Hey, followers. Just a heads up, I’ve started watching The Handmaid’s Tale, and I know this particular dystopia is highly triggering for some people, some of whom I know and love in real life, so should I reblog anything from it, I’ll be tagging it with the name of the show.
Blacklist often and stay safe, please. I don’t have any particular triggers regarding it, and it’s still fucking me up a little, given our current political situation in the US.
You know, I feel like Castiel’s intense need to always give Dean peace and keep him from having to do the morally questionable work always feels like penance for what happened in On the Head of a Pin.
Castiel is the only one alive who saw Dean in hell. He is the only one who witnessed him at what Dean considers his very worst, when he took pleasure in causing other’s pain. Sam knows how much internal pain and conflict this caused Dean, but he was never actually witness to it. I think it’s up there among Dean’s greatest fears (after losing Sam of course), going dark side again and hurting innocents. Even when he was a demon, he still had enough of Dean Winchester in him to fight off that impulse. Crowley kept him sated by feeding him demons to harm because even Crowley knew making Dean hurt innocents would be stepping over a dangerous line. It’s why Dean was willing to be launched into space and sacrifice himself forever, to avoid becoming the thing that fucked him up the worst.
Back in season 4 Castiel only knew that Dean was the Righteous Man, had a mission God wanted him to do, and that he was Alastair’s best torture student. And he had seen Dean in hell enjoying the torture. So when he commanded Dean to return to torture, it was with some trepidation (I mean, even then Cas was starting to fall, starting to “
express emotions, the doorways to doubt”) but he still insisted upon it because he didn’t truly understand how bad it would be for Dean. But then things went south. Dean was darkening right there in the room with Alastair and Cas began to doubt. And when Alastair got free and nearly killed Dean, I think Cas felt immense guilt and began to truly change how he saw his life and Dean’s and broadened his role as Dean’s protector from just physical to emotional.
It feels like so many of Cas’ decisions since that day are his own self-imposed penance for that decision because they are explicitly to give Dean peace and save him from ever having to harm an innocent and become what he saw in hell again. In the green room, Cas was trying to shield Dean from the pain of seeing Sam free Lucifer. Season 5 was all about saving Dean from saying yes to Michael because the ensuing battle would harm millions of innocents and Dean’s psyche. Saving Dean from becoming involved in shady dealings with Crowley and a heavenly war was Cas’ entire storyline of season 6. In season 8, Cas was willing once again to die and be locked in Heaven to give Dean peace on earth. He avoided Dean when angels were after him to keep him out of the fight and was willing to stay by his side literally forever when he was a demon to protect him from the pain of harming innocents.
So now, Cas going to heaven where many of his siblings hate him and stealing the Colt to go kill Kelly on his own are very much in character and follow the trend of Cas being willing to take on just about anything to give Dean peace and keep him from having to go down that path that he first witnessed in hell. I imagine for Cas, there is no worse fate than allowing Dean to live with the pain of harming an innocent again, when he can take that on himself. Cas may make some terrible decisions, but every one seems to be out of love and self-sacrifice for Dean.
Everyone may be flailing about the incredible romantic implications of the giften mix tape, but let’s not let that overshadow another grad gesture of love on the part of Cas: to once again be willing to even damage his own soul by killing an innocent to protect Dean from ever being even close to what he saw in hell.
Even at the end of s6 (and really ALL of s6, based on what we learned in 6.20) was about the same thing.
In 6.21, Dean IS torturing demons trying to find where Lisa and Ben had been taken, he WAS falling into that again when Cas showed up and saved him from a demon who escaped his trap and was about to kill Dean. Because Cas saw Dean almost beyond caring for himself again.
What he didn’t see was the look on Dean’s face after he told Cas to leave.
It’s what motivated Cas to throw in with Metatron in 8.22. It’s what motivated him to work with Sam behind Dean’s back in s10 to cure the Mark. It’s why he’d said yes to Lucifer in 11.10.
It’s the absolute most heartbreaking incarnation of “I did what I had to do.”
