rescue her metaphorical guns blazing is definitely only something that solidified SINCE 12x23 so I guess it’s one of those things that is only easy to talk about looking back from 13x09 (even if we’ve been wondering if/how Jack would at the very least open a rift and get Mary back since the summer) because now we know for sure he’s doing it for very similar or at least comparable reasons to what Cas did for Sam. So we’re seeing another thing that only happened off-screen in the original loop happening on screen this time but told through different characters and in different ways (like Patience leaving home to go hunt monsters being an emotional and situational reverse parallel to Sam leaving for Standford, but possibly being the closest version we’ll see on screen to that moment). So there’s a whole parallel structure going on here which just *starts* with Mary going into the AU like Michael and/or Sam falling into the cage in 5x22…

Don’t *think* she’s going to come back soulless although every friggin time a character returns from somewhere or other since, like, ever, people start speculating if they’re soulless so in before that :P

[mittensmorgul]

Hey, Mittens! since you've a MUCH better memory of the show than me, maybe you can help me understand: didn't TFW have a pretty functional goodbye & acceptance of Dean sacrificing himself at the end of S11 when Deano went to soul-bomb Amara, with no expectation that he'd survive that? I'm curious how you think circumstances/feels have changed lately, that they're not accepting it with the deep sea dive now. maybe too much stewing wind-up? timing & angel possession is different/uniquely heinous?

OOH this is actually a really good question! Because not only is their whole interpersonal dynamic between the three of them evolved CONSIDERABLY since the end of s11, but also the circumstances and runup to Dean making his choices, and the entire way each of these scenarios have been framed are entirely different, you know? Not to mention that the potential OUTCOME of each of these terrible choices are VASTLY different. Let’s start with the obvious.

In 11.23, Dean wasn’t making a unilateral choice the way he is in s14. This was actually the culmination of a LOT of other potential solutions that they tried and then failed. Actually, it was the culmination of the entirety of s11, and all of Dean’s struggles within himself and with Amara, the reintroduction of God to the story, the audience learning the entire truth in 11.20, Chuck attempting to defend himself in 11.21, coming up with a Group Solution to lock up Amara again in 11.22 (which was doomed to fail because the solution is NEVER to lock up your problems, which was the whole point of all of s11), and eventually running out of options and working as as group to come up with the last ditch Soul Bomb solution (which was also never a viable solution and was doomed to fail, because the answer was to find BALANCE and restore order to the cosmos rather than rejecting the darkness entirely).

Obviously Dean did not go into that final confrontation with Amara expecting to survive, but he did not make the decision in secret, without consultation with anyone else, nor without theoretically exhausting other options while working directly WITH GOD HIMSELF ON THE PLAN. In s14, Dean was handed what he was told was the One Solution to Save The World and accepted Billie’s word on that because he was struggling so hard with both feelings of extreme doubt in himself and guilt over having brought this upon himself by saying Yes to Michael in the first place, as well as personal horror at what would happen if he were to fail to contain Michael as he bashed at the door in his head. He doesn’t think he’s strong enough to stop Michael for long, and he literally made this choice out of sheer terror and desperation, layered with guilt and feelings of abject failure.

In s11, the threat was from the outside, not held in a tiny locked corner of Dean’s brain, you know? And I think even walking into that confrontation with Amara, Dean knew he had one last chance to reason with her, too. Now that he knew both sides of the story of how she was locked up in the first place, and the broken family relationship between her and Chuck, he had a chance. He didn’t just walk in that room and blow her away. He tried using his words, and miracle of miracles, it fucking worked.

The choice Dean made in s14 was done entirely in secret, he’s flat-out rejecting the possibility that there may be another way, without even trying.

He’s making this choice from a place of fear inspired by the resigned acceptance of Billie’s Book Of Fate, instead of from the empowered but still hopeful place of having run the gamut of alternate options with God Himself.

Because Dean had to accept after 13.01 that God wasn’t listening anymore. And having that reinforced by the archangel currently bashing away at the walls in his mind, that God considers them a “failed universe” and has abandoned them all forever, well... talk about doubling down on the hopelessness Dean had already been feeling.

Not to mention, Dean wasn’t being pressured into accepting that responsibility in 11.23. The Bad Thing was an external force that Dean had already disconnected himself from and come to terms with his role in letting her out of her metaphorical box, even though HE HIMSELF HAD BEEN THAT BOX while he’d had the MoC. In s14, Dean is STILL CURRENTLY THE BOX holding the Bad Thing at bay.

If the Soul Bomb had detonated in 11.23, Dean would be Dead™. He could accept that. He could accept his own death as a noble end to save the universe. In s14, Dean is having to face the reality that putting himself in that box would very likely not lead to his own death, but instead eternal torment trapped out of reach beneath the ocean with the worst of all possible tormentors locked inside his head with him. And if that ain’t horrifying, I don’t know what is.

Plus, the fact that every box ever has failed to stay locked on this show, and even things flung to the bottom of the Mariana Trench have been recovered (First Blade, anyone?) and were never truly hidden away for good, it’s obvious to everyone who is Not Dean that this is an objectively TERRIBLE plan in every way. But Dean’s not able to see that, and needs his loved ones to help him find hope, to remember there are better ways, and to support him and help him hold on until they find one.

So yeah, on pretty much every level, this is an ever so slightly different variation on the Soul Bomb Solution.