#this started off with me just wanting more act 3 dialogue with carver

[sandalssandal]

DA2 (Fake Rival!Warden!Carver banter Act 3)

Hello! This is fake banter I came up with in my free time. Fenris’s dialogue is the only explicitly paired one, but you can read any of them assuming they’re romantic or platonic with Hawke. These also assume everyone gets along with Hawke but they’re not explicitly friendship.

I hope everyone is decently characterised, enjoy!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Carver: You… and my [Brother/Sister] are together, correct?

Fenris: That is correct.

Carver: I don’t get, what do you see in [him/her]?

Fenris: Do you really want to know?

Carver: I want to understand.

Fenris: [He/She]…

(Green personality): Brings me peace of mind.

(Purple personality): Makes me laugh.

(Red personality): Knows how to throw [his/her] weight around.

Carver: Really, that’s what you like about [him/her]?

Fenris: I can share other aspects of why I like Hawke if you wish.

Carver: Forget it - perhaps I’ll never understand.

======

Hawke: I’m proud of you.

Carver: What?

Hawke:

(Green personality): *chuckles* I’ll say it again, if you want me to-

(Purple personality): Didn’t hear me the first time? I’ll say it a hundred times more-

(Red personality): You heard me, don’t make me repeat myself-

Carver: I get it! Stop, just stop it.

Hawke: You look upset.

Carver: I just - don’t want to hear those words from you of all people. I don’t need your approval.

Carver: Besides… you remind me too much of Mother when you say it that way.

======

Carver: I have a request to ask of you Merrill.

Merrill: A request? What kind of request?

Carver: Well… you don’t have anywheres to be… I was thinking- *ahem*, I was thinking once I leave for Vigil’s Keep …perhaps you can leave with me?

Merrill: I’m sorry Carver, I can’t do that.

Carver: May I ask why you can’t?

Merrill: Sure you can!

Carver: …

Merrill: …

Carver: …Why can’t you leave?

Merrill: Because Hawke still needs my help, now more than ever! I won’t abandon [him/her] like that.

Carver: *long sigh* Of course [he/she] does.

======

Carver: Do you regret not making me a guardsmen?

Aveline: Makers breath Carver, are you looking to open old wounds? Put it to rest.

Carver: I just want to know, because…

Aveline: Go on…

Carver: Because sometimes I wonder if it turned out differently, if I wouldn’t have gone with my [brother/sister] on that stupid expedition.

Aveline: Hm… I see.

Aveline: If you want my honest opinion? I don’t think being a guardsmen would’ve made a difference. You would’ve signed up anyways and Hawke wouldn’t have stopped you.

Carver: Do you think so?

Aveline: I know so.

======

Varric: So Junior, how’s that popularity in the Wardens coming along? Are people kissing the ground you walk on yet?

Carver: Ha-ha very funny Dwarf, you of all people should know that kind of information.

Varric: Should I? The Wardens can be very secretive y’know, even with their gossip.

Carver: Hm… yes I suppose we can be. Sometimes I forget who I’m speaking to.

Varric: Aw not going to share anymore, Junior? *tsk* I shouldn’t have said anything.

======

Carver: I knew somehow [he’d/she’d] end up in the centre of it all… it’s like [he/she] begs for trouble to find [him/her].

Anders: It can’t be helped can it? [He’s/She’s] a mage after all. Hawke’s a part of the fight regardless of [his/her] station.

Carver: Can it Magey. This is partially your doing, filling [his/her] with nonsense about “justice” and “action”.

Carver: I don’t know why I didn’t hand you to the Templars before, I should just drag you back to the order once I’m finished here.

Anders: I’d advise against doing that, Warden Carver.

Carver: Oh? And tell me why I shouldn’t.

Anders: Because Hawke would follow suit.

Carver: And become a Warden? *scoffs* Please, I wouldn’t let [him/her].

Anders: It wouldn’t be up to you, trust me.

======

Carver: You seem like a free spirit.

Isabela: Is that so?

Carver: Yes, and you have a ship.

Isabela: If you’re trying to flirt me, you could just say I have pretty eyes and huge tits.

Carver: That’s-! Not what I’m- I just don’t understand.

Carver: Why do you stay here in Kirkwall? There’s nothing here worth your time.

Isabela: Oh so you finally drop a proper line, I’m swooning in your arms already.

Carver: Isabela…

Isabela: Fine, I guess I’ll answer your question.

Isabela: I guess I stay because… I like the view.

Carver: The view? Are you referring to my [brother/sister]?

Isabela: Maybe I am - maybe I’m not, maybe I’m referring to what’s in front of me.

Carver: I… see…

Isabela: *chuckles* It’s fun to watch the view turn red.

[holyhellpod]

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

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

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

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

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

Apple | Spotify | Google

Transcript under the cut!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Real Ghostbusters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I’m an entity of my word.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The French Mistake

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

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

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

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

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

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

Realities are socially constructed

Realities are constituted through language

Realities are organised and maintained through narrative

And there are no essential truths.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

I got all of these for free from Google Scholar! 

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

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

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

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

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

[hollyand-writes]

One of the things that hurts me most about Bethany and Carver is how neither of them really get what they want out of life, regardless of which path they take in Dragon Age 2. 

And one of things I have noticed on my current Bethany playthrough after my many, many Carver playthroughs is how much more similar the Hawke twins are than I’ve seen talked about in fandom -- because, ultimately, their fears and worries come down to the same thing. It is easy to miss, though, because they express themselves so differently. 

In my playthrough, Bethany is not necessarily the cheerful “sunshine” and the optimistic “sweet little sister” I often see her depicted as. Carver is not necessarily the grumpy, sullen “middle child” type (although it’s never explicitly confirmed that he’s actually a middle child) I often see him depicted as, either. Bethany has her hard, frosty edges. Carver has his soft, caring ones. 

Both twins are foils for each other in many ways -- Bethany the mage, Carver the warrior; Bethany the one who openly talks about her feelings, Carver the one who doesn’t; Bethany the one who’s overtly religious/devout, while Carver is privately so; Bethany expresses through her words, Carver expresses through his actions; Bethany, who starts on high friendship with (and admiration of) Hawke while Carver... definitely doesn’t -- but their character arcs in DA2 and even many of their dialogues and reactions are the same. 

Note that when you go to Sundermount in Act 1, Flemeth’s advice to them is exactly the same, regardless of how opposite Bethany and Carver seem on the surface. 

“Regret is something I know well. Take care not to cling to it, to hold it so close that it poisons your soul.” 

Curious, no? Why does Flemeth have the same advice for them on regret, despite Bethany being the “sunny” one and Carver being the “sulky” one? 

In a Regency AU longfic of mine, I write Bethany as the sunny, cheerful twin, but with a bit of the snark she has in game. The narrative choice I made to deviate her character from canon was because her circumstances are so different: both Hawke twins are alive, for a start. Bethany, in my AU, has every reason to be happy: she isn’t a mage, she is nobility, she lives in a nice house and has nice dresses and goes to parties where she got to flirt with a handsome prince and lives the life that she canonically loved so much in stories she read growing up. 

The Bethany in-game is... not quite like that. The Bethany in-game is worried. She is constantly looking over her shoulder for templars. The Bethany in-game talks with animation and interest and longing about what their life might have been like if they got to be Amells and nobility -- no poverty, no hiding, no running, no make-shift dresses that Leandra learned to sew when she ran away with Malcolm -- but also with a twinge of regret that her life couldn’t be like that. That her life couldn’t ever be like her dreams, like the stories she loves. 

The Bethany in-game is, as Carver tells you in the Legacy DLC, a girl who wanted so badly to just be “normal”. No magic. No hiding. No looking over her shoulder all the time for fear that the templars might come. Bethany is canonically a virgin in Act 1 but not because she’s this innocent, virginal sweet-little-sister type -- but because she was forced to hide. She couldn’t get too close to anyone, couldn’t let them ever see the real her, because she was a mage -- and because who could she trust, other than her family, not to sell her out to the templars? World of Thedas 2 talks about how she “never did anything fun [and] stayed down in her house most of the time.” It’s likely she didn’t want to be like that, but that she felt forced to be like that. 

(Carver had more freedom in that respect -- able to moon after Peaches or even get busy with her behind Old Barlin’s barn without worrying that he might accidentally reveal himself as a mage. It’s a secret that is easier to keep when it’s not you that’s the mage. And yet, even then, both Hawke twins found ways to help their neighbours and community in Lothering -- we learn from Act 2 letters that Carver helped a neighbour trap rats in the cellar, while Bethany helped the neighbour weed.)

And then, just when Bethany comes so close to that ideal life that she always wanted and dreamed of -- just as Hawke is about to hit the jackpot and reclaim the Amell Estate, and end all her worries about being a poor apostate unprotected by money or title (for that’s what the whole Deep Roads Expedition is about: Carver even says they need money, influence, status, anything to get the templars off their backs) -- her dreams are denied, again. She either goes to the Wardens or gets taken to the Circle. 

As a Warden, Bethany is obviously harder, bitter. Her interactions with you have more bite, less affection, and her regrets about the life she is now forced to lead are obvious. But I argue that while she seems “happier” in the Circle, she is not necessarily so. She is just better at hiding it in her letter to you -- and focuses on the fact that at least she is no longer forced to hide anymore. Her meeting with you during the Qunari battle at the end of Act 2 as a Circle mage is anything other than sunny: she is even cold towards Hawke: 

Hawke: ‘It’s a Hawke family reunion!”  Bethany, bitterly: “What’s left of it.” 

Or even: 

Hawke: “I’m glad you’re safe.” Bethany: “The city is under attack. None of us are safe.” 

Or even her angry response about you getting involved in Orsino and Meredith’s argument at the end of Act 3. Even as a Circle mage, you can hear the bitterness in her voice -- and if she comes back and fights with you as a Warden, it is obvious (at least to me) that she is still struggling to make peace with her new life and how its cost her even more than she thought her status as a mage already cost you all. 

But, as far as Bethany is concerned, at least in the Circle, she is no longer forced to hide anymore. If she can’t join you in (what she perceives, perhaps with some hint of envy in her interactions with you in the DLCs, as) your fancy life as a noble up in Hightown, if she can’t be “normal”, then at least she can be “normal for a mage”. Fleeing is exhausting. Knowing you are the reason your family are always fleeing -- or at least, one of the reasons your family is fleeing -- probably brings on a lot of guilt, at best... or even regrets that you were born and caused them so much difficulty, at worst. 

Bethany spends most of the game worrying about herself, for obvious reasons. Carver, on the other hand, spends most of the game worrying about you. 