I normally don’t like to add to posts, but this is just one of my favorite things about her. I guess Carrie Fisher just carried glitter everywhere, because she did the same thing at Indiana Comic Con when she was there in 2015. She actually kinda got in trouble because she was taking so long with each person who came for autographs because she wanted to “baptize them” with her glitter. She wanted to make sure that everyone who saw her got some glitter.
tldr; she was truly a gift and i sobbed at work when i got a notification that she passed, and i’m crying now as i type this.
So what if we all picked a day and wore glitter for her?
Next May the 4th seems appropriate. Dedicate Star Wars day to the original princess?
LET’S DO IT!!
I am so on board with glitter for Carrie day.
She talked about how her therapist (I think it was in her book Shockaholic but I can’t check right now) always knew when she was having an ‘off’ time in her head depending on how much glitter she’d show up wearing to appointments. It was her way of making the world sparkle and shine even when it felt dark. It made her feel better. Evidently she wanted to share that with others.
I purposely went out and bought glittery body dust in her honor. I’m going to welcome in 2017 lit up like a firework. Ain’t none of y’all going to ever be able to hug me ever again without getting covered in glitter. It’s on. We’re doing this. And on May 4th we’re going to make the world shine.
For Carrie.
Glitter for Carrie Day is May 4, 2017. Spread the word.
This is my blog, and I’m going to just say a little thing about Destiel because I want to, and I can. Especially because this is the least amount of queerbaiting we’ve ever seen in this show thus far. Why? Because there’s a lot of nuance for those of us who grew up in the Mix Tape Generation, and to us, there’s absolutely no way to misinterpret this scene.
Here’s why I liked it, and found it so wonderful.
There was no reason for this scene. None. It did not play to the overall narrative of the episode, or even, the show in general, which is how a lot of the queerbaiting on the show is done. And you can go ahead and say that it’s just showing that Dean thinks Castiel is a part of the family now and that’s how he’s showing it, but Dean doesn’t make mix tapes for Sam. Or anyone that we know of. It was a small scene. Castiel means to return the tape and Dean gives it back. He says, “it’s a gift. You keep those.”
Now, this is a significant scene for being so brief.
Dean Winchester was born January 24, 1979. Which makes him about my age. And here’s what I remember about people giving other people mix tapes:
You gave your crush a mix tape to say your feelings and hopefully end up macking in the janitor’s closet after fourth period in middle/high school.
If you weren’t making that mix tape for yourself, you were making it for your crush.
Also, the most meaningful band in existence to Dean Winchester, born January 24, 1979 is Led Zeppelin.
So. He didn’t just make a mix tape to give to Castiel. He made a mix tape of HIS favorite music to give to Castiel. That’s Level 2 flirting through mix tape sociology. And we already know how much Dean treasures his music. How meaningful it is to him. One of the most popular lines from the show, to this day, is: “driver picks the music, shotgun shuts his cakehole.”
This small, insignificant scene is probably lost on the younger viewers who didn’t grow up in a mix tape generation, but let me say this: for any of us who were born circa January 24, 1979, knows that this small, insignificant scene is anything but.
Mix tapes had power.
Mix tapes had significance.
Mix tapes were confessions.
I’m going to be screaming about this for at least five years.
But wait, I have more to say.
Giving a mix tape back means one of two things.
1) I don’t like you. 2) Basically the equivalent of giving back a promise ring.
We all know that Cas likes Dean. Loves him, according to his own words a few episodes back. So that nixes number 1 on the list. So that leaves 2. Why would he be giving back a promise ring? Because he thinks he’s pissed Dean off too much for him to want to stay together.
Then Dean insists he keep it. If Dean wanted to break up, he would have accepted it back. But nope. Don’t give back the promise ring, Cas. This argument is not the end of us. I still care about you. Keep it. It’s a gift.
I posit that Castiel didn’t even know the real significance of it, being an angel. He thought Dean was giving him something to be entertained by. Dean didn’t tell him it was a gift until Castiel tried to return it! Which is so very Dean being allergic to his feelings until he can’t be anymore. He’s not going to openly flirt with Cas or give him a line like he does the women he sleeps with because Cas means something to him. And he realizes that Castiel won’t understand the significance of a “confession” like a mix tape. Dean could play it off with fear of rejection if it was that. But it means something to DEAN. And Castiel starts to understand that the second he took it back!
