#which was probably the turning point of he and Benny's relationship tbh

[wander-over-the-words]

I can't draw em yet but just know that Benny and Ethan are the embodiment of that new-ish ship meme where one has the beautiful brown eyes (Benny) while the other is staring into your soul (Ethan)

the plot twist of course is that Mr. Gorgeous Brown Eyes over there is the asshole of the relationship while Mr. You'll Feel Like You Just Met Death Because This Guy Stared At You is actually a sweetheart

[raspberry-gloaming]

I'm currently at a point where because I've got into Gallifrey, I follow or have at least browsed people's blogs who love other dweu stuff. And I thought it might be fun to say what I currently think and know about eu characters/companions so when I have in the future delved deeper into the eu I can look back and compare and laugh and see how much is accurate! There's gonna be a "read more" here because this gonna get Long.

Also please let me know what I've got right and not and also tell me more about these characters if you are fans of them!

Benny: starting off strong i know some stuff about her! she's an archeologist from the future (wonder if she ever met River) and she travelled with... one of the doctor(s)? Possibly Seven? She is besties with Brax and sometimes works for him and his collection. Probably must be able to put up with bullshit because of those last two points. Has a husband called Jason and at least one kid, which, iconic, female adventure and action protagonists should get to be mums more often its always the childfree so big up Benny for that. made a cameo at the end of Gallifrey IV.

Evelyn: I have heard her. A little. I basically skipped through the apocalypse element because I wanted to understand some of the reasons that Romana is the way she is in Gallifrey, but didn't listen properly because I got bored. Is an old lady, which is great - its great to see ages mixing it up a bit, instead of the 19-25 year old girl primary companions we consistently get in nu-who. Travelled with Six and is/was a professor at a university. Not sure for which subject though.

Fitz: Canonically bisexual and wears a leather jacket. I've seen A Lot of shipping him and Eight, and these shippers seem to have a similar vibe to Two/Jamie shippers. I don't know much else, except that his time with the doctor is probably fucked up because from what I have gleaned, Eight's companions Go Through It like big time.

Compassion: Faction Paradox which I believe is in an alternate universe (also the faction paradox timelines seem to have have a different vibe of names to the main universe ones, every time I'm on the "Individual Time Lords" category on the wiki and see a name that seems out of place it turns out to be a character from Faction Paradox.) Is a person (human i think?) but is also a TARDIS? Like you can go into her and travel? Where tf is the door this is very cursed. Also used as a breeding machine to make more TARDISes as well? By Romana? Idk but this seems pretty fucked up in an icky way. And fucked up in a non-icky way too. I'm just confused tbh. Not sure which doctor is involved in this one.

C'rizz - Possibly people can't say his name right? Is that him? Alien boy, travelled with Eight and Charley. That's about all I know.

Chris Cwej: I know even less about him, hes the other possibility for people mixing up his name or something. Think he travelled with Seven. Idk why but he gives me dick vibes.

Hex Schofield: Travelled with Ace and Seven. Is from 2021 or something and says "sus." Which yh that was a thing but he was made before among us existed that's a cool coincidence that it turned out like that.

Liv and Helen: They exist. That's it I know nothing more.

Molly O'Sullivan: Also exists. Travelled with eight?

Charley Pollard: Has a Nazi for a sister - Blind Eye my beloved. Calls herself Edwardian even though she's from the 1930s, idk if its like a character point or an accidental fuck up by the writers. Has a romance with the doctor in some form. And also a pretty messed up relationship with him i think. Actually just a pretty messed up time. Especially because I think she was in Scherzo which I hear Wild Blue Yonder was inspired by. So good luck girl you're gonna need it.

[perlukafarinn]

I posted two polls yesterday, asking who is your favorite potential love interest for Dean besides Cas and vice versa. I’ve tallied the votes for both polls and reblogged them with the results and some commentary but I thought it’d be nice to gather them in one post, plus some extra thoughts from me below the cut.

Potential love interests for Dean:

Benny (116). And yes, correct.

Cassie (77). Also correct. A few of you pointed out that Dean should have gone to her in season six instead of Lisa and are you wrong?

Victor (34). Tbh I wasn’t expecting Victor in the top three but I am very happy with all of you!

No one (28). Very Cas coded of you, very sexy.

Crowley (25). This is the one I feel like the character in question would be the most upset about. Only number 5??

Bela (13). I’d also like to interject that demon!Dean/demon!Bela should have happened.

Lee (8). Good for him, I guess.

Jo (5). I don’t know if I’m surprised by Jo’s ranking or not.

Donna (4). This one had a lot of support when her first episode aired, if I remember correctly.

Tessa (3). Good for her, I guess.

The rest got either one or two votes. With two we’ve got: Aaron (surprised he didn’t get more), Anna, Ash, Cain (very disappointed he didn’t get more), Deacon, Garth, Ketch (uhhh), Rhonda Hurley.

One vote: Balthazar, Daphne (lowkey feel like the two people who picked them read the question wrong), Donnie, Lisa (I also don’t know whether to be surprised by this ranking or not. On the one hand she’s Dean’s longest running textual love interest. On the other, they kinda forgot to give her a personality beyond ‘love interest’ and ‘mother’), Lydia (????), Me (lmao), Michael, Mick (also ???), Robin, Ronald (ngl I had to look him up), Sam (😶), Sarah Blake (this voter did admit they might be projecting) The Impala if it turned into a guy (this one might have the most canon support), That one hot desk officer from season 1 you know the one I mean (I don’t).

Potential love interests for Cas:

No one (33). I was expecting this option to be high up but not number one! Quite a few people specified he should be a single parent but what I really appreciate are the few of you who wrote dissertations in the tags on why this makes sense for Cas’ character.

Meg (26). Correct and very sexy.

Mick (25). I’ve seen like one episode with Mick so idgi but good for him!

Balthazar (6). Thought he’d get way more votes?? Idk might be my bias speaking.

Sam (6). Love the one of you who specified that Cas should not like him back.

Luca (4). Okay so there is a canon character named Luca who is a priest but I’m pretty sure y’all mean the Luca from In the Shadow of your Wings by ao3 user Enochian Things, who is also a priest (esp since a couple of you did say he’s not a canon character) and who actually meets Cas.

Benny (3). It should be noted that two out of three of you wanted to include Dean in this ship.

Crowley (3). Just as with Dean’s list, he’d be very insulted by placing so low.

Hannah (3). Hannah got three votes, two specifying in a male vessel and one just specifying “trans”.

Kelly (3). Makes sense, as she is the mother of his child and they have a friendly relationship. Also makes sense this didn’t get more votes since they have no chemistry and she is a republican.

These all got two votes: Djinn queen, Me, Pastor Sexy.

And now, a special category of those with one vote from people I’m pretty sure read the question wrong: Cassie, Lisa, Ash, Victor.

Another special category of Dean alternates who got one vote but don’t count because they’re still Dean: AU Dean, Amnesia Dean, Dean Smith.

And the rest all got one vote: Dabb-era OC, Hypothetical guy from centuries ago (from one of those times Cas’ mind got wiped), Jesus Christ (asdjifsdkl), Miguel from The Love Story of the Runner-Up by ao3 user Margo_Kim, Sergei (???), That angel dude who wanted him for his hands (okay who and what episode).

Okay so what jumped out to me immediately was “no one” topping Cas’ list (it placed pretty high on Dean’s list but Benny, Cassie and Victor still beat that option handily). 

A lot of people straight up did not like the thought of Cas with someone else (very Dean coded of them) but a lot of others just couldn’t picture it. Which I think can be attributed to none of Cas’ relationships with others being all that developed on the show, besides with Jack which is obviously not romantic. Tbh there aren’t a lot of deeply developed relationships on Supernatural that don’t include Sam or Dean (and lbr, mostly Dean).

People were also explaining their choices a lot more in the Cas poll. Idk what that means but I just thought it was interesting. There also wasn’t a consensus on Cas’ sexuality; while Meg and other female characters got votes a lot of other voters said they see him as gay and can’t picture him with a woman.

Most delightfully surprising result: Cassie taking second place! Honestly, it’s what she deserves. And Victor in third! The taste! 

Most expected result: Benny winning the Dean poll in a landslide.

Most surprising low placement: Balthazar only getting six votes in Cas’ poll. I thought this ship was more popular but that’s probably my bias speaking since I happen to like it.

Funniest vote: Those three of you who wanna shoot your shot with Dean/Cas. Go for it, I’m rooting for you!

Favorite specification on a vote: “Meg in a deeply lavender marriage way”

[hello-em75]

TAGGED BY: my musk ox @chiefhiccstrid and @winxrus ! thanks guys!

last

drink: jasmine milk tea with boba! so goooood

phone call: my mom 

text message: my babe @chiefhiccstrid ;)

song you listened to: “eastside” by halsey, khalid, and benny blanco 

time you cried: two days ago when i watched inside out (how do you not tear up when bing bong sacrifices himself like he’s my hero)

ever

dated someone twice: well i haven’t dated someone once SOOO 

kissed someone and regretted it: haven’t had my first kiss yet loll

been cheated on: in my head yes JK 

lost someone special: i probably thought they were pretty special at the time, but then realized that they really weren’t all that

been depressed: no fortunately. i’ve had my bouts of sadness and loneliness more often than i’d like to admit, but i’ve always been surrounded by a loving family and i have my extra special best friend who always reminds me of how much i’m loved so i’m pretty blessed <333

gotten drunk and thrown up: not yet LMAO

fave color: i always say blue, but i’m always in some neutral color so probably gray, white, or black if it really came down to it

in the last year have you

made new friends: yep! and i’m incredibly thankful for them 

fallen out of love: if you mean an unhealthy level of infatuation then hells yes 

laughed until you cried: luckily yes

found out someone was talking about you: yeah, but it wasn’t anything bad so we’re good 

met someone who changed you: i wouldn’t say they changed me, but @chiefhiccstrid has definitely brought out nothing but the best in me since we’ve become friends, and i’m eternally grateful for that and her 

found out who your friends are: eh, i guess? we’re still “friends” in the sense that there’s still a strong sense of familiarity and trust among us all but they’re not the people i turn to first in the way that friends do

kissed someone on your facebook friends list: no kisses yet

how many of your facebook friends do you know irl: all of them pretty much

do you have any pets: nope! and it kills me every day

do you want to change your name: i used to think it was pretty basic, but now i can’t imagine myself with another one

what did you do for your last birthday: i was in las vegas with family and my dad’s friend’s family! i remember eating sushi, taking a solid nap in our hotel room, eating a overpriced and frankly not worth it “thanksgiving” dinner, opening presents, and eating cake lol

what time did you wake up today: around 10 AM LOLL

what were you doing at midnight last night: sleeping 

what is something you can’t wait for: httyd: thw (obviously) and graduating high school! 

what are you listening to right now: unfortunately, a spotify ad 

have you ever talked to a person named tom: only in my dreams bc tom holland and i are tight af in my head.