Carver’s bitterness and regrets are more obvious than Bethany’s. Carver was not the boy who wanted to be “normal”: like he tells you in Act 1, “I want to be someone.” In the Wardens, he finds his purpose, albeit at a great personal cost he often glosses over in conversation. In the Templars, he is “a man still uncertain of his choice” but if there is one thing that can be said in its favour, it was his choice, for once. Not his family’s. Not Hawke’s. After all, what else could he do, when you chose to leave him behind and Bartrand returns without you and you’re presumably dead? When Fereldan refugees cannot find employment in the city and Aveline denies his application to be a city guard (which I believe would have been the best choice for Carver, and it’s kind of bittersweet that he only gets to be one -- or rather, help them out -- during DA:I when he’s been a templar for so many years and is addicted to lyrium). 

His mother is in mourning during Act 1 and won’t work; his uncle gambles all his money away. The templars are the only option open to a man of someone of his skills and desperation, and he naively joins thinking he can help people like Bethany -- his dead mage twin sister over whom he obviously has regrets that she was the one who died and not him. 

Both twins have a resentful streak over their circumstances, although Carver’s resentment is more obvious than Bethany’s (although Bethany’s resentment definitely comes out on occasion, much more so as a Warden; Bethany is just better at hiding/suppressing hers). Bethany’s codex entry says that “she could never give up her resentment of being different and fear for what their future would hold”. Carver’s resentment, on the other hand, comes from how that “difference” affected him and your family, not to mention the pain it caused Bethany over not “being normal”. 

Basically, neither the Hawke twins got what they wanted out of this life. They are forced to make do with less-than-ideal circumstances that turn them even further away from their hopes and dreams, whichever path you choose for them. They make do, and they cope as best as they can, no matter how well or imperfectly they do it. And it gets me in the feels every time. 

[galadrieljones]

gala’s writing tips: Dialogue Edition

I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while now, so here you go! I’m gonna try to do a series of posts with quasi-abbreviated writing tips, from me to you, on various topics. If you disagree with me on any of my advice, cool! I’m just one teacher, and this is just my perspective. Either way, take what you want and leave the rest <3 And happy writing!!

Advice for...Writing Dialogue!

Forget every awful thing your English teachers have ever told you about the word “said.” “Said” is the ONLY dialogue tag we should ever really be using, with few exceptions. Dialogue tags have taken on too much of the burden these days when it comes to characterizing speech, when they should be near invisible. Especially when used too copiously, flashy dialogue tags can tend to be cumbersome and annoying to read, slowing down your pacing and constantly reminding the reader that they are Reading Dialogue™ when they should just be immersed in the scene. I feel this has a lot to do with the influence of film and television on our writing, and the incessant urging of high school AP Lit teachers that we NEVER EVER REPEAT WORDS EVER. But that’s bullshit. First of all, repetition has a lot of positive functions, and I hate this blanket moratorium on it as if it’s evil. Second of all, fiction is NOT film and television. Keep that in mind forever!! And instead of relying on fancy tags to spice things up and characterize your dialogue, use actions and description to imply your character’s state of mind as they speak.  

When writing dialects, avoid overdoing the phonetic spellings and excessive punctuation. It tends to be cringy, and trust me when I say, you will never capture a dialect perfectly by spelling accents out the way they sound phonetically in your own subjective head. Instead, when writing original fiction, do your best to describe the dialect ahead of time (it’s okay if it’s not 100% perfectly accurate in every way--remember that fiction is not film and it’s not real life--lots more goes into writing a compelling character than just their dialect) and just type the words the characters are saying, as they’re normally spelled. If you’re writing fanfiction, keep in mind that your reader already knows how your character’s voice sounds, so there’s no need to (literally) spell it out for them. Remember that CADENCE (tempo and rhythm of speech) and DICTION (word choice) are much more important in terms of characterizing a dialect and a speaker than simple phonetic spellings in the language. 

When writing dialogue in scenes, don’t forget to address BODIES and ENVIRONMENT. The first thing you really want to avoid is “Floating Head Syndrome,” ie: speaking characters floating in a vacuum who do not have bodies. A good way to solve this is to give your characters something specific to do while talking, which addresses the body and also allows characters to manipulate and/or move through the setting, creating opportunities for description. Mixing action with description of setting in scenes with dialogue will also help you pace your dialogue more effectively, as I know pacing is one of the hardest things to figure out and improve when writing dialogue.

When writing scenes of dialogue, avoid excessive interiority between exchanges. Interior monologue is definitely OKAY, but you don’t want it to be outright replacing writing that focuses on setting and action. Spoken dialogue in conjunction with only or too much inner-monologue will result in Floating Head Syndrome. 

You want your dialogue to move FAST, usually, and the way to make your dialogue feel fast is through efficient pacing. Excessive description of anything in the middle of a dialogue exchange, including setting, exposition, and inner-monologue, is going to slow down your pacing and make your dialogue feel cumbersome. So will overzealous tags. The best way to practice and improve your pacing is honestly just to READ A LOT. Don’t take pacing cues from film and television. Read the masters and read them a lot. A few really great writers to study for pacing in dialogue are Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Raymond Chandler, and James M. Cain. Seriously, read Cain’s crime novel Double Indemnity. You’ve never seen dialogue so thick with tension and so beautifully paced.

Next: How to make your dialogue sound realistic? This is a big question. First of all, it’s best to try and remember that in fiction, dialogue doesn’t have to be “realistic.” Dialogue serves all sorts of purposes aside from simply communicating information, and the way that it sounds or appears on the page can often be a function of the writer’s style as well as characterization of the speaking character. Fiction writing is not method acting. In fiction, our main medium is LANGUAGE, not pictures and sounds, and it’s actually really important to remember this. With language, we can simulate and even mix all five senses. We can create impressionistic images and layer in symbolic or ambiguous meaning as well. There are no rules that say dialogue must be realistic. 

Continued: Instead of focusing on making your dialogue “realistic,” focus making sure each speaking character has their own AGENDA, ie: characters hear what they want to hear and will often respond accordingly. THIS is how real people talk--past each other. Never have two characters answer one another in a repetitive and direct fashion. The least realistic thing ever is the idea that when two people are talking, the conversation at hand is the ONLY thing they’re focused on. A really good exercise for practicing agenda is to write a scene in which two characters are discussing something serious, but only indirectly, ie: they can never overtly refer to or announce the exact thing they’re discussing. Think about it like: The conversation they’re having is right here, but the thing they’re talking about is “over there.” It’s in the room, but it’s not on the table. A really good short story for studying how this can be done well is Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” No, I’m not telling you to write like Ernest Hemingway, but he writes agenda better than any other writer out there.

Moving on: When starting a scene, skip the small talk. When two characters meet up at the bar, it’s not necessary to go through the whole “Hey, how are you?” “I’m fine, how are you?” “Just super. The weather’s been nice.” “I agree.” This is boring. It’s implied. It’s not doing any work. So skip it. Again, fiction is not real life. If you sit and listen to an irl conversation between two people sitting at the next table at Starbucks, you will find yourself bored as hell in about two minutes. That’s because irl, there’s so much filler, and in fiction, we get to cut it out. Because it’s boring. This is just another reflection of how dialogue does NOT have to be “realistic.” Because instead, you can toss off the small talk in a single sentence of description and then get straight to the point: They met at the bar. Frank ordered a gin gimlet while Leonard ordered a vodka soda. After a little small talk, Frank cleared his throat and finally asked the big question. “Are you sleeping with my wife?” he said. Here, we have a little writing to set the scene and establish the setting and context, and then we get right to the tension. 

That said, in conclusion: TENSION is the most important factor to consider when writing a scene of dialogue. Tension can come in all forms. It can be romantic, menacing, ominous, sexual, etc. But there must be something rubbing against the grain, otherwise, your reader is going to get bored. Tension killers include all of the above: small talk, too much exposition (ie: establishing plot points and background context), characters talking to one another in a direct and one-dimensional manner, pacing that is too fast (not enough attention to setting and/or bodies), pacing that is too slow (clunky dialogue tags and too much inner-monologue/description between each dialogue exchange). 

To incite tension, make sure you are always aware of a couple different things: 1.) What is at stake in the scene? ie: What has the potential to be lost and/or gained? It can be small or big, but there must be something at stake; 2.) What do your characters want, and what is keeping them from getting the thing they want?; 3.) Is the passage of time, OR the environment playing a role at all, in terms of adding tension or conflict to the scene?; 4.) What is the ultimate purpose of this scene in the overall text, and how can you deepen that purpose by addressing BOTH plot and character? 

I hope this helps in any way!! As always, if you ever have a writing question, drop me an ask. I have been writing and teaching writing to many different skill levels for a long time, and ll do my best!! <3 -gala

[elizabethrobertajones]

So 10x03 when Cas bear hugs deanmon what’s the significance of their eyes changing?

Cuz they look so nice together :’)

Actually, when they released the moment before this in SDCC that year, the demon eyes were in a different place: 

https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/93105032733/obsessionisaperfume-4persephone

I think maybe just for effect as without the Cas reveal (for spoiler purposes we had no indications Cas would be in or around the Bunker the whole time until we saw the episode) it was more interesting to have Dean flashing demon eyes when taunting Sam and a lot of pre-season meta freaking out about the promo focused on how he was doing it as he taunted him to emphasise his lack of humanity at that point etc. 

In the real episode he does the whole thing ~as Dean~ before flicking his eyes black and lunging at Sam, who has just seen Cas approaching over his shoulder and stepped back as a gesture of “surrender” so that Cas can grab Dean. This was also really debated before the episode because without knowing why Sam relaxed and started to step back before the clip cut away, a lot of people analysed him as giving up and letting Dean kill him (there was a lot of time between SDCC and the episode airing of course), and despite how obvious the framing was afterwards that it was because Cas was right behind Dean ready to grab him, people who wanted to see this as some huge Sam sacrifice got so worked up about it they even would prefer to speculate that Cas could still teleport and magically went from the gas station to behind Dean, than entertain the idea that Sam was trusting Cas to handle it and had seen his salvation storming down the corridor towards Dean… 

I find it actually kind of hilarious in a meta way because it gives us these two ways to look at what the eyes mean - when they’re shown in the middle of the conversation with Sam, it draws the focus of the Sam n Dean battle of wills, and very much centres it on how Dean is manipulating Sam with his actions, maybe even to the point of giving up rather than kill his brother, and the conclusion is a life or death moment for the two of them. In truth, Dean is utterly immune to that knife and Cas is right behind him, so neither ending could possibly happen as motivations that people speculated, despite at the time it leading to some interesting debate about their motivations. 