Yeah I don’t think Cas understood what he was doing. But those of us in the Mix Tape Generation totally understood what the symbolism was. And Dean clarified to Castiel that gifts are meant to be kept.
How else am I, a child of the Mix Tape Generation, supposed to interpret that other than Dean saying I GAVE YOU MY HEART, CAS, YOU CAN’T JUST GIVE IT BACK DAMMIT.
So were you aware that the The Beauty and the Beast story we all know is a heavily abridged and rewritten version of a much longer novella by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve? And that a lot of the plot holes existing in the current versions exist because the 1756 rewrite cut out the second half of the novella, which consisted entirely of the elaborate backstory that explains all the weird shit that happened before? And that the elaborate backstory is presented in a way that’s kind of boring because the novel had only just been invented in 1740 and no one knew how they worked yet, but contains a bazillion awesome ideas that beg for a modern retelling? And that you are probably not aware that the modern world needs this story like air but the modern world absolutely needs this story like air? Allow me to explain:
The totally awesome elaborate backstory that explains Beauty and the Beast
Once upon a time there was a king, a queen, and their only son
But while the prince was still in his infancy, in a neat reversal of how these fairy tales usually go, the king tragically died, leaving his wife to act as Regent until their son reaches maturity
Unfortunately, the rulers of all the lands surrounding them go, “Hmm, the kingdom is ruled by a woman now, it must be weak, time for an invasion!”
And the Queen goes, “Well, if I let some general fight all these battles for me, he’ll totally amass enough fame and power to make a bid for the throne; if I want to protect my son’s crown, I have no choice but to take up arms and lead the troops myself!”
(Btw, I want to stress that this woman is not Eowyn or Boudica and nothing in the way her story is presented suggests that she had any interest martial exploits before or in any way came to enjoy them during these battles. This is a perfectly ordinary court lady who would much rather be embroidering altar covers for the royal chapel and playing with her child until necessity made her go, “Oh no, this sucks, I guess I have to become a Warrior Queen now” and she just happened to kick ass at it anyway.)
And the Queen totally kicked ass, but the whole “twice as good for half the credit” thing meant that no matter how many battles she won, potential enemies refused to take her and her army seriously until she had defeated them so no sooner would she fend off one invasion than another one would pop up on a different border.
So she spent the majority of her young son’s life away from the castle leading armies, but it was OK because she left him in the care of her two best friends, who just happen to be fairies! This was an awesome idea because a) fairies have magic, and therefore are like the best people to protect the prince from any threats and b) fairies consider themselves to be so above humanity that the lowest fairy outranks the highest mortal, so they’d have no interest in taking a human throne. Good thing they were both good fairies instead of one good and one evil one!
(Spoiler: they were not both good fairies.)
So the two fairies basically take turns raising the prince until he’s old enough to rule. And on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, the evil older one comes into the prince’s bedroom.
“So listen, kid. You’re about to become king, your mother’s on her way home from the war to see you crowned, and I have a third piece of good news for you! You see, I’ve actually been spending so much time here lately because Fairyland’s become a bit too hot to hold me for reasons totally not related to me being secretly evil. And if I have to hang in the human world, I might as well reside in the upper echelons of it, so even though as a powerful fairy I completely eclipse your puny human status in a staggeringly unimaginable way, since you’re about to be king and since my premonition that I should stick this whole guardianship thing out because you would be hot one day has totally proved accurate (go me), I will graciously lower myself to allowing you to marry me. Please feel free to grovel at my feet in gratitude. (Btw, we can totally start the wedding night now, we’ll tell your mother about it when she arrives tomorrow.)”
THIS IS ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL DEAN AND CAS SCENES IN SPN HISTORY.
Here we have Dean and Cas being open about their feelings. Cas has been away, and Dean’s been worried. Cas comes back, and Dean lashes out at him.
