#what your conspiracy theory did was not normal queer analysis

[poptart-cat-78]

The Hunt Club and the seven deadly sins.

Okay, I’ve had this analysis/conspiracy/ theory(?) before I just wanted to post it here on Tumblr. Since I don’t see a lot of people do deep dives into this series, and I’ve already made lots of memes and fanart, why not make these “theory” posts as well huh?

WARNING FOR SPOILERS

Anyway after watching multiple let’s plays of The Beast Within (and playing it myself), I began to notice how each of the Hunt Club members implement a specific sin into their interpretations of the Clubs Philosophy (which, according to the Baron, is to “Embrace your Inner Nature”). So I’m going to try to analyze each of the Hunt Club members and which sin I think they embody, starting from the most obvious to the least obvious.

1.) Herr Priess = Lust

The most obvious in my opinion. He talks about being an “entertainer” and how he “loves women, the bait and the hook. How he “prefers pleasure, not murder” (when Gabriel asks about the “instinct to rip somebody’s throat out”). Him being Lust likely explains why I want to spray him with pepper spray and not go anywhere near him. Honestly the grossest character in this game and HE shouldve been the one to perish lmao.

2.) Baron von Zell = Wrath

You COULD say that he embodies Envy but considering his behavior throughout the game, he’s DEFINITELY more Wrath. I mean how would YOU feel if your ex turned you into a werewolf, ditched you and started flirting with some stupid American who just happened to befriend said ex?

3.) Herr Hannuman = Sloth

He’s a drunkard who’s the least threatening member next to von Aigner. He basically doesn’t do anything throughout the game so I had to equate him to Sloth.

4.) Herr von Aigner = Gluttony

“Look at me, I love to eat and I love to drink. If I could make that a nation religion. I would” This quote is basically all I needed to equate him to Gluttony

5.) Herr Doktor Klingmann = Pride

A little harder to pinpoint, but since he SPECIFICALLY has Gabriel call him “Mr. Dr. Klingman” in German and he’s pretty proud of his research on wolves, I’ll equate him with the sin of Pride

6.) Xavier = Greed(?)

Gotta admit, he’s a hard one to pinpoint. The only two sins left are Greed and Envy. I equated him to Greed just because I don’t see von Glower being the sin of Greed (as Ill explain his next).

7.) And finally,the Baron himself, Baron Friedrich von Glower = Envy

Now why did I pick Envy for von Glower? Easy. One, it’s the last sin left. Two, could you imagine having to live an immortal life as a queer werewolf man who was also nobility? Having to hide your true self for all those centuries? I imagine the poor guy was envious of those who could live “normal lives” without the fear of being exposed.

Whats also interesting about this analysis is that there are seven members (including Xavier) and seven sins. Idk if that was a coincidence or intentional but Jane Jension is a genius. I hope you enjoyed this analysis!

[partywithponies]

Sarah Z does not deserve any hate. She’s a lot nicer in her video than I would’ve been, I’ll give you that.

[robertjacobsugdens]

And here we have the long winded meta about Robert’s clothes literally no one asked for. It’s time. This has been burning in my drafts for the past twelve thousand years.

I am going to approach the issue in two parts. A textual analysis and a meta-textual analysis. Basically, I’m gonna look at Robert’s clothes both as diegetic elements, meaning as style choices made by the character in-universe, and as non-diegetic elements, meaning as choices made by the Emmerdale production team. Yeah. It’s that kind of meta. Strap in, folks. We’re about to go on a journey.

First, I’m going to start by analyzing Robert’s clothes within the text. 

Robert, we all know, is the son of a farmer. He grew up in a certain environment and a certain expectation of masculinity. That expectations were of the most basic and rugged kind of masculinity. A “real” man was one who did farm work and found fulfillment in it. Who found himself in it. Robert never really saw himself in that. And of course, we can’t talk about Robert and his relationship to masculinity without talking about his relationship with Jack. Jack was the model of masculinity Robert was supposed to take after. Any deviation from that was seen as an attack on Jack or a deviation from what was “normal” and what was “good”. 