something that gets on your nerves: i could air out my laundry list here, but i’ll go with ignorant and narrow-minded people 

most visited website: i honestly don’t know between tumblr, ff.net, or one of my school websites that i have to go to everyday to get a good grade lol

hair color: it used to be a dark brown, but i got a balayage treatment done last year so it’s still brown but has streaks of blonde now too!

long or short hair: aggressively long but i honestly love it

what do you like about yourself: if looking externally, probably my eyes because that’s something people consistently compliment me on. if looking inwardly for something i like about myself (which is definitely harder), probably my sense of humor and go with the flow attitude towards most things lol

want any piercings: i have one set of piercings in my ears, but i kind of want to get another one in my ears to make it two sets!

blood type: i honestly don’t know and neither do my parents (without looking at any of my documents) so if i ever needed blood we’d be in real trouble hehe

nicknames: em is the main one, but pretty much everyone calls me emily irl.

relationship status: a questionably happy single ngl

zodiac: sagitarrius

pronouns: she/her

fave tv shows: race to the edge, voltron, trollhunters, queer eye, and the crown

tattoos: none yet! but i’m leaning towards getting one when i’m old enough to!

right or left handed: right-handed

ever had surgery: thankfully nope

piercings: only in my ears

sport: i probably would be okay at most of them if i was at all fast but nope lol

I have practiced: piano, violin, clarinet, and guitar (which i eventually all quit). 

vacation: gosh, i want to go all over the world because i’ve pretty much traveled only in the us and canada in my lifetime thus far SO LETS INTERNATIONALLY TRAVEL

trainers: if this is relevant to sneakers, then yes i have had them in the past year. but if not, then i have no clue LOL.

more general

eating: nothing atm

drinking: nothing atm

about to watch: nothing, because i should be asleep at 2 AM haha

waiting for: httyd: thw and money to fall in my lap so i can go visit all of my rad httyd fandom friends and not be fucking broke going into college

want: happiness? lasting love? a sense of security? success? is this too deep for this question bc i went there LOL

want to get married: definitely one day!

career: nothing yet! still have to graduate hs and go through college first

which is better

hugs or kisses: hugs

lips or eyes: eyes

shorter or taller: taller

older or younger: for a relationship, i would rather them be older then younger

nice arms or stomach: arms

hookup or relationship: relationship

troublemaker or hesitant: oof can there be somewhere in between?

have you ever

kissed a stranger: nope

drunk hard liquor: psh i’m not that cool jk

lost glasses: yes, but always after i get new ones luckily

turned someone down: yes, but still not 100% sure if they were joking or not when asking me out so maybe no?

sex on first date: nah that’s not really me

broken someone’s heart: gosh i sure hope not

had your heart broken: at the time i probably saw it that way

been arrested: not yet lmao

cried when someone died: if we’re talking about stoick then yes LOL

fallen for a friend: nope! at most they’ve been acquaintances or surface-level friends tbh

do you believe in

yourself: it changes on the daily

miracles: hmm i guess? like i believe that they can happen, but i wouldn’t pray for one or hope for one if there’s a way i can take to achieving something myself if that makes sense

love at first sight: attraction yes, “love” is a hard no

santa claus: at one point in time i did, but not now

kiss on a first date: it really depends on the date and who the guy is 

angels: yes

others

best friend’s name: stefanie :))))))

eye color: hazel

fave movie: httyd/httyd2, spiderman homecoming, mulan, princess and the frog, the incredibles, and probably more bc i’m brainfarting atm

fave actors: tom holland, chris evans, america ferrera, andree vermeulen, jay baruchel, lana condor, noah centineo, awkwafina, gemma chan, anna kendrick, and probably a whole bunch more that i’m blanking on lol

TAGGING: @involuntarydiaphragmspasm , @fanaticfangirl2602 , @astridthevalkyrie , @drchee5e , @hotccup , @howtodrawyourdragon , @ashleybenlove , @whosthatgal , @knowerofuselessfacts , @evilwriter37, @lutavero and anyone else who wants to do it! 

[elizabethrobertajones]

i love jack a lot but i don't get everyone's excitement about dean eventually adopting him. like why would you want to force him into another parental role with a kid with unstable powers JUST when he's escaping his role with sam? i'm not accusing you or anything i'm just really really frustrated at fandom's mentality

Yeah, there’s some good posts around discussing the various metaphorical and direct representations of the bad family dynamics going on here. I think it’s possible to enjoy and dislike the same thing from different angles. I LOVE Jack choosing Cas as his father and setting his personal compass by Cas. It’s perfect. But for Cas’s sake I’m genuinely skeeved out by it because of the way Jack(’s powers) latched onto him from the womb and that it is basically what I figured all along - that Jack himself is an innocent sweetie pie because he has a soul and he is therefore gifted free will and a blank slate to be what he wants and is at the very least not inherently evil… 

But his powers still did something because of his increased awareness and powers in the womb that I don’t like, which is… convincing… Cas to be his guardian. Cas being forced into the dynamic is one of the metaphorical parallels to the brothers’ issues which I’ve enjoyed the meta about, because of course Cas can still love Jack and all and have meant it because I don’t think he wasn’t acting from the heart in 12x23 because have you met Cas, that was a classic example of his heart on display. And I’m actually hoping they do have a sweet dynamic when Cas gets back. But I still don’t like HOW it happened, in the exact same way I really dig sweet moments between Sam and Dean which don’t have the complicated baggage, but I can still be uncomfortable about romanticising other parts of their relationship, and critical of how Dean was forced to parent Sam… 

So yeah. Anyway, I think the thing with Dean and Jack is that it’s the goal - Sam already likes Jack and wants to give him a chance. Cas has his connection to him already and it’s unlikely he’ll hate Jack on his return :P Dean is not wrong to be upset and critical based on the information he has like @k-vichan‘s post I just recently reblogged was explaining (Sam hasn’t even told him on camera that Jack said that Cas is his father which means until we get past the point of disbelief that he hasn’t said it off-camera that’s still something we might find out later from Dean’s POV to affect how he feels about him. Although I’m usually careful not to get over-attached to what hasn’t been said on camera in case the writers start assuming it’s obvious they shared it and leave an emotional gap… But this is such a big thing it might HAVE to be said on screen or else be a gap.)

Like… Obviously the emotional hook for “coming to like Jack” is something that falls on Dean to have while the others are already seeming to be clear on it. He’s the obstacle - the thing standing between Jack and a happy families thing (so it might be a long haul or Dean is just starting to warm up when things go bad either with Cas’s return or something that happens with Jack for what will be a frankly bizarre season if they don’t tease him ~going dark~ to test him at some point). It’s like a will they won’t they on Dean liking Jack :P 

And I think that in this case it’s not forcing anything on Dean when he comes to NATURALLY adopt random youngins and other hapless friends (like Garth, tbh :P) but that he has to want to do it and it is something he does instinctively because he’s a nurturer and has a caring soul. Maybe because of the Sam stuff but it’s not weird when he does it to, like, Krissy or something. It’s one of his softer traits but in this case it has mytharc relevance, since Jack is, WE can tell, really sweet, but Dean is in no position to see him for what he is, which may compromise them looking after him, and even if Jack is sweet and squishy right now, he has cosmic powers and intentionally or not he’s going to be dangerous on a huge level even if it’s just for drawing attention. I think Dean coming to like him will play a big part in reconciling this whole situation just because he’s the one who instinctively doesn’t like Jack already. And that’s something where he’s messed up with grief and hasn’t seen anything to convince him Jack isn’t a problem, so it’s set up to be a bigger struggle for him.

And that probably also plays into Dean as the emotional centre of the show - that Sam is usually dealing with the plot stuff head on, while Dean is the filter we struggle with it through. I think Dean not trusting Jack is another way of drawing out uncertainty and tension about Jack in the narrative. Is Sam wrong to trust him? Is there still something hinky between Jack and Cas? Will Jack turn bad? Even if it’s seeming quite clear that Jack is not as bad as Dean thinks by far, and Sam’s made the right call here, to go with his confidence in leadership and standing up for himself arc, playing the reconciliation to Jack’s presence in their lives through Dean is giving us (or, well, the surface level read of the show, which I pay as much attention to as I can out of curiosity as a writer about stringing appearances and cheap drama out of more complex stories and I watch the episodes from the POV of “what is the show trying to tell us” before “what can I read into this”) a more drawn out exploration of who and what Jack is and the conclusion on what his character can be. 

And I think that means Dean will be challenging Jack too, and always probably be more on the side of checking if he really is what he seems or second-guessing his actions etc. It will give Jack something to grow and fight against, especially since people HATE letting Dean down and Dean is the moral centre of the show when it comes to love, humanity, what is the right thing to do, the free will choice, just generally a beacon of these themes. If Jack has to win Dean’s approval, it’s going to be a complex and satisfying story and a good way of proving we can definitively trust him. Not because Sam makes bad choices or because Jack doesn’t already seem like a good guy, but just because Dean has Standards which are so high you can define and navigate the story by them. Like Cas rebelling in 4x22. Or on the flip side, 6x20.

This is all kinda wishy washy stuff for later in the season that what we already have, though, and I don’t know how thoroughly others have thought it through or if I am missing some really obvious lines of thought here myself, but I don’t think the instinctive reaction that people are wishing Dean adopts Jack is all just forcing a new child on him, or that people think Dean shouldn’t come to that choice himself, and approve of Jack for real reasons. One of the short posts out there about it that I like is a line of spec that Dean will start to like Jack after he does a Benny - does something to save or help Cas that Dean can’t deny Jack is good any more after seeing. That’s not just wishing another child to look after on Dean, that’s a complicated series of Dean recognising Jack’s potential to be good and understanding him better or now having a motivation to reach out to him. 

And I do personally find it kind of creepy to be super gung ho about Jack as any of their children - Cas for the reasons I already said although I like it for Jack and would be open to Cas being cool with it :P But Sam and Dean as well because I think there’s a lot of point scoring going on with who gets to parent Jack like it’s a token or trophy for them, unlocking a whole bunch of parent headcanons and also, and I know it’s weird to say about a 1 day old baby, infantilising Jack. I think he’s already starting to get an idea of the more complex stuff and a lot of his literal born yesterday mannerisms will disappear as he gets older, since he has an adult intellect to deal with the world, so I’m very curious about his character growth. 