Because then when the eyes only flick to black when Sam backs off, Sam has backed off because Cas is here to save them, and Dean’s unwittingly about to be stopped in his tracks from harming Sam. The eyes only briefly function as a “right, I’m done, time to kill you” warning, which can only really for the viewer be a spike in heart rate, before Cas leaps in and saves the day, and the longer struggle and use of the eyes is in contrast to his glowing blue eyes, and all of a sudden this is all about instead how Dean and Cas look paired next to each other, and it becomes a message about Team Free Will: that Sam didn’t have to make that choice because Cas was there to resolve it without anyone getting killed, and so it’s a powerful moment of Cas saving Sam, Sam trusting Cas enough to take the knife away from Dean’s throat, and then finally, our only Dean n Cas interaction while he’s a demon, where Cas grips him tight and saves him from his own personal hell. 

Even though they don’t exchange any real dialogue except Cas telling Dean it’s over, I think it’s so important to show this, if not any other interaction, because the eyes together like this represent the depths they’ve respectively sunk to at this point, with Cas having been on the stolen grace arc for 3 episodes and just topped up by Crowley in an act of mutual desperation, mirroring Dean’s demon issues almost scene for scene in some cases in 10x01 as well. It’s sort of the culmination moment of the journeys they’ve been on, and there’s a lot of good and bad and grey areas in what they’ve learned and experienced in that time because it’s Carver era so there’s a lot of that sort of exploration of themes of the lengths people go to and what is a monster and what is human and how human can a demon or an angel be and so on. And Cas’s angelic nature at that point is NOT a good thing because Crowley just gave him a stay of execution, with stolen grace, for selfish reasons, that won’t stop Cas dying any time soon. 

(Part of the reason I feel like season 10′s plot changed at the end so much is because Cas’s grace issue and all the ethical stuff set up gets changed so much. 10x02 and 10x17 work together because Dabb, mirroring what Hannah would do for Cas to get his real grace vs what Cas would do to save Dean, but 10x18 waves it all away for Cas, and the story abruptly ends with him just being fine again, and no further part to play in the story. The fact his whole season had been kind of about his grace and these ethical implications about it all really makes me feel robbed of some sort of huge Cas thing and I’d love Dabb to get back to whatever it was going to have been when the biggest ideas were on the drawing board back at the start of season 10, especially because I think his fingers were in the pie with that one :P) 

Anyways. It was really neat to see them do the eye thing side by side, and I could probably talk about it literally all day so I think I’m just going to force a stop here :P

[kaeltale]

Fanfic Writer Appreciation Day: Fic Rec Monster-List

Norse Mythology (not Marvel):

Sigyn's Saga (series) by Fialleril: Rated T, Graphic Depictions of Violence [Loki/Sigyn, Genderqueer Character, Friendship/Love, Innuendo] “Norse myth from Sigyn's perspective.”

riddles in the dark (series) by Fialleril: Rated G [Fenrir, Jörmungand, Hel, Character Studies, Metaphors, Riddles] “A series of metaphorical takes on Loki's three monster children, to the tune of riddles from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.”

The Witcher (games and/or novels):

No Monopoly on Altruism (WIP) by kinirohana: Rated G [Dettlaff/Regis, Drabble Sequence, Accidental Plot] “100 word drabbles for the rarest of rare pairs. Starting in the days where Dettlaff is resuscitating Regis after his dissolution by Vilgefortz.”

It Takes A Hansa by jikanet_tanaka: Rated T [Child OMC, Milva, Angoulême, Regis, Cahir, Dandelion, Geralt, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies] “In a kinder, better world, on a cold winter morning, Maria Barring's child is welcomed to the world by his exhausted mother and his overly giddy auntie Angoulême. Oh, and by his four dads. Overly self-indulgent AU where everybody survives, and Milva's kid gets to be raised by the most epic family of all time.”

Love and Rhetoric (series) by a_sparrows_fall: Rated E [Regis/Geralt, Hurt / Comfort, Canon-Typical Violence, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Minor Character Death, Blood Drinking, Addiction, Withdrawal, Questionable translation of dead languages] “Geralt doesn’t want Regis to leave Toussaint. Not yet. They have unfinished business… if only they can both avoid the ghosts of their pasts.”

Blood Ties (WIP) by Dordean: Not Rated [Ciri & Regis, Friendship/Love, What if Ciri had other options, Minor Character Death, Hurt/Comfort, Long live the Queen] “’A grey pebble in the mill-cog of destiny. You, who spilled blood; you, who drank blood. The crossroads now lay ahead. What will you choose: freedom or power? To succumb to your fate - or to shape it? Safety of idleness, or courage: to act, to fight for who you are? You are at the crossroads. Choose.’ Ciri on the Path, Regis in exile; but that is not the end - for either of them.”

Unsaid by a_sparrows_fall: Rated M [Regis/Geralt, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Telepathic Bond, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Dialogue] “’And then he hears it. A voice in his head. Definitely not his own. A man’s voice: soft, scared, and just a little bit posh. Oh, dear, it says.’ A soulmate AU, where soulmates form a telepathic bond. Based heavily on the novels.“

Misethere by astolat: Rated E [Geralt/Emhyr, Consent Issues, Sex Pollen, Infidelity, War, Seduction] “Emhyr was looking at him for once, with a strange expression. ‘I have misjudged you,’ he said, sounding irritated actually: how dare Geralt surprise him. ‘I get that a lot,’ Geralt said.”

Young Wolves by dreadelion: Rated M [Eskel/Geralt, Friends to Lovers, Trans Male Character, Illustrated] “A collection of illustrated ficlets, showing Geralt and Eskel's friendship through the ages, from first meetings to best friends to something more.”

Absolution by Taricha: Rated G [Dettlaff & Anarietta, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Post-Blood and Wine] “Dettlaff keeps coming into Anna Henrietta's room at night, and she cannot find a way to make him stay away.”

Sherlock Holmes (BBC=Johnlock, ACD=Holmes/Watson):

Electric Pink Hand Grenade by BeautifulFiction: Rated E [Johnlock, Sickfic] “’If Sherlock's brain is a hard drive, then these attacks are an electro-magnetic pulse.’ Sherlock Holmes does not do anything by half, not even a migraine. It falls to John to witness one of the greatest minds he has ever known tear itself apart, and he must do his best to help Sherlock pick up the pieces.”

The Progress of Sherlock Holmes by ivyblossom: Rated E [Johnlock, John Watson/Mary Morstan, author chooses not to add other plot tags in order to not give the plot away, but if you are sensitive about difficult relationship issues, consider yourself warned] “’I had,’ he said, ‘come to an entirely erroneous conclusion, my dear Watson, how dangerous it always is to reason from insufficient data.’“

Within the Narrative by Dale Pike (yesiamTHATdalepike): Rated M [Johnlock, Angst, Tragedy, Comedy] [This fic was NOT written by Mark Gatiss. Beware of Fourth Wall Breaks, Sock-puppets, and a chaotic evil author who’s really chaotic good, but had to learn a hard lesson in social ethics] “Rated by Proper Dave to be his Fourth-Favourite-Sherlock-Fic of all time. A boring story, with certainly an element of comedy, about the stuff between the lines.”

Alone On the Water by Mad_Lori: Rated G, Major Character Death [Johnlock, Euthanasia, Deathfic, Love Confessions, Grief] [VERY IMPORTANT: TAKE THE TAG WARNINGS SERIOUSLY] “Sherlock Holmes never expected to live a long life, but he never imagined that it would end like this.”

Albion and the Woodsman by Glenmore: Not Rated [Johnlock, Parentlock, Drug Use, Depression, walking around the world] [Mary Is Not Good] “Post Series 3. Sherlock and John are devastated after Mary Morstan makes her final moves. Sherlock relapses at the crack house, John walks around the world ...and a lot happens in between. Parentlock, in the good way.”

Since First I Saw Your Face (WIP) by Stavia_Scott_Grayson: Rated M [Holmes/Watson, Friends to Lovers, Victorian Sherlock Holmes, Pining, Resolved sexual and romantic tension - eventually, Victorian Attitudes] [non-fictional characters, historical references and events] “During the Great Hiatus, Holmes, studying in Tibet, reflects on his first meeting with Dr John Watson.”

Mass Effect:

Red Streak (WIP) by ThunderheadFred: Rated E, Major Character Death [Fem!Shep/Garrus, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Canon, First Contact War] “During the surrender of Shanxi, ex-Marine Hannah Shepard agrees to parley with the fleet captain of the invading turian Blackwatch. Two decades later, Hannah's daughter Jane lives in the shadow of that infamous truce.”

Pretty Taste For Paradox by ThunderheadFred: Rated M [Fem!Shep/Mordin, ASMR, Angst, Romantic Friendship, Asexual Relationship, Slow Burn] “After being resurrected by Cerberus, Shepard is a raw nerve, a stranger in her own skin. Why else would the never-ending nattering of Professor Mordin Solus send a shiver down her spine?”

Dragon Age:

The Strongest Force and Tempering Justice (two-part series) by WritingByNight: Rated M [Fem!Hawke/Anders, Fem!Hawke/Justice, Angst/Romance, OT3] “Hawke never did give the impression that crazy was her turn-off. - A short post-game tale of love and madness.” and “Justice said he disapproved of the obsession with Hawke. He did not say he disliked her.”

An Apostate? Me? by Sarah1281: Rated T [Fem!Hawke & Carver, eventual Fem!Hawke/Anders, Humor/Parody] “Emma Hawke has never been the most subtle or sane of apostates, much to the annoyance of the brother that can only watch in amazement and horror as she stumbles her way from refugee to noble to champion in a city as bizarre as she.”

Phantom of the Opera (Gaston Leroux):

The Chain Unbroken by inkblottales: Rated T [Erik/Christine, Romance/Suspense] “Erik is the architect of his own destiny - or so he thinks. Will Christine breach his defenses? Will the enemies who wish to destroy him succeed?”

Naruto (oh gawd, this list is going way into my past...):

How & Why by randomsomeone: Rated M [Gaara/Sakura, Romance] [This was the first fanfic I ever read that really stuck with me] “A psychological war gets completely out of control. Lust doesn't cut it and love doesn't just happen, so how else can it work?”

[captainscominglookbusy]

rant about Dead Space 3!!

Let’s just take this part by part, shall we? I could go stream-of-consciousness style, but then we’d be here all day.

Without further ado, why Dead Space 3 is the most disappointing video game of all time. Full spoilers below, for Dead Space 3 and Mass Effect 3. 

THE STORY

The story is sad because it’s a worse version of Mass Effect 3.

Our grizzled hero, despite his heroic actions, is now stuck back in the midst of civilization until he is whipped back into the action by a big strong Latino man, who helps him get off the planet just as it is attacked. He must leave behind his civilization in order to save it.