You might ask, what does that have to do with the fact that Robert dresses like a villain in an 80s teen movie? Good question! I see Robert’s clothes as both a complete refusal of the rural masculinity Jack embodied, and also as a sort of desperate attempt to feel superior to Jack in some ways. 

The thing is, that to be a man in this society is to contend with masculinity in some ways. It’s why men feel compelled to come up with nonsensical concepts like “metrosexuality”. A thing that exists in the sense that it’s a real phenomenon, but also doesn’t exist because it’s garbage. I believe this relates to Robert in the sense that he embraced the kind of new type of masculinity that focuses more on material wealth and power than physical strength and manual labor. It’s still incredibly toxic, but in more insidious ways. 

His clothes are a signifier of his status. They’re telling people: “I work in an office and I can get away with wearing this snazzy purple flower print that is totally not work appropriate because I am my own boss.” I might be paraphrasing. 

Now, onto a meta-textual analysis. This is where you should get your tin-foil hat on and assume I’m writing after a night on TVTropes and idk, binging X-Files or something. Again, strap in.

From a storytelling perspective, clothes are important. They’re a visual cue, and on a visual medium like TV, and especially on a soap where narrative has to be packed and condensed into a pretty limited time slot, they’re fundamental. At any given time, the clothes a character is wearing should tell you something about them. 

Now, if you hang around Tumblr enough, you probably know about the “Deprived Bisexual” and the “Queer Coded Villain” tropes. In case you don’t, here’s a brief overview. Bisexual people have historically, in media, been presented as duplicitous and ambiguous. This especially exploded during the height of the HIV crisis, when it was believed that bisexual people, especially bisexual men, were contributing to the spread of the disease by sleeping with gay men and heterosexual women. As for the villains, given that they often went outside the norms of mainstream society, writers often found beneficial to attach more “queer” attributes to them as signifiers for their otherness. 

I’m not saying the Emmerdale writing/costume/production departments got together in a badly lit underground parking lot conspiring to code Robert as a queer villain, I’m just saying, this stuff is called a trope for a reason. And that reason is that it’s pervasive in our social and personal consciousness. It’s ingrained. We don’t really know it’s there at all until we confront it.

So, if you know what you’re looking for, you realize that Robert wears a lot more pink and light purple when he’s scheming, and more blue when he’s supposed to be seen in a positive light. Like, trust me, I have seen every single shirt that man has ever been put into, I have charted their appearances during the years. The most egregious offenders straight up disappear after Robert’s redemption arc. His suits get boxier and more masculine, while before they tended to be slimmer. His colors get colder. More blues, more dark purples. More neutrals. In a few words, more stereotypically masculine. 

So, again, was this a conscious choice? Maybe, maybe not. I’m not crying “conspiracy theory” here, that’s not my intention. But it is interesting to note and chart this phenomenon. 

The more outside of social norms Robert acts, the more outside the bounds of rural masculinity his clothes get. Which isn’t to mean Robert escapes the bounds of toxic masculinity. He just trades one kind for the other. This only really starts to change once Robert starts the process of accepting himself and becoming more comfortable with himself. I find fascinating that him becoming comfortable with his identity coincides with more acceptably masculine clothes. 

Now. This is the end of me yelling into the void. If you got this far I honestly don’t know what to tell you. You deserve some kind of prize. Go get a cookie or go stand into the sun for five minutes and soak that vitamin D. 

[elizabethrobertajones]

If Destiel is going to happen. Do you think they have non-disclosure agreements about Destiel?

If it was going to happen, they would, probably like any upcoming plot thing. I don’t really think at this point it is or really ever has been something they’d have an NDA for, which is why we have Misha casually telling people about the jilted lover note, or Jensen with absolutely no briefing on how to handle the fandom when it comes to shipping >.> That’s not to say I am agreeing that it’s not real or there, but, well, I’ll refer you to my next anon down:

Anonymous said: true, an actor gets to interpret lines and act out something, but even that is going to be re-shot and edited. actors are in a position where their opinion can reach more people, and because they are linked to process of getting the story to us, their opinions are more easily mistaken for fact than say, mine… which are on anon, on tumblr. :P

And yeah this is why I think Jensen has no clue. To use a recent example, 11x15 absolutely hung him out to dry with the writing and editing. He had no control and probably no idea when it came to setting Sam up in a scene immediately following Dean meeting Gunnar, to meet HIS childhood crush, and for the moments to be played side by side like that. Or for the scripting of his own scene to mirror Dr Sexy as much as it did. He might think he filmed a normal sort of scene about meeting a childhood idol (did he even know the camera implied that Dean recognised him by his butt? They film these things completely out of order :P) but when you add up everything about that sequence, it was directly paralleling one childhood crush to another, and the character Sam talked to played almost no further major part in the episode, really. The only reason she was more than a background character was to have this comparison.