I think it’s just a fandom thing to be eager for the main characters you care about to have fun relationships and the idea of just giving them a kid can be appealing to some people, but it kinda weirds me out. I saw a gifset of the father reveal to Sam captioned with “Sam realises he’s an uncle” and I like that a lot more because it emphasises his brother relationship to Cas, and puts Jack in that context to him. I think since Jack said Cas is his father, “parenting” just means “we are responsible for guiding this young soul” not “I will be his father” and Sam and Dean are basically his uncles, not surrogate fathers, and I’m pretty much just gonna treat it that way, personally, since it’s less skeevy to me. That’s a YMMV thing, though, so I’m not saying you can’t enjoy the dad TFW stuff, I just don’t wanna :P 

(The Claire stuff was different since they didn’t have a whole bunch of responsibility over her and the episodes she was in never made it weird, and it was a side storyline… With this it’s all such high tension it sort of feels to me like I need to draw much stronger lines, especially since with all the fatherhood parallels some/all of TFW are going to be examined through being John at some point or another… There is a LOT more going on with Jack that makes it complicated and fraught :P)

So… uh… tl;dr… I have no idea if I’m even answering your original thought any more :P Idk about the wider fandom of crack posts and cracky art, but I think the meta folks I follow are not being too weird about it or will at least entertain all the posts being critical or introspective about these dynamics and I think some crack posts are just made in the spirit of fun, though it doesn’t help NOT give the impression everyone’s gaga for dad TFW and not being very considerate of the deep dark meta stuff and character angst going on… :P 

[bentfire]

85 questions game

Rules: Answer these 85 statements and tag 20 people

tagged by @madi-starlight  thanks!! i’m procrastinating and this was a v nice distraction

i’m gonna tag @zoetekohana @zaatanna @puddingmcmuffin @mininjas @fireonallwires @distopianpixie + anyone else who wants to, sry i’m shit at tagging people in these things

the last

01. drink: water

02. phone call: to a local restaurant for food delivery bc i was too lazy to cook

03. text message: one of my friends is obsessed w/ lisa frank so i sent her the link to the lf tarot cards

04. song you listened to: "dinosaur” - akmu

05. time you cried: last week probably. my best friend and i currently aren’t talking and i’ve been taking it pretty hard lately.

06. dated someone twice: yup

07. kissed someone and regretted it: not really

08. been cheated on: yuuuuup

09. lost someone special: my childhood dog, balki. i’ve lost all my grandparents, but none of those hit me anywhere near as hard as my dog, honestly.

10. been depressed: i mean i go through phases where i’m sad? but i think to say i was depressed would be embellishing it.

11. gotten drunk and thrown up: almost every time tbh. unless i’m home drinking alone, then i know when i’ve hit my limit. but if i’m out with friends i usually don’t realize i’m ~gone until like....... i’m way fuckin gone

3 favourite colours

12. turquoise!!

13. green

14. b l a c k

in the last year have you

15. made new friends: i don’t rly think so

16. fallen out of love: never been in love!

17. laughed until you cried: oh yeah

18. found out someone was talking about you: no! but i wouldn’t be surprised if my coworkers do lmao

19. met someone who changed you: nnnnnno

20. found out who your friends are: regrettably

21. kissed someone on your Facebook list: yup!

General:

22. how many of your Facebook friends do you know in real life: the vast majority of them? i don’t use fb anymore but i honestly don’t think i added anyone on there i hadn’t met. OH there’s a few tumblr friends on there, but i think only three maybe that i haven’t actually met.

23. do you have any pets: yep! a dog, khloe.

24. do you want to change your name: i used to?? i mean. i’m not in love with my name. heather is kinda ..... lame tbh. but i mostly go by nicknames so it doesn’t bother me too much

25. what did you do for your last birthday: i don’t think i did anything, actually. 

26. what time did you wake up: noon. ooops. but i didn’t fall asleep until almost 5am soooo

27. what were you doing at midnight last night: probably working out. that’s usually the time of night i finally force myself to lmao

28. name something you can’t wait for: young justice!!!!! getting my hair/cut dyed in a couple days! i ordered new glasses and i’m excited for those to come in!!

29. when was the last time you saw your mom: a year and a half ago

31. what are you listening to right now: the crickets chirp 

32. have you ever talked to a person named tom: i work in a retail pharmacy so yaaaaa probably on a daily basis, there’s a zillion ppl named tom/thomas

33. something that is getting on your nerves: blogs w/ impossible to find back buttons!! i’m trying to scroll through your blog like pls don’t make me work for it

34. most visited website: tumblr, youtube, ulta

35. hair color: blonde

36. long or short hair: medium?? it’s a couple inches past my collarbone

37. do you have a crush on someone: vaaaaguely. there’s a dude i semi-work with and he’s just so gosh darn nice?? he’s coming back to work with us for a few days and its Glaringly Fucking Obvious to my coworkers i like him so when head boss dude told me he was coming back he announced it in front of allllll my coworkers so they could laugh at how badly i blushed. i hate that i’m fucking obvious!!! but at least he doesn’t know lmao

38. what do you like about yourself: i like to think i’m pretty funny. also my hair. eyes. booty. not to be totally self-involved but tbh i really love my toosh.

39. piercings: two in each ear and a nose ring!

40. blood type: i probably bleed kpop at this point

41. nickname: benny, peetah, pikachu, little bit

42. relationship status: single, thank fuck. i like my freedom too much.

43. zodiac: libra.

44. pronouns: she/her

45. favourite tv show: AVATAR: THE LAST DAMN AIRBENDER, young justice, voltron (i hate putting voltron next to those two though bc no offense but like....... voltron could never ever compare to how glorious a:tla/yj are)

46. tattoos: none! i’m debating getting one before my bday in october though

47. right or left handed: right

48. surgery: i had my gall bladder removed when i was 15

50. sport: i was a goalie in soccer for years!

51. vacation: like dream vacation?? australia. california. vegas. seoul. 

52. pair of trainers: apparently trainers = tennis shoes????? idek these things. i have a white pair of keds that i wear almost daily bc work

MORE GENERAL

53. eating: the last thing i ate was a couple apple slices?? idk what this is asking

54. drinking: waaaater

55. I’m about to: try to get some sleep

56. waiting for: sleepiness to hit me tbh

57. want: money. to kiss a pretty girl. to have my own house.

58. get married: maybe? i honestly can’t imagine myself caring about someone enough to wanna marry them though. and if i ever did no wedding pls thanks.

59. career: pharmacy technician!

WHICH IS BETTER:

60. hugs or kisses: hugs

61. lips or eyes: lips

62. shorter or taller: TALLER tho it aint hard bc im way too short

63. older or younger: i guess older? 

64. nice arms or nice stomach: arms

65. hookup or relationship: iiiiiii guess relationship? 

66. troublemaker or hesitant: troublemaker duh

HAVE YOU EVER:

67. kissed a stranger: i don’t think so

68. drank hard liquor: yaaaa

69. lost glasses/contact lenses: nope

70. turned someone down: yupyup

71. sex on the first date: lmao yes

73. had your heart broken: i’m currently mourning the loss of question 72 so yes?? but truthfully yeah. i wouldn’t say my heart was broken as that’s melodramatic af. but there was a dude i could’ve really seen myself falling for and it didn’t pan out and that was probably the saddest i’ve ever been over anyone.

74. been arrested: nope. but i have been pulled over by the cops five times in one night. four?? maybe it was four times idk

75. cried when someone died: my dog, yeah. 

76. fallen for a friend: i’ve had crushes but def never fallen.

DO YOU BELIEVE IN:

77. yourself: sometimes

78. miracles: not really

79. love at first sight: lust, yeah. love, nope.

80. santa claus: nope

81. kiss on the first date: i actually used to be anti-anything on the first date, but that’s mostly bc it takes me a long time to warm up to people and feel comfortable enough around them to do anything. but the last girl i dated i did literally everything with on the first date so ?????? guess that shits out the door

82. angels: not so much

OTHER:

84. eye colour: mine?? blue. kind of a greyish blue.

85. favourite movie: the first thing that came to mind was ‘forgetting sarah marshall’ tbh

[whatevertheywant]

My Bisexual Opinion: ABBA Edition

I saw where another blogger had discussed several different ABBA songs, and given the general happiness the announcement today has given me,I’m gonna discuss some favorites of mine as well

1. Super Trouper- My favorite ABBA song! There’s something uniquely intimate yet still still fun and upbeat about it. I love Anni-Frid’s voice so much and how well she and Agnetha harmonize <3 <3 <3 My favorite lyrics are “I’ll be there when you arrive// the sight of you will prove to me I’m still alive//And when you take me in your arms and hold me tight// I know it’s gonna mean so much tonight” Everything from the backing vocals to the composition to the ladies’ always flawless voices is just so on point! Also, I totally want Anni-Frid’s jumper from the music video

2. The Winner Takes It All- A close second favorite. Oh my sweet lord! This song doesn’t get the love it deserves by a long shot. Like...sweet mother of emotional vulnerability! I know Bjorn says that he didn’t write this song about his and Agnetha’s divorce, but there had to at least be a touch of those feelings that went into it. I can’t imagine how hard that must have been, at least initially for Agnetha to know Bjorn wrote the words she was singing. You can definitely feel the raw emotion she put into it. I know the divorce was particularly hard on her. (The Meryl Streep version really puts my heart through the ringer, but I digress). There are too many examples of amazing, heart-wrenching lyrics to list them all, but the biggest gut punch is probably “And I understand...//You’ve come to shake my hand// I apologize if it makes you feel bad// Seeing me so tense// No self-confidence” then the last chorus. I just want to hug her and tell her it will all be okay.

3. Dancing Queen- An absolute bop! I don’t want to say it’s overrated because it is definitely deserving of its popularity, but I hate that the U.S. kind of slept on ABBA because they were thought to be purely a disco band because of it. Anyway, I actually sang this song for karaoke at an event a couple days ago. It’s so fun and easy to sing along to! You can’t help but feel at least a little better after you listen to it. I’m disappointed that no one sent me this song or sang it to me when I turned 17 tbh. I also associate this song with a disco tape my fourth grade teacher played for us all day every day (Yes, in the year 2005 A.D., the year of our lord. Someone always had to go flip it at least once a day.) Benny coming through with the piano! Everyone is obviously enjoying themselves.

4. Lay All Your Love On Me- Yaaaaas Angetha! Also an absolute bop! I have this song on a spotify playlist for my fiancee. I love the beat as well as the lyrics! It’s very much a mood when you’re falling fast for someone but haven’t quite made things exclusive with them yet. The subject is familiar enough for everyone to relate, but the lyrics are unique that they don’t fall through the cracks as just another vintage pop love song. “And I’m possessive. It isn’t nice// You heard me saying that smoking was my only vice// But now it isn’t true// Now, everything is you//”. Like, hell yes, intensity and love while acknowledging jealousy isn’t a cutesy part of a relationship but still natural! 

5. Mamma Mia!- Here I go again! Another fun crowd song. That piano and guitar intro/outro is just so I C O N I C. Usually,I focus more on lyrics than music as a writer, but the music is what makes this song unique and great to me. The arrangement is just. so. GOOD. The boys really brought their game to this one on all fronts. I do also love the lyrics. Very solid song, very easy to relate to. I also like the ambiguity that the song ends on. Did she go back to the guy or not? That’s the lack of resolution makes it all the more addictive imo.

6. Does Your Mother Know?- LET BJORN ULVAEUS SING LEAD MORE. I love,love, love the girls, but I need more Bjorn lead vocals! He’s a great singer, and this is such a fun, flirty song.  I like that it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and there’s something amusing about the mental image of young Bjorn at a bar trying to have this conversation with a barely legal fan that’s probably throwing herself at him.