He must then reunite with old and new characters alike in order to find some crapshoot plan where no one knows how it works - they just know it’s the only way to stop the Eldritch Abominations that are threatening life as we know it, the ones that show up once a civilization has advanced beyond a certain point and then wipe them out for Generic Evil Reasons.

People needlessly die along the way, the hero must confront the pain of failing to save his friends, and in the end he must sacrifice himself in order to give the war An End Once And For All. Except also he might not be dead.

Despite my tone, that story’s alright on the surface. I actually really liked Mass Effect 3. Say what you want about the ending, the game as a whole is pretty solid. Dead Space 3 just executes all of those things worse.

At no point are you given a really clear idea of what’s happening on the moon in the first level, or in humanity’s civilization at large. Have the Unitologists taken over? Are they ALL militant? Is it moon-wide, or just in the city Isaac’s in? Or just a few city block’s worth of revolution? What’s their goal? Are they just trying to create more Markers, or are they trying to kill Isaac? Does Isaac know any of this before Carver and Norton show up? If so, why is he just sitting in his apartment? If not, WHY NOT? Nothing ever gets explained. Instead, never mind that, we must now venture forth into space.

There’s some derelict ship exploration for the first third of the game - the ships all have the same design, so it’s really boring, but the concept is fine. If it got diversified and revamped, it would have made a solid base for Dead Space 4’s gameplay, which I believe was kinda the plan if Dead Space 3 hadn’t been awful and tanked the franchise.

Then you go to the scariest place of all places you could go in a horror franchise - Hoth. And you spend the rest of the game there. You just walk in circles around this one snowy science base, trying to figure out what happened. Oh wow, they got killed by Necromorphs. Whoa.

At one point I actually started to appreciate the story’s twist on certain things - up until now in the franchise, Big Establishment Things like the The Church and The Military were the bad guys, whereas the good guys were generally normal people, often with the power of SCIENCE on their side (you come across several evil scientists as well, but the general trend still stands). And for the first while of DS3, it seems like the opposite is true - you find out this science division was trying to turn on some Machine that might lead to an outbreak, and the military general is the one trying to stop them. His way of doing this is by murder, but still, I found it to be an interesting twist that the military seemed to be fighting against scientists for what was best for humanity this time around, a reversal of what the Dead Space universe has catered up to this point.

But then it turns out that turning on the Machine is the right thing to do, science was right, the military were just being jerks and not listening to reason, because why explore different angles of the same themes the franchise has already covered. Let’s just do the same thing again but worse. I love it.

Eventually you find out that there was an alien civilization that did the exact same thing humans are doing now with the Markers, and that they tried to stop the Markers from taking their final form…A MEATBALL MOON MADE OF ALL THE ZOMBIES PILED TOGETHER LIKE IT’S KATAMARI DAMACY. HOW SCARY.

Why would the Moons work like this? Like, on a biological level? Why design a Marker that creates deadly vicious monsters, if building more Markers through non-zombified people is required for the process to work? How could a species evolve to function in such a way? Don’t worry about it, aren’t you scared?

So anyways, after you’ve found the Codex to turn off The Machine (no, those are not made up names for the MacGuffins, those are the ACTUAL generic names they decided to go with), you let the bad guy activate the Moon beam (instead of just shooting him once he gives up his hostage, which the heroes have at least five seconds to do without any risk), and then fight the moon. And fall from space back down to the planet. And live.

*sigh*

Moving on.

THE CHARACTERS

Dead Space has always had two separate schools of bad guys; the Marker side, and the human side. In Dead Space 1, you have a deceptive hallucination manipulating you on one end, and crazed scientists and secret government agents on the other. In Dead Space 2 you have Nicole, no longer hiding as a messenger for the Marker haunting you at every turn in a fantastic representation of PTSD, and you have a provincial overlord willing to contain a deadly outbreak at any cost, not to mention an INCREDIBLE character in Stross, a fellow inmate whose scrambled brain and his tendency to lash out can’t overcome the fact that he truly does want to help make things right.

In Dead Space 3 you fight evil people with guns and a moon. Such depth.

Danik is this game’s main antagonist, and he just shows up to make things more complicated and less fun. He’s sane enough to taunt Isaac with generic evil monologues, but insane enough to believe that necromorphism is the ideal form of humanity. They try to have their cake and eat it too, and in doing so they’ve curb stomped the cake. None of his ideology is any more interesting than what players already found out in the Unitology church in DS2, and that didn’t even require a living character to give us exposition.

I should reiterate that Danik, also, has no idea what THE MACHINE Macguffin does, but he’s convinced he’ll be able to activate it the EVIL way, instead of the GOOD GUY way.

The Brethren Moon twist is an attempt at cosmological horror, a stab at Lovecraftian abominations, but it falls completely flat. There’s nothing intimidating about a moon, aside from I guess being big.

Cthulhu is not scary because he’s big.

Cthulhu’s scary because his very presence can drive you insane, can take you into the abyss, can make hallucinate and rave and kill. Sorta like the Marker we’ve been dealing with for two games. An effective, creepy looking icon inherently tied to the franchise. So what’s the point of revealing the Marker’s Final Form?

The Moons add nothing to the story, aside from providing something that can technically be considered a plot twist and giving Isaac something bigger to fight and upping the ante so that the final boss of Dead Space 4 would probably be just fighting space itself. Dead Space. OoooOOoooOOOOoooh.

The good guys are only slightly better. Isaac’s character, while not developing all that much (he’s just mopey the whole game), isn’t completely sabotaged, and Carver is a fine character in his own right, particularly if you play co-op (so I’ve heard). The two have some decent dialogue with each other - their sort-of-friendship feels unearned, but looking at it on its own, it’s written well.

And then, Ellie…

The game flat-out tricked me. Ellie, the awesome cool amazing standout character of Dead Space 2, becomes a complete damsel-in-distress in this game, and I say it tricked me because I didn’t even notice. When she first showed up as “stranded and in need of rescue,” I figured “okay, once we finally find her she’ll start kicking butt and taking names again,” but I was SO DISTRACTED BY HOW BAD THE REST OF THE GAME WAS THAT I DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE how nothing of a character she is in this game. She gets rescued, she gets upset with Isaac, she cries, she talks to him over the intercom, she has A BIG FAKE SACRIFICE FOR NO REASON, then gets captured, is used as a hostage and bargaining chip, and then she gets sent away on a shuttle. I don’t think she fires a gun once in the whole game. She’s there for Isaac and Norton to fight over, because that’s right, Dead Space 3 has the AUDACITY to introduce a LOVE TRIANGLE AS PART OF THE MAIN PLOT. I understand that emotions are heavy in stressful scenarios, and that people act irrationally even in important, large-scale moments, but some of the dialogue plays out like a fricking soap opera.

“I know you two [Isaac and Ellie] had a “thing,” but she’s mine now.” - actual dialogue from Norton. THE DRAMA.

As far as the other characters, even Isaac and Carver don’t care about them.

At one point Isaac finds the corpse of Rosen, a former squadmate, and says “Oh thank god” because it’s not Ellie’s corpse. What kind of monster do you have to be that THAT’S your only reaction to seeing your ally’s dead body? They don’t become good friends, but good Lord, Isaac, show some sympathy. The guy drove you around space for the first third of the game.

Another side character, Buckle, the group just leaves to freeze in a building, even though it takes Isaac about 2 minutes to find the heater for the building and turn it on (AFTER said character dies). And the other side character, Santos, Carver actively tries to stop Isaac from saving because “it’s too risky.” 

Let me clarify: Carver (and also Ellie) just stand and watch Isaac try to help her for about 30 seconds, before stepping in and forcing Isaac to stop. Santos falls off a cliff and dies because Carver decided to criticize Isaac’s sense of morality instead of actually helping. These are the heroes, let me remind you.

And Norton’s just stupid. He’s an annoying a-hole, who is then revealed to be a spy, whose life you then save, who then tries to BLAME YOU EVEN THOUGH HE KIDNAPPED YOU TO COME ON THE MISSION IN THE FIRST PLACE, and then you shoot him. And Ellie’s sad about it for ten minutes, despite all of the above.

Wouldn’t it be cool if the spy was a character you had grown to trust and like, like in Dead Space 1? Or even one that you were mostly apathetic towards until the twist, when his character suddenly becomes ten times more interesting, like in Agents of SHIELD?

But no, they just picked the character you already hated. Because that makes for a GREAT character and a SHOCKING TWIST.

There’s nothing satisfying about it. The character is a jerk to Isaac the entire game, then is revealed to have sold you out to Danik, then gets starts trying to shoot you, and you’re STILL somehow supposed to feel bad when you kill him.

What?

Also, there’s just…dumb stuff that happens.

Isaac has a gun pointed to his head. Point blank. You want to know how he gets out of that situation? This genius engineer that has survived by the skin of his teeth for two games?

He waits. And waits. And then right as the bad guy’s about to shoot, he just moves really fast out of the way.

Kinda dumb, right? A pretty anticlimactic way to resolve a supposedly tense scene?

What if I told you he does that THREE TIMES throughout the course of the game?

*shuffles cue cards* alright, what’s next? Oh, right, yes-

THE GAMEPLAY

The gameplay is the scariest part of the game.

Because it’s bad. Everything that feels crisp and neat and unique about the first two games is gone.

You know things are going wrong when the first weapon Isaac shoots is an automatic pistol. Not a plasma cutter. Nope. One of the most interesting things about the last two games, where Isaac the engineer is forced to improvise mining tools in order to create efficient weapons? Out the window. Here’s a normal regular gun. And also all the ammo is the same. That inventory management that actually created an effective level of anxiety in the last two games? The one where you had to cleverly balance how much of each type of ammo you carried based on what you were expecting to encounter, and how comfortable you were with each gun, and how running out of one type of ammo would challenge you to confront the situation differently than you normally would? Gone. Shoot whatever gun however much you want. Which begs the question, why even craft more than two guns?

WHY EVEN CRAFT MORE THAN TWO GUNS?

WHAT’S EVEN THE POINT?

There’s no point, is the point. I created a plasma cutter and an assault rifle on my first play through. And I pulled out the rifle like three times. One gun was enough, and I felt no desire to try out anything else. Because what’s the point. It’s all the same now.

And not just the ammo. Every enemy encounter feels the exact same. Within a single side quest I lost track of how many times I entered a room and three to four Slashers crawled out of the vents, one by one. Every room felt the exact same. After a certain point, the game just stops trying to surprise you.

In boxing, an uppercut can take you by surprise, if it’s thrown in at the end of a chain of jabs and crosses. But imagine you’re sparring with someone who only uppercuts.

Ever.

That’s not a challenge. It doesn’t matter how hard the uppercut is. You just lean your chin back a few inches and counter.