For most of their relationship, they never talk about it. Dean just assumes that Cas just wants to get away from him because he thinks Cas has more important things to do than spend time with him. Cas, on the other hand, always thinks that the only way he can be acceptable to Dean is if he isn’t a burden, if he delivers what is required of him, and if he functions properly as a savior and protector. Neither of them know the truth. Dean doesn’t know that Cas would want nothing more than to stay with him, that the reason why Cas is away all the time is so he could keep him safe. Cas doesn’t know that Dean just wants him to stay and keep him company, to fight alongside him, and to always be within reach because he worries about him all the time. They care about each other so much, but they’ve always had trouble communicating it properly–until now.
Dean gave Cas a mixtape of his Top 13 Zepp traxx–Dean’s extended an olive branch to Cas to let him know that he matters so much to him that he wants him to share his taste in music and know the words to his favorite songs–that maybe they don’t always say the right things to each other, but maybe the gesture would show him how much he means to him.
And here we see Cas returning the mixtape Dean gave him after spending a
significant time apart. He uses this as an olive branch to get Dean to
talk to him–to let him know that he listened to it while he was away because he cares about him–that maybe this gesture would be capable of bridging the distance between them. But Dean gives it back to Cas and reinforces that the tape is his because he gifted it to him, and Cas takes it back. They tell each other everything.
Dean tells Cas that he’s angry because he’s worried, and Cas tells Dean that all he wants to do is redeem himself to Dean. They’re communicating their feelings. They know each other more wholly. They understand each other.
And it’s really amazing to see how far they’ve come now that they’ve both realized that they’re so much better when they’re together.
This post was triggered by something that @roachpatrol said over here about the expectation for girls to be sweet and clean and harmless:
Holy shit, if I was eight years younger and wandering into fandom for the first time, I can guarantee that the culture right now would’ve fucked me up and ground me down and taken away all my healthy outlets.
Picture: you are a girl at the tender young age of mumbledyteen. Up until this point you have been taught that all dark thoughts are literally hand-delivered into your head by the devil, and that the only correct method of dealing with negativity is to ignore them and pray harder. Concentrate on what is good and righteous and pure to the exclusion of all else, this is how you be a good person.
You are also a fully-functioning human being, one who can feel stressed or lonely or angry or any number of bad things. Mostly, with emotions that are still working themselves out, you feel this rumbling, white-hot white noise under everything, all the time. Sometimes it rolls in like a thunderstorm and everything else gets drowned out, and sometimes it’s only quietly muttering in the distance. Either way it’s always there, and the sound shreds uncomfortably at the inside of your brain.
When you were younger, before you were in charge of your own media consumption, your brain would shred up a myriad of saccharine stories to try and match the noise of the shredder in your head. Bad things happening, people getting hurt, characters trapped in unhealthy relationships of all kinds.
Fanfiction, the product of a hundred thousand other mumbledyteens whose brains are all screaming the same way, makes something in your brain go ping.
Unfortunately, if the planet had ever been united on any single message, it was probably that no matter how you feel: 1) your feelings weren’t unique 2) they didn’t matter 3) they didn’t matter because they weren’t unique, they were shared among millions of hysterical, worthless teenaged girls just like you.
Fandom was confirmation of the first, but (with some hiccups along the way) outright rejection of the last two. Fuck you, our feelings do matter, and this is a story just for us.
A disclaimer: these aren’t good stories, otherwise they wouldn’t have to be defended. Their flavor of topic is not within societally acceptable bounds. Fictional characters have sex and get tortured and raped and abused, but their screaming harmonizes with the pitch of the shredder when it’s burrowing deepest.
As a teenager I never thought that my feelings were important enough to deal with, but these stories let me look at them sideways. Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.
And hell, these days I’m a happy, healthy adult who barely even has the urge to go looking for whump fic when I’ve had a bad week. I’m not going to forget just how much bad stuff that fic helped me air out, though, not ever. (Not to mention that thanks to all of those abuse!fics, I can recognize an unhealthy relationship at 500 paces, even if the fictional abuse was depicted as something loving and romantic. Abusers in real life don’t go around with helpful warning tags on their sleeves anyway.)