7. Thank You For The Music- I love the simplistic style of this one. It’s possibly the sweetest songs the band has ever released. At some point, everyone has thought or said, “No, ABBA, thank YOU for the music!” It really was the perfect way to say goodbye (thank fuck they came back though!). It leaves you with a sadness that is still warm and fuzzy, like watching a friend or relative graduate. It would be a good song for a grad slideshow for a music major. And for added cuteness, imagine the home videos there likely are of tiny ABBA members singing and dancing! 

8. I’m a Marionette- My best friend’s favorite ABBA song. It is a grossly underrated one! It can be a little difficult to listen to because both the music and lyrics give off an anxious or frantic feeling, much like one would probably feel being a marionette (Ghost does a good cover of this one.). The music industry is often guilty of meddling with and stifling the creative process, which can make artists feel like puppets more than people. This is another song where the music stands out to me more than the lyrics. Anyone who hears it can see why.

9.  Fernando- I am a sucker for softer sounds. I also love the Spanish influence of the song as a whole. There’s a fond sense of nostalgia. The entire chorus is so sweet and makes you feel like you’re taken back in time along with the singer. Whether you take the song as being about two former lovers remembering being young revolutionaries or the war being metaphorical, it feels like the sweeter side of a bittersweet ending. “Though we never thought that we could lose// There’s no regret// If I had to do the same again// I would, my friend” makes me think of the split between Anni-Frida and Benny (just speculation) and their split possibly being more amicable than Bjorn and Agnetha (given that The Winner Takes It All has any inspiration from their divorce). Very haunting.

10.  Slipping Through My Fingers- (the Mamma Mia! version chokes me up sometimes because I must protect Meryl Streep at all costs) The song can be emotional enough without the creator context,but knowing why Bjorn wrote it makes it more visceral for me. If you don’t know, he wrote it because he  was feeling sad about missing out on so much of his daughter’s life because of how fast she was growing up and how frequently the band was touring. Agnetha sings vocals on this one, which adds to the emotion here. Ouch, right? They both did such a great job on this one! It feels so poignant and authentic. It can tug at the heartstrings of both parents and their daughters. It’s hard to not just post all the lyrics, but here are some of my personal picks from this song: “What happened to the wonderful adventures//The places I had planned for us to go// Well, some of that we did, but most we didn't // And why, I just don't know” and “Sometimes I wish that I could freeze the picture//And save it from the funny tricks of time (Slipping through my fingers)”

That’s definitely not a complete list of the songs I most enjoy by them, but I figure I rambled enough for a bit. I’m just super excited! I may post more at some point, but if you actually read the whole thing, bless you.

[elizabethrobertajones]

I just watched 10x04 and since I'm taking a billion years to get into the season 10 rewatch and at this point it is clearly my hiatus project, I'm just making an adjacent post about one thing :P

The last line of the episode after much back and forth about if they should be resting up from hunting, taking a break because they're woefully off their game after ~going dark~ and running rampage for months, etc etc, is Dean saying:

DEAN But I am just trying to do the right thing, man, 'cause I'm so sick and tired of doing the wrong one.

I think with hindsight of not just that season but season 11 and 12 too, the last line of the episode basically shows where Dean is for the rest of the show from this point. With his self-reflection on being a demon underway, and that it gave him clarity (as he said in 10x03) to see a lot of their messed up stuff, and after that he doesn't want to fall pray to the darkness (lower case at that point :P) again.

He decides to try the better way here, but he's just completely messed up by the Mark, which was why he couldn't give Kate a fair chance for most of the episode, always being ready to kill her and not giving her the benefit of the doubt - she walks out the episode alive but only because she escaped them, and she's not a friendly monster they could ever count as an ally without an other episode to repair all this damage Dean did.

I think it's showing he's had the learning experience from being a demon, and he's going to try and put it in action as much as possible, but he still can't actually *do* anything about it until he doesn't have the Mark any more. He's so messed up by it that even when he wants to do the right thing and is tired of getting it wrong, in an episode where he should have been all compassion and understanding if he'd actually learned and was able to put it in action...

Side note - not like in 8x04 where he HAD changed because of Purgatory and Benny, and was the one to suggest they let her go... Looks redundant to do this characterisation but the point THERE was just letting a monster go good/bad? but here it's a lot more about the inner darkness - what she did to her sister, that people died as a result of this direct Dean actions with Gadreel parallel thingy she had going on, etc. It was less that she was a monster because I think they would still have let a truly innocent monster live especially if Dean was allowed to see them as innocent, but he was having trouble processing the nuances of that darkness, and because it was so on the nose to what he did and he was embarassed and self-loathing about his actions, he couldn't see her innocence, or her actions as sympathetic, because doing messed up stuff to save your sibling? The kind of crap that turns bad and causes all the darkness he just dealt with.

And I think it might be worth paralleling to Max, in 12x20, how he stopped him in the moment but afterwards was helpless to stop his free will to go do it anyway once they left him behind, and I guess grimly accepting this is what people do when they have access to a magical way to fix dead and dying family...

Anyway. I really like this line because I think it does set up Dean's arc for the next few seasons. In season 10 he's at a serious disadvantage to do anything about it, but the season is full of Dean's coping mechanisms and at least for the first 3/4 going along with anything he thinks might help, and working hard to dig himself out. At the end when he loses hope, he knows the "wrong thing" is sinking back into being demon!Dean, and so before it can happen, he goes to talk to Death and make arrangements to save himself from going back; this line goes right to the end of the season in that way, and I think from the perspective of Dean's characterisation, season 10 is pretty good at keeping on a track; there's STUFF I'd have liked to be explored and think was maybe dropped or not given the attention it needed but what they actually ended up writing, events aside, specifically about how Dean reacted and changed, is pretty clear and well-written.

In season 11 without the Mark, and even with Amara's external threat, he does start trying to change and do better and he's immediately more balanced without it, and trying to make amends. He starts communicating properly after the midseason, and his determination to do the right thing shows with him prioritising Cas in trouble, and eventually the big stadium event talk with Chuck and Amara, he seeks a way that feels RIGHT: the old way of sacrifice might have FIXED things at least in the urgent world is ending need to do something right now way, but in the moment he took the initiative to keep on trying to talk it out and find a way that FELT right. I don't think Dean would EVER talk his way out of sacrificing himself when he believed it was right to do it; that that wasn't selfish motivation to live, but that it felt WRONG to him to end it this way, and that there was a better way to do this, which he found.

And now in season 12 Dean's in a weird place where he's the one who achieved all that doing things right-ness finally and concluded his own personal arc and gained massive experience points, levelling up all sorts of personality traits in the process. And I kind of think that his season has been about trying to do the right thing, especially about the interpersonal relationships, when it comes to everyone and everything around him. Mittens has been keeping a closer eye on this than me, but Dean carries on being right about his gut feeling about many things and is a sort of beacon of what is right, even more than usual (after all, God appointed him to look after the Earth and said he was the best guy for the job). I'm hoping this bears out through the end of the season but at least his feeling about the BMoL is completely true and now firmly proven to others, though we knew longer than HE even did :P

He's also been communicating well, for example the brilliant conversation at the end of 12x10 where he really lays out the truth to Cas about why he's been angry with him, or, well, many times he reaches out to Cas either about their relationship or other stuff... And with Mary, he tried to be open and honest with her as much as he could to start with, especially that conversation about being a hunter at the end of 12x01 - and even when she bolted before he could get to opening up about the really hard stuff. He needed his illusions shattered, which happened at the end of 12x02, and ideally if she'd stayed, after 12x03 they might have had a better talk once he was less stunned by her presence and treating her like the saint!mary he imagined, but she left. He still in contact with her, being shown to be the one who texted her, and was playing Words With Friends, attempting to keep a line open on their relationship even if it now had to be handled at great length and like it was fragile glass with how much she could deal with from them. He was TRYING to rebuild from the ground up, and by constantly being the one reaching out, he's put in the position of being the one holding his arms open on the relationship, again, the one trying to do the right thing, with all the emotional resources available to him. And I think in general has shown a much greater awareness of how other people are doing.

He also starts his frantic Cas panic at the point in several seasons past he was only in the occasionally praying to him or being grumpy that he hadn't called point, moving that whole panic forward to before he gets any hint that something is *actually* wrong, because stuff like Casifer threw him for such a loop and again, 11x23 in the car he makes a point of telling Cas he's understood he doesn't always put him first and can get too head up his arse about his and Sam's problems, so in this season we see him closely attuned to Cas, noticing he sounds weird on the phone and immediately going into the sort of nervous state he was in in season 11 only AFTER he found out Cas was possessed. In 12x19 in the mixtape scene he's started angry as a knee-jerk response, but he doesn't let Cas leave before he's had an extremely open emotional conversation with him, explaining how he feels, which I still frankly can't believe actually happened. (Sadly also showing the different places they're at, with Cas taking this conversation as a sign he HAS to kill Kelly on Dean's behalf to protect him from doing something awful)

TBH even something like the conversation in 12x15 where he casually talks about Lucifer being locked in the cage in front of Crowley counts for him inadvertantly telling Crowley what the RIGHT thing to do was and putting Crowley in a position to sweat about what Dean would think if he knew... (Which has of course not worked out for Crowley, so he's probably glad Dean never KNEW to give him the speech that would now give Dean a free "told you so" even if of course he knows full well he deserves one and he was RIGHT THERE being inadvertently scolded by Dean without him knowing - see what I mean about him being a beacon? :P)

I think it's still trial and error (he gets over-confident about both the Colt and the security of their home despite some really obvious home invasions, starting with Toni getting into the Bunker and shooting Sam at the beginning of the year) but being the emotional POV of the show more than Sam, whose characteristic of being reserved has really shot him in the foot for representing himself the same way, this is his arc - becoming a reliable line through the season of what is the right thing to do, or at least trying to find better ways to do things.

And he's not successful at changing minds but he also has been using emotional maturity in making middle ground (... eventually, in the cases of arguing with Cas and then Mary, needing to have a moment of realisation when he thought she was going to get killed in 12x14) and especially with Sam in 12x15, not fighting openly when it was something that could have caused a massive brother rift, as we've dealt with in many seasons where they disagree and fight. Dean still voiced his issues with everything and made it clear he was going along with it for Sam's sake but he didn't try to stop or argue Sam out of it, just pointed out everything he didn't like about the situation whenever it came up so that Sam knew where he stood about it.

I've seen a few complaints Dean hasn't had much to do all season - Sam either, tbh but that's a separate issue and I'm still at "just let him go scream in the woods for chrissakes" rather than a clear meta picture :P - and I think at least for Dean his arc has been pretty clearly laid out and in almost every episode he's been dealing with it. For example the most Dean-centric episode, 12x11, dealt with his nature that at the end of the day when you take everything else away, Dean saves the day with an innate knowledge of when to act, and that hunting evil is in his blood, but so is a well of kindness and understanding that is behind his sense of right and wrong. Being down in season 10 and having just watched season 9, I remember how *broken* Dean was very clearly, and how his sense of right and wrong was genuinely damaged because, well, there was darkness in him. His sense of justice was damaged, but season 11 showed him conquering it and finding a better way... I think season 12 is showing this in action, which is possibly why he's had this seat in the middle of everything, watching everyone else's actions and moving through the events as the season really just as its emotional narrator as it falls to pieces around him and even Sam goes and takes strong actions like going with Mary to the BMoL in 12x14 and telling Dean he's working with them in 12x16. Anyway I think this season has done an awful lot to sell the weight of Dean's opinion and to build him up like this, and I think it's a really important and validating character arc for him... Although he was technically free of the Mark since season 11, this IS the first season without some dark pull on him since season 9 and though his goodness was made obvious again very quickly in season 11 because we needed to know we could root for him again, I really think this season is building back up his sense of self, and posing it in opposition to the other characters.