Every. Single. Time.

Every element of spice and variety in Dead Space’s 1 and 2 feels gone, or at the very least watered down.

And speaking of variety, let’s talk about the enemy design.

Dead Space 2 was fantastic about upping the ante with enemy design. It added at least five new kinds of necromorphs, and every one of them was a change in gameplay. The Pack can be killed in a single shot but swarm you in massive numbers. The Stalkers rely on predatory, velociraptor tactics; every new enemy introduction is cool.

Even Dead Space: Extraction has Grabbers that hide under the water and Fliers that soar around the room and swipe down at you. (For the record, Extraction as a whole is a little cheesy, but still a lot of fun and clearly trying out new ways of exploring the Dead Space universe that are fun and interesting. Unlike a certain other entry in the franchise).

Compare all that to Dead Space 3, which outside of bosses, introduces two enemy types: the Fodder, which are essentially slashers that can turn into Lurkers by exploding into tentacles, and Aliens, which are (to be fair, legitimately scary) minibosses in the last few levels of the game.

Everything else is either the exact same or a slight redesign. The Lurkers are dog zombies, not baby zombies. The swarming enemies are now emaciated adults instead of children. But everything still feels…the same.

There are even little swarmer necros that, this time around, can take over a body and start haphazardly shooting the gun its holding.

But that’s made entirely moot by the NON-haphazard gun-shooting human enemies you fight in the first level! What’s interesting or scary about a zombie that can’t aim?

Oh, also, that satisfying squishing noise when you killed a Swarmer that was crawling on you? It’s just gone. Isaac just swats them off silently. No sound effect at all. Minor gripe, but it’s stupid.

There’s a recurring Giant Enemy Crab that is just annoying to fight, and one boss sequence against the Nexus that’s legitimately fun. Because it’s just the final boss of Dead Space 1 with a bit of a twist. Almost everything good about this game is lifted directly from previous games, and almost everything new and innovative about it falls flat.

There’s three new types of puzzles, and only one of them is decent.

And also, one more random note - and by random I mean it felt just as random to me as it does in the middle of all this - Dead Space 3 is incredibly proud of its ladders. It’s weird.

Someone real high up the corporate Ladder (heh, ladder) was really pleased with how the ladder mechanic worked out.

In case you’re wondering, the ladders are nothing special. They’re fine, they didn’t ever glitch for me or anything, but like…there’s ladders everywhere.

Dead Space’s 1 and 2 handled elevation through stairs, inclines and lifts, but someone was REAL happy that they came up with the idea of adding ladders. They’re bright blue, they’re generally required to use in order to progress, they halt momentum because Isaac climbs ladders slowly, and did I mention they’re everywhere?

At one point there’s a wall of ice, or rock, or tightly packed snow or whatever, that comes up to a bit above Isaac’s head.

A fairly physically fit person could pull themselves up. And you’re playing as Isaac. Who can curbstomp limbs straight off of bodies in a single go.

But nope, we need to throw a ladder in there for no reason.

Don’t have an animation where Isaac can pull himself up. Don’t just desiGN THE LEVEL WITH A SLIGHT INCLINE. GOTTA REALLY MAKE THE MOST OF THIS HOT NEW LADDER TECH.

It doesn’t ruin the game. It’s just bizarre. And it’s bizarre that someone’s proud of it. And once you’re looking for it, it’s blatantly obvious that someone is DEFINITELY super proud of it.

So now we can go into glitches.

Let’s start small. Sometimes there are just little hiccups, like environmental elements loading in late.

Other times you take damage from, shall we say, plays that the coach should challenge. Here’s one where I defeated the boss, but (without touching me) it did damage to me as it sprinted over to where it needed to be for the next cutscene to happen.

Oh, also, every time you walk up to a wall and try to melee it, Isaac’s arm and shoulder JUST GO THROUGH THE WALL. For EVERY SINGLE WALL. I’ve programmed games in Unity that avoid that glitch. It looks and feels so lazy, and I don’t think it happens in any of the other games.

The game introduces a combat roll, but doesn’t expect you to use it. I accidentally rolled into a cutscene, and instead of just having Isaac roll in place and complete the animation before standing up, which would have looked fairly natural, I watched in shock as Isaac, like a photorealistic version of Samus’s morph ball, just uncurled in midair and teleported into position so the cutscene could play “normally.”

At another point a cutscene started as I opened a door, and for no reason (unlike the above, which was caused by my rolling), I watched two dead bodies take life and snap into place for the cutscene like extras in the freshmen musical forgetting their cue.

Also the game has these invisible threshold walls that enemies can’t cross. There are points in the game where you’re fighting enemies, and if you back through an open doorway or across a bridge, the enemies will just FORGET YOU EXIST. They literally run the other direction and then just stand there until you cross the line again. It’s ridiculous AI design that I only saw once in any of the other games, but I found four blatant examples of in Dead Space 3.

I didn’t encounter the infamous “main characters get their limbs shot off in the middle of a cutscene” glitch, but I recommend looking that one up as well, because it’s hilarious.

REDEEMING QUALITIES

I never said Dead Space 3 was the worst game ever made. Just that it was disappointing. So here’s everything they did right, that I can remember.

-Isaac’s character, thanks largely to Gunner Wright’s performance, is still pretty good.

-Carver’s character, while a little shallow, still feels “lived-in,” if that makes sense. I got the feeling that this guy had a story as long and complicated as Isaac’s even though we only hear bits and pieces of it in-game.

-Isaac and Carver’s evolving dynamic throughout the game, while feeling unearned in single player, is still well-written if you look at each scene without context.

-Apparently in co-op, the player playing as Carver will hallucinate and see enemies that aren’t actually there, prompting the player playing as Isaac to ask “What the Eff are you shooting at?” A really neat concept.

-The graphics, particularly in the space scenes, look solid, as long as they’re not glitching out.

-While not executed well, the idea of scavenging in a spaceship graveyard is a cool concept. Apparently that was gonna be the basis of Dead Space 4’s gameplay, and provided they make it more interesting, less linear, and more focused on survival instead of just advancing the plot, I think that would have been a good move.

-The scavenger bot is cute and I’m glad it was there.

-The boss fight against the Nexus is a modified version of the boss fight against the Hive Mind in Dead Space 1. And since it’s something stolen from Dead Space 1, it’s better than pretty much everything else about the game.

-The last portion of the game takes you into an underground alien temple. It feels cheesy, like you’re watching a 70’s horror movie, but it adds some change-ups and I actually enjoyed playing through it. They also clearly focused on making that part of the game scarier than the rest, because I actually got unsettled a few times.

IN SUM

All in all, though, Dead Space 3 is a mess of an action game despite having two masterpieces of the horror genre to use as rungs on the Bright Blue Important Dead Space Ladder. The story is cheesy, the characters are good at best and just awfully written at worst, the gameplay mechanics have simplified all the interesting parts of the franchise [re: enemies and inventory management] and complicated the streamlined parts [re: upgrades and crafting], and there are glitches and technical hangups galore. It all adds up to an uninteresting, non-scary, non-fun adventure that sends the franchise out on a note so low the basses in the choir would strain to hit it.

I have my own thoughts on what a Dead Space 4 could and should be, but that’s a separate essay. More than anything I just want it to exist and I want it to be good, so that passionate Dead Space fans who were disappointed by 3 can wash the sour taste out of their mouths and play at least one more game worthy of the first several entries in the franchise.

It’s a long shot, but trust me, EA, you’ll be doing the world a favor.

Because after Dead Space 3 you left a lot of us feeling like this.

Shameless plug for my Let’s Play of Dead Space 3 here. As of the time I’m writing this, the upload schedule is only a little ways in, but rest assured, I saw this monster through to the bitter, bland end.

[oosteven-universe]

Lev Gleason Presents #2

Lev Gleason Presents #2 !Comic House 2021    "The Greatest Name in Comics" Daredevil: Season 1 Issue 1 by Kenny Porter and Iñaki Azpiazu;     Freelance: Season 2 Issue 2 by Andrew Wheeler and Juan Samu;     Canuck Beyond: Season 1 Issue 3 by Adrien Benson and Esteban Calvi;     Plus a classic archive adventure featuring the Golden Age Daredevil! Each Mega Sized Issue contains a new #1 issue as well as at least two new 20-page stories continuing from the Comic House shared universe!    Well it’s a double dose this week with both issues one and two being released on the same day.  While I was kind of upset that the Silver Streak wasn’t back this issue the replacement with Daredevil makes up for it.  Though I want more Silver Streak now and while I was expecting to see the entire arc before moving onto the next we’ll see how the switch up goes and how many are in the rotation.  Again I am just as impressed with this issue as I am with the first one and how it comes across with the storytelling.  It is a great way to do an anthology series and it just works so well with this format in my opinion.    I love the way that these are being told.  The story & plot development that we see throughout is amazing thanks to how we see the sequence of events unfolding as well as how the reader learns information is presented exceptionally well.  The character development that we see through the dialogue, the character interaction as well as how they act and react to the situations and circumstances which they encounter.  The pacing throughout is superb and I’m really impressed with how each story flows into the next one and how the book as a whole really does this justice.    The way these are structured and how the layers within the stories continue to grow, evolve and strengthen is fantastic.  The layers with their characterisation and plot twists really work the advantage of the writers and showing how to add depth, dimension and complexity to the stories.  How everything works together to create the stories ebb & flow as well as how it moves the stories forward is achieved is sublime.      Each art team here has their own unique looks to them.  Each have their great qualities and their negative aspects but I do really enjoy how we see such a variety of styles.  The linework is nicely laid out and how we see the varying weights and techniques being utilised to create the detail work we see is great.  Personally I think the Canuck story is the most interesting visually and the creativity and imagination that we see here is mindbogglingly brilliant and it’s just a complete pleasure to see.  The colour work is nicely rendered as well.  The various hues and tones within the colours being utilised to create the shading, highlights and shadow work is extremely nice to see.      I do wonder why this Major Carver looks like a pinup girl though that seems a bit off to me.  Regardless, I have to say learning what we do of Freelance this issue makes me want to know more about him.  I love the world that Canuck Beyond is in it’s got that dark fantasy romance feel about that make for the best storytelling.  I’m excited for this Daredevil as well being in Australia because it’s different, unusual and daring.  Speaking of, the old school Daredevil story is again a testament to what started the industry and how the art has evolved yet remains the same in so many aspects.  The people and the realism in them is what drives the story and while liberties are taken it doesn’t change the fact that this is what set the stage for what we see today. ​    Brilliant anthology series folks.  This is how you really redefine this type of series with some solid longer length stories and bringing an old school story to showcase how the industry got to where it is today.  This is something you need to be reading folks you will love the diversity and amazing displays of talent. 