Of course since Jensen looks like Dean and puts in all the effort to bring us Dean you would think he’d know the character best, but he’s just standing in the worst possible place to see it. I mean, like, he’s trapped in the Truman show except he’s getting hauled out to discuss it with the audience every so often. And people working with actors on film have a luxury that, say, playwrights never had, because they can withhold info - give new script pages at the last minute, be working several episodes in advance… Say, surprise Jensen with the demon!Dean reveal that they’ve known about forever and ever the audience seemed to be guessing longer than Jensen finally knew :P 

I don’t think it’s a conspiracy or anything, but the writers and crew have been playing around with implications a LONG time - almost the whole show, really - and at what to them is a fairly safe remove. If you follow the breadcrumb trail back to the knowing smirks, you get “who says Destiel isn’t canon ;)” or “the potential for love in all places” and then you go a few layers above those assholes (meant lovingly :P), and suddenly the higher ups have no idea, which takes me right back to NDA anon, because 9x03′s wank storm proved that there’s no long foretold plot about it. When we talk about the Destiel arc, it’s just what they’d treat as the regular emotional arc between Dean n Cas, and then we bring in the tools to analyse it… Which takes me to my 3rd anon:

Anonymous said: agree so hard with you on the stuff about actors and pr and fandom. whenever i see actors from various fandoms saying things like ya i play it that way, ya i think my character is this or not that, i’m like cool, but that’s your interpretation. sometimes i agree sometimes i don’t. as viewers, we’re also in a position to interpret the story. and i definitely enjoy what i get out of it.

Absolutely :D 

I also think SPN gave us the okay several times to analyse it however we want and knows its fanbase well enough in the show to give proper nods. I mean, not like we needed permission, but that the show itself doesn’t squirm away from this sort of analysis but embraces it, even if it seemed to think it was funny, it didn’t think it was bad, early on (and I think acknowledged the part they had to play in it, like, fair cop, when they first started getting meta).  Then Robbie wandered into the show and rubbed his grubby hands all over it, so now within the text of the show, it’s literally more the actors fault for not getting it about shipping, than it is the final product of the show’s fault for not encouraging it, even if “it” in this case is a fairly safe middle of the road “it’s okay to interpret Destiel out of the show if you want to and like it”… 

Anyway when it comes to Jensen, he obviously hasn’t had anyone seriously explain to him - even after 10x05 - the really complicated media theory at work here, and honestly looking at his part of Fan Fiction, or, say, that scene back in 4x18 where Sam tells him about Sam slash Dean, I’m not sure he’s ever been given a definition of what fandom does which doesn’t imply that fandom interprets secret relationships or inserts gay stuff where there wasn���t any… 

idk, at this point they’d need a long weekend and a team of scholars to set him straight on the matter, because standing where he does on the production end, I’m not entirely sure he has even really thought about interpretation. He has a role as a storyteller, but it’s so much the mechanical actions of the story, no matter how much nuance he puts into a performance, he’s thinking that he’s creating, like, a fixed event and that’s just what the story is. Even away from the queer readings the show encourages multiple takes on things, or actively tries to whip up sides in arguments between the brothers or something… The whole ambiguity about John’s parenting… 

The actors really aren’t big-picture about it, and so they’re going to miss a lot of stuff, especially the stuff which you can’t get from acting it out without seeing how the finished product looks. Which puts US the viewers in the one seat in the whole assembly line where we get to authentically describe what the story is. We might come up with different things, but our reading is the one that matters (even if it’s still technically not “correct” in a world where there’s no right answer), since this is produced as entertainment FOR us.