(I feel like when the season's over I might revisit this with a detailed look at him vs ALL the other main characters on this thread but for now have a "this is where I'm at anyway" post)

[elizabethrobertajones]

9x19 Rewatch

I had Mel threatening me with being shoved in a woodchipper if I didn’t carry on this rewatch.

I also haven’t watched Fargo in years but it’s left lasting imprints on my psyche

We get the full Jody recap and some basic vampire lore. It’s got a little reminder of the time Dean WAS a vampire, if you look closely, which is especially relevant to his arc this season and honestly I don’t know why they didn’t harp on that more :P Okay, he was made a vampire entirely involuntarily as part of that stretch of season 6 which is all rape metaphor all the time. Dean and vampires is already a huge mess because of this and that thing where John used him as bait in 1x20, and other stuff, and vampire episodes are closely connected to Dean’s issues - scroll to the bottom of this page for a great series of posts on it that sadly only goes through season 2 but is where I got this thought from like... literally the week this episode originally aired since I had in fact reached fandom at that point and this was super relevant to the new episode: 

http://sleepsintheimpala.tumblr.com/mymetamess 

... anyway, the pattern keeps up. I know I and a couple of others have written about Dean being slam-dunked back into the closet around season 6-ish area (tbh, really just a Gamble era thing) and 6x05 either is something you can point to as a real inciting incident especially while Dean’s still desperately clinging to his year-long relationship with Lisa, or just a good sort of one episode summary of where he’s at... However it is, Boris the vampire rape-metaphors him and introduced it via creepy hitting on Dean, so all round is a terrible incident, that fits strongly with the themes of where Dean seems to be at around that time in relation to his sexuality... 

Of course, Benny, a vampire, is used to show Dean opening up to monsters as friends later in season 8 to go along with a much more positive, happy depiction of Dean, as, even with all the angst that inevitably comes, he seems a little better off emotionally, and his strong bond with Benny is used as one of the indicators of at that at the start of the season. (Along with plenty of paralleling in the vampire-related incidents around that - Edlund precludes the entire Carver era conclusion with the “god” vampire in 8x05 >.>) Dean, later with the Mark at a more advanced stage, blows off steam with killing vampires, and all the nuance in these cases disappears, and to me that feels like completing what is now almost a prophecy Gordon made back in 2x03 about becoming a killer (echoed by Cain in 9x11). I’ve been over this territory a lot, if you read everything I write meta on, but anyway, this is why it feels obvious to me to use the last MotW slot of the season for a vampire episode. Dean’s now spiralling down in his descent, and his personal-arc related monster is back...

I suppose this time, the lesson is not being able to let go of a child, with Dean as the Mom Vampire, and Sam as Alex (she acts as the neatest parallel to him in 11x12 as well, at least in the sense of reflecting his established character/history - he and Claire are really interesting for where Sam feels he might be going... I suppose if I ever scrape myself together long enough to get to the end of this, I’ll have to try and collect up and make sense of all of Sam’s random honesty hour moments to Claire, Charlie, Eileen and others about how he feels about hunting...) - anyway, this is the easiest surface level parallel of this episode as a whole: that Dean couldn’t let go, he struggled with turning Sam (into an angel, not a vampire) to preserve him, and it was his ultimate downfall. And as the title of the episode shows, the names are really important, as they have been all season since the Gadreel/Zeke thing.

Anyway I suppose I should actually watch this :P

We start with a whole lot of red exit signs, because this episode is super doomy, given where Dean is going:

DEPUTY FRANK Yeah, copy that, but the bullpen's empty, and I got someone in holding.

RADIO Sheriff's heading to the station now. They won't be alone long.

Oh, I love lines that are just meaningless chatter on a first watch. (This is also part 3 of just fawning all over Berens this season, bee tee dubs.) Of course the vamp has no idea that the Sheriff will be heading to the station, or that the Sheriff will be BE-heading him in the station before the title card. :P He’s accidentally completely right in a throwaway comment while he thinks he’s clearing the police station so he can get uninterrupted time to threaten Alex.

There’s also many times I wish the recap wasn’t there, because the first indication this is Jody territory in the episode is an external of the police station with Sioux Falls on it, and that establishing shot is also a warning that this is her jurisdiction... Just a quick blink and you miss it hint that Alex is not as unprotected as she seems...

A lot of the vamp episodes mess with typical cold open expectations; 2x03 especially uses the vampire as the victim and the hunter as the monster. Here, Alex seems like she’d be vulnerable and dead with vampires after her, but this totally isn’t the case with Jody around to save her, again making the vampire the one who bites the dust for the obligatory end of cold open blood splatter. Jody’s protection/right as a police officer-hunter is explored beautifully in this episode, such as her insistence she goes with Sam and Dean to save Alex later, as well as using her cabin for a safe house and so on.

GIRL A-are the others with you?

CODY Everyone was off on a hunt when I'd realized you'd run away. Figured I'd do you and them a favor and come take care of this before they even know we're gone.

Also with the inversions - the vampire talking about being “on a hunt” is a vague term that both hunters and the things they hunt can use about their activities. Alex has the whole vulnerable girl in a cold open thing going for her to have us on her side, but Cody’s language certainly COULD be blurred with being a hunter, especially as he’s clearly treating her as something that needed to be, well, hunted.

Anyway yay Jody, the real hero of this episode :D

Dean is much better at parking than in 9x08. Cue meta about his heterosexual parking to compare to how he “couldn’t even park straight” back then while in his sexuality crisis of the season. (Great parallel because Jody episode. No parallel parking though. The Impala can not be parallel parked. 9x06 proved this)

JODY Eh, only aches when it rains. How you boys been?

DEAN Peachy.

SAM Touch and go.

JODY I know the feeling.

Did they wait for it to rain for this scene or was that just luck? :P

Making use of the rain around that line, anyway, is pretty neat for expressing Jody suffering with an unseen injury or... mark... that flares up circumstantially - and the fact that it’s clearly currently bothering her is also an omen for Dean.

This whole episode is an omen for Dean.

Anyway she asks how they are as one unit, but Sam and Dean have conflicting replies and emotional needs at this point and are working out of sync. Their fight is buried, but: Dean expresses he’s fine as Winchesters do (and of course being the one with something to hide, especially that he’s currently spiralling... Jody in 10x08 tells him he can talk to her about shit because it’s all on the other side of this, and again in 12x06... Dean does not seem to be good at making use of the resource of Jody’s shoulder, freely offered. Her shoulder is hurt though :P Maybe he doesn’t want to hurt her further by telling her the horror show of his life - the casual, fun fling of a friendship they have with her, in a way, of keeping the Big Plot Nonsense away from her, though she had directly got involved and helped them with it in season 7...) And Sam, the currently hurt one whose season is all coping and recovering and holding a justified stance in the argument (that is, when the argument is on track) gets to express dissent to Dean talking for them, assert himself as an individual AND be open about being currently hurt in a way Dean can’t be.

Interesting little exchange.

I love Jody keeping things she beheaded in the boot of her car.

Though.. she had to have a really good instinct to know that it was vampires since she jumped in on that conversation late. Does she habitually behead people?

Anyway Sam and Dean joke about her being all grown up - there’s a lot of instances of them JOKING together which I think has been taken as them being back in a good place, but is really just a thin layer of humour slapped on top of all the awful for the sake of working together.

JODY Total Jane Doe. She won't even give me her name. Girl's basically feral.

names are important - in this case, without one she is basically less than human in Jody’s language choices... Or dead, as “jane doe” is also used notoriously for unidentified corpses. Which ALSO foreshadows that she’s replacing a dead girl (the Vamp Mom’s baby girl)

Sam notices the marks on her neck, while Dean is just enjoying threatening her. He sees her as vamp adjacent (and the fact she’s marked by them though he hasn’t even seen it yet, is already symbolic of her connection to them, especially because it’s causing Dean to treat her as basically a monster or not on the side of hunters anyway. This is all ignoring that she ran away and was clearly trying to get AWAY from the vampires and NOT be like them. She is “marked” and because she snarks at them for being hunters, it draws the “us” or “them” lines immediately, so Dean moves into interrogation mode.

(And yeah the “mark” is in quotations because the parallel is obvious there - Dean thinks she’s become a monster or is less than human even before he turns into a demon, that mark is making him into something he doesn’t want to  be. He KNOWS it. He’s known it since he got it. Probably BEFORE he did. But now the consequences are hitting him and it’s terrifying and so he’s not giving her any benefit of the doubt because he wouldn’t give himself)

They learn what’s on the record about Annie and Dean’s response is just,

DEAN Eight years is a long time for a human to live with vampires without getting killed or turned.

His suspicion about her I think also comes from a feeling that if she IS still human she has to have been indoctrinated somehow just because how is she still alive - I don’t know if he suspected exactly that she was a lure, but I seem to remember he isn’t very surprised at this information either. This is before Sam points out she was being used to feed on, and of course back in 7x22 they had a girl who looked a LOT like Alex turn on them (hi Jenna from season 11 :P) - I said back in my 7x22 rewatch that this episode was doing right by this story of the girl, not least because it gives her much more time, but also it’s a much more nuanced exploration of her and why she’d act and feel how she does, and her choices are so important to the story, rather than the girl in 7x22 being a plot token. 

Anyway then Sam says that thing that’s relevant for, like, everything:

SAM Jody's right. And she had scars on her neck, feeding scars. Uh...They're layered, as if they'd been built on for years.

Which is a super dark metaphor for basically any sort of trauma you want to apply here. Especially as here I feel like there’s a lot of projecting going on - this was how Dean broke in hell, essentially, but with torture instead of feeding, and of course now he’s picking up where that left off and finally turning into a demon. We could say Dean’s trauma has been built on year after year... 

And then the chilling imagery of:

DEAN We've seen it before -- vampires keeping people as pets, human feedbags. Sometimes these slaves...

SAM Stay loyal to their captors.

DEAN Yeah.

SAM Right.

which might have them in sync again but for really chilling commentary on their loyalties. I don’t think OVERALL their relationship is THIS bad but it’s definitely a comparison they make as a worst case scenario, and honestly, the chill bliss of season 11 and 12 so far with no Giant Bro Drama has really taken the edge off my feelings of HOW bad it got in Carver era, when we had to suffer it week by week. 

Anyway. Using winsync to deliver this info is just... brr. This is the point in the story when they’re most tied to each other in this horrible way where the resurrection codependency problem has flared up the most and Sam’s next on the block with demon!Dean lurking. The threat that Sam would go dark was huge over the hiatus, because of how his season ends, with him sitting LITERALLY in the dark...