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

Wait did carver ship destiel???

Carver created it.

Let me explain. (Disclaimer: I don’t have a telepathic connection to anyone involved in the making of Supernatural, so I may be wrong.)

Fandoms are quick at shipping things. Especially if attractive white men are concerned. Sometimes they don’t even need two characters to have ever shared a scene to ship them. Imagine what happens when two attractive white men have a conversation and stare into each other’s eyes while doing it. The first Dean/Castiel fics started being published online hours after Lazarus Rising aired. But the fandom didn’t expect the show to actually give the angel Castiel a storyline about a romantic relationship with Dean, of course! It was one of the ships you’ll find fics on the internet because the internet writes fics about any combination of characters possible. They even write fics about characters who were in different seasons and never knew about each other’s existence. (Hell, even characters from different shows altogether.)

Season 4 goes on and hey, Jensen Ackles and Misha Collins have a stunning chemistry together. The showrunners are really happy about it, and decide to keep Castiel’s character around, because the audience has responded very favorably to him and the actor’s interpretation of him and everything is beautiful.

Now, the show, ever since day 1, has built a subtextual narrative around Dean’s character, relatively to his sexuality. Season 4 makes no exception - like they’ve always done, they build a parallel between Sam’s connection to a female demon to Dean’s connection to a male angel. The show does not mean to make Dean/Castiel “canon” - it’s one of the ingredients of the bisexuality subtextual narrative that runs through the show. Season 4 is written by people like Cathryn Humphris, the duo Dabb-Loflin, Jeremy Carver himself, Ben Edlund - all people very keen in developing this narrative. That Carver is very fascinated by the dynamic between Dean and Castiel, starts appearing fairly evident in his episode The Rapture, but we can say everything is still under the subtextual bisexuality narrative umbrella. (Jensen does not have a strong grasp of the word subtlety.)

Season 5 starts and writers start writing episodes. Ben Edlund works on episode 4, for instance, and you can see that subtextual bisexuality narrative in all its splendor, with details such as future Dean implying he has a sexual relationship with future Castiel (all in the realm of the totally plausible deniability, of course, because subtext).

But Jeremy Carver works on episode 3 and boi. Free To Be You And Me, in my humble opinion, is the act of foundation of Destiel as A Thing.

Not that the show has intentions of ever developing a textual romantic/sexual relationship between the two characters at this point of its history, of course. But boi - a lot of people start really enjoying the idea of playing with it with more intensity than your average Dean-is-bi subtextual dynamic thing. In my humble opinion, if Carver is N°1 Destiel creator, Mr Jensen Ross Ackles is N°2 Destiel creator. “But Jensen said--” of course he did, because in his mind it was part of the subtextual bisexuality narrative, just a big part of it. That’s why he was surprised at the name-dropping of “Destiel” in Fan Fiction, for instance - it took him a while to fully understand the shifting from subtext to text, and it threw him a little off balance.

Now let’s go back to season 5. People jump on the Destiel subtext wagon, they make Dean and Cas grow closer and closer and rub their hands at how great Jensen and Misha are when working together. Season 6 comes and they decide to give Castiel a large role in the narrative of the season, because he’s a fan favorite and Misha is just great at the thing. Now, they have to decide how to make the season nice and totally excruciatingly painful - Gamble, Singer & friends wonder, how do we totally shatter the characters? Someone comes up with the idea of literally breaking Sam’s mind and whatever, and someone comes up with the idea of breaking up Dean and Cas breaking Dean and Cas’ relationship. Carver isn’t working on this season, but hey, he was a big - the biggest, arguably - contributor in building the amazing dynamic between Dean and Cas. Gamble and Singer (whatever you think of them) realize that the most efficient way to break Dean is to take Cas away from him.

Season 7 happens and Gamble and Singer continue the whole ‘losing Castiel is the think that shatters Dean’ thing. Ben Edlund really enjoys the thing and Repo Man demonstrates it, because Ben Edlund destroyed subtlety before Robbie Thompson made it cool (that’s not true, it was cool with Edlund too). Now, I have no idea how they were going to fix the situation if Gamble had stayed showrunner. Thing is, the show’s ratings are bad, something isn’t working, the network isn’t happy, or whatever, and they have to change the cards.

And guess what happens - there you go! Our Jeremy Carver pops up and says, I know how to fix this. I become showrunner for the next seasons, you end this season as a set-up for my new plans. Alright, what should we do? they ask. Bring Castiel back! he says. But he’s, like, super dead, they reply. So Carver pulls Castiel out of his ass, pretty much, because ‘lol he’s alive after all although there’s no reason why he should be’ isn’t a great narrative choice, but our Carver doesn’t give a crap and tells Gamble, bring the buy back. Gamble does it, the season ends up in a way that sets up Carver’s plans, and there you have Carver as the Big Boss.

The Carver era makes Destiel an actual, genuine plotline. Say whatever you want about queerbaiting or whatever - it doesn’t take away the fact that the nature of the relationship between Dean and Castiel, and the way it differs from the kind of relationships Dean has with family members, and establishing it as love is one of the big plotlines of Carver’s seasons.

Now Carver has left the show to explore new shores, but the show has been inherited by Mr Andrew “how can I make people interested in a random heterosexual couple that has absolutely nothing interesting about them, oh right I’ll give them that one Destiel dialogue from that one time, ahaha everything hurts” Dabb, so...

[asfeedin]

Friday Finds & Reader Recommendations – 04-24-2020

Good morning and HAPPY FRIDAY!!! I hope we all have a cozy and wonderful weekend loaded in reading some seriously great books!! Speaking of which…

I’m already almost finished a book I just started a day ago and I LOVE IT!!!!! HOLY. MOLY. It’s the first part of a duet and the next one is coming out in a couple of weeks and I’m so relieved because I know the end of this one will make me crazy. LOL!!! I think I may have just found a new favorite author, and my review will be up this weekend.

In the meantime…

TAKE A LOOK AT WHAT WE FOUND FOR THE WEEKEND  !!

STILL ON ➔➔➔ TWO MONTHS FREE KINDLE UNLIMITED DEAL!!! <— If you haven’t tried it yet, now’s your chance. WE ARE LOVING IT! And it’s still going on through the end of April!

And…

So, That Got Weird by Amelia Kingston <—THE AWKWARD GIRL & THE JOCK ALERT!! Ashley loved it so much that she read it again! “…As the reigning campus sex god, he has the playboy act down pat. But underneath those six-pack abs beats a broken heart. He doesn’t trust people and he sure as hell doesn’t believe in love. The odd couple strike a deal. Four weeks of & “tutoring” for five thousand dollars…”

I reread ‘So, That Got Weird’ by Amelia Kingston and that was a fun time – it has the same vibe as Elle Kennedy or Maya Hughes’ books (which I’m a huge fan of).

Third Life by Noelle Adams <—LIVE!! AGE GAP OLDER MAN/YOUNGER WOMAN ALERT!! She only knows his first name but… “...he keeps asking me to meet him all over the world, and I keep saying yes. …I don’t know anything about him except his first name. That’s the way he likes it. He’s too old for me, and he’s hiding secrets, but I’m not going to be able to keep my heart out of it for long…“

Detained by Ainslie Paton <— MONY LOVED THIS ONE!

Mony: I finished Detained by Ainslie Paton, Aussie author. Really loved it!

First chapters – Mystery Guy & female reporter stuck in a Shanghai airport detention room – clever & hot. Characters “real”, dialogue tight – kind of book I like. Also, story unusual & set in China & AUS. Bit too long at end but I wanted to read it in one shot. Love finding books that punch their weight above their GR rating.

This was one of Ann’s “personal 5-star lose all track of time and reality books.”

Master of Salt & Bones by Keri Lake <— LIVE!!! DARK ROMANCE ALERT!!! P.S. I love this author!! “…When I was a little girl, I dreamed a handsome knight would come and rescue me from my wretched mother. He’d ride up on his white steed and break the curse I’ve been fated to carry since the day I was born. Funny how things changed over time. How the fairy tale twisted into something far more crooked, darker than I ever imagined. In reality, my knight is scarred and broken, living alone in a castle of bones that overlooks the sea. He isn’t searching for me. He never was. Lucian Blackthorne is as cursed as I am, and equally shunned by the locals…”

Killian by Ryan Michele <— LIVE!!!

Kitty Valentine Dates a Billionaire by Jillian Dodd <— LIVE!!! JILLIAN DODD ALERT!!

Falling North: A Turner Artist Rocker Novel (The Turner Artist Rocker Series Book 2) by Alyson Santos <— LIVE!!

The Devil in Apartment 13 by Tiana Laveen <— MODERN-DAY URBAN GENIE/JINN IS HER NEW NEIGHBOR… and he wants to make her his mate! “…Vivian Carver believes her name is synonymous with bad luck. She’s a bartender living smack dab in the middle of NYC and has had it up to here with entitled tourists, an annoying roommate and just barely surviving. She’s forced to move into a cheaper apartment, and with it comes a seedy landlord, drippy faucets and a peculiar stranger in apartment 13.  Shahzad has pulled all the stops to get to know Ms. Vivian Carver, someone who in no shape, form or fashion understands her full potential…”

Beauty and the Rose: a Dark Romance by Stasia Black & Lee Savino <— LIVE!! TRILOGY CONCLUSION ALERT!!

Don’t Love Me (My Secret Boyfriend Book 1) by S. Doyle <— HE TOLD HER NOT TO… “…The state took me away from my mother when was I twelve and sent me to live with an uncle, who worked on some fancy estate.  That’s when I met Ash, she was ten and the daughter of the man who owned the estate. She thought I would be her new best friend but I only wanted to be left alone. For years she was always there, always annoying me, always wanting more from me. But our roles were clear. She was the princess and I was the chauffeur’s charity case.  I told her not to fall in love with me…she didn’t listen…”

Dark Protectors Bundle: 3 Stories by Rebecca Zanetti by Rebecca Zanetti <— REBECCA ZANETTI BOOK BUNDLE BARGAIN ALERT! “…From New York Times bestselling author, Rebecca Zanetti, comes three stories in her Dark Protectors-Reese Family series�� **Every 1001 Dark Nights novella is a standalone story. For new readers, it’s an introduction to an author’s world. And for fans, it’s a bonus book in the author’s series. We hope you’ll enjoy each one as much as we do.**

The Danger You Know by Lily White <— LILY WHITE’S LATEST DARK READ ALERT!! HE’S HER STALKER…“…I pursue her despite the wedding bells that rang for another, only I can see how she is drowning beneath mediocrity. How many times must I remind her? It can’t matter that I am the person who ruined her life. The man who killed her father. The constant shadow that watches her sleep. The lover who prefers dirty alleyways to freshly laundered sheets. She’s mine. Always has been…”

Michaela: Read this today and loved it! 