But holy shit, can you imagine if I’d found fandom as it is today.
Yes, your church is right, your family is right. Horrible things in stories are only there because they were written by horrible people, and they’re only popular because horrible people read them. The very concepts they address corrupt everything they touch.
That shredder in your head, the one that takes innocent cartoons but then shits out sadness and mayhem? That’s disgusting, you’re disgusting. How dare you think about minors having underaged sex, you minor? How dare you consider another person getting hurt? Your feelings don’t matter, they aren’t unique, they’re shared with all kinds of worthless shitbags just like you.
Every ounce of what you read and write and enjoy is going to be weighed for sin and tested for purity. You know, just like the rest of your life, except this time there’s no deity who’s handing out second chances.
Maybe that’s what bothers me most about all of this. It’s the same petty fandom bullshit as always, but “you’re wrong for liking a ship because IT WILL NEVER BE CANON” is a hell of a lot easier to laugh off when you’re young than “you’re wrong for liking a ship because YOU’RE AN ABUSIVE PEDOPHILE AND IF SOMETHING BAD HAPPENS IT’S YOUR FAULT FOR PERPETUATING IT.”
My fault, my bad thoughts, no outlet for any of them. The message to repress all the bad things so I can look like a good person, but my brain is so full of unprocessed shit that it’s solidified. Nobody actually saved any real children, but my brain sure is getting a second dose of fucked-up.
Are the people getting attacked going to be okay, will they be able to go and address their braingremlins somewhere else? I’d also ask if the people doing the attacking are okay, with all of the denial and repression they must deal with, but it seems like they’ve got venting pretty well handled by taking it out on strangers.
Hey, c’mon, calm down friends. I bet I’ve read a story that’s got a character screaming at just the same pitch you are.
It helps to read one of those and harmonize your voices, I promise.
holy shit, dude, this is powerful. i’ll delete this reblog if you don’t want the extra attention, but thank you for your thoughts.
Roachpatrol speaks my mind on this matter.
Posting because I know so many traumatized people, and so many of them just really need to see this, right now, for so many reasons.
“Audience catharsis is the whole point of tragedy, after all.”
A thousand times yes. This, some scholars believe, WAS the point of Greek tragedy. It wasn’t for teaching specific lessons (don’t do this or that will happen), it was for creating pity and fear. Pity is, of course, feeling badly for the characters you’re watching/reading. Fear is the understanding that these things can happen to you, or things like them, and that you may not necessarily be able to protect yourself from it. You may never accidentally kill your father and marry your mother, but you can watch Oedipus do it, see his downfall, and empathize with the kind of human frailty that caused him to try to outrun fate in the first place. Empathizing with him doesn’t mean you want to off your dad, it means you have made and will make mistakes too, that were based on consequences you hadn’t foreseen, and his distress resonates with yours. This pity and fear is what causes the emotional purging we know as catharsis.
Furthermore, Nietzsche (yes we’re citing Nietzsche too) basically considered tragedy a dress rehearsal for real-life suffering; if we see, say, a fictional character in great pain, when we are faced with great pain it’s easier to see that we can survive it too, that we have survived bad things and we are capable of surviving more of them. Even if it doesn’t end well. Because suffering is human, and we are humans, and human life can go on in the face of great suffering.
So yes, I read and created dark horrible fic, that is not directly related to the horrible things I have experienced (I have never been abducted by strexcorp or forcibly reeducated or kept in a lab with abusive creators), and I feel pity and fear for the characters and I recognize that I have seen some shit, and that they have too, and that all people have. Was Sophocles a sick incest creeper for writing Oedipus Rex? Or was he just giving us a chance to purge intense, and intensely human, emotions?
(source: my primary partner, who has been teaching Greek drama at NYU for more years than he’d care to admit; any remaining mistakes are my own but if you come at me with “hubris is just pride” i will fight you.)
(ETA fixed spelling of Nietzsche; autocorrect why are you like this)
Tumblr backup 