Actually, lemme just remind you of how we find him at the end of 9x06 -

since, well, I have the gif, it’s another Berens ep, and the foreshadowing in season 9 is just a thing of beauty.

Also, the “captors” thing reminds me that Berens’ other episode this season was Captives, which through every branch of the story stressed this theme, and of course included Sam and Dean’s own sense of being captive in the Bunker with each other. Sam is in a precarious position where he’s fallen out with Dean and honestly has a pretty fair grievance about the Gadreel thing, but is working with Dean anyway, living with him, making jokes with him, and completing his sentences. About loyalty to their captors.

Now of course I’m a total Dean!girl so I see this all as fairly metaphoric of where they’re at in the argument, that though Dean is in the wrong I still find him sympathetic and empathise with his actions (as much as I want to slap him upside the head and tell him to get himself together :P)...

The other side of this is what is buried so deep it’s barely whispered in the subtext a lot of the time, and you have to catch it by implication or in very rare special episodes like 9x07, is only suddenly thrown out into the main text in 10x03 where demon!Dean really lets Sam have it about feeling like HE has been shackled to HIM with the whole looking out for Sammy thing. He tells him that he quits on that job, and equates his sense of freedom to not having to worry about Sam. Obviously that’s all garbled through demon!Dean filters for what Dean may actually feel in a non-evil way, but it makes the point of how over the years it’s been so forced on Dean to save Sam that this metaphor works there too, of the scars building up and loyalty to what he feels has been a captive situation with having to look after Sam... 

I mean the real tragedy is how this is all such a mess that they BOTH have this horrible metaphor apply to them and they need to be freed from it - on both sides. Season 12 seems to be shaping up to a group effort, larger core family feeling (keeping Jody around in this discussion, great metaphor to that in 12x06 with the group exorcism), and I’m enjoying the dynamics so much more...

Oh wait and I haven’t even commented on the obligatory prison imagery - yes this is in a police station and all, but the interview room is given bars by the blinds -

it was in the earlier round of questioning too... I like how this episode is shot a lot. :D

Also this shot of Jody listening in at the door:

I love that it gives us this indication she is the POV (as much as there is one - the looking in through the windows makes it SO impersonal and I would write an essay on that, but it’s all gut feeling and I do not have a media studies degree despite the apparent dire need of one I have in my day to day life since fandom :P)... Jody is listening in and watching over this conversation, and this look shows her obviously ready to arbitrate or step in by putting the camera’s focus on her, like this fade from Winchesters to Jody, indicates that she is in control here.

DEAN And they didn't love you. They loved your blood. They fed on you.

ALEX I fed them. My choice. My brothers -- they brought me food when I was hungry. So when they struck out on a hunt, I fed them. They're my family.

Family don’t end in blood? Doesn’t start there either - especially not when they’re drinking your blood :P Idk, it feels like a subversion of this saying because it’s about family and blood. Sam and Dean keep using the wrong name for her, which makes her angry and even more uncooperative. If her name is like... a passcode to talk too her, they’re failing to gain entry by sticking to the name they THINK she should react to, trying to reason with the stolen child instead of the person Alex has become.

Alex stresses choice here, about choosing family, and again the parallels are all sorts of awful here because of the chosen family theme of the show, and how Sam and Dean choose each other, but from an outside POV that they have that Alex has been raised by vampires, they see the damage and toxic nature of this in a different way from her. She may have been running away but she needs, well, the rest of the events of the episode to see clearly and to choose a family that is good for her. It’s making the point it’s not EASY to break these bad family bonds, especially when they seem to be chosen (Dean is made to pick Sam many times over others - e.g. Death making him pick between Sam and Adam in 6x11, which I have recently rewatched so it’s on my mind :P But at the same time these choices are forced, and made out of a desperation where Dean is unable to lose Sam and fail him, so the choice is dubious and it plays into a much more complicated dynamic that needs change and repair...) 

Sam carries on being a BIT more sympathetic. They’re SORT of playing good cop bad cop but both with being hunters and Alex isn’t going to get on with that however they approach it. 

They also talk about her decision to run away:

DEAN And how do you think that decision is gonna sit with the rest of the nest? One of them already pursued you. You think when the rest of them find out that you left that they're just gonna shrug and cut their losses?

SAM You lived with them for years. They've tasted your blood. They have your scent down cold. I mean, how far can you run and for how long?

DEAN You didn't think this out, did you? What would happen, who might get hurt -- your, uh, "brother," for one.

which is REALLY accusatory there that she got Cody killed and putting all the blame on her actions...

(Honestly the fact this episode doesn’t start (after the cold open) with cutesy Winchesters in the Bunker getting the call from Jody while living a slice of life, really isolates us from them. This episode is already really making them look bad, Jody look good, and definitely our POV player)

DEAN Because of a choice you made. These are the consequences.

Dean, currently wandering around with the Mark, having made a choice that will get a lot of people hurt and killed, including, nearly his brother too...

Anyway this escalation of her teenage rebellious escape attempt into her family being killed, her being blamed, and Vamp Momma as a threat who might kill her for it, as Alex thinks, is what convinces Alex to put herself in their care. As far as I remember in this episode she never reaches out to the vampires and in a LOT of stories like this I know the victim often has a lapse and calls the monsters down on them. As far as I recall, a few clues about where she might have gone and her scent are enough to get Alex in trouble, and she genuinely does put her trust in the authorities - both hunters and cop - from this point. Though she’s not happy about it, she’s not punished more than this emotional blame for her attachment to the vampires? I might be wrong about that but I remember a lasting fondness for this episode’s treatment of Alex as a victim. Sam and especially Dean are blame-y and judge-y but Jody (our sympathetic character here) wants to reach out and save Alex for her own sake. And is rewarded for that.

(Thinking of blame, though... Don’t get me into her being turned into a vampire as a rite of, like, puberty or womanhood or whatever because it’s super weird but this is sort of what’s going on with Alex’s comment that it was “time” she left as her normal growth was about to be interrupted - Vamp Mom’s plan is to FREEZE Alex in this seemingly virginial-but-enticing adolescence in this fucked up backwards rite of passage, out of twisted love for her/her dead daughter but also it conveniently keeps her as the perfect honeytrap forever... Saving her allows Alex to mature normally and have control of her body, but all the stuff relating to her time as a lure is laden with the potential for blame about how her body was used - which 11x12 was about... There’s a whole mess of stuff there >.>)

DEAN Mills, you okay?

JODY No wonder she didn't thank me. That creep was her brother.

Again with the really impersonal - “Mills”... Dean knows Jody better than that but RIGHT NOW this is the story that is being told, and the feel of the episode that’s coming across.

After Jody says the thing about “brother” we get the obligatory reaction shot from a Winchester to the word - in this case Dean’s gruff angry facade momentarily cracking and sparing a moment to think about dead brothers. He’s not ALL  gone yet, although we’re now very very few episodes from Dean losing that core sense of self that is his care for Sam...

(This isolated feeling from Dean is also good with us getting closer to that - keeping him at arm’s length to emphasise the coming loss of self, because we’re being cut off from him, and stuff like this shows DEAN is being cut off from his true self to, already.)

(Throwing in a reminder we’re 3 episodes from Dean yelling at Sam that their relationship is a dictatorship)

7 minutes in and Jody is already getting close to the name thing by picking at what’s so weird about it. I know for storytelling purposes it’s important to ask that question early, but I like that it’s ALL Jody getting invested in this and trying to work out how to understand Alex

Sam and Dean take the clue of where to go next and leave Jody with “babysitting” duty, though it’s already apparent Jody is invested.

I have so many questions:

The barbershop next door and this thing wedged on the other side of the bus terminal - I guess maybe the terminal is a tunnel between shops to a place out back where the buses come in if I had to make up a reason for this. But yeah, the OPEN sign, the chairs, the wedding dress? The poster that the only word I can make out is the middle one - “suede”... What IS that shop? There’s no other camera angle on it and I guess it was made up by the set department...

WHY a wedding dress though? THAT sticks out. Alex isn’t being forced into any marriage-equivalent situation, nor are any of the other characters... It’s a very odd thing but they captured it in this shot >.> I need back up.

- 

@mittensmorgul seemed totally chill with the concept and assured me that this is a Thing that cleaners do to show off their competence... I guess the thing is now just that they chose to display this so obviously in the scene.

I’m going to go for retro DeanCas subtext and suggest the cleaner and launderette from 9x01 are linked except dry cleaners are an upgrade from launderettes in terms of self service vs someone doing it for you and them doing fancy stuff like wedding dresses... Like Cas had an upgrade from human (clearly linked to the launderette scene as that was where he accepted a lot of human limitations finally) but anyway, look, a wedding dress! Cas is gonna get married!

[disclaimer: I vaguely remember how this season ends]

For some reason all I take away from the rest of this scene is trying to make vampire hissing noises and realising it’s harder than it looks to do with your mouth open, bearing your teeth, without making phlemgy noises.

Jody’s cabin in the woods objectively looks creepy because cabins in woods are creepy as fuck, and the fact that it’s Jody’s doesn’t really do anything to smooth that over...

She does not do much to reassure Alex by giving her the old horror movie rundown on the setting:

JODY F.Y.I. -- The woods around here -- really easy to get lost in if you don't know your way around. Me -- I know them like the back of my hand. 

ALEX I got it. "Don't try running. You won't get far". 

ALEX Oh. Dead. 

JODY [taking the picture back] You know, there are about a thousand more polite ways you could say that. I'll give you a pass on account of the whole raised-by-monsters thing.

Alex is obviously trying to get a rise out of Jody – maybe just testing the limits of this semi-captivity she’s in with her and seeing what sort of prison guard she’s ended up with. Jody gets in this barb despite trying to be high-minded (because Alex dragged her family into it) and the “raised-by-monsters thing” emphasises again the line between human and monster that Alex is wavering in between… By the definitions OTHER people put on her, not so much what she’s doing aside from being sarcastic.

I’m half sure the exterior shot for the vamp house was Cain’s AGAIN but from a different side. The interior is probably any old set. I’ve talked a lot about how the state of Sam’s soul and how in peril it is is almost a direct correlation to run down shacks with boarded up windows. This is a rare case where “Blackout windows” and the whole state of the decrepit house refers to Dean. Because windows are the eyes to the soul or something, and they’re all blacked out. Wonder what that means.

(I have a post on that in my queue, another relic of season 9 meta that I stumbled on and was awed about at the time)

DEAN Hey! Hey, you need a hand with that?

This is objectively one of the worst things Dean’s ever said :P

I remember meta about his flippancy about it being a sign of his decaying soul (everything is) but honestly I think he’d say it whatever was going on :P

Anyway I love the dedication to Fargo references in this show.

Remember that time Sam knocked a vampire out with a shovel?

(Teamwork!)

SAM Ralph Hedges. Stacy Kepler. Any reason you targeted them? 

DALE Yeah. Hunger.