Michele: I LOVE Lily and Dark reads are still my favorite!!  thank you!!!

Tori: I’ve been binge-reading some Lily White lately! Omgah! Just finished The Vanity of Roses and started Wishing Well last night! I guess this one will be next. Seriously, one of my new favorite authors! ♡♡♡

The Prince and the Pawn (When Rivals Play Book 4) by B.B. Reid <— SERIES FINALE!!! BULLY BOOK ALERT! “...They were wrong for each other from the start. The jock and the nerd, what a cliché they made. He was the town prince, and she was a nobody. Tyra Bradley was invisible. That is until she told him he needed some manners, and so began their game of cat and mouse...”

Everything Girl by Emily Mayer <— MONY LOVED IT!! And was her message to the author about it (and the author replied).

Mony: Hi Emily,

Loved loved loved your book. Well written, quirky characters, and great book boyfriend…loved the Montana setting. Good job pacing the slow burn between Jack and Evelyn. A gem.

Hoping you’re thinking about writing a sequel about Ben. Fantastic character – came alive with his wit, charm and “manwhore struggles.” Just begging to be written! What do you think? Thanks!

Emily (the author): …I took a detour for book #2, but I am spending my quarantine with Ben! I couldn’t agree with you more. He definitely needed his own story. I am already a little bit in love with his story and can’t wait to share it with you!

To another reader: “still hoping for a May release date” ..

Jan: New Lucy Score coming out in a couple of days: By A Thread: A Grumpy Boss romcom. I like the grumpy boss trope.

Mony: I didn’t see that By A Thread was about a grumpy boss…one of my favourite tropes as well…

HEY SWEET TEA (The Way To A Man’s Heart Book 8) by Frankie Love <— LIVE!!

Don’t Go Stealing My Heart by Kelly Siskind <— LIVE!!

The Girl and the Stars (The Book of the Ice 1) by Mark Lawrence <— LIVE FANTASY ROMANCE ALERT!!!!! GORGEOUS COVER & TITLE!! “…To resist the cold, to endure the months of night when even the air itself begins to freeze, requires a special breed. Variation is dangerous, difference is fatal. And Yaz is not the same.   Yaz’s difference tears her from the only life she’s ever known, away from her family, from the boy she thought she would spend her days with, and has to carve out a new path for herself in a world whose existence she never suspected...”

Pretty Things by Janelle Brown <— RECENT PSYCH-THRILLER RELEASE AND GUESS WHAT????

Nay: For anyone who likes book adaptations, I just saw Maryse’s FB post about Pretty Things by Janelle Brown, and when I went to add it to my tbr on GR, I saw that one of my friends had posted that Nicole Kidman is going to produce and star in the book’s adaptation as a streaming Amazon series.

Maryse: OOOOOH YAY!!!! I love that!! Though I’m going to read it first.  Thank you for that news, Nay!

Michele: Just finished Fixed on You series…..GREAT, love, mystery, heartbreak and well the end……it was the best bargain….

Cheryl: Hudson is a hot alpha guy who says right off the bat that he is incapable of love and combined with Alayna’s obsessive “love’ disorder, you just know a train wreck is coming.

Krisztina: I just finished the Fixed trilogy by Laurelin Paige. Hudson (the whole story from his point of view). I have to say that I was reading the 2nd half of Forever With You with tears in my eyes … now I am obsessed with Hudson Pierce 

A Kiss to Tell by W. Winters <— SUPER-BARGAIN ALERT! HE WAS BAD NEWS & SHE WAS THE GIRL THAT DIDN’T BELONG… “...From the first time I saw him, Sebastian had a hard stare that pinned me in place. And years later, it hasn’t softened. We lived on the same street and went to the same school, although he was a year ahead.  Even so close, he was untouchable. He was bad news and I was the sad girl who didn’t belong. One night changed everything...”

AUDIOBOOK LVERS!

Not a member of Audible yet? Get a free 30 day audible trial (which includes 1 free audiobook + 2 audible originals)

AND! Audiobook Matchmaker!! <— Find out which of YOUR Kindle books are available as audiobooks at a BARGAIN-PRICE! This is how it works. Click on that link & Amazon will show you all of your Kindle books that are also available as an audiobook at a seriously discounted price. This way, you can switch back and forth, seamlessly between your ebooks and your audiobooks. VERY COOL!

➔➔ Audible now has an “Escape” package membership (30 day free trial) – used to be called the “Romance” package <— this one is SO cool, and worth it (unlimited listening for all of the audiobooks in the program, and there are tons – kind of like Kindle Unlimited)!!

and…

Little Secrets by Jennifer Hillier <— RECENT PSYCH-THRILLER RELEASE THAT I’m DYING TO READ!!

Shirley: I’m listening to Little Secrets. I’m at 20% and so far, so good!! I think you would really like this one Maryse!

Maryse: YESSSS!! I know I would. Totally my thing…

  The Hardest Fall by Ella Maise <— Ashley loved it so much she listened to it again!

Ashley: Okay, I re-listened to ‘The Hardest Fall’ by Ella Maise. Love it. My favorite part is where her horde of peanut butter m&m’s is discovered and her reasoning for it is one of the most relatable reasons ever.

Shooter by Dahlia West <— Ashley loved it so much she listened to it again!

And I’m also re-listening to ‘Shooter’ by Dahlia West….which makes me want to revisit ‘Preacher’ by Dahlia West.

PREORDERS (going live soon!!! )

➔➔➔  Get Maryse’s Book Blog updates delivered by email (you’ll get one daily email that will have each post from that day consolidated on it).

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[elizabethrobertajones]

@destielonfire replied to your post “You've been around for a while in the SPN fandom, right? I was...”

i'm sorry about the chronic pain, I can understand how that doesn't leave much room for enthusiasm or writing or anything else..... I was wondering though, you say you got what you wanted from the characters, but is that also true about destiel? Or does that no longer matter to you in the sense that you'll just be happy to see it play out however the writers want? (not a wanky question, I am honestly curious)

Thanks :) And, yeah... Destiel too, but in a weird way where obviously I still want it to pay out MORE and BETTER and more easy to read as canon, but literally since I got invested I have been pretty much non-stop since season 9 convinced that I knew exactly what the last shot we'd ever see of those two together was:

- that was how it was gonna happen. Cas said he loved them, and then bam before Dean knew it, he's dead at his feet and that's a wrap, folks!

As you can see, with more canon to come and Cas returning along with it, I'm at a bit of a loss to process past my point of "welp that's going to happen one day" in my bitter grumpy "oh they'll make it canon alright" feeling here. I mean I'm not even THAT bitter about stuff in general on the show, but I sort of nurtured in my heart of hearts the grim acceptance this was my worst case but also 70-90% likely endgame scenario for making it canon, to keep my expectations sensible. And this model is not how Cas dies in general - this is the very specific "this is how canon happens" thought. If the show ended on this shot, we'd have had that to work off to yell forever about if it was canon or not, and maybe got a Korrasami-style explanation later but without the happy ending.

Breezing past the endgame before it was meant to happen is a bit confusing :P

And other stuff like the Sam and Dean development, or their personal growth - again, this season tidied things up in such a way the spoilers for next season about character development are like, "and then Sam carries on being chill and in charge" and I'm like, one, cool love it all aboard, two, who is this guy. Because the whole long painful Carver era grind through all the meta and spec was a grim hope that ONE DAY MAYBE the show would even get to MAKING its point instead of waffling around hinting while putting almost the opposite picture in the main text with only subtextual clues that it was all fucked up and meant to change. 

By the time it started getting to the point it was all going too fast - like, I should have braced myself to speculate beyond this point after Sam was like "it's called sublimation Dean" and Dean snarked about that's him alright. Like, seriously. Miscalculation on my part, and then we barrel into season 12 in full force and systematically work through entire checklists that have just been sitting around gathering dust on everyone. And even if we're not at the END of the checklist, it's like, Carver just wrote all the points on the checklist up for us and made us aware of everything that had to change. And even when little bits of character change came, they were still quite quiet, and not really addressed as solid changes that paid off, and then the end of season 11 was all crowded and messy trying to wipe the slate clean, and only with the last conversation with Amara and Chuck, and then the promise of Mary coming back, do we get an idea change is coming...

I mean I have been browsing old meta tags on and off this hiatus and we all made the required checklists for what we hoped Mary was going to do in the narrative, but something about Carver era just really wore me out like we could say all this needs to happen but would we just get more and more nonsense showing the problem without delivering the answer? And with no clue how it was supposed to look or could play out or, again, that anything could continue after it. Most spec was hedging bets on, well, we'll get some resolution with Mary but then they'll kill her off... and they're like hey we removed Mary from the board but she is SO not dead, she's kicking more ass than ever! Like... okay. Cool. Cool cool cool. What?

And no one's *fixed* and some of these things aren't exactly OVER, like, performing!Dean symbolically died and we had a whole rebirth followed by breaking down Mary's walls too thing, but I still expect Dean not to act magically cured, and he was wearing short shorts in 11x04 anyway so it's a fluid development that's been going on for ages, but tiny nods like the shorts that he might be feeling better and more comfortable were great but not playing a role in the narrative, while now it has BEEN the narrative and his entire conclusion to season 12 in his personal arc was this great coming together of his personal arc Carver set up and the new angle to attack his childhood trauma Mary brought to the table, and it's DEEP and actually getting to the heart of things and unpacking the characters and exploring how they feel and putting it all out there.

And I can't even explain Sam - just know that until this season I only had one thing I ever really cried about in this show, which was Bobby's death, and then somehow out of nowhere, Berens hit me so hard I SOBBED when Sam uncovered the Colt and looked at it in tears with his eyes, so clearly SOMETHING epic happened there in his characterisation and his own personal growth. (Sam's personal growth tends to hit me in hindsight about what it was all about... It's almost like I need to be 3 seasons clear to understand it properly >.>) And then 12x22 managed to completely beat me up on both Sam and Dean AND Mary's behalf and I cried a bunch more times, very confused about when the show changed to something I cried about the emotional stuff in... I cry very easily at OTHER things. I spent the last couple of days WEEPING about [static noises] in The Adventure Zone, and the Orphan Black finale, and I've got a low investment in OB, I just like watching it. I cried at its previous season finale as well. SPN just isn't a tear jerker for me, and it's not tuned that way in general? And this season the writing has changed to doing SOMETHING with the characters that puts it into the territory where they're wringing our investment in the characters in a GOOD way and I think it's to do with the changes and the sense of finally overcoming and growing and being free of the weights piled on them over the years. Even just the PROMISE that that might happen is shocking enough, really :P

Like long term 12x22 is probably going to lose some of its punch once we see where this development goes and HOPEFULLY we work our way to the real resolutions. But just in terms of emotional attrition from Carver era, it's just a massive RELIEF to have some things spoken out loud, and other things like the grenade launcher game they put in the subtext, to be acknowledged and played with in a way which really really WORKED to convey that they WANT to positively develop their characters and maybe it's a waiting game but they seem to want to actually DO it.