With the threat of the hunger of the Mark as the big bad in season 10, this is pretty ominous. Vampires being used as mirrors to Dean as well… Ironically he blows off steam killing them in order to feed that hunger and stop it being dangerous to random humans. (The main example of this I can think of… is from 10x19. Hi Berens :P)

Anyway Dean gets back to torturing, no hesitation. I’ve now left this rewatch too long to remember if this is the first time he gets into it since getting the Mark or what, but this is another neon sign that he’s not okay.

I’ve seen a lot of meta about the bit about siblings here –

DALE Well, all of us but little sis. She was, uh, "too good to turn". Mama couldn't bring herself to, no matter what we said, no matter how bad Alexis got.

DEAN Bad? 

DALE Let me guess. You never had a teenage sister. Dragging her heels, whining, near constant, about everything, but more and more about the blood, like she's somehow above it, like she's better than us 'cause she don't feed on people.

Again the suggestion that a little sibling is a burden. Ironically Dean had it the other way around that Sam had a problem WITH drinking blood. Monsters tend to work in reverse to the Winchesters so that’s no surprise… It also suggests favouritism between siblings and the parent; I think Sam and Dean both relate to that, thinking John may have liked the other better for different reasons, even if it involved a lot of projecting. I’m getting pretty sleepy to remember what the meta I’ve read about it suggested though >.>

The “Bad” thing is also interesting too – Dean seems to be thinking it means she’s evil because he’s determinedly looking for signs of that still because they don’t trust her (and so he falls completely for the READING of the story that Alex as a lure was evil. This is about INTERPRETATION though – Dale tells the truth of events but the bias on the reading determines if she’s evil or a victim.)

Anyway Dale just found her annoying. :P

DALE Her moping? That teenage crisis-of-conscience crap? It's annoying as hell, but it's just an act. When the chips are down, she'll always choose us over humans.

That confidence that she’ll choose family – taking and corrupting the iconic line about it

Also talk about a Cas mirror for picking humans - which Alex does - and remembering 9x22 and the whole “humanity” thing is waiting in the wings for Cas...

MAN Come on, sweetie. Aren't you gonna give me a name? 

ALEX It's...Ann.

That’s the 3rd name she uses so far (And Dale used “Alexis” for us, so Bingo! I guess) – a corruption on her original name – of the innocent little Annie who genuinely WAS, turned into the vampire lure. Like, no wonder she doesn’t want to use Annie again after reconnecting with her past. It’s not like LotR with Frodo calling Gollum “Smeagol” and luring out the old identity that could be reasoned with to a degree until things went really south… Alex has every right to keep the name she had been given by the vampires that still carries less baggage than this, especially as it seems to be more connected to her identity as herself (the “crisis of conscience” self that rebels) while she’s constructed a persona under “Ann” who is exactly what she wants to leave behind…

Then, the obvious demonstration of the story being wrong:

DALE Best a vamp could ask for. And you better believe you don't get that good at it unless you enjoy it. In her own sweet way...Girl's as bloodthirsty as any vampire. 

SAM [suddenly realizing] Jody.

(Cut to Jody returning with firewood, finding Alex missing, a whole little horror movie tension building moment�� aaaaand Alex is passed out on the bed, one sleepy, harmless teenager)

She also shows a sign of humanity:

ALEX Sheriff. My grandma?

JODY I'm so sorry.

ALEX No, it's -- it's fine. I figured -- it's been years, and she was old.

She tries to shrug it off, but the fact she asked at all is a great sign that she’s not a lost cause, because she’s got concern about another human being…

 Dean kills Dale just because they’re done with him – it’s framed as a quick decision where Sam leaves, and though Dale is subdued and tied up, Dean goes back to kill him. It might not seem like much when they’re in a rush and Jody is in danger and these vampires are blatantly evil and by the Winchesters’ standards the type of monster they have a right to kill without hesitation, unlike some of the sympathetic vamps they’re encountered who should give them pause. BUT the way this all goes down, it leaves Dean making a snap decision that’s bloodthirsty and involves killing, right at the point of the story when every single kill he makes, from the moment he gets the Mark, is weighted with a huge amount to say about his current arc and how he’s doing. The kill at the end is a much bigger sign of him being Not Okay, but, yeah, this isn’t a good thing either, despite how it may seem like part of their regular job. Later in the episode his bloodthirsty choice turns the vampires against them even more than they’d normally react to hunters, although I guess it takes the heat off Alex for getting so many of the family killed. :P

I always hate to think about poor Jody spending a night sleeping on the cold forest floor. I like to think the vamps came at like, 4am, and the Impala gets there maybe like 6 or something.

Dean comes rushing in to save Jody – Sam too but we see the shot of Dean rushing towards her and his dialogue full of concern, so it sort of makes him more in the focus there.

It seems sort of normal until –

DEAN You think they went back to the nest?

SAM Of course they did. Why wouldn't they? Question is -- what are they gonna do when they find their brother dead? 

Oops.

They try to tell Jody not to come out of honest concern that she’s hurt, but Jody has her own priorities that she’d had Alex in her care. When Dean tries to convince her Alex is evil, Jody has the alternative reading:

JODY I don't care. Whatever she did, she did because they made her. 

DEAN Oh, and that's a reason? 

JODY She's a kid!

She has a much better idea of consent and coercion, and the most tragic part is this –

DEAN Yeah, a kid who's been playing vampire murder since before she was in braces. 

SAM Jody, he's right. A-at best her loyalties are...Screwed. 

DEAN And how do you even know she wants to be saved? 

DEAN YOU DESERVE TO BE SAVED

But yeah, Dean’s sense of self was ripped from him when he was 4 years old and he was set on the path of violence and revenge and hunting things. (Also saving people but that’s all shelved this year >.>) He has no point of reference for it NOT being weird to be screwed up by this sort of life since before you were in braces and for it to affect your adult self. He thinks he’s a killer right now – that he’s been shaped into one and that’s all he’ll be and he’s embracing it… So learning “Annie” was lost years ago just makes him all the more convinced she’s evil and unredeemable and NOT innocent of who she is.

Jody, despite missing the huge metaphor of Dean’s life or Sam’s issues with loyalties being screwed (see also: slaves and captors discussion earlier) emphatically declares that childhood is innocence no matter what happens in it and that Alex has a chance to be good because she was used and turned into what she was by the vampires…

SAM What is this even really about? You barely know the girl. 

JODY [glares at the boys and moves to the car] I'm coming. And if either one of you lays so much as a hand on Alex...You'll have to go through me.

And Sam thinks Jody is being WEIRD about it – he’s following along with Dean a bit too much, and I can imagine Sam fans may have been wanky about this because Sam is normally more sympathetic. In this case he’s trying to understand Jody, but he’s essentially still in the same boat as Dean, not able to understand someone’s violent past from their redeemable present, and I quite like the way this story has him swept in Dean’s wake, following along (to a point) because the darkness affects both of them, just Dean more and this is a point of the story pushing BOTH of them deeper… I don’t think the wake up call REALLY comes until 11x01 when Sam starts making alarmed noises about how far they go and starts trying a few solutions for better ways…

Alex wakes up on what is clearly her bed

It has flowery covers and yet it very obviously in a gross vampire basement in all other respects. She’s probably slept her basically all her life that she remembers clearly. This is her idea of home. It also, not uncoincidentally, looks a LOT like a messed up version of Dean’s room in the Bunker. No actual private space – a sort of curtain around it. The same concrete décor, and a little shelf behind the bed, with books and candles on it… Garbage everywhere… Vampires upstairs… Nice.

MOMA Baby, why did you do it? Why did you run from us? 

ALEX I love you, mama. I do. I just -- I couldn't take it anymore. The blood and the death, the sounds of their screams. I just... I can't do it anymore. And the way I feel afterwards, the guilt...I'd rather die than feel that way again.

“This is better… it’s making me into something I don’t want to be”

(I actually haven’t seen 9x23 in years but I think that’s the line >.> fairly traumatising episode tbh :P)

MOMA It's my fault. 

ALEX What? 

MOMA All of it. This is my fault. I should've turned you years ago.

This also feels pretty ominous but I can’t put my finger on why. Honestly my best bet is Crowley to Dean – all the grief he’s ever got from him, and making him into demon!Dean seems at first to suggest he finally has a Winchester who’s compliant to him…

The vamp nest in daylight has a sheep carrying truck and an old school bus outside it. Humans as livestock and Alex’s lost childhood? Who even knows :P Anyway they give Jody the briefing like she’s a soldier, but with a lack of trust about dealing with Alex.

MOMA It was so selfish. I wanted to watch you grow up. I kept putting it off. Don't you see? These things you've been feeling -- all the guilt and suffering -- those are human feelings. It ain't too late. I can take the pain away. And then we can stay together, as a family. Like none of this ever happened. Wouldn't you like that?

“human feelings” immediately hits me with Cas in 10x01 talking about “human things” – I guess this describes a crossroads they all come to. Cas, struggling between being an angel and human, ends this season on “I just want to be an angel” which suggests he doesn’t want to feel, or care, as much as he does. Though it sounded like that was a declaration of intent over the hiatus, when we catch up to him he’s actually moping in bed wallowing in the pain – maybe unable to escape it because of being sick.

Likewise, I have a post waiting in my drafts to reblog for 9x23 comparing Dean telling soulless!Sam that being human is suffering and if he died Sam was supposed to sit in a dark room and suffer about it… With guess what screencap placed under it? :P (Hint: it’s Sam sitting in a dark room suffering because Dean is dead)

I think they all have their humanity in question at this point – Sam doesn’t lose it in any magical way, but his actions as a result of all this are called into question as season 10 starts and ends with Sam taking really extreme actions with consequences in order to save Dean.

Anyway “Moma” is of course meant to be completely wrong (see also: Dean talking about suffering and being human in 6x09) and of course feeling human things is the most important thing. It’s the core of the entire show – humanity. This season is all about humanity and how important it is and of course showing Dean in a state of losing it to emphasise just how important it really is. Alex as a mirror character to him is threatened with losing it – shutting off all those emotions that mommy vamp thinks are too horrible to deal with… But what would be left behind is monstrous by this show’s definitions, and that’s exactly what’s about to happen to Dean.

And of course, Alex is saved by someone who wants to be her family and to care for her…

The blood cure for vampires is VERY similar for demons, and I suspect probably influenced the original idea – 8x18 featured the blood cure, shortly before 8x22 showed the demon one.

Oh there’s a really weird room here in the vampire’s garbage-filled house. Most of the rooms fit the trash everywhere, blackout windows aesthetic but one room Dean looks in has all these fancy and useless lace curtains over the gaps between the boards that the light is shining through. Not so obvious in the still but it seems like real beams of light effects.

I’m reminded of Cas’s phone background (established in 9x18 using images from 9x03, and confirmed he still uses it several phone models later in 12x09)… At the very least it’s a sign of hope – that Dean can be saved, that there’s still some light in his soul even when it seems at its darkest… or tbh we’ve had white lace already this episode with that wedding dress. Now Dean’s associated with a RIDICULOUS surplus of white lace which can only be here because Wanek or someone wanted to show this because it’s A: not practical, B: not very vampire-y and C: really weird even for a trashy house like this. Also they look clean and white and nice! So yeah Dean’s gonna get maaarried.