And I'm basically just in shock :P

And with the Destiel stuff, then, to go back to how it all makes me feel, I feel like there's maybe a very real possibility they're going to do some pretty amazing things with it, canonical ending or not, for a subtext gremlin like myself I can't even BEGIN to grapple what they might throw at us, because I can barely process what they already have given us, because it's almost completely unbelievable to me because I've lurked in fandom so long waiting for them to actually make a move? Practically, the meta I read at the end of season 9 still broadly applied at the start of season 12, but immediately and mercilessly got resolved or changed up or turned on its head and shaken all about, and I'm too tired to keep up :P

So I don't know, there's a large part of me that's now content to watch it play out, but mostly because I feel like the way it's pandered it's crossed a lot of lines with the stuff they have given us like mixtapes and an "i love you" and angel/human romance episodes and Dean being singled out to kneel at Cas's lifeless body... I mean 12x10's actual concept was like a ridiculous dream back when, reading meta about all these season 8 human/monster relationship episodes, and the interspecies romance in Bloodlines using 6x20's dialogue and so on. They explored it all obliquely, and some parallels like the one in the LARP episode or the Prometheus episode were pretty blatant Crypt Scene foreshadowing to the point people were speculating it before it happened in good detail, AND romantic AND interspecies romances at that. But an actual episode unpacking not just angels and humans and how they mix, but to tie it to Cas, and to tie Cas to Dean directly? If you dropped 12x10 in the middle of season 8, the meta writers would have literally exploded. No survivors :P

And that's the positive remains of the season 8 meta bubble I still read when I was there in season 9 and it was getting bitter, and then I weathered season 10 and with the plot accordion and the beginnings of putting Cas somewhere else to delay everything with Dean, getting back to it with 3 personal episodes and loads of other moments which explored how Cas REALLY felt and related to humanity and "humanity"? I mean... wow.

And there's a part of me desperately trying to keep everything in context, to remember this journey as it unfolded from right back in the days where it was all snide and borderline cruel gay jokes and now it's a narrative goliath... And even to remember how sparse and painful and scavenging for Destiel subtext scraps season 10 was or something... But that part of me that's trying to keep it all in context literally can't handle season 12's context because it defies all the previous ways you're supposed to handle it. It's too hot to hold onto and you have to drop it. Which I appear to have done, because in the sense of waiting and expectations and wondering wtf canon would look like or what the writers would dare to do... All the things like that, they've actually just ALREADY crossed all the lines my careful expectations were set to? Because I always tried to listen to the bitter, careful, don't get your hopes up side of things because it sounded much more healthy to take it all as a pleasant surprise... 

I don't know where it's all going and I can't take it as a promise of canon or even dare to raise and sort of hope that it's going to get more canon from here. But's going to get more INTERESTING from here, for sure :P And I feel like in season 13 I will be in business to write a LOT of meta. I just can't even begin to grapple with what they're going to throw at us before we see it...

[elizabethrobertajones]

"God appointed him (Dean) to look after the Earth and said he was the best guy for the job." Doesn't Sam fit in there, too? God said : Earth will be fine. It's got you. And Sam.

Yeeeah, I know, and I almost put that but I thought that would require a tangent which there was no place for in there. So you get a full-length tangent for asking about something I unfortunately already had a whole list of mental bullet points on, so buckle up XD

Essentially it boils down to my “dean is the centre of the universe” theory which of course has the flipside that I really do not subscribe to “the winchesters are the centre of the universe” because I feel like the cosmic order goes absolutely out of its way to pander to Dean, and Sam is an afterthought. Read into that as much unexpected bitter Sam girl-ing as you like as the other side of the coin of this being one of those ultimate Dean girl theories, it does happen over here sometimes :P 

6x09 and 9x11 both place a magical weight on being the older brother, but it’s also a curse in a different way that it singles him out. The burden in season 5 is on him not saying yes to Michael while since at least season 2 Sam’s been saying stuff that thematically puts him on the side of letting Destiny happen and fighting it from the inside - as he eventually did with Lucifer - Dean’s always wanted to flip the whole thing over and reject it outright. So his season 1-5 stuff and 9-11 stuff were both about fighting a immense cosmic pressure and rejecting it, emphatically, and ending a seemingly fated and unstoppable thing just by sheer force of will. At this point Dean’s ability to dig in his heels and shape the course of the world around his stubborness is literally equivalent to god-like power. He can MAKE it about Sam, like in 5x22, but it’s coming from him.

Sam obviously gets much more screwed over by being “and Sam” in the season 9-11 arc rather than the 1-5 arc which was properly tailored to them with Michael and Lucifer, because the new template is Cain and Abel. The whole point of that is Abel’s dead, so as a mirror, there’s nothing left to swing at, which is why I think even some meta writers on our side when we were speculating season 10 contemplated Sam as Dean’s Colette (platonically, as the one who would fill the same sort of role) just because there needed to be something to compare him to and there wasn’t even a dramatic re-enactment to look at aside from Cas’s stock movie footage in 6x20 :P In season 11 we got Sam thinking he was talking to God but it was actually Lucifer which belatedly used something out of the parallel, but it wasn’t a whole lot and of course was like 35 episodes since Cain said that, and meanwhile the Destiel parallel to Colette had been there the whole time.

In Chuck and Amara, both of them got paralleled to Dean, Amara as his dark mirror (in 10x05, Marie promises in the second act Dean becomes a woman) and Chuck literally just mimicking him as if Dean’s pull is so strong it absorbed God into it when God couldn’t push the other way and get Dean to treat him with any awe or respect. (Meanwhile: Sam asked him why planets were round or whatever.) Can’t remember now what they were exactly but Sam did get some parallels to Amara - mostly being the angry sibling in the face of a rather absolute brother, where Amara seemed to have a younger sibling dynamic if only for “create” has to come before “destroy” and I think if I remember correctly without going to look, in the 11x23 resolution her dialogue was more obviously mimicking Sam issues and Chuck’s were Dean issues, depending on which version of the Carver era bro drama you saw it as (I thiiink I saw it as a resolution to 8x23′s dirty laundry airing that spiralled into Gadreel then to the Mark etc). Honestly I think Amara’s anger goes either way, especially since she and Dean clicked so well over season 9-10, and especially when she was fuelling demon!Dean’s rage against Sam and everything he says in 10x03, you can see her anger behind it once you know she’s there too, as the rationale they came up with for why the Mark makes its bearer so determined to kill their sibling. (It took another season and a half but there’s finally enough retcon to make the “how demons work” errors in 10x03 make sense because you can just blame it all on her :P)

I can see a kind of line of dominoes from the start of the show and the way they set up the dynamic where it gradually puts Dean more and more in the spotlight, especially when Sam’s ~out of commission~ as a reliable POV character in season 4 & 6, and just small choices along the way (since Kripke era mind you. Early Kripke era) which end up with Dean holding the emotional spotlight, and a cosmic power to shape events that Sam doesn’t really have. At which point the “and Sam” in 11x23 as the culmination of all this, seems laughably token to the dynamic, both in-world and to the fans, like, you can’t JUST make it all about Dean, and at the end of the day it will always default back to Sam n Dean against the world, cue musical number from 10x05… But somewhere between season 6 and 11, Sam became an accessory to Dean on the cosmic level, because of these unfortunate elements of the way their earlier rounds on the merry-go-round went. So Dean walks in to confront Chuck and Amara alone, and Sam gets the Mark of Cain for 3 seconds without us even seeing the conversation where he decided to do it. And it was pretty obvious Chuck was using him since the whole point was he was avoiding dealing with things properly and Sam’s personal development made him so easy to manipulate Chuck probably barely felt bad about doing it, especially when he’s probably got a messed up sense of what people do for him out of faith. (And Sam’s the one who has a line back in 9x22 about people doing messed up things in the name of faith >.>)

Anyway, cosmically, Sam spent all of season 9, 10 and 11 left out and on the side as an “and Sam” who at best wasn’t falling foul of Dean’s shot at the mytharc and getting fratricided for his trouble of sticking it out with Dean… Chuck’s “and Sam” considering the location and circumstances of that conversation where Sam was off watching Crowley eat beer nuts in the bar at the end of the world, honestly sets off a latent bitter Sam girl feeling I didn’t even know I had until the end of season 11, and this is probably why I spend 99% of the time all snuggly and warm in my Dean girl cocoon where I feel the narrative has basically never done him wrong in such a way as Sam crawled through Carver era and emerged a strange sad empty moose in season 12. 

I mean I honestly do not see these complaints now in season 12 in the same way because I’m trying to figure out what the hell they even rebuild of Sam from and figure 12x04, 5 and 6 did a brilliant job with him, all things considered. And he HAS been more emotionally present and involved in stuff or at least a spotlight is being shone intentionally on him mediating and withdrawing even when you’d think he really should have more to say and Dean’s doing all the shouting for him. Which basically means that at least they are now intentionally making Sam like this, whereas I honestly can’t tell in Carver era if they were shooting for one thing and got another, because once this season really began pointing it out, I started seeing earlier stuff in a much different light and retroactively got a lot more concerned about Sam, like the Sam girls had been for ages but I hadn’t listened. >.>

(And as a side note, I think this is why Eileen hurts so much that I’m still equal parts pissed off for the representation issue AND hook line and sinker for the Sam man pain and I see a lot of the fandom outcry between ourselves rather than Angry Open Letter Time involves Sam’s feelings too, with most of the coda fics I’ve reblogged so far angrily proving she’s fine and immediately flinging her at Sam, and my response to the episode was to go plan ahead huge chunks of the Saileen stuff in the long fic I’m working on too. He’s been so sad and empty I honestly think Dean’s reaction in 11x04 to Sam hooking up was understated because he was trying to play it cool :P Now I can’t help thinking all the progress Sam made is directly linked to how many youtube ASL classes he took >.>)

tl;dr, the way Sam’s been sort of moved to the edge of things a lot lately, I think tracks all the way back to the way he interacts with the mytharc on a cosmic level, and the “and Sam” line now genuinely bothers me on Sam’s behalf that God treated him as an afterthought to Dean, but when I’ve got my Dean girl hat on, it’s easier to treat Sam the same as that then write all this, which means I’m part of the problem aaaaah :P