Might be because Crowley’s got an eye to have a consort though

JODY We got to go! What did they do to you?

ALEX I'm sorry, Jody. I made my choice.

BAD CHOICE IS NO CHOICE *wanders through the show banging a saucepan with a spoon*

I mean that’s the moral of this story when it comes to saving Alex, but I mean, there are sOME wider applications here.

CONNOR Hell of a sight to come home to... Brother lying dead on the floor.

No idea it was a Winchester that had done it. 

Berens really starts off his first season on the show interested in the sort of legacy/mythical power of a name with a story to it – mostly through Cas, and how the angels relate to him, but it turns out these vampires know who the Winchesters are, and somehow or other worked it out after they captured them too (I doubt Sam and Dean go around saying, hey, I’m Dean Winchester, this is my brother Sam…) – maybe it’s their scent. Maybe vampires have a rumour mill of their own (demon bathroom walls too this season) and warn each other what to look out for if they have Winchesters on their case… Whatever it is, their names are known and they’re legendary enough figures the vampires know exactly how to taunt them.

Names are important.

Also that “hell of a sight to come home to – brother lying dead on the floor” thing – well that’s what Sam does in 9x23 when he comes rushing in to save Dean from Metatron…

CONNOR Which one of you took off my brother's head?! Was it you? Was it him? Pretty fitting -- brother for a brother.

The “brother for a brother” thing sounds an awful lot like passing on a brother-killing curse between people…

I have the TV instead of my second monitor to watch this so I’m less good at looking than normal, but I think this scene just has some ominous shots of Dean lying still on the floor. I can’t remember if it was confirmed he woke up and was listening to all this or not, and he just gets up at some point but the way he’s put in the front of the frame at several points, even blurry, makes it very ominous because he’s just lying there “unconscious” – I feel like he hasn’t actually slept since he got the Mark and knocking him out doesn’t do much good, really, but we don’t know that yet, so it’s harder to guess how he was doing at the time this aired… However now I’m convinced he listened in on this whole thing, and was being pretty cold and tactical about when he should jump in – even if it meant leaving Sam to get roughed up and even bled out a bit first. (In 4x19 Sam is also left to bleed out while Dean is fighting the ghouls and it’s very tense but Dean honestly want to get to him to save him – I have seen these moments paralleled anyway)

MOMA Hey. Don't be bothering my girl. She's going through something, a process. 

JODY What did you do to her?

MOMA Fed her my blood. She's on her way now. All that's left is to feed.

Like I said, weirdass womanhood rituals going on here. First blood and all that, but instead of bleeding it herself, Alex takes it from another woman… (yeah I know Alex is older than this but… metaphors… Especially as Moma goes on to imply Jody is menopausal and is obviously barren herself either because vampire or because she was also menopausal when she was turned so could never even hope to have a replacement baby of her own – anyway Alex is being forced to take blood from both these mother figures, representing the end of her growth and stunting her before she can become a real adult…)

ALEX Please, mama. Let her go. I already drank from you. Let her go. 

MOMA Made an impression on my girl, I see. Baby, this is the human half of you talking. After the change, this human -- she ain't nothing to you.

At this point I’m pretty much just quoting ominous lines to point at them

I like the “Human half” – I was talking a little way up about how Dean had some good left in him, and in a way the real metaphor for Dean is that he doesn’t fully “become” demon!Dean Cain 2.0 until he kills Sam – like Alex won’t be fully turned until she drinks from Jody. So demon!Dean still has a whole “human half” if you look at it that way, that there’s a final act of turning.

(Which was also compared in 10x03 to Soulless!Sam killing Bobby to “scar his vessel” too much for a soul to go back in it – to kill the human part of himself that could have remained. I have just read an essay about souls in supernatural and there’s a lot of conflicting philosophy bouncing around in my head so I’d better leave off here… Maybe by 10x03 I’ll have a clearer sense of what I’m thinking about this :P Also in 10x03 Dean is on a sliding scale of human to demon by how much blood is in him…)

MOMA I have fed her, clothed her, loved her going on nine years. You think motherhood's just about blood? You don't know the first thing about it. 

JODY Maybe not, but I know what it isn't. And it ain't about forcing her to be like you the second she becomes inconvenient.

Motherhood does not get a whole lot of exploration in this show for obvious reasons, since Jody is one of the only mother characters to really survive like this and open us up to plots like this. And even taking in Alex and then Claire, her stories haven’t REALLY been strongly about motherhood outside of this episode, because she’s a fascinating, complex and interesting character with a ton of crap going on in her life :P

Anyway it’s a “family don’t end in blood” type message but again twisted and messed up as it’s coming from the villain. Honestly if you flip it around and make Moma into Bobby’s perspective but not evil, that’s kind of a lot of stuff he said about Sam and Dean in 7x10, in the best episode about FATHERHOOD in the show. And of course he’s the originator of the “family don’t end in blood” line.

Jody, though, is continually watching out for coercion and lack of choice (which is probably why Dean is banned by the plot from talking to her about his problems for, what, 3-4 seasons now of her offering, because as soon as he delves into it a lot of truths that Jody’s eye for this can pick out will suddenly be really uncomfortable for Dean).

This is also – from Jody – a good line addressing John’s parenting, especially looking at it like Dean was forcibly turned into John by subliminal emotional coercion… demon!Dean reminds us of 3x10 constantly because of how up to this point it’s the only exploration of what that would REALLY be for Dean, and that ended up with the “my father was an obsessed bastard” speech about everything he put on Dean. Now we’re back in this territory, we have this mirrored example of monstrous motherhood instead, but still mirroring where Dean’s going to end up…

Oh yeah there Dean goes with immediately being prepared for the fight, having been holding a syringe of dead man’s blood ready for the instant a vampire touches him. Beautiful choreography of the vampire grabbing his hair and him lunging up at it in one fluid movement but kinda sad there’s not a longer hair-pulling moment :P heh.

JODY Alex! Was that her name? You named her after someone. Was it your daughter? I couldn't figure out why you changed her name. I thought maybe you were ashamed of your theft, but you have no shame. You said that I was using her to fill a hole in my life, and you're right. I am. You are, too.

Just Jody nailing projection perfectly. See above: can’t talk to Dean about his shit :P

Meanwhile: Dean is stronger than a vampire and does the whole “Look at me, bitch!” thing when he kills it, which is… maaaybe a sign he’s not doing too well. I’m pretty sure we’ve lost him at this point in the story (all the stuff that keeps him distanced from being the emotional POV here especially) and we’re essentially one episode away from him being TRULY consumed by the darkness after he kills Abaddon

I guess there’s another episode in between though :P

He goes to help Sam and has a completely pointless bit of snark about their fight:

DEAN Yeah, I know. You wouldn't have done the same for me.

Dean still kinda sees killing monsters as saving Sam (messing up the line between saving people hunting things) and he’s still harping on that fight. 

I’m guessing the words have got all twisted up and poisonous inside him along with the literal darkness doing this to him… Not a good time to have a serious argument while one of you is infected with a brother-killing curse that will feed off these dark feelings :P I think his descent is being accelerated by that – which also explains how it was much slower in season 10, to me, because Sam rescinds this statement while Dean is dying, and though they’re still completely messed up by the time they get back on track a little with doing MotW and living their lives, the fighting is replaced by Sam trying to help Dean… But then towards the end of the season when things are bad between them again because of the Book of the Damned nonsense, and then Charlie, Dean immediately and dramatically drops again.

Meanwhile: Alex saves Jody by rebelling against her old family and picking a new one.

JODY [to ALEX] Don't watch this, sweetheart.

I just love Jody so much.

“It looks like you were enjoying it, maybe too much…” Was I following a thread of Sam really really not seeing the warning signs until it was far too late? Dean brushes it off as part of the job – pretending it’s business as usual with the one liners, pride in what they do… You can imagine him on a good day seeming to act similarly, but Sam’s definitely picked up on the difference. I remember when I got to fandom reading something I think adjacent to this episode about Dean killing that vampire in 2x03 with the saw as one of the most brutal kills he ever made on the show… Again, vampires, again being used to show that something’s seriously wrong with him, and Sam being super alarmed to witness it. Of course this time Dean busted out some superhuman moves and strength to finish the fight so even ignoring his personality change, Sam should be worried :P

Jody interrupts this argument, which is always a bad sign when characters aren’t allowed to get to the end of discussions where something might have actually come of it. Sam was genuinely starting to dig into how Dean feels and has been acting and his VERY NEXT QUESTION could have got him the sort of answer he needed to be Truly Concerned about Dean, but nah. Here she is :P

Jody shifts the need to apologise back to herself, after Sam and Dean try to tell her she was right about Alex, which I think is Jody now too deep in her own confused feelings about wanting to keep Alex to really think straight about it. Moma did kind of get to her, but we’ll see when she goes to talk to Alex that it was in a good way where Jody’s even more clear and careful about boundaries and suggesting what Alex should do next than she would have been even as her normal caring self who wouldn’t exactly have been un-equipped to have this conversation… Anywho here with the Winchesters it kinda sucks that she exonerates them for their opinion of Alex – which while it was founded in experience, lacked the usual empathy even Sam at least should normally have for a victim. Jody’s feelings saved Alex’s life and she’s still apologising for being messed up about it >.>

Then aahahahaha oh my god Berens you fucker:

JODY Feelings I've been trying to bury for years, you know, buried it under work, religion...even dating. We know how that worked out.

*cut to a shot of Dean looking horrified/amused* Yeah, that’s Crowley they’re talking about and that’s Dean reacting to the thought of dating Crowley to bury feelings that have been sat on for years. I mean. Wow.

I knew Berens shipped Drowley like nobody’s business but I’m still finding nonsense little gems down in this part of the show which we couldn’t have seen coming at this time – even with people seeing a LOT of what came next :P

Anyway Jody says she’s going to address all her sad feelings head on because she is a well-adjusted character when it comes down to it and certainly in comparison to the Winchesters. Terrible example set in front of them :P they might actually learn to talk about their feelings!

/sarcasm directed at Carver era Sam n Dean from the safe perch of Dabb era

Oh god thinking of Dabb era remember how he nearly was a showrunner on something else like, next episode? Yiiiiiiiiiiiiiikes.

Anyway Alex says thank you very politely for Jody offering her something to eat, after she shrugged off Jody making her a sandwich earlier, so her return to humanity is marked not just by the cure but by showing her behaviour changing too. Now the threat of the vampires is all gone and she’s chosen humanity, she can begin to act like it too (after all of Jody’s comments about her being feral earlier)

The episode ends on a final gesture of empathy from Alex, which I guess is the biggest sign of humanity, and finally links them together in a way where from those 2 words you know they can try to build their family together:

JODY You don't have to explain. I know. Whatever you want from me, I'll give it. If you want, I'm here. But what you've been through the last 48 alone, losing your entire family, everything you've ever known or loved -- no one can understand that.

ALEX You can.